Getting Screwed: Sex Workers and the Law

by Alison Bass

  Experts also suggest that local government encourage safe sex practices and regular health exams, but not mandate them (as currently required in Nevada’s brothels). “Compulsory testing for sexually transmitted infections stigmatizes sex workers, tests are not always accurate, and testing clean on a certain day may give the false impression that a person is sexually healthy afterward,” Weitzer says.7 Instead, he recommends that local health officials conduct safe-sex outreach education with sex workers and clients and encourage regular exams and free testing, as they do in the Netherlands and New Zealand, which don’t mandate testing and have very low rates of HIV infection.

  Mandatory testing may actually increase the danger of sexually transmitted disease transmission, according to some. As Lenore Kuo, the professor of women’s studies and philosophy at California State University, Fresno, writes:

  In reality, medical exams simply force prostitutes who are infected to work in an illegal venue, where they are often more likely to infect their clients due to the related difficulties of practicing “safe” sex. In Nevada, as in other jurisdictions, there is a common tendency for many men to offer prostitutes bribes not to use condoms. Regulations requiring medical testing of prostitutes are only likely to increase this tendency because they lead to the false expectation that the prostitute is disease-free. It is quite possible that a prostitute has been exposed to an STD [sexually transmitted disease] since her most recent test. . . . There is therefore no clear value in such tests but significant danger in encouraging clients to believe that prostitutes are disease-free.8

  Both Weitzer and Kuo make persuasive arguments that criminalizing prostitution is a failed and dangerous strategy. It doesn’t reduce the prevalence of sex work, and it clearly harms the women who do it. Arresting prostitutes heightens their isolation and estrangement from family and friends and makes it very difficult for them to seek other types of employment. Kuo notes that “criminalization also strengthens the prostitutes’ dependence on pimps, who will post bail, arrange child care, and obtain legal counsel when they do get arrested.”9

  Women who are not sex workers are also threatened by a culture that allows sexual predators to kill with impunity and views prostitution as something dangerous and forbidden. Kuo argues that “women will never be normalized, will never cease being ‘other’ until sex and sexual activity are normalized. And sex and sexual activity will never be normalized until the sale of sexual activity is normalized (and vice versa).”10

  On a more pragmatic level, decriminalizing adult consensual prostitution would allow law enforcement to focus on violent crimes and what both sex worker advocates and antitrafficking proponents consider a priority: prosecuting pimps who exploit underage youth and traffickers who force illegal immigrants into the sex trade. Many researchers argue that decriminalization would make it easier for victims and clients to report abuse to the police without the fear of being arrested themselves.

  “Sex workers would be much more likely to come forward if you just talk to them than if you arrest them,” says John Lowman, the criminology professor at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. “If there’s an adversarial relationship between prostitutes and the police, they’re not going to solve anything.”

  BACK AT KRAMER’S BOOKSTORE, Maddy is getting restless. Earlier in the interview, watching me scribble away in a notebook, she admitted, “I’m a little nervous talking to you.” Now, in response to my questions about her future, she says she won’t be doing sex work for much longer. “The work I do is a wonderful fit, but it’s not forever,” she says. “It’s like modeling or sports.”

  At the time of the interview, Maddy was about to complete a bachelor’s degree and had already been accepted into several M.B.A. programs. She tells me that when she starts graduate school, she will probably stop doing sex work. “The economy has tanked, so there’s less of a demand for luxury goods,” she says, implying that this may be a good time for her (as a luxury item) to get out of the business. She bends over and changes back into her flats. Then she abruptly stands up. “I really have to go,” she says and, with a quick wave of her hand, flies out the door.

  Silent No More

  Two years have passed since I last visited Julie Moya’s brothel in Manhattan, and only one of the sex workers I met then is still working there: “Paris,” the slender New Jerseyite who attended Rutgers University. She is slated to graduate at the end of 2015, Julie says, and plans to become a nurse. Sarah, the tiny spitfire from Israel who was also in school, studying art history, left for a higher-end escort service, which made Julie sad. “She got great reviews,” Julie says. “The men loved her.” Sarah’s friend, Natasha, the buxom blonde from Russia who overstayed her visa, recently got married (solving her visa problem) and is now pregnant. Another of Julie’s regulars, an attractive brunette whose work name was Taylor, also escaped into matrimony. “She met a client, and they ended up getting married,” Julie says. “They are doing real well together.”

  Julie especially misses Sarah and Taylor. “They were such sweet girls,” she says wistfully. But in the next instant, her mood brightens. “We’ve got some really nice new girls now,” she says. “You should come and visit again.”

  Julie herself has turned over daily management of the brothel to friends now that she is the primary caregiver for her grandson. She received full custody of him in July 2014, and he has been out of foster care and living with her for more than a year. “The courts decided I was the best with him,” she says. “As long as I don’t bring him near the business, they’re basically going to let it be.”

  Her grandson, who turned eight in May 2014, is still acting up in school, but he refuses to take psychoactive drugs. “He doesn’t like the way they make him feel,” she says. “He’s a handful, but I’ll never give him up.”

  At one point, Julie had talked of moving back to Cincinnati and opening up a nightclub there with her older son, now that gambling is legal in Ohio. But for now, she is focused on raising her grandson and trying not to repeat the mistakes she made with her own children as a young single mother. “I understand things much better now,” she says.

  Gambling has also come to Massachusetts, and Elle St. Claire, who turned forty-four in 2014, is hoping it will give her business a much-needed boost. While she continues to do sex work, phone sex, and adult webcams, she and Jessica, her longtime fiancée, are perennially strapped for cash. In 2013, Jessica took a part-time job as an electronics equipment technician, working out of the apartment doing customer service and diagnosing DVR equipment malfunctions. “It’s been a stable source of income while the economy has been up and down,” Elle says.

  Elle says there are plans to build a casino in the Springfield area (one of three now permitted in Massachusetts). MGM recently received the license for the Springfield casino and resort. “Once the casino is built, a lot of people will come to Springfield to have fun, whether it’s gambling or shows, and I think my phone will ring more,” she says.

  In the meantime, Elle has gone back to driving a cab, which she did as a single parent in the 1990s. She is trying to save up enough money to renew her real estate license and pay off the debt she and Jessica incurred when they had to move out of their Holyoke house. Elle says the company that managed their duplex found out she and Jessica were in the adult entertainment business and told them point blank that it didn’t want “our kind here,” she says. So after several years of battling the company in court, in May 2014, Elle and Jessica moved to a new apartment in Chicopee, a few miles away. “The new place is really perfect for us,” Elle enthuses in an email. “The location is convenient and suits our lifestyle; our neighbors are very accepting and supporting. In fact, the community has been treating me as ‘completely normal,’ which I am not used to. Things are amazing, absolutely wonderful!”

  Jillian, the activist-escort from western Massachusetts, is also still doing sex work. At age thirty-three, she says she’s more organized and efficient than she used to be. �
��When I was younger, I’d do five calls in a day, and then I wouldn’t work for a week,” she says. “Now I decide what days I’m working, and I’m sort of on the clock from noon until 10 p.m. I usually work three to four days a week, although right now I’m working five or six days because I really need to make the rent on August 4.”

  Jillian often works with another woman (they share clients and sometimes do threesomes), and she prefers regulars to new clients, particularly new clients who are younger men with an entitled attitude. Recently, she says, one twenty-year-old client got hysterical at the sight of her menstrual blood and made such a fuss that she returned some of his money. But he soon texted her again and asked if he could see her that same day and pay her a few days later. Jillian texted back, “No escorting on the layaway plan.” Then there was the doctor who booked a threesome with Jillian and her friend. As she describes the session on her blog, he “wanted to bend ‘D’ and me into acrobatic positions and, after asking whether we were on drugs or had diseases before giving me the money, had the audacity to be annoyed about switching condoms between us — a doctor!” She concludes, “Sorry for kvetching at such length, but these people are unbelievable sometimes.”

  Jillian, however, has also met some very nice clients. She describes two of them on her password-protected blog:

  The two clients I saw today, one hour right after the other, were both exceptions to my usual rule about guys in their late twenties being jackasses. The first was a polite analytical chemist in his late 20s. He was even good looking, which usually spells disaster because that type tend to be arrogant, but despite being somewhat laconic he was the soul of courtesy. The second was a nerdy, sweet bearded heating and air worker. He showed me some hilarious pictures of himself skiing in a kilt and horned head gear, and we laughed about him freaking out everyone on the slopes. We talked sci fi novels and role playing games. He even gave me a ride to the bank and then dropped me off at 7 – 11 afterwards. (I didn’t feel comfortable with him dropping me off at home, so I just walked the block back from the store.)

  Many of Jillian’s best clients are regulars, which is why she was so upset when one of her favorite regulars, a married man in his midsixties, emailed her recently to say he was going to stop seeing her because a death in his family made him realize he needed to be more financially responsible and attentive to his wife. The man had started seeing Jillian and her partner because, as she puts it, “His wife was his second sexual partner ever, and since she was very traditionally Catholic sexually, he regretted all the sexual experience he’d missed throughout his life.” He was very generous, paying double for sessions, bringing Jillian chocolate, and taking her out for Indian food on occasion. As she wrote wistfully in her blog, “I should have remembered the general pattern that holds that when a client seems to have fallen in love with you and starts to spend a whole bunch of cash on you, it’s not going to last forever.”

  While Jillian still volunteers with Arise for Social Justice, the nonprofit that advocates for the rights of poor and low-income people, she has devoted much of her spare time over the past two years to another unpaid activity: writing and editing for Tits and Sass, the blog for and by sex workers. She says she devotes “maybe twenty hours a week to it; I tend to work slowly and am somewhat obsessive.” When the famous poet and writer Maya Angelou died, Tits and Sass published a blog about Angelou’s foray into sex work as a young single mother. Gawker picked up the blog, the Huffington Post did a segment on it, and it was widely shared on Facebook.

  Jillian plans to continue doing sex work for the foreseeable future. “I have no specific exit plan,” she says. “I don’t feel like I’m ready to go back to school yet. So I will continue writing and try to put myself out there more as a freelancer.” When she first began doing sex work, she thought the demand for her services might dry up by the time she hit thirty or thirty-five. But now she sees women in their forties and early fifties who are still doing well in sex work. “Age isn’t as much of a barrier as I originally thought,” she says. “A lot of sex workers don’t have an exit plan. In this unstable economy, you tend to stick with what you know.”

  By contrast, Anna, “the girl next door” whom I’d met at Sheri’s Ranch in Nevada, did have a definite exit plan. She stopped doing sex work when she left the Nevada brothel in October 2013. Her husband had finished graduate school in Las Vegas, so they had moved back to Florida, and Anna commuted by air. But after a month of that, she decided she’d had enough. She says she and her husband spent weeks repairing the damage renters had done to their central Florida house, and then Anna found out that she was pregnant. Now the mother of a baby girl, Anna has put off her plans to go to graduate school for the time being. “I wanted a family,” she says.

  Anna loves being a mother, but there are days when she misses the high life at Sheri’s Ranch and all her friends there. Before she left, her co-workers gave her two goodbye parties. “It was a beautiful send-off,” she says. “The girls made me cry. My last two weeks there, there were two send-off cakes and people signed cards. It was very sweet. [Sheri’s] definitely was my second home for four years. I loved it and do miss it.”

  Anna and many of the other young women I profiled in this book never considered sex work a permanent career. Like many women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they viewed it as a short-term economic choice, a way to pay off debt, get through school, or support a family. For some, like Elle, who had already sampled the 9-to-5 life, it remains a conscious career choice. For others, like Julie and those with a criminal record, it is a trap with no easy exit. And for still others, particularly women like Maxine Doogan, Carol Leigh, and Jillian, it has become a lifelong political and socioeconomic statement. Yet whether these sex workers are in the profession by choice or under duration, for the short or long haul, they share common ground in the challenge of living with criminal laws that make it difficult for them to live safe, financially secure lives.

  Consider, for example, what recently happened to Joi Love. She left Rhode Island in 2013 to move in with her mother in Richmond, Virginia, and help her deal with some pressing personal issues. “My little brother had been terrorizing my mom and my sister,” Joi says, referring to her half-brother, her mother’s son from a second marriage. “Helping my brother was a useless cause, but I got him out of the house.” She and her longtime boyfriend, Lucky, then moved to Atlanta, where Joi began working again as an escort. In the spring of 2014, they met a younger woman who was also interested in doing sex work and they began traveling around with her. In July 2014, Joi and Lucky were visiting her mother in Richmond, and their acquaintance was staying at a nearby hotel when she got caught in a prostitution sting. To save herself, the young woman claimed that Lucky was forcing her into sex work — in essence, trafficking her. Richmond police immediately arrested Lucky and Joi.

  “They told me I could also be a [trafficking] victim witness against him,” Joi says. “But that would be a lie. Clearly, I’m not a victim of anything, and we’ve lived as husband and wife forever.” When Joi refused to play ball, she was charged with two felonies: conspiracy to pander and conspiracy to receive the earnings of a prostitute, even though she says she was not getting any money from the younger woman and had nothing to do with her decision to sell sex. She was also charged with a prostitution-related misdemeanor. Joi’s boyfriend, Lucky (no longer so lucky), was charged with more serious crimes, including kidnapping, pandering, transporting, and receiving money from a prostitute.

  After spending fifteen days in the Henrico County jail, Joi was finally able to post bond. It cost her $1,500; Lucky had to pay $2,400. They were released only after agreeing to wear GPS monitors on their ankles (for which each had to pay $75 a week.) The woman who turned on them was released on her recognizance and will not be charged, Joi says. While Lucky managed to scrape together the funds to hire a private attorney, Joi did not have enough money to hire a lawyer for herself. Instead, she was given a court-appointed attor
ney, who pressed her to say she was a trafficking victim so she could avoid jail time.

  “When I met with my attorney, he was basically making the case for the prosecutors,” she says. “He didn’t even have a defense he was going to present.” Joi herself collected the evidence to show that she was innocent of the felony charges and convinced her attorney to mount a defense. On October 20, she pleaded guilty to the misdemeanor, and her lawyer convinced the Henrico County prosecutors to drop the felony charges.

  At Lucky’s trial, the woman who claimed she was trafficked kept changing her story. In the end, Lucky was convicted of only one felony, transporting a sex worker. Joi says her boyfriend is currently on “home incarceration” at her mother’s house in Richmond while he appeals his conviction.

  After Joi was arrested, her middle daughter, who had been accepted at a North Carolina college on a full scholarship, had to delay her enrollment in school because Joi could not afford the remaining school fees. Her ex-husband had died of stomach cancer in June of 2014, and her youngest daughter, who was supposed to come stay with Joi in Atlanta, had to go live with her ex-husband’s sister in North Carolina instead.

  Joi is hoping her middle daughter will be able to start college in the spring. And she is looking forward to becoming a grandmother. Her oldest daughter, who finally graduated from Wake Forest University in 2013, is pregnant and living in Virginia with her boyfriend, a basketball player whom she met in college.