Not the Perfect Victim
Photo: Support Ho(s)e / Justice for Alisha Walker Facebook page. Alisha Walker has two notable birthmarks: one on her face, and one on her leg. When she was fifteen, she got a tattoo to cover the one on her leg. “There’s flowers, cheetah print, a bird; it says Envy Me on the back and there are bows,” she describes. (Her very first tattoo, which “hurt like hell,” is on her kneecap.) The second birthmark is on her forehead, and she told me it was a source of teasing in school and continued embarrassment—the reason for her bangs and concealer. It’s visible in the mugshot that accompanies the 2016 Chicago Sun Times story about her, headlined “Fifteen years for prostitute in fatal stabbing of Brother Rice teacher.” The birthmark is smaller than I thought it would be.
I learned about Walker’s case through Support Ho(s)e, a Chicago and New York City-based collective of sex workers and accomplices (as many of the activists call themselves) that has been a source of support and advocacy for Walker throughout her trial and incarceration. The year Walker was arrested, I attended a vigil in Millennium Park marking the International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers. There, the collective read and remembered the names of murdered sex workers from around the world. The lengthy list was spirit-breaking. Members of the collective were crying silently: some stood upright, while others were hunched in defense against the subzero weather. One used their lighter as a candle. The mood was one of resilience, but you could feel how much effort it took.
I wrote a story about the vigil for a local news organization and began to communicate regularly with Red Schulte, a nonbinary organizer with Support Ho(s)e. Schulte told me Walker had just been transferred from Logan Correctional Center in Lincoln, Illinois to the Decatur Correctional Center almost an hour south, where rules for prisoners were tougher. Schulte and other Support Ho(s)e members visited Walker regularly and contributed funds to her commissary. They had also recruited a strong legal team for her. As I became more interested in the case—drawn in by the discrepancies between how Walker’s supporters described her and how popular media was portraying her—my desire to write about Walker grew.
I considered whether I was up to the task. Chicago’s queer and sex work communities overlap somewhat, but at best I was adjacent to the latter. Writers like Melissa Gira Grant, Juno Mac, Molly Smith, and Charlotte Shane—who have personal experience doing sex work—write with nuance and compassion about other workers. Yet most coverage of the world of sex work is patronizing and sensationalistic: voices of academics or government authorities are privileged over those of workers; articles are accompanied by hyper-sexualized photos of thighs in fishnet stockings and feet in high heels; journalists publish information about rape and HIV status without workers’ consent. And while there is certainly some strong, responsible reporting about sex work, many journalists still struggle to write accurately and thoughtfully about the stigmatized profession.
In her photo on the Illinois Department of Corrections website, Walker is smiling. Her hair is crimped, her eyebrows impeccable arcs, her green eyes warm and mischievous. Since she entered the corrections system, her body has changed. Prison food has caused her to gain weight, and sometimes her skin breaks out. She conceals her blemishes with the limited makeup she’s allowed to have.
Photos of her before her arrest, at her home in Ohio, show a
