Kitt Night, president of SWOON Alliance, stands with clothes offered in their sex worker mutual aid pop-up closet, Kitt’s Clawset, at the QMNTY Center, Monday, April 7, 2025, in the North Side’s East Allegheny neighborhood. Pittsburgh’s SWOON Alliance [Sex Workers Owning Our Narratives] uses the pop-up clothing swaps to connect sex workers with new and gently used clothes for their work, for transitioning genders, or for transitioning to work outside of the sex industry. (Photo by Stephanie Strasburg/PublicSource)
With marginalized communities under attack, sex workers around Pittsburgh are coming together to seek decriminalization, share information — and enhance their work wardrobes.
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Inside Pittsburgh’s QMNTY Center, attendees browsed tables lined with high-heeled platform shoes, leather harnesses, fishnet tights, lacey bras, corsets, chest binders and tucking underwear. Dresses, skirts, slips and negligees, shorts, pleather catsuits and costume pieces hung from portable racks. These items — often expensive, even luxurious — were free to anyone who needed them, so long as they planned to wear them to work.
That August 2024 clothing swap was specifically for sex workers. It was held at Kitt’s Clawset, a free mutual aid resource offering the kinds of clothing that sex workers of all stripes might need for a day at work.
Kitt’s Clawset is a project of SWOON Alliance [Sex Workers Owning Our Narratives], an organization that offers mutual aid, educational workshops and safe social spaces to area sex workers. It’s run by Kitt Night, newly elected president of SWOON. Members of SWOON also engage in advocacy for sex workers in the Pittsburgh region, working to end stigma and violence toward sex workers and to improve their living and working conditions.
“Sex work” is an umbrella term for a type of labor that, according to the Global Network of Sex Work Projects, includes the regular or occasional exchange of sexual services for money, goods or reward. Strippers, online cam models, adult actors and performers, phone sex operators, OnlyFans models, professional dommes (or dominatrixes), erotic masseuses, sugar babies, escorts and people who offer actual in-person sex acts legally or illegally are all sex workers. Estimates of the number of Pittsburgh-area sex workers — including part-timers and those who drift in and out of the work — range from hundreds to more than 1,000.
SWOON’s clothing swaps are one of many ways local sex workers are responding to economic uncertainty for all and the discrimination and financial precarity sex workers continue to face. Advocates for sex workers are pushing for changes in how law enforcement treats the profession, while also working to build community and reduce stigma.
“There are people that have been trying to get out of sex work or have gone out of sex work that end up going back into sex work because of things that are happening” in the economy, said Night.
Night has no position on whether a person should or shouldn’t be involved in sex work — only that it should be their decision. “We’re here about rights, not rescue.”
From criminalizing condoms to a summary offense?
In-person, full-service sex work is criminalized, meaning that a consenting adult selling services to a consenting client may face financial trouble and a permanent record that makes it harder to find other employment and housing. Advocates say criminalizing sex work deters sex workers from interacting with law enforcement, increasing their vulnerability to violence.
In 2018, an investigation by the Tribune-Review showed local police adding “instrument of crime” charges to prostitution arrests when sex workers were arrested carrying condoms or cell phones, a practice which discourages sex workers from using or carrying items that reduce harm and improve safety. As a result of the investigation and subsequent advocacy by the Sex Worker Outreach Project [SWOP] (now SWOON) and others, the Allegheny County Police stopped criminalizing condom possession.
City arrest data shows that arrests for prostitution held relatively steady at about 20 per year from 2021 through 2024, and that the majority of these arrests involve people who are engaging in the act of offering or soliciting prostitution, with no related assault, rape or trafficking charges.
In March, the Coalition for Safer Sex Work, organized in conjunction with SWOON and sex workers across Pittsburgh, presented the City of Pittsburgh Safer Sex Work Ordinance to the city’s LGBTQIA+ Commission, reflecting the coalition’s belief that the majority of local sex workers are trans, non-binary or queer. The ordinance seeks to reduce prostitution — the non-preferred term for sex work typically used in legal documents and legislation — from a misdemeanor to a summary violation, like littering. It would:
- Reduce the maximum fine for a prostitution charge to $100, versus as much as $2,000 now
- Allow community service instead of a fine
- Eliminate the risk of jail time for a summary, uncomplicated prostitution violation.
The LGBTQIA+ Commission endorsed the proposed ordinance on March 18. City Councilor Barb Warwick plans to introduce it to council in June for Pride Month, according to Laura Byko, Warwick’s chief of staff.
Night said the ordinance would “allow them to safely work, not have anything on their record, have insane fines that they can’t even pay or wouldn’t be able to pay.” It would also help those who might decide to change professions because “if you have prostitution charges on your record, you’re not able to get a job.”
Opening the ‘clawset’
When SWOON, incorporated as a nonprofit in January, was known as SWOP Pittsburgh, it was a critical source of community for Night after several years of working without contact with fellow local sex workers. SWOP organizers introduced Night to the staff at the QMNTY Center, an LGBTQIA+ community center located in East Allegheny.
“Being from Baltimore, the gay scene is very lively, very different, very POC [people of color] — and that’s what I loved about the QMNTY Center, it just reminded me of a piece of home,” Night said. Staff “would treat me like I was family.”
In 2022, Night came to SWOP with their idea for a mutual aid closet for sex workers. With most sex workers operating as either self-employed workers or independent contractors, the money for work clothes is typically an up-front investment.
“Getting someone connected with a pair of [stripper] shoes is the difference between them having a job tonight and not having a job at all,” said Maggie Oates — a researcher who works at the intersection of art, privacy and computer technology. Oates has been involved with SWOP and now SWOON since 2019, when she was studying computer science with a focus on privacy at Carnegie Mellon University. Members had asked her to share insights on privacy and security issues affecting sex workers.
“There’s a lot of wonderful initiatives to help people get work clothing in Pittsburgh,” Oates said of the closet, “and obviously the work clothing needs are unique in this community.” Besides defraying cost, Oates pointed out that the closet reduces waste, offering new homes for gently used items that might otherwise end up in a landfill.
Night held the first “SWOP SWAP” on Dec. 17, 2022, the International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers.
Night and their fellow volunteers sourced “corsets, fish nets, any lingerie items, even sex toys, heels, shoes, accessories” for the first clothing exchange, which was “chaotic” to get off the ground, per Night, but also a success. “Once I was there, I knew that this was something I wanted to do, this was the community I wanted to work for and be around.”
The idea for a closet for sex workers inspired the employees at the QMNTY Center to open a free clothing closet for the LGBTQIA+ community, permanently housed at the center. Kitt’s Clawset operates as a pop-up within that space, with Night and volunteers bringing all of the sex-work-specific items in and setting up for just a day at a time.
The fourth iteration of Kitt’s Clawset took place in March, and it continues to see a lively turnout each time, with dozens of sex workers coming to make use of the closet and space. The process has taught Night a lot about the diverse needs of the community, and improved their understanding of their own gender presentation and identity.
At the beginning, Night said, “I was reflecting my femininity specifically, so I was just on a one-track line of feminine clothes.” They concentrated their efforts on feminine items — dresses, heels, purses. Then, they met more masc-presenting sex workers who would say, for example, “I would love to have a packer” (a gender-affirming item that simulates external genitalia underneath clothes) or who were looking for binders (used to flatten the appearance of breasts).
Now, said Night, “I’ll bring any gender-affirming stuff I can find … They’ve been taken right away.” Kitt’s Clawset is always seeking donations of new or gently used gender-affirming clothing and accessories in addition to sex-work friendly clothing.
Reducing stigma and advocating for the sex worker community, safety education and connection are among SWOON’s top goals for the coming months. In addition to Kitt’s Clawset, SWOON has recently:
- Organized social hours exclusively for sex workers to unwind and talk shop with each other
- Conducted a workshop on money management
- Released a resource guide for Pittsburgh sex workers
- Created a mutual aid fund that offers one-time financial relief so that local sex workers don’t have to choose between unsafe work and survival
- Tabled at local events including Wilkinsburg Pride and First Fridays on Penn Avenue in Garfield.
Whether it’s swapping clothes so workers have wardrobes for everything from dating to camming, or advocating for local legislation, lowering barriers faced by sex workers saves lives, according to Night. “There’s no workers union for sex workers, so we have to do a lot of the ground work, we have to do a lot of helping, and do extra around sex work.”
Updates about upcoming clothing swaps and other events can be found on SWOON’s Instagram.
Nico Hall is is a writer of creative nonfiction, personal essays, journalism, reviews, interviews and short fiction. You can find more of their work on Autostraddle.com, find them on Instagram or contact them via their website nicokhall.com.
This story was fact-checked by Rich Lord.
This article first appeared on PublicSource and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
