‘The police see us as disposable’: what life’s really like in New York’s maligned ‘red light district’

As rightwing media and the mayor target a Queens neighborhood, sex workers say they're just trying to survive

In 2000, Cecilia Gentili worked late nights as a sex worker on Roosevelt Avenue, a dusty corridor linking Queens' most diverse communities, under the shadow of the clattering 7 train. It was the only way she could survive as a new immigrant. After coming out as trans, she had been shut out by employers in her native Argentina, and in New York, I really thought that things would be different," she says. But in a way, it was a double level of discrimination: being trans and being undocumented. So again, I found myself engaged in street sex work."

She rented a $150-a-month room in a shared apartment in Jackson Heights, a neighborhood full of other immigrants and queer and trans sex workers trying to help each other scrape by. When I needed a place to live, it was not the city of New York that facilitated it, it was another sex worker. When I needed to eat, it was another trans person," she says. If she felt unsafe on the street, she'd walk to a late-night street vendor and stand in their lamp's warm glow.