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It all started with a knife. On the way to her day job one morning in 2020, Queen Hibbler noticed that her tire pressure seemed unusually low. A quick stop at the Jiffy Lube down the street confirmed her hunch, but when the mechanic walked back into the lobby and she saw what he was holding, Hibbler’s blood ran cold. “He was like, I don’t know who you pissed off, but this is what I just pulled out of your tire,” she recalled. “It was a six-inch serrated knife.” Unfortunately, she knew exactly where it had come from. Three weeks prior, after an argument with an ex-military client, the man had started stalking her. He’d been harassing her with intimidating phone calls for weeks, and the knife was a terrifying escalation. “I was like, all right, I need to do something about this immediately,” she said. “I was telling my friends that if anything happens to me, this is the person who did it… I don’t know what he’s going to do, so I need to be prepared.”
That night, she signed up for her first concealed carry class. A month later, she was a registered gun owner. It was not a decision she took lightly. Growing up in Chicago, she had lost loved ones to gun violence and was intimately familiar with how dangerous a lack of training can be. “It’s a lot of power when you have firearms, so that’s why it’s very important to be highly educated on what you’re dealing with,” Hibbler explained. After the knife incident, she found an instructor she trusted and started learning everything she could about firearm safety and responsible gun ownership. Now, six years later, Hibbler is using her experience to help other women in her industry find their power—one concealed carry class at a time.
“My hope is to get as many sex workers as possible armed,” she told Playboy. “People in marginalized communities are more at risk because of the way the administration is set up right now—especially sex workers, especially full-service sex workers, especially street-based sex workers, especially if you are trans or undocumented—so they out of everybody need to be able to be armed and have access to utilizing their Second Amendment rights.”
It shouldn’t be surprising that sex workers around the country are boning up on firearms education. There’s a long tradition of both armed self-defense and general firearms enthusiasm across the political spectrum, particularly within communities that have historically been targeted for violence and oppression. Organizations like the Socialist Rifle Association, the Sylvia Rivera Gun Club, Yellow Peril Tactical, the Huey P. Newton Gun Club, the Pink Pistols, and Black Girls Shoot! take the activist maxim “we protect us” seriously, and offer their communities tools to do so in a world that doesn’t expect them to fight back. In that regard, Hibbler and the other sex workers she’s hoping to educate fit right in.
Hibbler’s position on the board of the Sex Workers Outreach Project (SWOP) Chicago chapter and role as its director of media and communication have come in handy for her mission. In May, she and her instructor, former probation officer Javondlynn Dunagan of JMD Defense, announced their first Intro to Concealed Carry course specifically for sex workers. All 40 spots filled up immediately, and Hibbler’s voice swelled with pride when she said that every single attendee had aced their test. “They all got a perfect score when they went to certify for their license!” she said.
For those who want to continue their firearms education, there’s also a SWOP Chicago gun club in the works. “We are gathering all of those folks together so we can regularly go to the range and practice,” Hibbler explained, “because it’s really important for not only people to be armed, but for people to be familiar with their firearms, and to go practice at least one to two times a month…It’s very much this ‘stay ready so you ain’t got to get ready’ type thing.”
Further north, SWOP’s Minneapolis branch is on a similar wavelength. Co-directors Andi Snow and Athena Papagiannopoulos have been organizing together for over a decade; they met while working at BJ’s Liquor Lounge (an historic and now-closed Twin Cities strip club) and both are seasoned gun owners. Papagiannopoulos was introduced to firearms through her social circle, while for Snow, arming up was a matter of practicality. “You’re leaving [the club] with a bunch of cash on you at 4am, you’re possibly intoxicated, your personal protection has to step up,” she explained. “I always used to carry a knife, then start carrying a gun.” The duo had already formed an informal gun club with Atlas Defense instructor Manuel Manchea, a former Marine-turned-community defense activist, but in January 2026, Snow and Papagiannopoulos decided it was time to up the ante. The Trump Administration had just flooded the Twin Cities with 3,000 ICE agents in Operation Metro Surge, and SWOP Minneapolis became heavily involved in the protests, ICE watches, and neighborhood patrols that still make up the daily fabric of life in their city.
The organization has long offered self-defense classes, wellness events, harm reduction resources, and other community programming aimed at supporting the city’s sex workers, but once ICE came to town, SWOP Minneapolis started adding firearms education, gun safety, and permit carry classes to their social calendar. “We just had a mural painted on our building of Alex Pretti [who was killed by ICE in January], and we were giving the girls an example that, even if a man steps to your defense, if something happens to him, it’s still you, defenseless, so you need to be able to help and protect yourself,” Snow explained. “Alex died protecting women, and our whole shit is protecting women.”
Related: The Sluts Will Save Us: The Minneapolis Sex Shop Resisting ICE
Their bimonthly sex workers-only gun club has been a huge hit among the local community. Their permit-to-carry classes are booked up months in advance. Their offerings now include both dry fire (unloaded) classes at the office and live fire classes at local gun ranges, where participants are encouraged to dress to impress. “Train how you live,” Snow says. “You know the phrase ‘scaring the hos?’ We always say we’re scaring the bros. We take over. It’s fun because you have all these hot girls coming in, in like fishnets and mini skirts with bedazzled belts with their tits out, like, ‘we’re here!’ and everyone else is like, ‘Where are they coming from?!’”
At its heart, SWOP Minneapolis’s pink-and-purple gun club is all about sharing knowledge, taking up space, and creating a safe, affirming, and welcoming environment for sex workers (even if they give a few Fudds a heart attack in the process). “We sprinkle magic wherever we go,” Papagiannopoulos says. “That’s why we really push for everyone to be authentically yourself, because we’re not hiding that we’re doing this. Just come in closed-toe shoes!”
Magic sparkles aside, these sex worker activists are deadly serious about their training—and have bigger plans than gleefully terrorizing their local range dorks (though they’re certainly having a good time doing it). According to Snow, the ultimate goal is to strengthen the city’s community safety network. “We do eventually want to be able to patrol and be visible, around and available,” she explains. “Our main stroll is not in a very safe neighborhood, so hitting the stroll every once in a while, but also still patrolling neighborhoods from ICE. It’s a part of our culture now, and we want to be a visible, militant part of that.”
One of the things each of the collectives have in common is that they’re located in states with fairly permissive gun laws (i.e. we’re probably not going to see a New York City offshoot anytime soon). Nevada holds the dual distinction of having some of the nation’s loosest gun laws and its lowest rates of mental health care, both of which can be tricky facts to navigate if you’re trying to start an inclusive and safety-focused gun club. The Las Vegas Red Umbrella Collective has embraced the challenge, joining likeminded sex worker organizers in the Midwest to start their own firearms series. The first installment took place on June 2nd, International Whores’ Day, and RUC organizer Jackie Valentina was thrilled with the response. “We had quite a few people there, and it was just such a great environment,” they said. “Everybody was so sweet, and they all loved it so much, they had a blast. The instructor pretty much did his CCW course, which is like eight hours long, but compacted into like two and a half hours, so it was really informative too.”
Valentina had gotten their own concealed carry permit after taking a class at Range 702’s indoor gun range. After hitting it off with one of the instructors there, they convinced him to hold a special intro class for the local sex worker community. As RUC posted on Instagram, “we firmly believe that self defense and education shouldn’t be reserved for just a select few,” and to help with accessibility, the instructor lowered his rates (and Valentina covered most of the rest). “I want to break this habit of people treating women and femmes and queers and sex workers like we’re just like tiny little helpless creatures,” they explained. “I want us to feel that power we have within us.”
Each of the workers interviewed for this piece alluded to the current political moment when naming their reasons for arming up. It’s no secret that the Trump Administration has been hell on marginalized workers, whether they work in mining or higher education or agriculture or the sex industry, and sex workers are still denied even the most basic rights or protections under current U.S. labor law. Homicide remains a leading cause of death for sex workers in this country, while Black, Brown, and trans sex workers remain disproportionately targeted and harmed by workplace violence. “A lot more clients are walking around armed, and there are instances where people are taking advantage of their service provider,” Hibbler said. “If they’re in a jam like that, they need to be able to know how to de-escalate, and in the event that it’s not able to be de-escalated, you need to be able to know that you’re able to defend yourself. My instructor always says there’s only going to be one story to tell at the end of the day. If it’s gonna be down to me or you, it’s gonna be you.”
Meanwhile, over the past decade, there has been a marked increase in firearms education and gun ownership among minority populations (particularly Black people, Asian people, and women). Explicitly anti-racist, anti-fascist, queer-and-trans-inclusive leftist gun clubs have sprung up all over the country. As these sex workers see it, it makes perfect sense that some of the most vulnerable people in the country would seek new ways to defend themselves in a world that seems increasingly hostile to their very existence. “The people that are usually the ones toting guns are conservative white men and I don’t think that’s fair,” Valentina said. “I think that we should have an equal playing field. We shouldn’t meet the barrel of a gun with our hands up, on our knees.”