At the Sex Workers’ Art Show, you can expect to be exposed to a lot more than flesh. On Monday night, strippers and prostitutes, phone-sex operators, porn stars, and dommes will arrive at Boston’s Oni Gallery for an evening of entertainment, arousal, and education. Professionals and ex-professionals from all areas of the sex industry will present a cabaret-style event featuring music, poetry, video, photography, striptease, fire dance, and spoken word.

Annie Oakley, a self-described whore activist from Olympia, Washington, founded, organizes, and performs in the Sex Workers’ Art Show. The idea for the show was born of anger. When Oakley " came out " as a stripper, she was confronted with " assumptions based on classism and sexism, " she says. " I was mad. And I decided that I was going to make people deal with this. " She organized the first Sex Workers’ Art Show five years ago in Olympia, and has done so annually ever since. And now she’s taking the show on the road.

" It’s a different feel being on tour, " she says. " In Olympia, it’s a lot more about networking within the sex industry, about talking about labor issues and outreach. On the road, the goal is much more audience-focused. "

The artists and performers’ perspectives on sex work range from celebratory to sinful, but all seek to squash the myths and stereotypes that surround sex-industry professionals. Society brands sex workers as amoral, unintelligent, drug-abusing degenerates, incapable of doing anything but degrading themselves. Not so, the Art Show participants argue. The industry is peopled not by stereotypes, the workers hope to prove, but by individuals. And some of the individuals involved include Candye Kane (porn star turned blues artist), Carmen Li (Chicago dominatrix, activist, and performer), Michelle Tea (author of Valencia and Chelsea Whistle), Jayson Marston (of LA’s Adult Industry Medical Center), and many others.

" One of the goals of the show, besides educating the audience about sex-industry issues, " says Oakley, " is empowering sex workers, to give them a space to be taken seriously as artists and people. "

The Sex Workers’ Art Show is a hotbed for confronting issues of sexuality, gender, power, art, violence, race, and class. " People come because they think it’s a strip show, " Oakley acknowledges. " They come out of curiosity. They leave with something totally different. Audiences are being blown away. " Figuratively only, of course.

The Sex Workers Art Show will be held on November 25, from 8 to 11 p.m., at Oni Gallery, 684 Washington Street, in Boston. Tickets are $16. Call (617) 542-6983.