As a child, public service was proof to me that people are inherently good.
When I was seven years old, I swiped the family Newsweek, where I learned about homeless people, people with AIDS, and black people in Africa suffering under apartheid. I also read about politicians campaigning to shelter the homeless, about scientists searching for a cure for HIV. I read about students, companies, and nations boycotting apartheid South Africa, about Mandela released from prison, and about all the people who braved prison, beatings, poverty, and death for justice.
In those pages, I learned that you could find examples of people doing public service everywhere. Good people existed, despite the evidence of my early life — which was a series of unpredictable embarrassments and bullying. That unpredictability was the cornerstone of my lifelong anxiety; my earliest memory is of feeling that sinking sensation in the pit of my stomach upon discovering that I had made a mistake, and that people were angry at me, but I didn’t know why. I was two years old.
There had only ever been one elementary school teacher, Mrs Pirsky, who had been kind to me. But, look! the magazine told me: here are many Mrs Pirskys of all nations, kind and brave and hardworking, working for the public good. If justice could happen out in the world, then maybe justice could happen one day for me.
I took the personal injustice that animated me and used it to examine the world. A fire grew inside me: I wanted to dismantle capitalism, which gives bullies, demagogues, and oligarchs the upper hand, and makes black and brown people, women, and the poor suffer.
AAt the age of 15, I became a socialist. When asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I thought in terms of where I could be useful. Would I expose injustice as a journalist? Would I study and the world with statistics as a scholar?
One thing I never considered becoming, until recently, was an elected official. In the United States, before the national popularity of Bernie Sanders, socialism was a dirty word. There was no room for someone interested in nationalizing industries and redistributing wealth in the 1990s Democratic Party, which was instead busy championing workfare and chucking people into prison. In university, my political activity was largely centered around organizing and writing about protests. I took it to mean that I would always be on the outside, critiquing.
When I moved to the United Kingdom in my mid-twenties, I found, with delight, that there was a place for me in mainstream politics. Here, members in Parliament decried the occupation of Palestine and lambasted agencies and governments that let disabled people die of panic, starvation, and homelessness.
I found my first political home in Scotland’s Scottish National Party. In the electrifying atmosphere of by-elections in Glasgow, I knocked on the doors of people in desperate poverty and isolation. I took a job with a member of the Scottish Parliament, where I learned how to represent families losing their homes, people abused at work and school, and people tormented by violent neighbors.
Hearing their stories — and knowing that sometimes I could help — showed me that there was a place for a socialist like me in electoral politics.
When my marriage broke down, I fled to the southwest of England, where I worked for several years in the tourist industry. The scarce, precarious work catalyzed my decision to take up sex work. Building my business gave me the confidence and stamina to engage again in politics, and when Jeremy Corbyn, a lifelong socialist and campaigner for peace and justice, became the leader of the Labour Party, I joined.
II joined the Labour Party in Plymouth under my professional name, Margaret Corvid: an out sex worker, specifically a dominatrix. I was nervous about my possible reception, but was pleasantly surprised by the warm welcome I experienced.
I learned that the core of local Labour activism isn’t rooted in the latest news from London. It’s dealing with local issues: a wheelchair-bound woman unable to find parking near home, a mother worried her neighborhood will be infested by rats when the Tory-led council slashes trash pickup in half. We campaign year-round, knocking doors and taking up complaints. Dominatrix or not, if I was willing to get involved, I was welcome.
I threw myself into Labour’s frenetic Council election push last spring, and thought about running for councillor. I knew that making a difference in modest, essential ways could lift my heart, connecting me to the humanity that my own mother had once told me I could never join. I couldn’t dismantle capitalism, but I could help people by making good policy.
My husband and I visited a councillor, a sweet, odd, funny friend. We asked if a woman who whips men for a living could ever be elected. Maybe, he said; times are changing. But with my anxiety, could I handle the work, the staggering effort it takes to win an election? Could I sustain the tough work-rate needed to serve my constituents and my party?
My answer came in waves. Labour fought hard in Plymouth and nationwide for the vote to Remain in the European Union. We stared and wept in shock as the vote came in for Leave. Over the summer I turned my eye to the American election, heartbroken about Bernie’s poll-booth failure and bureaucratic sidelining by the Democrats — and the later electoral college victory of Trump.
Trump’s win ripped me out of my post-Brexit malaise. I concluded that fascism is rising everywhere, and that we must use every means at hand to fight it. I realized that I do not need to avenge my wounded heart; I want to defend everyone.
The yes that I found was a victory of self-realization. After building a business, caring for my mental health, and watching with horror the politics of the last year, I felt prepared to walk the difficult road.
That is why I plan to stand for council next year, against one of the vicious Tories or racist councillors of the UK Independence Party that took control of Plymouth last year. I can be part of the collective fight for democracy — part of the only real answer to Brexit, to Trump. The only way to take our council back, I have realized, is do the hard work, to go door by door, street by street.
