Playing the Whore

by Melissa Gira Grant

  Just two years after COYOTE’s formation, in June 1975, more than one hundred prostitutes occupied the Saint-Nizier Church in Lyon, France. The action inspired other French prostitutes to occupy churches in their own cities in solidarity with those in Lyon, who held Saint-Nizier for ten days before being evicted by police with force. In Lyon, feminist groups grappled with how—or if—to support the occupying prostitutes. A feminist leaflet from the time, translated by Lilian Mathieu, reads:

  We, like they, are in the situation of prostitutes, in that, forced to marry, we are obliged to sell ourselves body and soul to our lord and master in order to survive and have a respectable place in this male society.

  Though the feminists who supported the prostitutes ultimately wished to end the practice of prostitution, “by presenting the movement as ‘the symbol of the liberation of all women,’ ” writes Lilian Mathieu in the essay “An Unlikely Mobilization,” quoting another leaflet, “the feminists tried to universalize, or expand, the cause they had seized on, and thereby to legitimate it.”

  “They justified their solidarity,” he continues, by claiming, as one of their leaflets went, that “ ‘it’s not just on the street that women are led to prostitute themselves.’ ” Lyon’s prostitutes, like those in New York crashing feminist conferences nearly concurrently, could see this support was outrageously conditional.

  There’s a photo inside the 1977 “Hookers and Housewives” edition, a near-perfect illustration of the headline, of Margo St. James standing before a mic on the steps of San Francisco’s city hall with three unnamed members of Wages for Housework (another emergent force in the late seventies’ women’s movement, who went on to support the London church occupation by the English Collective of Prostitutes), two black women and one white woman. One woman holds a sign, AMNESTY FOR ALL PROSTITUTES. Had this image of feminism found its way to me before any of those now iconic shots of that more ubiquitous icon of seventies feminism, Gloria Steinem, so often seated solo, indoors, with her highlighted hair in its centerpart, those tinted glasses that dwarfed her face, I could have paired Steinem’s with another: a feminism both of and for the streets. The caption under the photo reads:

  May 9th demonstration by Wages for Housework protesting violence against women. Moments later, [Margo St. James] was yanked, headfirst, down the steps, by her hair. It took 14 phone calls to get the D.A. to press charges against the man who committed the unprovoked assault.

  By the time I arrived in San Francisco thirty years after COYOTE’s founding, having moved into an apartment just behind City Hall, Margo St. James had left for Europe, and then again for rural Washington State. Her name was a continued presence in sex workers’ rights circles, including in the naming of a clinic—the St. James Infirmary—founded in her honor. I moved to San Francisco in 2003 because that’s where the movement was. Really, it was where all the movements were: Without its student liberation movement, its black liberation movement, its women’s liberation movement, and its gay liberation movement I can’t imagine San Francisco birthing a prostitutes’ rights movement from a houseboat docked in Sausalito, where Margo herself had lived.

  But before Margo St. James, there was Sylvia Rivera, who took her place in history at the Stonewall riots. In the same year that Margo formed COYOTE Sylvia was intervening in one of the first Gay Freedom Day celebrations, in Washington Square Park. You can watch her yourself, in a film discovered and posted online by transgender activist Reina Gossett. “Y’all better quiet down!” she yells, her voice even when amplified straining over the boos from the crowd. “I’ve been trying to get up here all day for your gay brothers and your gay sisters in jail.” Today as many as a third of transgender people in the United States have been incarcerated at some time in their lives. “Most of these women are not in jail for violent crimes,” says transgender activist and author Janet Mock “it’s for survival work.” That is: for the crime of refusing poverty, for hustling or trading sex. How many people could we spare prison, I want to know, if we simply stopped arresting people for selling sex?

  This is how it came to pass, after fighting the police at Stonewall and putting gay liberation on the national map, that Sylvia Rivera had to fight to speak at the anniversary of that riot. Radical lesbians in the gay movement had denounced transgender women like Rivera as “female impersonators,” accusing them of profiting off of women’s oppression. “The transgender community was silenced because of a radical lesbian named Jean O’Leary,” Sylvia Rivera recalled,

  who felt that the transgender community was offensive to women because we liked to wear makeup and we liked to wear miniskirts. Excuse me! It goes with the business that we’re in at the time! No we do not. We don’t want to be out there sucking dick and getting fucked in the ass. But that’s the only alternative that we have to survive because the laws do not give us the right to go and get a job the way we feel comfortable. I do not want to go to work looking like a man when I know I am not a man.

  It was Sylvia who stood up for the trans women and queer kids who ended up in jail when they hustled and did sex work to get by. Rivera did sex work, too, to take care of herself and to raise money for the organizing project and shelter she started with Marsha P. Johnson, called STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries), the first transgender organization in the United States. They were harassed by the police even when they weren’t hustling, just for being visible. The police raids on bars such as Stonewall were written up as “vice raids” in the press, when laws against cross-dressing or two men or two women dancing together fell under that rubric. The police enforced their outcast status and, as with every outcast group, did so along the lines of who they already considered most suspect.

  On a warm night in June 2011, when same-sex marriage was legalized in New York State, it would be hard to imagine the cops breaking up the giant party that followed at Stonewall in Greenwich Village, and in the streets outside. But a few blocks north, in the building that houses the community law project named for Sylvia Rivera, cops had been conducting surveillance, stopping queer and trans youth of color coming and going and asking them to name the young trans women in photographs they had printed off.

  Recalling those years just before Stonewall and not long before prostitutes’ rights became a national issue too, author and activist Amber Hollibaugh writes in her essay collection My Dangerous Desires:

  I was a United Farm Workers organizer. I belonged to two communes, snuck desperate men trying to escape the Vietnam War across the Canadian border, marched in protest against the Vietnam War in cities all over the country, laid in front of Black Panther offices late at night to keep police from firing inside, and got my first tear gas mask at eighteen to use in the street riots that I regularly joined. Then, late at night, I did sex work. Prostitution made it possible for me to afford an existence most middle-class and upper-middle-class radicals I knew assumed was inherently theirs by right.

  Amber Hollibaugh, Sylvia Rivera, and Marsha P. Johnson are far from alone in funding movement work with sex work. I think back, too, on those people I met in the sex workers’ rights movement in San Francisco, thirty years after COYOTE’s formation, who were using sex work to support their unpaid activist work. Those who had laid the groundwork for the movement in the eighties and nineties were, by that time, more or less retired from sex work. They didn’t come up the way this new generation came up, the Reagan babies and Clinton kids, who got our start in the business just as the first wave of sex worker chic hit with feminism’s third wave. Our generation had never known a world before AIDS, had only vague memories of a sex industry before the Internet. We didn’t have the sexual revolution; we had decades of sex panic.

  We weren’t wholly reliant on the Internet to become politicized. It was my AIDS activism in the mid- and late nineties that introduced me to queer politics, to sex workers’ rights—all of a mix. One spring we marched in the streets of Boston for the rights of queer youth; the next spring, before the official youth pride m
arch, the only other out queer woman in my high school, who had been running with the Lesbian Avengers, pulled me into a smaller unpermitted march along a desolate section of Massachusetts Avenue, being held in memory of a trans woman who had been doing sex work and was murdered. The cops had done nothing. Maybe this is what united us, these movements: We kept coming together, each in our own ways, against the assumed inevitability of our early deaths.

  So we were never one movement, even if together we had—in books such as Whores and Other Feminists and documentaries such as Live Nude Girls Unite!—begun to tell its story.

  A week or two after taking the apartment behind San Francisco’s City Hall, I heard about the arrest, across the bay in Berkeley, of a woman named Shannon Williams, who had been working out of an apartment when it was stormed by over a dozen police in heavy gear, with weapons drawn, all to charge her with a 647b, the California state criminal law against solicitation. I had made one of my first new San Francisco friends online, and she was a sex worker and massage therapist. She volunteered at St. James Infirmary by giving free massages as part of its occupational safety drop-in clinic every Wednesday. The infirmary didn’t just offer HIV tests and condoms, but also primary and holistic health care, and all of it for free. M. and I were hanging out in her apartment in Oakland, and she was telling me about this protest she heard a new group was putting on. Shannon Williams had been arrested while wearing leopard-print lingerie, and the police hadn’t let her get dressed before they cuffed her and walked her to the cop car, so the protesters were going to wear leopard print when they stood outside the courthouse for her arraignment. That group became Sex Workers Outreach Project–USA. Williams’s arrest launched a new wave of sex worker advocacy across the country.

  SWOP–USA gathered again in San Francisco in December 2003, on the patch of grass at the foot of the steps of City Hall, to hold a vigil for forty-eight victims of violence. After twenty years, a married, middle-aged, white man had finally confessed to killing these women in the Pacific Northwest. Gary Leon Ridgway, the Green River Killer, said:

  I picked prostitutes as my victims because I hate most prostitutes and I did not want to pay them for sex. I also picked prostitutes as victims because they were easy to pick up without being noticed. I knew they would not be reported missing right away and might never be reported missing. I picked prostitutes because I thought I could kill as many of them as I wanted without getting caught.

  He told police:

  I thought I was doing you guys a favor, killing prostitutes. Here you guys can’t control them, but I can.

  Annie Sprinkle, an artist, former prostitute and porn star, and one of the first wave of sex worker activists in the seventies and eighties, had proposed there be a vigil. Sex workers needed a way to remember those deaths and to speak out against the culture of catastrophic and outrageous neglect that makes them vulnerable to violence, and to protest against the cops who had looked the other way except to arrest them. Women’s groups were always speaking out against rape and violence, as with the marches through San Francisco’s red-light districts that Carol Leigh had reacted to twenty-five years before when she coined the phrase “sex work.” This was our turn. Sex Workers Outreach Project–USA had come together to support the Berkeley teacher arrested in her leopard-print lingerie and now ran with the vigil, making it an annual Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers observance. It had a not uncomplicated relationship to the establishment women’s groups, which rarely supported us in public. A feminist antiprostitution group tried unsuccessfully to disrupt the vigil in its second year. In its sixth year, after that antiprostitution group’s founder had passed away from cancer, we remembered her at the vigil, too. And in the tenth year of the vigil, after SWOP–USA’s cofounder, Robyn Few, passed away from cancer, there were dozens of observances around the world recognizing her and her fight.

  It can’t all be death and loss, though, even if sometimes the joy in the movement—the karaoke, PVC, leopard print, and all—makes sex workers seem unfit for “real” politics. Who else would use a fashion show of streetwalker chic to protest a little understood US policy restricting foreign aid to groups who oppose prostitution? But that’s what Brazilian sex workers from the organization Daspu asked sex workers to help them do onstage at the International AIDS Conference in Mexico City in 2008. Daspu members gave SWOP–USA members catwalk makeovers, and before an audience of UN people and the international human rights crowd, they used boots, fishnets, and smoky eyes to tell their story: The groups had been strong-armed by the US into signing loyalty oaths declaring their opposition to prostitution in order to keep their AIDS funds. Rather than sell out sex workers, the entire country of Brazil refused to sign the pledge and gave up $40 million.

  On another cold night in December, almost ten years after SWOP’s founding, we gathered again, but this time lit by a stage and not candles, not mourning but organizing. Members of SWOP–NYC were raising money to spin off PERSIST, a health project for those in the sex trade. It was inspired by the St. James Infirmary, and brought more than a hundred people together, crammed into that sweaty little room in their best drag, to bid on spankings and T-shirts. We applauded performer after performer, and got choked up and misty when the organizers hopped onstage to thank us—and then got back to cruising and mingling and dancing, a mix of generations, some back again at the Stonewall Inn.

  Not long after that benefit at Stonewall I interviewed one of the health project’s cofounders, Sarah Elspeth Patterson, for a story in anticipation of their launch. After the ten years since SWOP was founded, the forty years since COYOTE and STAR were founded, the movement was beginning to resemble those roots again. I would find sex workers’ rights activists on the streets of Lower Manhattan when I was reporting on Occupy Wall Street, marching but also lending expertise in street medicine, in harm reduction, in jail support, all the things sex workers had learned to care for themselves outside the law.

  At a community meeting that winter at Riverside Church near Harlem, about the NYPD’s policy of stop-and-frisk, a group of trans women, all Latina, came to the mic one after the other and described in Spanish how they had been targeted by the police: stopped while walking home from the subway or stopped when buying a cup of coffee (and an instance when one woman asked the officer why she was being stopped, she had the coffee thrown in her face). They said they were profiled as sex workers, whether they were working or not, and had the condoms in their purses used as evidence of their intent to do sex work.

  When the International AIDS Conference finally returned to the United States in the summer of 2012, after the ban on HIV-positive people entering the United States had been lifted, the travel ban on sex workers and drug users remained. Two of the groups recognized as most at-risk were shut out of the gathering, the largest in the world to address AIDS, to set policy goals and funding commitments. In the streets of Washington, DC, a few dozen American sex workers marched as a contingent in a larger march against the criminalization of AIDS. Something in the movement was shifting back: a recognition that, as destructive as the laws that target prostitution are, they are applied to us unequally, and to many more people than sex workers.

  One thing I want everyone to understand is that when ppl scream abt how empowering [sex work] is, they are reacting directly to whorephobia. It does not mean our work is abt sex rather than economics. It means you have left them no room for a complicated relationship with work or any possible other paradigms. Sex work can indeed be empowering. But that is not the point. Money is the fucking point.

  —Kitty Carr

  A movement that had in some ways been founded on the principles of sexual liberation, and had found itself pitted against feminists, was focusing now not on why sex is outlawed but why sex is a vehicle by which people are made outlaws. It’s not only a movement to reclaim the value of sex, though it is that and would lose its sense of joy and life without that, but it is also a movement to reject the systems that use sex to render certai
n people less valuable.

  Some of this has been accomplished by placing less emphasis on sex work as the banner under which the movement is organized. When she co-founded PERSIST Sarah Elspeth Patterson told me that it was important not to describe the people who run it and the community it serves as sex workers, not out of shame or stigma, but to address all the people who are involved in their own way in the sex trade and do not use that word to describe themselves. It can look like a disavowal of a foundational element of sex worker movement work, but it comes from the same place the phrase sex worker originated from: the power built in naming yourself.

  “Sex worker,” Patterson pointed out, isn’t a term that most sex workers use in the course of their actual work. They don’t advertise themselves that way; they’re escorts, or rent boys, or massage providers, or porn performers, or dommes, or subs, or simply working girls. Sex workers do use the name in their organizing, in their political work. But they’ve constructed a class identity as workers that they can’t use at work.

  There’s one critical function sex worker identity must still perform: It gives shape to the demand that sex workers are as defined by their work as they are by their sexuality; it de-eroticizes the public perception of the sex worker, not despite sex but to force recognition of sex workers outside of a sexual transaction.

  Our political work is still understood as sex, as if we cannot speak without producing pornography. I think of the men who come to my public talks, who corner me with personal questions about my “real work” after I’ve given a reading or delivered a lecture on my reporting or research. I recall my file of e-mails from reporters, academics, filmmakers, and activists who want me to introduce them to sex workers so that they can tell their stories, or organize them, without an understanding that they—we—are also reporters, academics, filmmakers, and activists, and are doing it ourselves. After I repeatedly told one such person that I couldn’t meet with him to discuss his “research,” he then asked me out for a drink, not realizing that if he wants this kind of interaction from a sex worker, he could just hire one who was actually working.