“Porn Star Runs for Lord Mayor,” the headlines said, alongside a photograph of me in fuchsia and black latex with a hot pink PVC flogger. If I was going to come out, I may as well do it in style.

I’m quite sure my parents knew all along. I started taking my clothes off in the supermarket when I was three years old. My mum found my first pair of six-inch stripper heels at home when I was twenty. At the time I tried hard to convince her they were for a fancy dress party. In hindsight, I don’t know why I bothered. I was completely transparent and a bad liar.

My parents kept wanting to come visit me at this twenty-four-hour café where I supposedly worked.

I never actually sat down and had that conversation with them. I didn’t need to.

Being the shameless exhibitionist that I am, my family eventually found out about my work through newspaper articles, magazines, and next-door neighbours. Besides, there were always my unexplained suitcases, my garish makeup, my fresh DD cups.

Zahra Stardust

What can I say? I spent my time wisely. I walked on people in stilettos. I undressed upside down on trapeze. I pulled pearls out of my vagina. I used cucumbers and Barbie dolls as dildos. We did X-rated double tricks in people’s garages that audiences described as ‘adult Cirque du Soleil.’ I ejaculated litres of fluid and screened it at film festivals. I trained to hold my entire body out sideways on a pole.

In 2009 I ran for Parliament with the Australian Sex Party. We began our electoral campaign to decriminalise the sale of X-rated films, enact anti-discrimination protections for sex workers and establish a comprehensive sex education curriculum. We pole danced at bus stops and handed out How To Vote condoms.

‘How can you be a feminist and a stripper?’ they asked. ‘It’s an oxymoron’ they said. ‘I can’t vote for a rep who dresses up like this.’

I have a love-hate relationship with the fast-paced, whirlwind opportunities to advocate in this way. It hasn’t been all golden showers and giggles. When you are out as a sex worker, your body is considered expendable; your life is treated as public property; and your mind is dismissed as ill-informed. Your body bears the brunt of scrutiny as a place where social fears about commodification, objectification, and sex acutely intersect.

When journalists pan down to your diamante stilettos while you are speaking about human rights, they reinforce discourses of fetishisation and titillation (and don’t even pay you for the pleasure).

When we as sex workers read the news, we are told we are perpetuating stereotypes, hijacking sexuality, and complicit in our own oppression. We should wake up. We are traitors. Victims. Objects. Degraded. Brainwashed. Anti-sex work feminist focus on ‘raunch culture’; ‘sexualisation’ and ‘pornification’ has been used to call for increased criminalisation of our work. Parliamentary inquiries are being fuelled by readings of ‘protection’, rescue, and rehabilitation, rather than informed by sex worker voices, epidemiology, human rights, or United Nations recommended best practice.

The crusade against sex work dismisses a long and fierce history of sex worker involvement in social justice movements, labour rights, feminism and political organising. It is debilitating. It is depressing. It is relentless.

It grates down on me like a war of attrition, slowly scraping away the layers of glitter from my skin. The ferocity and violence of abolitionist tactics make me cry. I have a physically sick reaction to media. This stigma is killing our communities.

I have become closed, private, protective of a part of my life that for me has been a refuge.

Managing the risks of coming out means that I have become a walking encyclopaedia. I have a photographic database—bibliography, footnotes, policy messages, statistics—burnt into my brain that I can never afford to switch off.

Stigma forces us to be reactive. And more—it drains vital energy that could actually be invested in creating and dreaming up new kinds of intimacies, relationships and communities.

When we as sex workers appeal to the sensibilities of politicians, media, and strangers for them to ‘like’ us, we are participating in an assimilationist strategy, seeking appeasement and approval from those who so vehemently hate us, proving that we are respectable and worthy – of citizenship, of rights, of love. They do not deserve our energy.

Being out does not mean that you are invited to dissect our lives to satisfy your own curiosity. Sex workers are not on call for your university assignment. Our bodies are not open slabs for you to project your opinions, voice your concerns, open up and extract information.

We are not a walking research project to appease the voyeurism and sexual tourism of careerist professionals who want access to our sexual communities while protecting their reputations.

We are human. We breathe. We bleed. We break.

There are opportunities to ‘sanitise’ how I talk about my job. If I am concerned for my safety, unwilling to respond to probing questions, or uncomfortable with strangers accessing my life, I can be selective in what I disclose. But hierarchy comes with the language we use—and our work doesn’t need to be ‘cleaned up’ to make it palatable for you.

Being out and proud is a strategy of visibility and activism; it fosters community and belonging, but it is also, for me, a necessity. I am too tired to hide my ‘lifestyle’ because it makes you feel more comfortable. Why should I have to?

This excerpt from ‘Coming Out Like a Porn Star: Essays on Pornography, Protection and Privacy’ is republished with permission from ThreeL Media. The book, edited by Jiz Lee, brings together the voices of over 50 porn industry professionals to examine how porn and sex work stigma affects their lives. The book launches in Australia on 17 November at Loop in Melbourne and on 29 November at The Red Rattler in Sydney, with readings and panel discussions featuring porn performers and contributors to the book. To purchase the book in Australia, visit this website.

Zahra Stardust is a porn performer, PhD student and former political candidate. Her doctoral research at UNSW examines the legal regulation of pornography in Australia, the emergence of queer/feminist/indie/ethical porn as a social movement, and the political implications of criminalising non-normative intimacies. Zahra has published in Porn Studies and Queer Sex Work and spoken at conferences such as Sexual Cultures (Brunel University), Erotic Screen and Sound (Griffith University), and the Feminist Porn Conference (University of Toronto). She was the 2014 Feminist Porn Awards Heart Throb of the Year and her films have screened in Paris, Amsterdam, Vienna, Barcelona, Berlin, New York and San Francisco.