Sex, Death, and College
- Dr. TJ
- 4 hours ago
- 5 min read
I've always been of the opinion that you should live as well as you want to be remembered when you're gone. To that end, the simple fact that someone has died does not necessarily absolve them of the life they've lived or the horrors and pain they have enacted on others. Said differently, death does not purify, but it certainly clarifies how you lived. It strips away the possibility of revision, at least for the person who has died, while leaving the rest of us to contend with the contradictions, consequences, and memories they leave behind. This sentiment routinely arises when well-known people pass away from this life—celebrities, world leaders, and politicians. Death invites us to revisit not only who someone was, but who they were to other people.
On July 11, 2026, Lindsey Graham, the Republican Senator from South Carolina, died suddenly following an aortic dissection attributed to arteriosclerotic cardiovascular disease. The news moved swiftly through media outlets and cycled through social media as supporters and detractors of the late senator weighed in on his political history, his complicated and often inconsistent views, and the legacy he would leave behind.
One story caught my attention among the flurry of conversation, initiated by author and actress Jesse James Rose. In a now-viral Instagram post, she wrote:
“Most of you know him as the homophobic Senator from South Carolina but to me he will always be the man who paid a twinky pre-transition college student a fat stack of cash to do unspeakable things to him in a hotel room while he wore red lingerie,”
Rose's post went on to describe her experience as a college student and sex worker, explaining that she did not initially know the identity of the person who paid her and only later came to understand that it was Graham. She also connected the experience to her own financial circumstances, noting that the money she earned through sex work helped provide her with financial security and allowed her to avoid student debt.
While the notion of politicians hiring sex workers may seem like a tale as old as D.C., the misalignment between Graham's public policy positions—particularly on LGBTQ+ issues—and Rose's account of his alleged private sexual life highlights an extreme, albeit unsurprising, hypocrisy if her allegations are in fact true. The irony is difficult to miss: a politician whose public life was entangled with opposition to LGBTQ+ rights may have privately sought out the labor, intimacy, and sexuality of someone whose identity and experiences existed in direct tension with the politics he publicly espoused.
But for me, this conversation is bigger than Lindsey Graham.
It speaks to a broader societal expectation of sex-worker silence and invisibility. I don't mean the confidentiality expected and exchanged between a sex worker and client. I mean the stigma and shame exacted upon sex workers, including, at times, by the very people who patronize them. There is something deeply revealing about a society that simultaneously consumes sex work and insists that sex workers disappear. A desire for the labor without the laborer.
We want the service without having to acknowledge the social, economic, and political conditions that make that labor possible—or the fact that the people performing it are living full and complicated lives outside of the transaction. This desire to disappear sex workers from public discourse is not new. It is part of the same broader impulse toward erasure that SESTA/FOSTA facilitated by pushing sex workers further out of visible online spaces and making it more difficult for them to communicate, organize, screen clients, and share information about their work. Rather than eliminating sex work, these policies largely demonstrated the limits—and dangers—of attempting to make sex workers disappear.
Perhaps even more interesting, however, is the continued shock many people express at the notion of college student sex workers. The revelation that Rose was a college student seems to be doing interesting work in this story. It invites questions that are rarely asked about other forms of student labor: Why would a college student do this? How could they possibly reconcile sex work with being a student? What does it say about their character? Their sexuality? Their financial circumstances? Their future?
These questions are not necessarily about understanding college student sex workers. Often, they are about making their existence intelligible within a framework that assumes the college student and the sex worker occupy mutually exclusive categories. But they don't.
I have been writing, researching, and being in community with sex workers for nearly a decade, specifically at the nexus of sex work, college students, and higher education. In my award-winning book Sex Work on Campus, I detail the realities of college students—like Jesse—and the complexities of balancing their student contexts with the rest of their lives. College students are not simply students. They are workers, parents, partners, activists, caregivers, artists, children, friends, and, sometimes, sex workers. These identities do not necessarily cancel one another out.
What the shock and revelation surrounding stories like Rose's reveal to me is that there is still much work to do. Not simply to render sex workers visible, although that remains important, but to advance the conversation beyond the binary frames that so often structure discussions of sex work: good/bad, victim/agent, exploitation/empowerment, right/wrong.
Those binaries are convenient. They are also insufficient.
Sex work, like nearly every other form of labor, exists within complicated social, economic, institutional, and interpersonal conditions. People enter it for different reasons. They experience it differently. They make meaning of it differently. Some people leave it. Some continue it. Some do both at different points in their lives. And for college students in particular, sex work may exist alongside—and sometimes because of—the very economic and institutional realities of higher education that we otherwise treat as ordinary.
The question, then, is not simply whether a college student was a sex worker. The more interesting questions are what that tells us about the student, the institution, the economy, and the society in which all of this is happening. And perhaps that is what death clarifies most.
On sex, death, and college student sex work, the story of Lindsey Graham and Jesse James Rose is probably better thought about by asking happens when the people society expects to remain invisible decide to speak—and what those revelations force us to confront about the people who consume their labor. Not necessarily whether a dead politician secretly lived a life different from the one he publicly presented.
If stories like this one leave you with more questions than answers, I hope you'll pick up the latest iteration of this scholarship.
The point is not to arrive at an easy verdict about sex work. It is to make room for a more complicated conversation about the people who do it, the institutions in which they live and learn, and what we reveal about ourselves by deciding whose lives are worthy of being seen.
Comments