Cabaret producer and stripper, Lara Cliftoninterviewed Maedb Joy, a poet and former sex worker of extraordinary moral courage who has created Sexquisite, a cabaret of performers with lived experience of sex work.
Portrait of Maedb Joy by Sarah Ainslie
Maedb Joy is a woman in her twenties who is on a mission to resist the simultaneous silencing of sex workers and appropriation of their culture. At Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club, as part of the campaign against the threat of closure, I attended what was potentially one of the last events, Sexquisite, a sex-worker-run cabaret. It was the best audience I had stood amongst for a long time. The crowd was mixed in age, class, bodies and genders, giddy with the pleasure of being in a sex-positive, shame-free, celebratory space.
Fifteen years ago, I was interviewed by Spitalfields Life about my work as a stripper. At that time, there were few public spaces where sex workers could speak with nuance, pride and political clarity. What strikes me most is not how much has changed but how much organising, creativity and solidarity it still takes to claim space.
So when The Gentle Author invited me to interview Maedb, founder of Sexquisite, I was chuffed and this is her story, in her own words.
“I worked in the sex industry from when I was fourteen. I was very isolated and working in secret. The only other sex worker I knew I met on Tumblr. I didn’t tell my friends.
When I was sixteen, I was arrested for working underage and was on bail for two years. It was a formative experience and really awful – I was forced to come out to my family. My dad was in police meetings with me, seeing everything. It destroyed our relationship.
That same year I had a road accident where I almost lost my right foot. But it ended up being a blessing because I started writing while I was in hospital. At first, I rewrote poems I found online, pretending they were my own. I was desperate for approval. Then I started writing about what had happened to me.
My mum, who is a feminist and an ex-music-journalist, started arranging gigs for me. They were punk gigs. I’d be the only teenager on a line-up with feminist punk bands, performing angry poetry about sex work.
After the accident, I went back to college and studied performing arts because I’d left school without GCSEs. We had to create a play and there wasn’t room for another main character, so I wrote a monologue about a girl in a hostel who’d been groomed. That was the first time I told a couple of hundred people about what had happened to me, but I was playing a character. That’s how I started performing, to talk about experiences without naming myself.
I got into Guildhall School of Music & Drama. In the second year, we had to put on an event. The event I put on was Sexquisite. That was the beginning of 2019.
At that point, I had no sex worker friends. People told me not to say anything about my past, that this was a fresh start. I was really scared. I was making art about my life but no one knew it was my own story. I didn’t even know what cabaret was. I put out a call asking for multidisciplinary artists who were sex workers – poetry, comedy, burlesque, theatre. Through Sexquisite I started meeting people like me.
Being a sex worker is very marginalising. People don’t understand what it’s like, having family angry at you, friends who won’t speak to you, partners who call you a whore. Performance was how I could show the complexity of it. Through a monologue you can explain what it actually feels like.
People think stigma is disappearing but I don’t think it is. In sex-positive scenes – such as at the Bethnal Green Working Men’s Social Club – it feels easier, but outside that bubble it’s still dangerous. I know sex workers who have had their children taken away. People can’t rent homes. They can’t explain gaps in their CVs. Even legal work like web-camming is treated as immoral earnings.
Sex worker is the only marginalised identity people believe you choose. That alone says a lot. You’re never allowed to say you had a bad day at work, people tell you you shouldn’t be doing it at all. Even within families it becomes a source of shame. This is why the law matters. The Online Safety Act has been coming into force this year and it’s had huge consequences. Platforms are deleting adult content, closing accounts, wiping out years of work overnight. Websites face massive fines if they don’t comply, so many are just cutting off adult material entirely.
It’s sold as protection but it’s collecting people’s data, pushing sex workers off safer platforms and into more dangerous situations. It’s also erased support spaces such as forums, harm-reduction networks and community archives. That’s not accidental. There are also ongoing attempts to expand criminalisation through policing and crime bills and to push versions of the Nordic Model, which claims to protect workers but actually makes screening clients harder and working conditions less safe. These laws don’t remove sex work, they remove safety for sex workers.
Meanwhile there’s a weird contradiction happening culturally. Sex worker aesthetics are everywhere. Some people dress like strippers, use the language and take the imagery, but they don’t work shifts or deal with the consequences, or support the sex worker community. At the same time, actual sex workers are being de-platformed and legislated against. That contradiction is exhausting but it’s also why my work has to keep going.
I want to start a UK Sex Worker Pride, in the same way we have Trans Pride and Black Pride. It’ll take maybe a team of a hundred people. I would love to do a big march and a big party. This year I’m doing a programme of events but next year it would be cool to make it bigger.”
Maedb performing one of her poems at Bethnal Green Working Men’s Social Club
Photographs copyright © Sarah Ainslie
