Getting Screwed: Sex Workers and the Law

by Alison Bass

  But after her arrest for prostitution, she couldn’t find a job at any of San Francisco’s night spots. So to pay off her bail, she went to work (for free) for the bondsman who had bailed her out. She also began her own process-serving business with the lawyers she met while working for the bondsman. But she remained furious at the judge who had convicted her. (She later helped defeat the judge when he ran for re-election.) In the course of her work, she met “some of the best legal minds in the city,” including the dean of the Golden Gate University Law School, who told her that if she passed a college equivalency test, she would be accepted into his law school. She passed the test and started taking law courses at night in 1963. A few months later, she filed an appeal of her conviction. After her first year, though, she flunked what she calls the “baby bar,” the test that all first-year students at the night school had to take. Later that summer, she won the appeal, and her conviction for prostitution was overturned. Shortly afterward, she quit law school.

  In her afterword for Prostitutes, Our Life, St. James says she quit law school because she “couldn’t stand the hypocrisy it supported.”11 In a more recent interview, she says she didn’t really want to practice law; she still had dreams of going to art school. To support herself, she began saying yes to the lawyers and judges who were constantly soliciting her for sex. “I wasn’t making a ton of money, just enough to pay the bills,” she says. “I wanted the fun more than anything.”

  Some of her clients at this time were narcotics agents and men from the Alcohol and Beverage Commission whom she had met at Pierre’s. Others were businessmen. “That’s when they still had two-hour lunches,” she says with a husky laugh. For a few months one year, a local cosmetics company paid the rent on her roomy new apartment on Alpine Terrace. “These businesses wanted a whorehouse they could go to and take their customers to,” she recalls. “I always had a couple of roommates who weren’t averse to working.”

  In 1967, when St. James was thirty, she fell in love with Roger Somers, an architect and musician, and moved out to the woods of Marin County with him. They lived in a community known as Druid Heights where neighbors shared in the gardening and cooking. Alan Watts, the famous British-born author who wrote many books about the value of integrating Eastern philosophy into Western life, was the philosopher in residence there. To augment her income, St. James began cleaning houses, and Watts soon became one of her most reliable clients.

  By the late 1960s, the sexual revolution was in full flower across the United States, and the women’s movement was gathering steam. Millions of young women across the country were discovering their sexual independence, and commentators of the time predicted that the new era of sexual freedom would finally put the kibosh on prostitution. After all, if men could freely have sex with women outside marriage, what was the point of paying for sex? But if anything, the freeing of sexual mores actually gave rise to a consumer ethic that put sexuality on display in a way that had never been permitted before. Sex became a product, and as Roberts notes in Whores in History, the advertising media began selling sex as “the archetypal form of entertainment with which the glamor of consumer goods was (and is) associated.”12 This new permissiveness extended toward commercial sex, and by the 1970s, the United States was seeing a proliferation of strip clubs, massage parlors, and pornography. Explicitly pornographic magazines such as Screw and Hustler emerged to give Playboy and Penthouse competition for the American male’s eyeballs.

  Although the sexual revolution did cut into the trade with some young men, who discovered they no longer had to pay for sex, many middle-class married men continued to patronize prostitutes, researchers found.13 It seemed safer to pay for an encounter with a discreet and accommodating hooker than embark on an unpredictable affair that might threaten one’s marriage and standing in the community. But while male clients, or johns, as they were known, were rarely arrested, the prostitutes who serviced them were routinely harassed by police. Streetwalkers took the brunt of it. Police used prostitution busts to enhance their arrest statistics and earn money for the state in fines, and the ease of arresting streetwalkers meant that cops spent a disproportionate time patrolling tenderloin districts. Some critics at the time even publicly questioned whether such patrols left other neighborhoods open to more violent crimes.14

  In San Francisco, African American streetwalkers strolling outside the downtown hotels were constantly being picked up by police — one streetwalker might get arrested as many as sixty times a year, St. James says. “They’d book them, and the bail bondsmen would make a lot of money bailing them out.” At the same time, police looked the other way when white call girls worked inside the hotels. Indeed, St. James says, some officers had nighttime jobs at the hotels, and like their compatriots in cities throughout the United States, they received payoffs or free sex from the prostitutes. “They pretty much got to choose who was working at which hotels,” she says.

  Living just outside the city, cleaning the houses of wealthy single men and couples where many wives felt trapped at home, Margo St. James had a front-row seat to the prevailing double standard, and she loathed it. Watts, who had become a close friend and spiritual adviser, encouraged her to view the political and sexual hypocrisy she saw around her in activist terms. At a party around this time, St. James says, she also had a conversation with Richard Hongisto, the newly elected San Francisco County sheriff, about what the National Organization for Women (NOW) was doing for the rights of hookers. Hongisto replied, “ ‘Nothing, Margo. Someone from the victim class has to speak out.’ ”15

  That got her thinking. Initially, she formed a group she called Whores, Housewives and Others. “I thought the housewives need a little politicizing, so I decided to get the hookers, housewives, and other intellectuals together and think about what they have in common,” St. James recalls. “We had our first meeting on Alan [Watts’s] houseboat in Sausalito. One of the housewives even traded places for one night with one of the hookers, who was a high-priced call girl and had some regular customers who were older businessmen.” Both women enjoyed themselves, as did the housewife’s husband, who was in on the switch, St. James says.

  One day, while she was cleaning Watts’s house, St. James came across the galleys of Tom Robbins’s first book, Another Roadside Attraction. She loved the book and wrote Robbins a fan letter. So when Robbins came to Berkeley in 1971, the same year his book was published, he visited St. James, and several women to whom she had given Robbins’s book came over and danced for him. Robbins, who was high on mushrooms, thought he was in the middle of the Arabian nights, St. James says. “The next morning, I’m fixing him the chanterelles and eggs for breakfast and he looks at me and says, ‘I know who you are,’ ” St. James recalls. “And I said, ‘Who?’ ’cause I’m looking for identity, you know. He says, ‘You’re the coyote trickster.’ ”16

  That conversation gave St. James a name for her burgeoning political movement, and in 1972, a songwriter friend of hers came up with the words that spelled out the acronym: Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics (COYOTE). With that attention-grabbing moniker, the modern sex workers’ rights movement was born.

  The same year, a precocious teenage runaway by the name of Julie Hahn began working as an exotic dancer in Larry Flynt’s Hustler Club on Walnut Street in Cincinnati, Ohio. Julie may have been only fifteen, but she had the body of a woman, full breasts, slim waist, and long blonde hair. With her flashing green eyes and youthful energy, Julie was an immediate hit with the club’s patrons. For the first time in her life, she had her own money and apartment upstairs from the club, where Flynt (who would launch Hustler magazine in 1974) lived with his wife, also an erotic dancer at the club.

  It was a heady time for Julie. She had run away from a difficult home life, where her stepfather refused to acknowledge her and her mother was too busy raising five younger children to pay much attention to her oldest daughter, who had been born out of wedlock and never knew her biological father. It was hardly a surprise th
at thirteen-year-old Julie gave herself to the first young man who said he loved her, and when nineteen-year-old Jack impregnated her, they got married and moved in with her family. But Jack soon cleared out. “He couldn’t take all the craziness,” Julie recalled years later. “He left when we were married about four months. It was a very lonely, depressing time.”

  When she was fourteen, Julie gave birth to a little girl with a serious heart defect. “When we came home to my mom’s house, [the baby] was blue and struggling to breathe,” Julie recalls. Little more than a child herself, Julie felt overwhelmed by guilt and remorse and a feeling that she had to get out of there. So she ran away and lived on the streets, going home with other people she met, sleeping on couches or with guys who were kind to her. After a few rough months, she ended up at the Talbert House, then a place for troubled teens run by the University of Cincinnati. She lived there for nine or ten months, until a girl she had met brought her down to the Hustler Club.

  “I loved dancing — it was fun and I was so starved for attention,” Julie recalls. “Working in the Hustler Club was like being a movie star.”

  At first, Julie didn’t like being touched by the customers or having to hustle them to buy expensive drinks. But after a time, she learned to distance herself from all that and became friends with the men who ran the club. “The guys would say, ‘Jill (that was the name I went by), Are you of age yet?’ ” Julie recalls. “And I’d say, ‘No, not yet.’ I was there for years before I came of age, and nobody cared. Larry Flynt knew; everyone knew. A lot of us were underage.”

  When she was sixteen, Julie says she had her first paid sexual encounter, with Larry Flynt’s lawyer. She describes her foray into prostitution matter-of-factly one hot summer evening in July 2011, while we are having dinner at an unpretentious family-style bistro in Tribeca, the lower Manhattan neighborhood a few blocks from Ground Zero. Julie is dressed casually in a low-cut black tee and black jeans, her silky blond hair cut at shoulder length. When she rushes into Edwards Restaurant, fifteen minutes late, she apologizes profusely. “I was dealing with a situation with my grandson,” she says as we settle around the corner table I have staked out in the back of the bistro. Julie explains that her five-year-old grandson was recently removed from their home because his father, Julie’s younger son, Jerry, was letting the boy touch his girlfriend’s breasts. “I noticed a change in his behavior; he was screaming at night and going around, grabbing breasts,” Julie says. “My son has been around [working] girls a lot. But this isn’t right. My grandson is only five.”

  The boy’s mother, a sex worker, disappeared shortly after he was born, Julie says, and she had become his maternal caregiver; Jerry and her grandson lived with her. But now that the child had been placed in foster care and New York’s child services department was considering pressing abuse charges against his father, Julie had temporarily moved out to Long Island to be closer to where her grandson was living. Several years ago, she had brought Jerry, now twenty-six, into the business with her, hoping to eventually pass it on to him when she retired. But furious at her son for endangering her grandson’s welfare, she said she was trying to separate the business into two brothels, one run by her and the other by Jerry.

  “We have two places now, with regular customers,” she says. “Everything is very . . . .” She pauses and intertwines her long slender hands to show how enmeshed the business has become. And then she sighs. “I made a lot of mistakes when I was young. I wasn’t a great mother. I’m trying to do better with my grandson.”

  Midway through dinner, Julie, who is picking at a Tribeca Cobb salad, resumes the story of how she crossed the line from topless dancing to selling sex. “I did something with a lawyer for Larry Flynt and he paid me. The lawyer was in his sixties and I was sixteen,” she recalls. “I didn’t like that at all. Yuck. I was repulsed by it. I didn’t have my armor on.”

  Julie did, however, like the economic independence that selling sex provided. So a year or two later — she is coy about her exact age at the time — she began turning tricks on a regular basis. “I liked the money,” she says. “I always wanted to please people. I liked to give presents to my family. It made me happy.” By then, she had reconciled with her family and regularly visited her daughter, who was being raised by her mother.

  By the time Julie was nineteen, she had begun working as a prostitute for a gambling friend of Flynt’s by the name of Marshall Clay Riddle, who ran a prostitution ring. Julie would later testify that she entertained clients in an apartment she had on Lehman Road in Cincinnati, in the same building in which Riddle lived, according to news reports and court transcripts.17 She was driven to nightclubs in Cincinnati and northern Kentucky, where she gave her phone number to potential clients, some of whom would then arrange to visit her at her apartment on Lehman Road. On one occasion, she said, she and another prostitute made $600 for a weekend in Huntington, West Virginia, with a coal mine owner and one of his workers.18 At other times, she and another woman who worked for Riddle would knock on doors at area motels in Ohio and Kentucky in search of tricks. In January 1977, Riddle transported Julie and several other women to Florida to service clients there.19

  When she came back to Cincinnati a few weeks later, Julie, who was still dancing at several strip clubs and turning tricks on the side, says she was told to hand out cards at the clubs for a truck-stop brothel in Tennessee in an effort to recruit women who might be interested in working there. The brothel was known as a lockdown because the prostitutes had to work sixteen hours at a time and couldn’t leave for weeks at a time, Julie says. Unbeknownst to Julie, local police had begun investigating the Tennessee lockdown and some other places of prostitution operated by Riddle and his cohorts. Because she was handing out the lockdown’s cards, local police arrested Julie for promoting prostitution in late February. She was carted off to jail, and her bail was set at $5,000. “The guys who owned the lockdown put up my bail,” she recalls.

  A day or two after being bailed out, Julie overheard Riddle and another pimp discussing how they were going to have to either get rid of her or put her in a lockdown because the police were putting too much pressure on her. “I got afraid,” she later testified. “I ran upstairs and got a couple of my things and left.”20

  With the help of a sympathetic police officer, her mother arranged to smuggle her out of town. “He gave me the birth certificate of a girl who had died in a car accident, and he knew another officer in San Bernardino, California, who met me at the airport,” Julie recalls. “She was really nice, and she showed me where it was safe to work” as a dancer and sex worker.

  Acutely homesick after a few months, Julie drove back to Cincinnati to see her family. But she had a car accident when she got home, and the police ran her fingerprints and realized she was wanted for skipping bail. After she was booked and released in the summer of 1977, she fled town again.

  “I ran off to Florida and was dancing in this club in Orlando,” she says. But she and the other girls had been ordered to dance nude, and they got arrested for indecent exposure. Police in Orlando discovered that Julie was wanted in Cincinnati and extradited her back to Hamilton County in the fall of 1977.

  By this time, the FBI had joined local police in investigating Riddle and other pimps for running a multistate prostitution ring that transported women across state lines to work as prostitutes in Ohio, Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Florida in violation of the federal Mann Act. Some of the workers may also have been underage, according to Julie and the U.S. attorney who prosecuted the case. Julie, who knew something about the prostitution ring and was sitting in the Hamilton County jail awaiting trial for skipping bail, feared for her life. “When I was in jail, a correctional officer who knew Riddle came into my cell in the middle of the night and told me to keep my mouth shut,” she says. “All of a sudden, the FBI came in and boom, took me out of there. They knew my life was in danger.”

  Julie agreed to test
ify against Riddle and the other pimps she knew, and the FBI put her into the witness protection program. They gave her a new name, Ingrid Hudson, and moved her to Minneapolis. In the spring of 1978, federal authorities arrested Marshall Riddle along with twelve other men and women allegedly involved in the multistate ring, according to news reports at the time.21

  By the time Julie was whisked into hiding, Margo St. James’s movement to improve the lot of working girls was well on its way. With a $5,000 grant from the Whole Earth Catalog’s Point Foundation, COYOTE held its first convention in 1973 to raise awareness about the archaic state laws that criminalized prostitution and forced prostitutes into the hands of exploitative pimps and corrupt police officers. Organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) signed on to help overturn California’s codes against prostitution, as did some young women who were attending the University of California at Berkeley and paying for their tuition by working as call girls. “They worked in our office for free,” St. James recalls.

  Jennifer James, St. James’s friend and an anthropology professor in Seattle, convinced NOW to make the decriminalization of prostitution part of the plank at its 1973 convention. The landmark resolution calling for decriminalization highlighted the double standard in society’s views toward the sexual activities of men and women and the fact that police almost always arrested the prostitute but not her customer. The NOW resolution also noted that because of laws criminalizing prostitution, sex workers could not seek the protection of police and were thus forced to ally themselves with pimps for protection and legal support.

  The same year, Margo St. James and COYOTE members protested in front of the San Francisco hotels where police were busting black streetwalkers while permitting white sex workers to operate inside as long as they paid off the off-duty officers. In the fall of 1974, St. James and her friends hosted the first Hookers Ball on Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco.