What Do You Do When You’ve Consumed Your Savior?

Scavengers and the Erotic

Sex events are not profitable.

Full stop.

I have sold ass for a high dime and still charge a cushy fee for the comfort that I offer and here is something that I know — and you should too: when you see a sex professional (like me) building community, hosting events and putting together spaces to explore your wildest curiosities, we are not buiding it for the paycheck.

We built it for love. For community. For the wild hope that if you build a space tender enough, brave enough, the people will come and be transformed.

And every time we build it, they have come. They danced naked under the stars lights. They cried in workshops. They flogged and were flogged. They found belonging.

They allowed themselves to be consumed in the safest of places.

And they consumed.

What do you do when you’ve eaten every savior you had, licked the plate clean, and then look around confused when there’s nowhere left to be held?

Today, Sex Down South — one of the longest-running Black woman led, sex-positive gatherings in the world — announced that it’s closing. The conference that has, for a decade, held Black and Brown, queer and trans, kinky and disabled bodies in a softer, braver way than the outside world ever has, is done. Ten years deep. Gone. Just like that.

I’ve been fielding messages all morning.

“Wait—what happened?”

“Is Tantra Fest coming back now?”

“Where are we gonna gather?”

But not one person has asked: Is Tia okay?

No one has said: What’s Marla’s CashApp?

Like so many before them, these event organizers were simply consumed.

Price of “Community”

People forget that many of these events are built on unpaid labor. Not underpaid — unpaid. A while back, I told Tia on on of our long morning calls, “no one knows you do this for free.” People have an idea of what it takes to put on an event, and that idea is usually dead ass wrong.

At Sex Down South, the organizers never took home a check. Ten years of labor, vision, logistics, emotional triage, and heart — offered up for free, for love. The fees that they charged didn’t cover the space they held, and they spent free time fundraising, writing grants, asking for support that was ureliable at best, unavailable at worst.

That “community” too often it showed up with applause, not support.

At the few Black-led, sex-positive spaces we have, nobody is really getting paid. Presenters donate their brilliance. Organizers donate their nights and their nervous systems. Staff “volunteers” are paid in access and vibes. Meanwhile, the hotel walks away with a fat check and a thin tolerance for the presence of sex, kink, queerness, and Blackness in its ballroom (the house Sheraton always wins) and the so-called “community” gets a heavily discounted experience of a lifetime.

Front: “The Virgin Martyr Cecilia” (2022), bronze, 251 × 152 3/4 × 70 1/8 inches. Back: “Young Tarentine II (Ndeye Fatou Mbaye)” (2022), oil on canvas, 131 7/8 × 300 inches

Now, I don’t want to put this all on the community because the organizers are not innocent in this story. But they are not villains either.

They are what this culture reliably produces: Black and Brown, often femme, often queer people who internalize the belief that love must be proven through overwork, and that to build community they must absorb the harm, protect the illusion, and say yes often. They have played both savior and martyr, a fence no one can straddle.

The timeline looks sudden from the outside, but we know that collapse is never actually overnight. It is the final crack in a structure that has been quietly fracturing under the weight of unpaid invoices, unpaid labor, and unmet humanity for years.

Sure, they refused to raise ticket prices to reflect the real cost of space, staff, accessibility, and safety. They never once insisted that the community meet them where the budget actually lives. And they carried any deficits and emotional fallout in private, so that everyone else could have a seamless “transformational experience” in public.

This is not some individual moral failing. This is what happens at the intersection of capitalism, racism, ableism, and erotic labor.

A Good Grief

I am not sad at all about this loss. I am not feeling the weight of this grief because if the only way you know how to engage with erotic, healing, liberatory space is to pay the least possible, expect the most possible, and then abandon the people who built it once the lights come up, …then the age of your favorite sex events is over. There is no sustainable model where Black and Brown, queer and disabled organizers continue to bankrupt themselves, not financially nor emotionally, in exchange for your catharsis.

The times are shifting for Black-centered erotic spaces. We don’t have the old money that built the White kink spaces where I hung out in the 99s and 2000’s, but we have enough to pay for what matters. We have enough to pay for the labor of those who are making sure that we have access. If you can buy costumes to cosplay sex workers for a weekend, then you can pay for the erotic labor it takes to have these spaces.

Community is A Practice

There is a difference between community and an audience, between co-creating a space and showing up to consume one. And there is a scavenger energy in Black erotic space. The scavenger will show up to get fed, but not to cook, clean, fund, or protect the kitchen. They will demand brave space, leave shit everywhere in the space and then vanish when it is time to hold the people who made that space possible. They will say things like “pay Black women” and talk about “mutual aid” online and then become mysterious when the mutuality would cost them more money, time, or inconvenience.

Scavengers gather. They pick a carcass clean.

Photo credit: Charlie Hamilton James for the January 2016 National Geographic article "Africa's vultures are disappearing".

We have to face the inconvenient truth: no one can afford to be consumed for free anymore. The Atlanta Tantra Fest is gone. Sex Down South is gone. And the line of worn-thin space holders, quietly closing their doors, is getting longer by the day.

There will be fewer festivals, fewer conferences, fewer play spaces and brave rooms until that shift happens. The ones that remain will be built by people who raise their prices to match the energy and effort they put forth, saying clearly and unapologetically: You do not get to pick at my bones.

And if that means there are fewer places to play dress-up in liberation for a weekend, maybe that is the necessary hunger that pushes us to finally learn how to feed each other for real.

May we all learn, and never forget again.

Oh, and incase you were wondering, Tia’s CashApp is $blackbettiee and mine is $godisfemale