by Alison Bass
“The firefighters helped us hang decorations,” she recalls. “They were happy as a clam that we were coming down [to the wharf].” The poet and children’s book author Shel Silverstein wrote a song for the occasion entitled Everyone Needs a Hooker Once in a While, and Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show played at the event in the Longshoreman’s Hall.22
The money from the Hookers Ball provided the group with enough funds to publish a newsletter, COYOTE Howls, and the ball became a San Francisco institution, a rowdy Halloween costume party that attracted local artists, musicians, celebrities, and, of course, hookers. In 1978, nearly 20,000 people attended the biggest Hookers Ball of all at the San Francisco Cow Palace, a raucous affair featuring a very drunk George Carlin and Margo St. James dressed up as a prim and proper Dianne Feinstein (then mayor of San Francisco) and riding in on an elephant. “The crowd went crazy, the fun began, much dancing, dangling, drinking, and a hazy cloud of smoke enveloped the arena,” one of the organizers later wrote. “No one felt any pain.”23
With the help of sympathetic lawyers and doctors, St. James and COYOTE were able to convince San Francisco officials to eliminate the practice of quarantining prostitutes in the city’s jails. COYOTE also worked to curb police harassment of streetwalkers working downtown San Francisco and other nearby towns. In 1975, a superior court judge in Alameda County (which includes Berkeley, Oakland, Fremont, and other municipalities across the bay from San Francisco) ruled that Oakland police were discriminating against women in their enforcement of prostitution laws. According to the lawsuit filed by the ACLU, the Oakland police had arrested and charged more than 800 women with prostitution the previous year, while only 36 men were given citations for participating.24 In response to the judge’s order, Oakland police temporarily stepped up their arrests of male johns, using undercover female cops as decoys, but St. James says the stepped-up enforcement with respect to male clients didn’t last long. Police did, however, reduce their arrests of streetwalkers throughout the greater San Francisco area. “Because of our lobbying, they left the streetwalkers alone. And women moved off the streets as much as they could,” St. James recalls.
The publicity from this legal victory and the Hookers Balls made COYOTE a national name and enabled it to establish the National Task Force on Prostitution.25 In 1978, Carol Leigh, a member of COYOTE and a sex worker, poet, and writer whose pen name was Scarlot the Harlot, coined the term “sex work.” As she explained, catering to a client’s sexual needs was work and should be treated as such. The phrase suggests that sex work is no better or worse than other forms of service work.26 It has since been widely adopted by researchers, advocates, and policy makers throughout the United States and abroad.
But COYOTE had less luck changing municipal or state laws that make it illegal to sell sex. And while the group had some success in curbing the excesses of law enforcement in the San Francisco area, the abuse of sex workers at the hands of the police remained a problem in other U.S. cities. According to a study by sociologist Bernard Cohen, published in 1980, New York City’s vice squad actually procured prostitutes to service judges and politicians. One woman, whom Cohen interviewed, acknowledged having sex with a state legislator to avoid arrest. She told Cohen, “I didn’t charge. That was public relations.”27
Violence against sex workers also worsened during this period. The number of sex workers who were reported murdered increased tenfold from 1974 to 1980, according to a national study of prostitution-related homicides published in the Journal of Forensic Sciences in 2006.28 In her afterword for Prostitutes, Our Life, St. James argued that “the prohibition of prostitution contributes to the escalation of violence, and the mix of prohibition and defacto [sic] legalizing provides pimps and police with undue power over women’s mobility and private activity, a power which is widely abused.”29
There is ample evidence that during this period law enforcement in the United States treated violence against sex workers with indifference, often not even bothering to investigate the rape and murder of prostitutes. As just one example, a young woman named Karen who was working as a street prostitute in Fresno, California, in the early 1980s was raped by a client wielding an ice pick. “He kept me for about three hours and then was walking me to a park, not far away, where he said he was going to kill me,” Karen relates in Sex Work, a collection of essays by sex workers and researchers first published in 1987. Luckily, a friend of hers spotted them and managed to get Karen away from the man. When they reported the rape to the police, one of the officers said that “it was impossible because I was a prostitute and could not be raped.” The police picked up the suspect and recovered the ice pick, but even though Karen said she wanted to press charges, the Fresno police would not file a report. “They just took him to jail for being drunk in public” and released him after three hours.30 One can’t help but wonder how many more women this predator ended up raping and possibly killing.
When Julie Moya first started doing sex work, she would occasionally walk the streets, and she remembers one violent incident in which she feared for her life. She was twenty and on the lam in California, standing outside the Stardust Hotel in Los Angeles. A man drove by and picked her up. “He took me to a room in this remote hotel,” she recalls. “We had sex and then he put a knife to my throat and robbed me. He scared the hell out of me.”
Working for a pimp could be just as dangerous. Julie recalls that when she and another prostitute were working in Florida for Marshall Riddle in early 1977, he became furious because they didn’t make as much money as he expected while on the stroll in Miami Beach. As Julie later testified, Riddle told her that if she didn’t start making better money, he would “disembowel” her. The three of them had taken a room at the Sheraton Hotel, and according to the court transcript, Riddle pushed Julie and then took her shoes and beat the other sex worker in the head with them. “Her head went through part of the window in the hotel [room],” Julie testified.31 Neither woman sought medical attention, and the three fled the hotel before the hotel staff could investigate.
According to a former federal prosecutor, what drew the FBI into the Riddle case were reports that teenage girls and women were being transported across state lines in violation of the federal Mann Act. “There may have been some involvement of underage girls,” says Cleveland Gambill, one of the former assistant U.S. attorneys who prosecuted the case. “The FBI worked that case very hard. I know they put a lot of resources into it.”
The trial of Riddle and the other pimps named in the indictment began in the summer of 1978 in the federal courthouse in Covington, Kentucky (two miles south of the Ohio border from Cincinnati). Julie remembers being flown back and forth from Minneapolis by the FBI several times to testify. Whenever she came to town, the FBI would put her and other witnesses up at a local hotel. “I remember how hot it was and swimming in the hotel pool with the feds and the other witnesses,” she says. “It was almost like a party.”
Julie, whom nature had endowed with silky blond hair, dyed her hair black for the trial to disguise herself as much as possible. “The newspaper referred to me as that raven-haired girl,” she says with a wry laugh.
Shortly before the trial, Julie’s daughter, then six and living with Julie’s mother, underwent what was supposed to be a simple procedure to repair her heart defect. But the surgery triggered a series of strokes, and Julie’s daughter lapsed into a coma. News accounts of the trial describe Julie’s breaking into sobs whenever her daughter was mentioned.32 “The [state prosecutors] were getting aggravated with me,” Julie recalls. “And then they did rebuttal. It was horrible.”
Even so, on the strength of the testimony from Julie and the other witnesses, nine of the defendants pleaded guilty to lesser offenses,33 and four of them were convicted of conspiracy to promote prostitution and transport sex workers across state lines. They received sentences ranging from one year, for Riddle’s common-law wife, who had worked as a prostitute and procurer, to eight to ten years, for the three
men charged with running the ring. Riddle received the longest sentence: ten years in prison.34
For her part, Julie Hahn (alias Ingrid Hudson) remained in the witness protection program in Minneapolis, where she worked in the shoe section of the Dayton Hudson department store. But the straight life couldn’t hold her for long. “I was kind of bored so I started dancing again and then ended up doing sex work,” she says. At the strip club, she met a petroleum coke refinery worker named Marty, and they fell in love. When Julie became pregnant, Marty proposed to her and they became engaged. But she made the mistake of telling him she had been a working girl. “He was real angry. He was saying he didn’t know if it was his child,” Julie recalls. Marty ended the engagement. “It really broke my heart,” she says.
Julie gave birth to her older son, Tommy, in Minneapolis in 1980. Now a single mother, she went back to sex work and serviced clients in her Minneapolis home to support herself and her son. She also began traveling to New York City to work as a call girl, leaving Tommy in the care of her aunt in Ohio. “I could make so much more money in New York,” she says. “I loved New York. I used to get very lonely and I liked having people around me all the time. There was always somebody up and awake, and I felt safe just looking out the window and seeing all the traffic and people going by outside.”
Julie moved to New York permanently in 1982, living in a penthouse apartment and working as a high-end call girl. She reclaimed her given name, figuring that with Riddle and the other pimps behind bars, she would be safe in a city that prized anonymity. When I met her for the first time, in January 2011, she had brought with her several yellowed clippings of articles about her life in the 1980s. One of the clips featured her on the cover of a now-defunct magazine called NYC Adult Today. In that grainy black-and-white cover shot, a much younger Julie is grinning, her ample cleavage spilling out over a low-cut dress. She is hoisting a glass of bubbly and is clearly delighted to be part of the Big Apple party scene. There is little hint in her smiling countenance that she has any idea that one day she will assume the mantle that Polly Adler once wore — as one of New York City’s most notorious madams, a favorite target for law enforcement and the media alike.
Sex Work Goes Online and Indoors
When Julie Moya opened her first brothel in Manhattan, in 1993, she advertised for clients in print magazines such as Screw or Action — like everyone else in the industry. But some months later, a satisfied client set up a website and registered her brothel on this newfangled thing called the Internet. That’s when her business really took off. “We started to get a really nice clientele, and it just boomed,” Julie recalls. “We were one of the first on the Internet. It changed our business in a day.”
Julie had embarked on her career as a madam on the advice of a prosecutor. In the early 1980s, she had met an Argentinian drug dealer named Eduardo Moya who lived in the same building in Manhattan as she did. At the time, she was living with the pimp who brought her to New York in 1982. But he was arrested for bringing prostitutes across state lines, and some months after she gave birth to his son, Jerry, he was sent to prison. She and Eduardo soon moved in together. She married Eduardo in 1985 and five years later moved to Argentina with him, when he decided to retire and live off his illegally acquired gains in a gated community in Mendoza, eleven hours west of Buenos Aires, near the border with Chile. But Julie hated Mendoza.
“The men didn’t treat the women there well at all. It was like being a pack horse,” she says. So she moved back to New York in 1991 and began earning money transporting drugs. In February 1992, she was arrested for moving three kilos of cocaine for Columbia drug runners, and the Manhattan district attorney prosecuting the case advised her to get back into the sex industry. “He told me to become a madam, that that was a victimless crime,” she recalls.
So while Julie was still on probation for the drug conviction (it was a first-time offense), that’s exactly what she did. “I was thirty-eight, and I thought, I can’t work as a hooker much longer,” she says. “So I got an apartment and brought in a few girls.”
Julie soon stopped working herself; she let her girls party with the men, and she ran the place. Thanks to the Internet, by the mid-1990s, she had twenty-five to thirty women working out of two apartments. She grouped them into three categories — Julie’s classics: “Those were regular girls, maybe not beautiful but pretty and they always gave good service,” she says; Julie’s private stock: “These girls were really pretty and higher-priced”; and finally, Julie’s elite: “These girls were models; they had perfect bodies, no tattoos. They were $600 an hour girls.”
Julie’s elite attracted professional sports athletes, wealthy tourists, and Wall Street hedge-fund managers willing to pay top dollar. Her sex workers also drew businessmen, lawyers, judges, writers, and a lot of cops, Julie says. “We used to have cops all the time as customers,” she says. “I never paid bribes to cops, just [gave] free sessions.”
Having worked for other escort services, Julie wanted to do something different, something better. “Other places treated men really badly,” she says. “I wanted to make my place different, and I did. My place was cited as ‘Best GFE [Girlfriend Experience]’ on this website where men exchange notes about their experience.”
Twenty years later, Julie still relies on the Internet to attract clients to her midtown brothels. These days, she advertises on websites such as eros.com, backpage.com, and Craigslist. And she is no longer alone; almost everyone who works in the sex business advertises online, whether they are independent sex workers or pimps, madams, escort services, or gentlemen’s clubs. Indeed, the Internet has transformed the sex industry, making it much easier for sex workers to control where and when they meet clients and who those clients are. While streetwalking had been the dominant model of sex work since the 1920s, that began to change in the ’60s and ’70s. Socioeconomic trends, including the gentrification of major cities and relentless police patrolling of areas where streetwalkers hung out, pushed most sex workers indoors. Sex workers’ rights activists have estimated that by the 1980s, streetwalkers accounted for only 20 percent of all prostitutes in urban areas. The transformative power of the Internet and the intensifying gentrification of cities such as New York and San Francisco accelerated this trend. By 2001, only about 2 percent of American sex workers were streetwalkers, according to one researcher.1 While streetwalkers can be a surprisingly diverse population, including sex workers who sit and read books while they wait for clients outside grocery stores, many still on the stroll today are drug addicts desperate to make money for their next fix or runaway teens selling sex for survival.
Even as most sex workers have moved indoors, the Internet, together with other technological advances, has fed a growing demand for their services. With business increasingly conducted on a global scale, the ensuing rise in business travel and tourism has spurred a demand by heterosexual and gay men for commercial sex.2
The booming trade in live sex shows via web cams is a perfect example of this. Voyeurs from around the world can tune into live sex shows being performed by women or men stripping and masturbating with sex toys in their homes in places as far-flung as New Mexico and Australia. Elle St. Claire, a sex worker in Massachusetts, has been performing live sex shows on the web for the past five years. She charges by blocks of time (ten, fifteen, thirty, or sixty minutes or “by the minute,” with charges ranging from $1 to $5 per minute, depending upon what is being shown. She juggles the web-cam shows with phone sex and in-person transactions with clients who visit her in the apartment upstairs from her living quarters. Elle St. Claire (her stage name) also offers Virtual Reality, a computer-mediated sexual interaction between two people using vibrators and other sex toys that can be attached to the computer. “I can be sitting around and working on the phone and cam, while I wait for the next call,” says Elle. “I find that enticing people online in a Virtual Reality often leads to a cam show or phone sex.”
Similarly, the Internet allo
ws men in Germany or Japan to correspond via email with a sex worker at one of Nevada’s legal brothels and arrange to visit her the next time they fly in for business. And of course, the Internet, together with ubiquitous cell-phone service, allows sex workers to attract and screen potential customers without stepping outside, giving them greater autonomy than ever before. Such autonomy, however, comes with risks, as the murders of five women whose bodies were discovered in shallow graves on Long Island in 2010 and 2011 attest to. All five women were escorts who had advertised online; they disappeared after arranging assignations on Long Island with a still unknown predator.3
Because of such risks, Julie Moya says she doesn’t have any problem finding young women over the age of twenty-one who want to work in one of her midtown brothels. In fact, she says, she has to turn away many more women than she accepts. Despite the autonomy the Internet provides, many young women, particularly those just getting into the trade, prefer to work in a place where clients are screened for them and there is security on hand, should someone get out of line.
At the same time that new technologies have made it much easier to provide and obtain sexual services, sociologists point to another trend that is spurring the demand for commercial sex: the growing number of men who view sexual pleasure as a recreational activity that takes place outside a monogamous relationship. Over the last two decades, an increasing number of men have been visiting prostitutes while traveling on business, and they view paid sex not as compensation for something that is lacking in their marriages but as a venue that gives them access to multiple sexual partners. Sociologist Elizabeth Bernstein refers to this trend as “an unfettered consumeristic ‘playboy philosophy’ ”— an indulgence that many men feel they are entitled to.4