Liara Roux, the ‘Whore of New York,’ discusses sex work, power, strength and stigma

By Brian Braiker

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Liara Roux is the author of a new memoir with a title that practically slaps you across the face—and then charges you for it. The book is called “Whore of New York: A Confession,” and as Roux is an out-and-proud escort, this is hardly the “confession” of someone who feels much in the way of shame about what she does.

And why should she? Sex work, she shows us throughout the book, is work. And she’s nothing if not honest about it. “I love the word ‘whore.’ I think it’s really fun,” she says in a lengthy interview on this week’s episode of “Brooklyn Magazine: The Podcast.” In fact, if anyone uses Roux’s time for old-school confessions, it’s often her clients.

“People are very interesting to me in an anthropological way … People will say the craziest shit to me,” she says. “Some people will basically treat it like confession. And I also love seeing what weird stuff people are into. I would always push to see if they have any kinks or strange compulsions. That’s what’s most exciting to me.”

Roux, who apart from being a high-end escort and fledgling indie porn producer, is an activist and community organizer, as well as a writer who has contributed to Vice and HuffPost. She was raised by religious parents in New York in the early aughts, a highly intelligent child who was diagnosed with autism early in her life. Being on the spectrum, she says today, is part of what allows her to approach her work with a certain level of detachment and curiosity—and also piques her interest when things do get “weird.”

“It’s a part of why perhaps I don’t feel the regular shame or discomfort about my sex life not being super standard or socially acceptable, because those things are already sort of hard for me to register,” she says. “It’s made it easier for me to do the work because my ways of relating to people are already so atypical that I don’t have the same significance attached to sex that I think a lot of people do.”

The book charts her upbringing, which includes a childhood that is not especially atypical. After dropping out of college, she moves in with her girlfriend in Northern California who she ultimately marries, despite no shortage of red flags. Roux, who is nonbinary about all things sexual and will answer to any pronoun as long as it’s used in good faith, ultimately quits a tedious job in tech to take on sex work through a site called Seeking Arrangements.

“Most people would think that sex work is going to be very misogynistic, but I always like to say that I started sex work to escape the misogyny of tech,” she says.

After leaving her marriage and California, Roux thrives. And when a 2018 set of legislation called FOSTA-SESTA comes down the pike, she gets politically engaged. The pair of bills, signed into law under President Trump, were pitched as targeting illegal sex trafficking, but the way they were worded effectively censored publishers across the web and made it even more dangerous for already marginalized sex workers to operate.

“As many opponents of the bill have pointed out, the law doesn’t appear to do anything concrete to target illegal sex trafficking directly, and instead threatens to ‘increase violence against the most marginalized.’ But it does make it a lot easier to censor free speech on small websites,” Vox writes in its explainer.

“I went into [then-House Minority Leader] Nancy Pelosi’s office and was talking with some of her advisors,” says Roux today. ”They really thought it was a child sex trafficking bill. They did not know that the language is actually about prostitution.”

Check out the episode for our wide-ranging conversation, in which Roux also takes a pop quiz on the “oldest profession” and breaks down how clients in New York differ from those in the Bay Area (“clingy”) and abroad (“British people need to be really smashed to have sex,” she points out).