Sex Workers Unite: A History of the Movement From Stonewall to SlutWalk by Melinda Chateauvert

Author:Melinda Chateauvert
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Social Science, Prostitution & Sex Trade, 21st Century, United States, Gender Studies, History
ISBN: 9780807061404
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2014-01-07T00:00:00+00:00

“Outlaw Poverty Not Prostitutes”: Button, from St. James Infirmary, San Francisco.

CHAPTER 6

“FUCK THE PIGS!”

Public Sex and Police Violence

Police violence against sex workers is not perceived as either police brutality or violence against women, when it is clearly a manifestation of both.1

—INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence

IN THE FINAL DAYS of the George W. Bush administration, more than one hundred sex-worker activists from around the United States gathered in Franklin Square, in Washington, DC, armed with red umbrellas (symbolizing sex-worker solidarity), signs, and banners to prepare for the National March for Sex Worker Rights. By national standards, by most protest standards, it was a small event. Yet so too were the 1965 protests of Gay Activists Alliance (GAA) members who stood in front of the White House. And similar to that earlier picket line, sex workers, like homosexuals, were outing themselves to demand their rights. They outed themselves as lawbreakers, allowing their identities to be known to police, to demand human rights and to claim their rights as citizens.

“Vive!” Franklin E. Kameny, founder of the GAA, would have shouted to the marchers. Then, like the storyteller he was, Frank would have shared his happy memories of the infamous Fourteenth Street Strip that began at the square and ran down to H Street, a line of topless dance clubs, adult bookstores, and massage parlors that, from the 1950s into the 1980s, “were alive, vibrant and full of people.” GAA had supported licensing nude dancing in the District, to keep the Strip hopping as barkers and girls invited customers into the Butterfly Room, This Is It, Benny’s Home of the Porno Stars, Cocoon, El Ceazar’s Palace, the Golden Eagle, the Californian Steak House, Adam & Eve Model Studio, Paradise Escort and Model Service, the Gold Rush, and Casino Royal. “Let the people frolic!” Kameny wrote, chastising “the Puritans” from the Washington Post and the Franklin Square Association of developers who bragged about their success in shutting off the neon lights.

Hundreds of people once worked those blocks of the Strip, and further north, up the hill to U Street and east toward Union Station, running into the streets to talk to drivers, stopping the cars cruising from Virginia and Maryland. “Boy-whores” hustled a block east on Thirteenth and New York Avenue.2

To the cheers of developers and gentrifiers in Logan Circle, the cops and the courts started cracking down in the early 1980s and some women began to disappear. “Serious about combating prostitution,” in 1981 a judge sentenced a thirty-year-old woman with a string of arrests and eight convictions for soliciting in five years to a fifteen-month sentence for violating conditions of her bond. Police and residents said that prostitutes brought crime to the neighborhood, which police said wasn’t often reported because “male victims don’t want it known where they’ve been.”3

Waves of crackdowns on the Fourteenth Street stroll had been going on for decades, but on the last weekend in July 1989, at 1:30 a.m., five police officers, stressed out perhaps by their inability to

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