Queer Whore Collective: Blackstage’s Leila Davis is Showcasing and Protecting Pole Dancers of Colour
It’s hard not to be blown away by Leila Davis. The 27 year old pole dancer, instructor, and stripper has fought hard against exploitation in her industry and now creates opportunities for other marginalised people to thrive. She has worked with brands such as Nike and Savage X Fenty and is a powerful voice in the UK pole scene. I had the privilege of seeing her perform live at a queer event a few months ago and her stage presence and sheer skill radiates.
Leila is the director of Blackstage, a show created to spotlight pole dancers of colour, which has cemented its place in the UK pole scene in just 2 years. Against a backdrop of constant exclusion and harassment of queer and Black people in the arts, and at a time where sex workers' livelihoods are increasingly threatened, Blackstage is providing a crucial platform for marginalised dancers and setting the bar high for the treatment of pole dancers. We sat down to discuss the journey Blackstage has been on.
Hi Leila, thanks so much for talking to me today. I know you’re balancing your usual work responsibilities alongside prep for the upcoming Blackstage showcase on April 1st. What does a day in your life look like at the moment?
I'm balancing teaching and management of a pole studio with the massive amount of logistics and admin there is to do for the show. I sometimes look up when it’s dark outside and realise I've forgotten to eat anything since breakfast. I want to do all the work right now and then delegate to my team so all I have to do on the day is perform and enjoy myself.
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You’re an incredible pole dancer. What was the start of your pole journey?
When I was 19 and going through a breakup, I watched a documentary with a friend about pole dancers in Colombia who were deemed to have non conventional body types and used dancing as a way to feel better about themselves and about their bodies. I found a class that was in the middle of nowhere and booked on immediately for a whole term. From the first session, I was completely hooked and knew this would be my life. A year in, I took an instructor training course and then I competed and performed throughout uni. I haven’t stopped since.
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Blackstage has gone from strength to strength over the last 2 years. Where did the idea come from?
I trained with an elite dance institution throughout my teens. As one of the few people of colour, I existed in the shadows of my white counterparts who constantly got picked over me. My community, the people I fill my life with, were all queer and BIPOC, and so I knew I wanted to create a space that focused on people who looked like us. The wider industry around me has always been rife with whorephobia, racism, and ableism. Having had glimpses of that world sometimes when I’ve competed, I knew I wanted nothing to do with that. There are some awful stories of Black women being shunned from competitions for speaking out about racism and I just want us to have spaces where we can exist and be appreciated.
Being discriminated against and pushed out of opportunities means you can’t access the resources you would have gained if you won. This spurred me on to go out there and create something of our own. Fuck your resources, I’m going to get better resources and I’m going to share them with my community - people who have historically been excluded and had so much taken away from them.
You’ve shared that you reached out to, and got completely ignored by, 30 different publications for support in promoting Blackstage ahead of your first showcase. Over a year on from that incredible first show and with a Nike partnership in hand, what challenges remain now in growing the show?
We still face the same challenges. The first time around, I gave people the benefit of the doubt. Now, however, I know that the people receiving my emails this time know who I am and are choosing to ignore me. Going forward, I’m going to focus on finding the right people to talk to instead of reaching out to people who don’t respect what I’m doing.
It’s a real shame as some of the publications you contacted are places that project a strong image of diversity?
Yeah it’s quite telling that they’ll share our art to an extent, when it’s cool. But they’re not interested in letting us tell our stories. They also rarely share sex worker led stuff, and when they do - it’s from cis white women. They’ll never platform a Black sex worker. It’s elitist.
You now have quite a large platform of your own as an athlete, creator, dancer, and artist. How do you navigate talking about sex work in your private and public lives?
Lots of my friends are sex workers, and the ones that aren’t have known me for a very long time and I’ve always talked openly with them. Publicly however, not everyone knows and I have to pick when I feel it’s safe to talk about in certain settings.
”I do feel that whorephobia is blocking me from having the same opportunities as my peers. We’re all part of marginalised groups and its hard enough being a queer Black woman but sex work makes it that much harder.”
When applying for initial funding, were you open about being a sex worker?
Oh yeah! I made it clear we need a platform for sex workers. Lottery funding didn’t want anything to do with me, but Arts Council picked it up. I'm part of Black Business Incubator, a programme supporting young Black entrepreneurs, and we’re always sharing loads of opportunities. I do feel that whorephobia is blocking me from having the same opportunities as my peers. We’re all part of marginalised groups and its hard enough being a queer Black woman but sex work makes it that much harder. It’s not a level playing field when I can get rejected straight off the bat just for being a sex worker.
How has being a sex worker influenced how you run Blackstage?
It’s so influential in how I present. I like to dress for pole as I do for the strip club, but when you come from a background where everyone is used to being naked all the time, you forget that other people prefer more modest clothing. A lot of polewear is relatively full coverage and some pole dancers do look confused when you wear something tiny. If I put on a competition, I would never police what people wear. People are free to be as slutty as they want.
I also strive to make sure sex workers are part of the Blackstage team at every level and want to reflect the realities of the people in my community. I would never hire someone who had negative attitudes to sex work. Performers have a 500 word space to give us an idea of who they are, any applications that have a hint of whorephobia would not be considered. We are blocked from participating in so many spaces, so we make our own.
Sex work is made more dangerous and emotionally challenging than other work, not by something inherent in its nature, but by a combination of stigma and policy that intertwine to make our lives difficult. What is the experience of being Black on top of that?
We would need the whole day to really answer that. Black women are one of the least protected groups in society. Misogynoir runs rife in any job and we experience it on a daily basis. I know people who have been asked to wear wigs in clubs. I have to compromise my identity and sense of style by trading out a bantu knot or my natural hair for a more eurocentric hairstyle that will be better received by my mainly white male clientele. Black women also have to code switch to be more palatable. Colourism is rampant too, darker skin women are avoided like the plague. Fetishisation is also prevalent and sometimes dancers of colour have to lean into it and allow customers to fetishise them depending on how much they need the money, but it can be uncomfortable. You can’t win. Every shift you have to decide what kind of person you’re gonna present as, it’s a lot.
Strip clubs are the wild west. HR in other workplaces might be flawed, but at least it’s something. We have absolutely no protection if we experience racism from a colleague, manager, or customer.
Sex workers are a very vulnerable group as you’ve laid out. What responsibility do you think pole dancers have then to support us?
If you want to benefit from pole, then you need to support the people who founded it. Donate to Black sex worker mutual aid funds, or the union. I’m thankful that I haven’t encountered any pole dancers who have been negative towards sex work but I’ve heard many stories and I always wonder why those people are even there. It’s embarrassing to be a pole dancer and to not respect us. My own experience is shaped by the fact that I work at a studio that is owned by Kelechi Okafor, a Black woman with a large platform as an activist and writer, who is also my friend. She has really created a community and vibe that is pro sex worker and as a result, I always see my students and fellow instructors sharing positive information about sex work and having these important conversations.
The pole dancers who hate on sex work could not do the job for more than an hour. They would crumble. They think it’s just dancing but don’t realise that the dancing is the easy part. You have to be resourceful, resilient, and skilled.
The job is incredibly difficult as you’ve said, and sex workers come up against exploitation that leaves them without fair compensation for your labour. This is also a problem in the pole world. In your first showcase, you paid each performer over £950, which is not common. Why was it important to you to pay that well, and how did you arrive at that number?
I run a talk called ‘how to make money as a pole performer’ and I talk about how much you should expect for a certain amount of work. I also need to justify how much i pay when i apply for funding.
I took the average cost of hire for a studio in London across the hours it would take to create and rehearse a routine from my own experience, and arrived at somewhere around £600. The show then sold out and as we’re a non profit, we chose to split the rest of the money left over between everyone who worked the show and in the end the performers received £958. Being a sex worker gives you a real sense of value for fair compensation of labour because people are always trying to get free labour from us in the form of time, company and dances. Our work is so devalued and it trickles down to pole so pole dancers who aren’t sex workers are also devalued. Lots of events will bring in pole dancers as an afterthought, and then expect us to perform for £100. It shows such a lack of respect and understanding for how much work is involved. I’ve had so many people try to exploit me and I now reject it entirely and want to empower my peers to get what they’re worth. It’s simply not going to be possible for someone to build a career out of their art if they get paid £100 for 20 hours of work.
What are you most proud of in what you’ve created here with Blackstage?
The thing I’m most proud of is the community that we’ve formed. The alumni have all gone on to be friends. It’s so affirming as a marginalised person who experiences racism in this space and has felt lonely, to then have people around you who can relate to your experience and support you. It’s particularly crucial for sex workers to have that sense of community because we do such stigmatised and precarious work and are usually not able to speak publicly and openly about our experiences.
It really sounds like you’ve done what you set out to do and have recreated the sense of community you have in your own life. What are your future goals for the show and what are your personal goals?
Personally, I want to be financially secure enough to have a wonderful life with my wife. As for the show, I want to grow and grow and grow. I want to tour the show internationally and hopefully do a competition in 2025. This is all really exciting but it’s also scary when you know you’re capable of something incredible and you know it’s achievable. There is so much variety and beauty in this show that is not found anywhere else. Our performers are all so uniquely skilled and it’s so exciting to see what they create. I would encourage anyone and everyone to come along if possible on the 1st April!
Words: Layla Caradonna
