Playing the Whore (12 page)

The Asia Pacific Network of Sex Workers reported that a common theme in interviews with detainees was the appalling food delivered in plastic bags which they then retained to use as toilets, disposing of them by hurling them from windows. Through eyewitness accounts, human rights observers established that at least three detainees were beaten to death by guards. Observers from LICADHO witnessed the body of one woman, left to die after advocates found her just the day before comatose on the floor of a detention room where she had been locked in with twenty other people. This occured at a facility on Koh Kor, an island that had once served as a prison under the Khmer Rouge. “The government needs to find real solutions to the economic and social problems which cause people to live and work on the streets,” LICADHO stated in their 2008 report on conditions at Koh Kor and a second facility at Prey Speu. “It cannot simply round these people up and throw them into detention camps.”

If the sex workers standing in the doorways in Phnom Penh’s red-light district looked out on the street with fear, it
could be just as likely from the prospect of rescue as due to any customer.

As is the case for much of industry, accurate data on how many sex workers are in Cambodia are hard to come by and difficult to trust. One study USAID funded themselves found that of a sample of roughly 20,000, 88 percent were not forced into sex work, whether through physical force or debt contracts. It’s especially tough to know how accurate figures on coercion are. But these are the figures found in the USAID-commissioned study and were presumably available to all those in the State Department who were agitating for crackdowns on all Cambodian sex work as a means to end trafficking.

These crackdowns are no corrective to abusive conditions in sex work, and can expose sex workers to yet more abuse, including those who want out. But this is of no concern to the American government, which not only wishes to “eradicate prostitution” (as a US attorney testified on USAID’s behalf before the US Supreme Court in 2013), but requires those receiving foreign aid to agree with them. When the Cambodian government sought to demonstrate their commitment to these American values, they had in no way “eradicated prostitution”—they had simply taken action, through detention and violence, to eradicate sex workers themselves. The State Department, in turn, upgraded Cambodia’s compliance ranking, and in its 2010
Trafficking in Persons Report
, offered only a weak admonishment that “raids against ‘immoral’ activities were not conducted in a manner sensitive to trafficking victims,” and recommend further “training,”
not investigations or sanctions. The US has spoken: They see no meaningful difference between the elimination of sex work and the elimination of sex workers themselves.

“The twin assumptions that no woman would willingly sell sex and that sex workers lack education and skills for ‘decent’ work are central to the issues playing out in Cambodia,” writes Cheryl Overs, author of the 2009 APNSW report
Caught Between the Tiger and the Crocodile: The Campaign to Suppress Human Trafficking and Sexual Exploitation in Cambodia
. In truth, many have also worked in garment factories, and left the factories due to low wages to move into sex work. The APNSW logo, a sewing machine with a red circle and slash through it, is a nod to all of this. Although antiprostitution NGOs such as International Justice Mission and AFESIP (the Somaly Mam Foundation) claim to teach women they have “rescued” and “recovered” from brothels to operate sewing machines at their Cambodian shelters, sex and garment workers together call attention to the poor conditions in the factories that make sex work a higher-paying, more attractive alternative.

It was these workers, under the umbrella of WNU and APNSW, who came out strongly protesting against the crackdowns and illegal detentions in the summer of 2008. Sex workers told their stories of detention and abuse at the hands of police and guards at a rally in Phnom Penh of 500 of their colleagues and hundreds of allies. They screened video testimony from others who had been denied medical treatment and had been sexually assaulted in the rehabilitation facilities, and they showed it again, to United Nations staff and
international human rights groups, just a few weeks later in Mexico City at the 17th International AIDS Conference. APNSW received awards for their work exposing the abuses driven by US policy, which itself remains the same.

The day I visited the brothel in Phnom Penh was just a few months before the worst of the US-influenced crackdowns would begin. The brothel grounds and the road leading to it were covered in dust, which left red dirt on the bottom of my laptop bag when I sat it down to take a seat on one of the plastic chairs between the bungalow-like buildings. I didn’t take any photos. It was just a moment to breathe in the place, the smell of diesel fuel and the sounds of multiple televisions playing against each other and drifting out into the night air. Everything that was necessary to me about this place was in the stories I had already heard, on the boat, on the outreach van, off the clock.

Before I left Phnom Penh, WNU hosted a musical revue, with burlesque, karaoke, and traditional dance. The Condi/Bush video played on a big screen, and a sex worker activist from Fiji lip-synched as Mary Magdalene, dressed in business drag and wearing pearls.

COYOTE Howls
was the newsletter of the first prostitutes’ rights organization in the United States. It was published from San Francisco in the latter half of the seventies, and like any good alternative newspaper of the time, it had a robust back-of-the-paper section with classified listings. But being a newsletter for and by whores, the back pages advertised their own satellite organizations. There were the Prostitutes Union of Massachusetts (PUMA), the Spread Eagles (Washington, DC), the Kansas City Kitties (Missouri), Scapegoat (New York), and PROWL (Professional Resource Organization for Women’s Liberties; Spokane, Washington). The copy of
COYOTE Howls
on my desk now (lent from the archives of legendary sex worker activist Carol Leigh) bears the headline “Hookers and Housewives Come Together: Violence Abortion Welfare Become Common Issues at 1977 International Women’s Year Conference.”

“Hookers and Housewives.” It’s hard now to conceive of these groups of women as class allies. Hookers and housewives, to speak in impossible generalities, are too often considered rivals (by those on the Left as much as by those on the Right), occupying opposite sides of one economic circle, two classes of women who earn their living from men’s waged work. Their labor, by contrast, is considered illegitimate. Caretaking and sex should be offered freely, we’re told, with genuine affection and out of love. A housewife maintains her legitimacy by not seeking a wage, and a hooker breaks with convention by demanding one. They are both diminished and confined by the same system that would keep women dependent on men for survival. And they could free themselves from that system together.

As Margo St. James recalled in an interview (also from Carol Leigh’s archives), before she founded COYOTE in early 1973, there was WHO—Whores, Housewives, and Others. Others meant lesbians, “but it wasn’t being said out loud yet, even in liberal bohemian circles.” An early COYOTE supporter, anthropologist Jennifer James, coined the term “decriminalization” to express the movement’s goals of removing laws used to target prostitutes. The National Organization for Women (NOW), still very much in its
Feminine Mystique
era, adopted the decriminalization of prostitution as an official part of its platform later that year.

Feminist thinker Wendy McElroy wrote in her essay “Prostitutes, Feminists and Economic Associates” that to the early prostitutes’ rights movement

McElroy cites a 1979 issue of
COYOTE Howls
, which reads:

It’s as optimistic as it was naive, if you could have looked ahead to what became the highest-profile political sex work scandal in the United States. Eliot Spitzer was the prochoice Democrat from New York who as New York State attorney general targeted corruption on Wall Street and as governor signed legislation toughening prostitution penalties that could have been used against him had he not stepped down first, slunk off, and waited the requisite months before launching himself back into the public sphere, as men like him often do. In the United States, anyway, a right-wing politician opposed to women’s rights, such as Louisiana’s Republican
senator David Vitter, can turn up on an escort agency’s client list and be elected to another term. Is it that conservatives harbor less shame, or that liberals possess no spine with which to support sex workers while actually in office—or both?

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:

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:

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,