One of the ongoing crises in sex work activism is the loss of records from those activists who came before us. Histories of these radical activisms have, until very recently, been just as marginalized as sex workers themselves. Other challenges to such recordkeeping and knowledge sharing include the fact that the extreme violence that sex work activists oppose is also visited upon them, taking knowledge holders from us; and the reality of activist burnout causing veteran activists to leave, cutting ties to keep whore stigma from following them into the rest of their lives. Currently Canada-based, the Sex Work Activist Histories Project is an interdisciplinary research initiative to record and share the radical knowledges, expertise, and histories of sex work activists. This paper introduces SWAHP, discusses key records and findings from its first three years, and concludes (we hope) by discussing with our conference audience what forms future sex worker activist histories might take.
