Getting Screwed: Sex Workers and the Law

by Alison Bass

  The loophole went largely unnoticed until 2003, when Providence police raided four brothels posing as massage parlors. The lawyer for the Midori and Oriental Garden Spas argued that no law had been violated. The state supreme court, the lawyer noted, had ruled in 1998 that Rhode Island’s law against soliciting was primarily aimed at outdoor prostitution and could not be used to convict someone for activity taking place in private.3 The criminal charges were dismissed, as were later charges levied against spa owners by police. By 2007, Providence, Rhode Island, had become a major tourist attraction for men, with numerous strip clubs, massage parlors, and brothels, which catered to clients up and down the East Coast. Joi Love wanted a piece of that action.

  In June 2007, she moved to Rhode Island, working first at the Sportsman Club, a hotel and bar with a strip club attached to it. “I stayed there a week, and the door guy gave me the number of a landlord who would rent to me,” she says.

  Joi and I are talking on the third floor of bustling Providence Place, a glitzy three-story mall in downtown Providence. It is the first time I have met her in person, and I am struck by how beautiful she is, with a mane of long, curly black hair, big brown eyes, and ebony skin. She is impeccably dressed in a caramel knit sweater and tight white jeans that show off her willowy figure. Black high-heeled boots complete the effect. Joi has already purchased her lunch (Popeye’s fried chicken, rice, and beans), and we sit down near large plate-glass windows overlooking I-95 and some former textile mills, which have recently been refurnished into condos. The now-closed Sportsman Club where she got her start in Rhode Island is located right across the street, Joi says. She gestures at the textile mills across the interstate. “I lived in those luxury condos,” she says. “But they were really racist; they kept saying, ‘Your people this’ and ‘Your people that.’ Just to show them that my people did have money, I paid for four months, and then I moved into the house where that steeple is.” She points out the window at a church steeple in the hazy distance.

  By the time we meet that afternoon in December 2009, Joi has moved to a six-bedroom house with a pool on a quiet residential street in North Providence. Her oldest daughter is an honors student on an athletics scholarship at Wake Forest University. Her middle daughter lives with her and goes to high school in Providence; she’s on the cheerleading team. Her youngest daughter is living with her father in North Carolina but visits Joi on the holidays and every summer.

  So what does she tell her children about the dungeon she has recreated in the basement of her house, complete with handcuffs, paddles, whips, and ropes? Or the medical exam room and tiny classroom where students can get spanked by Teacher? “I tell my kids the age-appropriate truth,” she says. “I tell them I use the dungeon to pretend to beat people or that I’m teaching in the classroom. I don’t give them details, but I’m sure my eighteen-year-old knows what I do; she’s not dumb.”

  In her two years in Rhode Island, Joi says she has assembled a large database of high-brow clients, including judges and lawyers, military personnel, businessmen, and Brown University professors. She has over a thousand clients ranging in age from eighteen to ninety, but most, she says, are between twenty-nine and fifty. Joi herself is thirty-seven, although she looks no older than twenty-nine or thirty.

  “I’d say 75 percent of my clients are married, but I get a lot of singles too,” she says. “The married men have sick wives or they’ve been married so long the wife doesn’t want to do it anymore. Or they are bored. Some men like it for the thrill: can they get away with it?”

  Joi charges $400 for two hours; one hour is $250. Most of her clients stay at least two hours once a week, she says. Joi says she makes over $10,000 a month. Even so, she is choosy. If a customer seems rude or drunk on the phone, she will not make an appointment to see him. If he just wants to give her money and have sex, she’s not for him. “If you want to have some type of conversation, a connection, then I am for you,” she says. “This past weekend, I had two couples. The guy [in one of the couples] had been coming to me for a while, and he convinced his girlfriend to come and visit with him. The girlfriend wanted to dress him as a woman and then have a three-way.”

  Joi says she is doing sex work completely by choice. “I’ve never felt as free,” she says. “I can go to my children’s games and take them shopping. In this industry, I can be myself. I don’t have to do anything I don’t want to do.”

  Joi is still with the same man she met in Atlanta, and she considers him a partner, not a pimp. “My boyfriend doesn’t dictate to me when to work or how to work,” she says. “I have my own bank account. I don’t cook, clean, or do laundry. He takes care of all of that for me.”

  A few weeks before my meeting with Joi, the Rhode Island legislature voted to close the nearly thirty-year-old loophole in the state law that permitted indoor prostitution. In the months leading up to the November 2009 vote, religious groups and antiprostitution feminists such as Donna Hughes testified that illegal immigrants were being trafficked into the state’s brothels and spas and that Rhode Island’s lax attitude toward prostitution was giving the state a bad name.

  A month after the new law was passed, making indoor prostitution, like outdoor prostitution, a misdemeanor, the police arrested six female escorts and eight male customers in four separate sting operations at hotels in Providence, Warwick, and Johnston.4 In February 2010, they raided two spas in Providence that were widely known to be brothels.5 No one was prosecuted or convicted in either of those raids, and no illegal immigrants were found, according to court records and the Providence police.

  Joi herself wasn’t sure she wanted to stay in Providence, now that indoor prostitution was no longer legal. “I can’t see myself living in New England for the heck of it. I’m not the New England type,” she said. “But for now I’m sticking around because of my clients.”

  What bothered her most was the impact of the new law on many women who are already marginalized and in desperate economic straits. “When they passed the new law, they didn’t do anything to help all those sex workers who were out of a job,” she said. “There are no programs in place to help them find another job, get retrained. The law is just going to push a lot of hos out onto the street and further hurt women.”

  That’s exactly what happened, according to researchers. As Weitzer notes in his 2012 book, “outlawing indoor sex work in Rhode Island in 2009 resulted in closure of massage parlors, throwing a substantial number of women out of relatively safe workplaces into more dangerous venues. . . .”6

  When Joi and I meet again at Providence Place three months later, she says one of her newest clients is a Rhode Island legislator. “I’m the third [sex worker] he’s seen and the first one since the law has changed,” she says. “I asked him why he voted for the change. I told him that he should vote ‘the way you actually are.’ He told me it was politics and has nothing to do with how he actually feels. It’s plain hypocrisy.”

  Joi says she supports decriminalizing prostitution and has a hard time understanding why so many Americans are opposed to commercial sex. “You can drink and kill yourself and someone else,” she says. Joi waves her left hand, and the huge diamond ring on her middle finger glitters in the sunlight. “You can smoke a cigarette at $9 a pack and get cancer and give everyone around you cancer. You can do all those things, but how many people got killed by a ho last night?”

  Joi says she regularly gets tested for HIV and drugs and has the test results on hand if clients want to see them. “I would prefer that sex workers be tested and required to have cards,” she says. “That way, if you’re underage or illegal, you won’t have a card. That would prevent child prostitution and illegals. That would be better than having police raid my house and humiliate me and my family.”

  Like many other sex workers I’ve interviewed, Joi is adamantly opposed to underage prostitution or trafficking. “If you have a seventeen-year-old in a strip club, that should be illegal,” she says. “If you molest or sell a child, yo
u should go to prison. If you beat and force a woman, that too. If a ho robs you at gunpoint with her pimp, I’m in favor of sending them both away for a long time.”

  In the middle of our conversation, Joi’s cell phone rings. It’s her youngest daughter, who is living with her father in North Carolina. “Sue Sue, whatcha doing?” Joi asks. Sue Sue, who is in middle school, is apparently calling from her school bus and complaining about some kids who are acting up on the bus. “Tell those kids they have to stop acting like that,” Joi says. “Tell them right now. No, you’re not supposed to yell at them, just tell them in a calm voice.” Joi listens for a few minutes and then says, “I’m going to go shopping for you. What colors do you want? Okay. What size?” Then she says, “All right, I love you. Tell Daddy he doesn’t have to call me anymore, ’cause you called me. All right, love you, bye-bye.”

  Joi says she doesn’t have a formal child support arrangement with Sue Sue’s father. She pays what she can, and he does the same. “He called a couple of days ago and said [our daughter] signed up for saxophone lessons. It’s $55. He asked me to pay for half, and I said ‘Fine,’ ” she says. “It’s better for me that way. I agree to pay what I can. When she was living with me, he paid what he could. I don’t need to have him support me.”

  A few months later, Joi invites me to her house in North Providence. When she opens her front door, a white pit bull (whom she rescued from the street) jumps up at me and bangs into my leg. Joi puts him in her bedroom on the first floor and shuts the door. Across from the bedroom is a spacious living room with a huge brown leather sofa and matching chairs clustered around a white-brick mantelpiece. Down the hallway is the kitchen and a dining room with a table set with fancy brown ceramic ware and brown napkins.

  Joi leads me down a narrow flight of stairs to a large, cozy-looking den with two big flat-screen TVs and a pair of overstuffed burgundy leather sofas surrounding a wooden coffee table. A young African American woman is vacuuming. “This is my girlfriend, Raven,” she says and then gestures at her. “You can just chill if you want to.”

  Off from the den, like spokes on a wheel, are a series of smaller, private rooms. First she shows me the classroom, with colorful ABC letters taped to the walls and a small writing desk and chair in the center. “I make it up differently depending on who is going to be the student and who is going to be Teacher,” Joi says. “I use little ABC blocks, and bring in trikes and bikes.”

  Next up is the medical exam room with a metal examining table and an anatomically correct body chart on the wall. Two rubber dildos and some jelly sit on a table nearby. “I do body rubs in here, but I’m not a licensed masseuse,” she says. “I do a lot of role-playing. It’s not about sex; it’s about fulfilling someone’s fantasy.”

  We settle down on the sofas, and Joi sounds off about the hypocrisy of most Americans when it comes to sex work. “As a prostitute, I’m not considered a person. If I get bashed in the face by a man, I can’t go to the police because I’ll be arrested and treated badly before I get the help I need,” she says, waving a long slender arm. “But if a rich white man is fucking a twenty-two-year-old blond gold mine and giving her a BMW, how is that not prostitution?”

  At one point, Joi says she isn’t particularly concerned about Rhode Island’s new law. “I don’t sell sex for money, I sell time, and legally speaking, my house is what’s called an alternative meeting space,” she says. But then she waves a hand. “I grew up in the ghetto, so I’m always ready to be arrested for nothing,” she says.

  When I ask who Raven is, Joi says the twenty-one-year-old was being beaten up by her boyfriend-pimp and she called Joi’s boyfriend, Lucky, in desperation. (Lucky’s barber was a client of Raven’s and had given her Lucky’s number.) When Joi and her boyfriend went to pick Raven up, Joi says she told her that she’d take her home to Virginia, but Raven didn’t want to go. “She’s been here eighty-seven days, and she says no one has ever taken care of her before,” Joi says. “I send money to her son and clothes to her sister, who is taking care of her son. She says I’ve done more for her than her own family has ever done.”

  A few weeks ago, Joi and Lucky took Raven home so she could visit her son. He was living with her twenty-year-old sister, who has two children and is pregnant with a third, their forty-year-old mother, and the mother’s younger boyfriend in a two-bedroom apartment in Franklin, Virginia. “Everyone is on welfare and flat broke and fighting all day,” Joi shrugs. “Raven could have stayed home, but she didn’t want to. She’s twenty-one and had never run a dishwasher. Can anyone say she’s in a worse position now?”

  Just yesterday, Joi says, she and Raven set up a scenario at a client’s request. Raven played his girlfriend, and Joi was her mother. “We started out in the office, and then we took our clothes off and he wanted to watch [Raven] take a shower, and then I took a shower and he watched me. And then we rubbed him down,” she says. “There was no sex involved for me. And I got a tip. That’s how I like it.”

  THREE MONTHS LATER, on October 12, 2010, North Providence police, armed with a search warrant, raided Joi’s house. Joi, Lucky, Raven, and a friend were watching television, fully clothed, in the den. The officers cuffed Lucky but not Joi, Raven, and her friend. They searched the entire house, took all three of Joi’s computers and some papers out of her desk, and snapped pictures of the pool and specialty rooms. A few days later, after Joi had bailed everyone out, she and her boyfriend packed up and left for Baltimore.

  Joi tells me later that no charges were ever filed in the case, but she has no intention of going back to Providence to live. She had three good years there, but after Rhode Island closed the loophole on indoor prostitution, Joi lived every day waiting for the other shoe to drop.

  “I had actually been looking to relocate anyway,” she later says in an email. “I knew it would be a matter of time. I had too many followers and clients not to be on the radar.”

  For most of 2011, Joi shuttled back and forth between Baltimore and Rhode Island. “My client base is too great to give up, plus I have weekly regulars,” she says. Her oldest daughter was still away at college, and the summer before the raid, her middle daughter had decided to finish high school in Kentucky (where she has relatives).

  By early 2012, Joi had resettled in East Greenwich, Rhode Island, a small town near the Connecticut border, where she started an escort service. In an interview a year later, she said, “I’ve kept most of my clients. Yesterday was Valentine’s Day, and I got fifty Happy Valentine emails, cards, and phone calls from clients.”

  JOI, IT TURNS OUT, is not the only sex worker who stuck around despite the 2009 law making indoor prostitution illegal in Rhode Island. By August of 2014, ten of the fifteen spas that were shut down in the years after the law passed had reopened, according to police, and men from Massachusetts and other neighboring states continued to frequent the city’s strip clubs and spas.

  The head of Providence’s vice squad is Anthony Sauro, an unassuming fifty-seven-year-old of Italian ancestry with a shock of white hair and a fit, athletic build. When we met up, he had been on the Providence police force for thirty-two and a half years and in charge of its vice squad (narcotics, nightclubs, prostitution) for the past two years. Just before Labor Day weekend that year, he gave me a tour of some of the city’s notorious hot spots, and the afternoon culminated in a guns-drawn raid on a brothel in the West End.

  That morning, Sauro picks me up at the bus terminal, driving an unmarked VW Passat (acquired in a heroin raid.) He is wearing a gray polo shirt with “Captain” embroidered on one breast. A gun is strapped to one side of his belt, and a walkie-talkie to the other. He begins the tour by driving down Main Street and into the asphalt parking lot of what looks like a former motel. It houses an “unbelievably busy” brothel, Sauro says, which charges an entry fee of $60 a customer and supplies body rubs and hand jobs. The women who work there are all Asian, imported from Flushing, Queens. Most of the clients are from Massachusetts.

  A
s Sauro and I sit in the car, a silver truck pulls into the lot and backs into a parking space. But the man at the wheel doesn’t get out. He’s too busy staring at us. A few minutes later, the truck pulls out again, and Sauro says, “I think we scared this guy off.”

  A few blocks down, Sauro pulls into another parking lot, where the sign on the door of the squat, one-story building reads, “ABC Spa.” “That’s actually the Refresh Spa, it’s an old sign,” Sauro says. “This place is full service [meaning customers get more than a hand job]. See, both cars [in the lot] are from Massachusetts.”

  Sauro says the city is trying to pass a “Bodyworks” law that would require spas that do body work to obtain a license and register their employees. Such an ordinance, he says, would make it easier for police to close down spas that do sex work. Without such regulation, Sauro says it’s difficult for the Providence vice squad to gather the evidence needed to close down the city’s spas or strip clubs (which often permit commercial sex in private rooms). That’s because many of these places hire retired cops or police from neighboring cities as security. “The first time I walked into the [Asian] spa on Main Street, I heard from someone on the force who knew I was looking into it within an hour,” Sauro says. “The owner had called a Johnston [Rhode Island] cop, and he called one of my guys to find out what was going on.”