Jt Santana | jtwb768

I have officially reached one of those points in a project where I can finally look at the mountain behind me instead of staring exclusively at the mountain still ahead. Research and writing are now complete for the first 21 articles in my upcoming 60-part series, Sex Work in America: Stigma, Sex, Law, Labor, and the People We Choose to Judge, and I have moved into the proofing, editing, fact-checking, citation-checking, and “why on Earth did I phrase it like that?” stage.

Twenty-one articles. Out of sixty. That is more than one-third of the entire series researched and drafted before the first article even publishes.

And yes, I am a little impressed with myself.

I am also slightly cross-eyed.

This project started with what sounded like a relatively straightforward question: Why is sex work so heavily stigmatized in the United States, and how did we get here? As it turns out, America has spent a few centuries making the answer considerably more complicated than “religion” or “prostitution is illegal.”

Once I started researching, the subject exploded outward.

Colonial America led to nineteenth-century brothels. Brothels led to red-light districts. Red-light districts led to municipal regulation, St. Louis experiments, Storyville, Jim Crow, Progressive reformers, white-slavery panic, the Mann Act, wartime sexual policing, the American Plan, hidden postwar sex markets, psychiatry, Stonewall, queer survival economies, COYOTE, HIV/AIDS, condom policing, the construction of the “whore” as a social category, the sexual double standard, and the racial politics of prostitution enforcement.

That brings us through Article 21.

The next group takes us into poverty, housing insecurity, religion, transgender profiling, modern prostitution law, Nevada, partial decriminalization, loitering statutes, police stings, and the consequences that follow people long after an arrest ends. After that, we still have health, labor rights, consent, LGBTQ populations, clients, international legal systems, online sex work, banking discrimination, FOSTA-SESTA, artificial intelligence, deepfakes, and a final evidence-based look at which policies actually appear to produce better outcomes.

So apparently I decided to write the cheerful little 60-part series where sex, constitutional law, public health, race, labor, religion, poverty, policing, technology, gender, and centuries of American hypocrisy all show up to the same party.

Naturally.

What has surprised me most is how often the history refuses to fit the slogans we use today. Regulation has sometimes protected people and sometimes subjected them to invasive surveillance. Suppression has sometimes closed abusive institutions and sometimes pushed workers into more dangerous settings. Anti-trafficking campaigns have addressed genuine exploitation and, at other moments, expanded into racial panic and sexual policing. Reform movements have included people motivated by compassion, feminism, public health, racism, religious conviction, business interests, and political opportunism, sometimes all operating inside the same campaign.

The easy version of this series would have picked a side first and then gone looking for evidence.

That is not what I wanted.

I want Sex Work in America to distinguish trafficking from consensual adult sex work without minimizing trafficking. I want it to acknowledge agency without pretending poverty has no effect on choice. I want to examine criminalization without romanticizing the sex industry. I want to take sex workers seriously without requiring them to love their work, and I want trafficking survivors taken seriously without requiring them to represent every person who has ever sold sex.

Most of all, I want the series to keep asking the question that has followed me through the research: Why has the person selling sex so often carried the shame for a transaction that cannot exist without somebody willing to buy it?

That question gets more complicated the deeper I go.

Right now, Articles 1 through 21 are moving through proofing and editing. I am checking arguments, tightening language, verifying citations, making sure historical claims are properly qualified, removing repetition, and confirming that later articles build logically on what came before them rather than simply becoming sixty unrelated essays sharing a title.

There is still a lot of work ahead.

There are also 21 completed drafts sitting in front of me that did not exist when this project started.

That feels pretty damn good.

The current plan remains to launch Sex Work in America on January 7, 2027, with a new article every week. If everything stays on schedule, the series will run through February 2028 and eventually cover American history, modern law, health, safety, stigma, queer communities, buyers, international approaches, technology, and the policy choices facing the United States now.

Sixty articles sounded mildly unhinged when I planned it.

Twenty-one articles later, it still sounds mildly unhinged.

The difference is that now it is actually happening.

21 researched. 21 drafted. Editing underway. 39 to go.

And the deeper this project gets, the more convinced I become that sex work is not really a narrow story about prostitution at all. It is a story about who America decides deserves dignity, whose sexuality gets regulated, whose choices we trust, whose choices we second-guess, and how quickly stigma can become law.

January is getting closer.

And Sex Work in America is getting very real.