Getting Screwed: Sex Workers and the Law

by Alison Bass

  Even so, Joi remains bitter about what happened to her. “The prosecutors don’t care what the facts are,” she says. “They just want a number they can add to their [crime-fighting] stats.”

  This is as true today as it was in the 1960s, when Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, an African American transgender woman, walked the stroll on 42nd Street and Eighth Avenue every evening. Now a seventy-year-old transgender woman who walks with a cane and has to be helped up to the stage, Miss Major is the keynote speaker on the first day of the Desiree Alliance conference in Las Vegas. One of the organizers introduces her briefly as a transsexual gay rights activist, but it is very clear that the audience knows who she is. As many as a hundred women and men have crowded into the main ballroom to hear her speak, and they hoot and holler in admiration, pound the tables, and clap loudly as she lumbers to the podium. Looking around, I am struck by the sheer diversity of the people in the room, women and men of every conceivable color, shape, and age, gathered here from all over the United States. Many sport tattoos, nose rings, and other piercings, and a smattering show off Mohawk-style haircuts. Others are dressed much more conventionally in revealing dresses, flowing skirts or shorts, and tank tops. Some of the women are strikingly beautiful, but most of the people in the room look like you and me, with all the quirks of body and face one would find at any large gathering. For a Monday morning, however, this is an unusually joyous, high-energy bunch. I hear laughter and lots of conversation floating in the air around me.

  Miss Major, as she is known, a huge woman who is wearing a stylish black wig and has no front teeth, begins by talking about the racism and sexism that still permeate U.S. society. She cites the case of George Zimmerman, who killed an unarmed black teenager in Florida and was acquitted. Despite the risks of being black or brown, gay or transgender in a culture that can seem unforgiving, she tells the crowd that they don’t need to follow “the white man’s rules”; they should do what feels right for them.

  Women, she says, have always used sex to survive in difficult circumstances, to get what they needed. “My mother was doing the same thing I’m doing,” she says. “She needed a stove, so she gave a little honey. It’s the same thing.”

  New York in the 1960s used to be a fun and exciting place for a hooker, Miss Major says — “42nd Street was heaven. The men all wore nice suits, the women in nice dresses. You could afford to live in New York City back then. Now it’s become a place for the extremely rich and extremely poor, and there’s no place for people in between.”

  In 1969, Miss Major was partying at Stonewall Inn, a favorite watering hole for gay, lesbian, and transgender people, the night police raided the place. While New York’s finest often harassed and arrested the patrons there, that June evening the regulars had had enough. The four days of riots that resulted became known as the Stonewall uprising, which gave rise to the modern LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) civil rights movement.

  A year later, Miss Major was arrested for robbing a white john. “I thought I was a female Robin Hood, and then I would go shopping,” she says, with a sly smile that exposes her toothless pink gums. Sent to Attica, she was incarcerated there during the riots in 1971, a four-day uprising that claimed the lives of ten correctional officers and thirty-three inmates. “I met one of the organizers of the riots, they called him Big Black, and he politicized me,” she says. “I’m a proud black, transgender ex-con.”

  For the past decade, Miss Major, as founder of TGI Justice in San Francisco, has tried to help transgender women in the prison system make better lives for themselves when they get out. “We try to make sure they have support so they don’t end up back in prison,” she says. “If you want to hook and walk the street, that’s fine on you. But if you want a different life, we try to help you have that.”

  Miss Major looks out over the audience. “You know, there was a time when we couldn’t have met like this,” she says. “At least now we can do this. So you have to make sure you enjoy this, laugh a lot, and share your uniqueness with each other.”

  For a few seconds, there is quiet and then the crowd erupts, giving Miss Major a standing ovation. In this room, at this time, a self-selected sample of America’s sex workers are silent no more.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book could not have been written without the assistance of the sex workers whose lives I chronicle in these pages. I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Margo St. James, Julie Moya, Jillian, Elle St. Claire, Joi Love, Madeleine Colette, Amy Lebovitch, Valerie Scott, Maxine Doogan, Carol Leigh, and the many other sex workers I spoke to in the course of doing research for this book. I am especially grateful to Julie Moya and Jillian, who gave me so much of their time and who generously put me in touch with others in the sex work community. I am also grateful to the researchers, community health professionals, human rights advocates, and law enforcement officials who helped me see the larger picture.

  My heartfelt thanks to the friends and colleagues who took the time to read parts of my manuscript and offer feedback, including John Temple, Jim Harms, Benyamin Cohen, Daleen Berry, Lois Raimondo, Mary Kay McFarland, Shula Reinharz, and Karen Osborn.

  I would also like to thank my editor, Phyllis Deutsch, whose incisive comments and support kept me focused and moving forward, and the excellent editing team at the University Press of New England.

  Finally, I would like to thank my husband, Jim Palmer, whose love and support keep me smiling, and my two sons, David and Jake, who make me proud and show me what really matters.

  NOTES

  Preface

  1. Barbara G. Brents and Teela Sanders, “Mainstreaming the Sex Industry: Economic Inclusion and Social Ambivalence, Journal of Law and Society 37, no. 1 (March 2010): 44.

  2. Ronald Weitzer, Legalizing Prostitution: From Illicit Vice to Lawful Business (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 3–4.

  3. Gregor Gail, “Sex Worker Collective Organization: Between Advocacy Group and Labour Union?” Equality, Diversity and Inclusion: An International Journal 29, no. 3 (2010): 293.

  4. Ibid.

  5. Ibid.

  Prologue

  1. Weitzer, Legalizing Prostitution, 63.

  1. The Madonna-Whore Divide

  1. Anne Seagraves, Soiled Doves: Prostitution in the Early West (Hayden, Idaho: Wesanne Publications, 1994), 104.

  2. Deborah Mellon, The Legend of Molly b’Dam (Kellogg, Idaho: Maple Street Publishing, 1989), 6–7.

  3. Timothy Gilfoyle, City of Eros: New York, Prostitution and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790–1920 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1992), 106.

  4. Ibid., 60.

  5. Ibid., 59.

  6. Nickie Roberts, Whores in History (London: Grafton Press, 1993), 23.

  7. Ibid., 236.

  8. Gilfoyle, City of Eros, 84.

  9. Ibid., 87.

  10. Ibid., 91.

  11. Roberts, Whores in History, 240.

  12. Gilfoyle, City of Eros, 64.

  13. Ibid., 65.

  14. Seagraves, Soiled Doves, 106.

  15. Mellon, The Legend of Molly b’Dam, 13–14.

  16. Seagraves, Soiled Doves, 106.

  17. Ibid., 107.

  18. Carl B. Glasscock, Lucky Baldwin: The Story of an Unconventional Success (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1933), 223.

  19. Ibid., 225.

  20. Ibid.

  21. Mellon, The Legend of Molly b’Dam, 24.

  22. Barbara Brents, Crystal A. Jackson, and Kathryn Hausbeck, The State of Sex: Tourism, Sex and Sin in the New American Heartland (New York: Routledge, 2010), 46.

  23. Sandra Dallas, Fallen Women (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2013), 342.

  24. Ibid., 343.

  25. Brents, Jackson, and Hausbeck, The State of Sex, 50.

  26. Dee Brown, The Gentle Tamers: Women of the Old Wild West (New York: Bantam Books, 1974), 67.

  27. Ibid., 66.

  28. Ibid., 67–8.

  29. Seagraves, Soiled Doves, 109.

  30.
Ibid., 110.

  31. Ibid., 45.

  32. Ibid.

  33. Ibid., 47.

  34. Kingsley Davis, “The Sociology of Prostitution,” American Sociological Review, 2, no. 5 (1937): 747.

  35. Gilfoyle, City of Eros, 271.

  36. Ibid., 290.

  37. Jan MacKell, Brothels, Bordellos and Bad Girls: Prostitution in Colorado, 1860–1930, (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2004), 204–5.

  38. Gilfoyle, City of Eros, 303–4.

  39. Seagraves, Soiled Doves, 45.

  40. Roberts, Whores in History, 267.

  41. Gilfoyle, City of Eros, 312.

  42. Roberts, Whores in History, 268.

  43. Polly Adler, A House Is Not a Home (New York: Rinehart Books, 1953), 21.

  44. Ibid., 25.

  45. Ibid., 44.

  46. Ibid., 92.

  47. Ibid., 97.

  48. Ibid., 126.

  49. Ibid., 130.

  50. Ibid., 164.

  51. Ibid., 217.

  52. Elizabeth Clement, Love for Sale: Courtship, Treating and Prostitution in New York, 1920–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 245.

  53. Ibid.

  54. Ibid., 243.

  55. Ibid., 215.

  56. Adler, A House Is Not a Home, 268.

  57. “Polly Adler Dead: Wrote ‘A House Is Not a Home,’ ” obituary, Washington Post, June 10, 1962.

  2. The Modern Sex Workers’ Rights Movement

  1. “Polly Adler Dead: Wrote ‘A House Is Not a Home.’ ”

  2. Polly Adler, A House Is Not a Home, 48.

  3. Ibid., 113.

  4. Ibid., 110–1.

  5. Jennifer Thompson, “The Greening of Margo St. James,” San Francisco Magazine, June 1974, 26.

  6. Margo St. James, afterword to Prostitutes — Our Life, by Claude Jaget (Bristol, United Kingdom: Falling Wall Press, 1980), 197.

  7. Ibid.

  8. Wayne Ellis, “The Other Side of Sexuality,” Every Other Weekly, March 9–22, 2000, 8.

  9. Ibid.

  10. St James, afterword to Prostitutes, Our Life, 197.

  11. Ibid., 198

  12. Roberts, Whores in History, 283.

  13. Ibid., 320.

  14. Ibid., 290–1.

  15. Ellis, “The Other Side of Sexuality,” 11.

  16. Ibid.

  17. “Transcript of Evidence and Proceedings,” United States of America v. Marshall Clay Riddle, Ralph Louis Bernius, Jacqueline Riley, Malcolm Britton Wooton, vol. 8, U.S. District Court, Eastern District of Kentucky, July 25, 1978, 1554.

  18. Ibid., 1637.

  19. “Transcript of Evidence and Proceedings,” United States of America v. Marshall Clay Riddle, 1560–1. Bob Fogarty, “Prostitute Reveals Ring’s Operation,” Cincinnati Enquirer, July 14, 1978.

  20. “Transcript of Evidence and Proceedings,” United States of America vs. Marshall Clay Riddle, 1594.

  21. Nancy Allen and David W. Reid, “13 Indicted on Prostitution Ring Charges, Cincinnati Enquirer, May 5, 1978. “Prostitution Case,” Cincinnati Enquirer, May 6, 1978.

  22. Ellis, “The Other Side of Sexuality,” 11.

  23. Jerry Seltzer, “Hooker’s Ball” (blog), http://rollerderbyjesus.com/tag/hookers-ball/.

  24. “Hookers Win Case Oakland vs ACLU,” Coyote Howls, June/July 1975, 1.

  25. Ellis, “The Other Side of Sexuality,” 11.

  26. Elizabeth Bernstein, Temporarily Yours: Intimacy, Authenticity and the Commerce of Sex (Chicago: University of Chicago Press: 2007), 11.

  27. Roberts, Whores in History, 291.

  28. Devon D. Brewer et al, “Extent, Trends and Perpetrators of Prostitution-Related Homicide in the United States,” Journal of Forensic Sciences, 51, no. 5 (September 2006), 1101–8.

  29. St. James, afterword to Prostitutes, Our Life, 192.

  30. Frederique Delacoste and Priscilla Alexander, eds., Sex Work: Writings by Women in the Sex Industry, 2nd ed. (San Francisco: Cleis Press, 1987), 145–6.

  31. “Transcript of Evidence and Proceedings,” United States of America v. Marshall Clay Riddle, 1595–6.

  32. Bob Fogarty, “Outburst at Lawyer Cross-Examination,” Cincinnati Enquirer, July 27, 1978.

  33. Bob Fogarty, “9 Persons Enter Guilty Pleas in Interstate Prostitution Case,” Cincinnati Enquirer, July 12, 1978.

  34. Bob Fogarty, “Defendants Found Guilty in Interstate Prostitution Case,” Cincinnati Enquirer, Aug. 2, 1978,

  3. Sex Work Goes Online and Indoors

  1. Bernstein, Temporarily Yours, 30.

  2. Barbara Brents and Kathryn Hausbeck, “Marketing Sex: US Legal Brothels and Late Capitalist Consumption,” Sexualities, 10. no. 4 (2007): 425–9. Weitzer, Legalizing Prostitution, 39.

  3. Robert Kolker, “The New Prostitutes,” New York Times, June 29, 2013.

  4. Bernstein, Temporarily Yours, 122.

  5. Ibid., 172.

  6. Ibid., 174.

  7. Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), 179.

  8. Bernstein, Temporarily Yours, 120.

  9. Ibid., 121.

  10. Weitzer, Legalizing Prostitution, 35.

  11. Christine Milrod and Ronald Weitzer, “The Intimacy Prism: Emotion Management among the Clients of Escorts,” Men and Masculinities, 15, no. 2 (2012): 454, DOI: 10.1177/1097184X12452148.

  12. Ibid.

  13. Bernstein, Temporarily Yours, 134.

  14. Milrod and Weitzer, “The Intimacy Prism,” 465.

  15. Bernstein, Temporarily Yours, 80.

  16. Fred Contrada, “Council Tables Panhandler Rule,” Springfield Republican, February 7, 2009.

  4. Why Women and Men Do Sex Work

  1. Weitzer, Legalizing Prostitution, 10.

  2. Lenore Kuo, Prostitution Policy: Revolutionizing Practice through a Gendered Perspective (New York: New York University Press 2002), 173.

  3. John Lowman, “Taking Young Prostitutes Seriously,” Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology, 24, no. 1 (1987): 103.

  4. Ric Curtis et al., “The Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children in New York City,” report submitted to the National Institute of Justice, U.S. Department of Justice (vol. 1, September 2008): 46, http://www.courtinnovation.org/sites/default/files/CSEC_NYC_Volume1.pdf.

  5. Ibid., 47.

  6. Ibid., 105.

  7. Ibid., 51.

  8. Ibid., 50.

  9. Weitzer, Legalizing Prostitution, 14.

  10. Tamara O’Doherty, “Victimization in Off-Street Sex Industry Work,” Violence Against Women, New York: Sage Publications (June 10, 2011), DOI: 10.1177/1077801211412917.

  11. Private online journal by “Jillian,” May 22, 2006.

  12. Weitzer, Legalizing Prostitution, 25.

  13. Ibid., 14.

  14. Kuo, Prostitution Policy, 95.

  15. Ronald Weitzer, “New Directions in Research on Prostitution,” Crime, Law & Social Change, 43, (2005): 218, DOI: 10.1007/s10611–005–1735–6.

  16. Kuo, Prostitution Policy, 173.

  17. Weitzer, “New Directions in Research on Prostitution,” 216.

  18. Kuo, Prostitution Policy, 97.

  19. Gillian Abel et al., eds. Taking the Crime Out of Sex Work: New Zealand Sex Workers’ Fight for Decriminalization (Bristol, United Kingdom: Policy Press: 2010), 254.

  20. Rochelle Dalla, Exposing the Pretty Woman Myth (London: Lexington Books 2006), 77.

  21. Ibid., 77.

  22. Abel et al., Taking the Crime Out of Sex Work, 251.

  23. Ibid., 255.

  24. Weitzer, “New Directions in Research on Prostitution,” 218.

  25. Ibid.

  26. Ibid.

  27. Ibid.

  28. Weitzer, Legalizing Prostitution, 9.

  29. Davis, “The Sociology of Prostitution,” 748–9.

  30. Ibid., 749.

  31. Donna M. Hughes, The Demand for Victims of Sex Trafficking, research report (June 2005
): 7, http://www.uri.edu/artsci/wms/hughes/demand_for_victims.pdf.

  32. Andrea Dworkin, Life and Death (New York: Free Press, 2002), 145.

  33. Melissa Farley, “Prostitution and Trafficking in Nine Countries,” Journal of Trauma Practice 2 (2003): 34.

  34. Melissa Farley, “Prostitution, Liberalism, and Slavery,” Logos, 12, no 3, (Fall 2013): 12, http://logosjournal.com/2013/farley/.

  35. Bernstein, Temporarily Yours, 51.

  36. John Money, Lovemaps (New York: Prometheus Books, 1986), 29.

  37. Ibid., 29.

  38. Ibid., 58.

  39. Ibid., 169.

  40. Dwight Garner, “Not Tonight, or Any Other Night,” review of How to Think More about Sex, by Alain de Botton, New York Times, August 15, 2013.

  5. The Truth about Sex Trafficking

  1. Donna M. Hughes, “The ‘Natasha’ Trade: The Transnational Shadow Market of Trafficking in Women,” Journal of International Affairs 53, no. 2 (Spring 2000): 625–51.

  2. Ibid., 650.

  3. Kari Lerum et al., “Using Human Rights to Hold the US Accountable for Its Anti–Sex Trafficking Agenda: The Universal Periodic Review and New Directions for US Policy,” Anti-Trafficking Review no. 1 (June 2012): 87, http://www.antitraffickingreview.org/index.php/atrjournal/article/view/24/26.

  4. Human Trafficking: Better Data, Strategy, and Reporting Needed to Enhance U.S. Antitrafficking Efforts Abroad, U.S. Government Accountability Office (July 2006), 10, http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d06825.pdf.

  5. Human Trafficking: A Crime That Shames Us All, Global Report on Trafficking in Persons, U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (February 2009): 48, http://www.unodc.org/documents/Global_Report_on_TIP.pdf.

  6. Human Trafficking: Better Data, Strategy, and Reporting Needed, 12.

  7. Duren Banks and Tracy Kyckelhahn, Characteristics of Suspected Human Trafficking Incidents, 2008–2010, Special Report, U.S. Department of Justice (April 2011), 1, http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/cshti0810.pdf.

  8. Amy Farrell, Jack McDevitt, and Stephanie Fahy, “Where Are All the Victims? Understanding the Determinants of Official Identification of Human Trafficking Incidents” Criminology and Public Policy 9, no. 2 (2010): 215.