Audacia Ray
Audacia Ray (they/she) is a writer and advocate with nearly 20 years of experience in LGBTQ, sex worker, feminist, and anti-violence organizing, communications, and policy work. As Director of Community Organizing and Public Advocacy at the New York City Anti-Violence Project, they advocate to shift resources away from the criminal legal system and toward support for LGBTQ survivors of violence. As an advocate, they have played a key role in campaigns around hate violence prevention, trans rights, and sex work decriminalization.
As a writer and storyteller Dacia hosted the Red Umbrella Diaries, a monthly sex worker storytelling series, for five years; the series was documented in a film of the same name that screened at DOC NYC and internationally. Their nonfiction work has been widely anthologized, most recently in We Too: Essays on Sex Work and Survival. She was an editor of $pread magazine and its respective best-of anthology published by Feminist Press. In a recent turn toward fiction, Dacia has become a Tin House Winter Workshop alumn and has published short stories in Necessary Fiction, Litro Magazine, NonBinary Review, and Stone Canoe. Dacia has a MA in American Studies from Columbia University and a BA in Cultural Studies from the New School. They spend their time in Brooklyn and the Catskill Mountains.
“The darkness that exists online is not a property that lurks inside our servers and our cyberdildonics; it is inside the people who have found an outlet that exists to express themselves---for both good and evil (and sexy stuff in between). To say that the Internet is an entity that threatens human society, morality, and nature is naive at best and an expression of displaced blame at worst.”
“As a rule, menstruation is generally not something seen in porn, which is a peculiar omission in an industry that fetishizes everything from shoes to stuffed animals to excretory functions. Though credit-card processing companies seem to have no problem with double- and triple-penetration sites, bukkake, and electricity play, most of them regard menstruation and other forms of blood play as out of bounds, citing obscenity violations as well as safer sex concerns---though anal cream pies and the like are at least as risky.”
“As a woman of color who is interested in these issues of democracy and who wants to enact social change, Pilaf sees the Internet as a tool that perpetuates the corporate, white, middle-class hegemony of American consumer culture rather than a tool for revolution. Instead of viewing the Internet as a new outlet for activism and that opens up a world of communication, Pilaf sees the online communication and activism as an escape valve, a way to remove oneself from interactions with people. Although I disagree with her on this point, I’m very much aware that my ability to see the Internet as revolutionary comes from a place of privilege, in which I can think of the Internet as a sexual, political, and intellectual arena because I’m in a place (geographically and economically) where these are the very things that are my primary focus and concern. Although some of Pilaf’s criticisms overlap with those technophobes who view the Internet as the devil’s playground, her observations come from a very real, intense place of political and personal discomfort with forging ahead of digital culture and the casualties this ‘progress’ may leave.”