Anything of Value: A Memoir of Sex, Work, and Survival

A memoir and call to action from renowned sex worker, activist, and legal scholar Lorelei Lee exploring the historical and current criminalization of sex work in the United States.To have engaged in sex work is to enter a paradigm in which there are sex workers and civilians, the two identities divided by stigma and the legal system. Lorelei Lee has lived their entire adult life on the other side of the law. From the early days of online porn in the 2000s to the rise of the social media-ification of sex work, Lorelei has been at the center of the twenty-first century mainstreaming of sex work. Visibility in culture—from references to sex work in music, to books, film and tv, to the visibility of sex workers as individual personalities online—however, does not mean safety for the workers themselves. At age thirty-six, at the peak of their pornography career but enraged by the violence that American culture and policy has continuously enacted on their community, Lorelei went to Cornell Law. While there, they began to understand that the present moment of criminalization and violence against sex workers, women, and immigrants in America is not an accident, but a continuation of a long history stemming back to the formation of our governing systems. It has been further entrenched even through other seemingly progressive movements like the feminist movement in addition to conservative movements like religious fundamentalism and white nationalism—sometimes working in coalition. Anything of Value blends a propulsive memoir of a life in sex work with legal and historical research, culminating ultimately into a brilliant argument for national and international decriminalization. Throughout, Lorelei interrogates why the rights of sex workers are integral to everyone’s rights, and how sex workers’ rights can give us a lens into truly understanding the intersection between power, gender, citizenship, collectivity, and labor in America. So many pieces of Lorelei’s life can be slotted too easily into stereotypes. Instead, Anything of Value is a brilliant attempt to lay bare the cultural forces that underpin these false narratives around what it takes to make a living. Read more