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.