Sex Workers of the World United
ON A COOL, SLIGHTLY BREEZY January day in San Francisco, several hundred female sex workers assembled and began to march. Decked out in colorful clothes, some wearing elaborate hats, the women trooped through the city’s Upper Tenderloin neighborhood, past a pair of police officers, and into Central Methodist Church, at the corner of O’Farrell and Leavenworth streets. Some of the women were old, some were young; some were white, many were not. All of these sex workers were in Central Methodist that day to confront the Reverend Paul Smith, who had been crusading for a police crackdown on prostitution. Once the women had settled into the pews, a locally famous madam known as Mrs. R. M. “Reggie” Gamble rose and began to speak.
Gamble addressed herself directly to Smith: “I want to ask first, how many of the women in your church would accept us into their homes—even to work? You would cast us out—where to?” She continued in her deep, sonorous voice: “Every woman here has at least one child. We are against street walking … as well as you. But what are you going to do about it? … I am a mother of a girl of 14. Another girl in my house is the mother of four. She was sick. She wrote to her brother, a Methodist preacher, for help. He answered, ‘trust in the Lord.’”
All eyes turned to the reverend. He began posing questions to the assembled women. “How many of you are in this life because you could not make enough to live on?” he asked. All hands went up. Yet it clearly wasn’t just poverty that led women to sell sex. How many would rather do housework? Smith asked. His question was met with a roar of laughter. One woman shouted back, “What woman wants to work in a kitchen?”
One day last June, in New York City’s Washington Square Park, this scene largely repeated itself, except that unlike the temperate conditions of a Bay Area winter, it was a blistering 90 degrees. Hundreds of sex workers and their allies gathered to protest the criminalization of prostitution and other forms of sex work. They wore colorful clothes and held red umbrellas and evocative signs. “Criminalization Kills!” read one. “The Only Good Cop Is A Stripper Cop,” read another.
The sex workers—mostly women, but also many men—began to march. They made their way around the park to its iconic marble arch. As they walked, they began to chant in unison: “Sex workers, survivors, united.” The marchers gathered in a circle as members of the crowd moved forward to give speeches. They decried recently enacted laws that would make it harder for them to coordinate the sale of sex from the safety of their homes. They spoke against police violence. After 90 minutes, the crowd began to disperse. “People hugged and in many cases wiped away tears,” journalist Zoë Beery reported in The Outline.
THOSE TWO DEMONSTRATIONS took place more than a century apart. The San Francisco march happened in 1917. The parallels between the two, however, are striking. Both were female led, both featured a diverse array of prostitutes and other sex workers, both took place in metropolises famed for winking tolerance and brutal repression—and both demonstrations were in response to specific policies that had been proposed in the name of helping sex workers.
In San Francisco in 1917, Reverend Smith insisted that shuttering brothels and locking prostitutes away in a “state industrial farm” would
