To make a great distinction between being paid for an hour’s sexual services, or an hour’s typing, or an hour’s acting on a stage is to make a distinction that is not there. – Margo St. James
Forty years ago today (on Mother’s Day of that year), Margo St. James founded COYOTE, the very first sex worker rights organization. Ironically, she was set on that path in 1962 by a cop who decided she looked like a streetwalker and a judge who convicted her of prostitution without any real evidence: “I said in court, ‘Your honor, I never turned a trick in my life!’ he responded, ‘Anyone who knows the language is obviously a professional.’ My crime was I knew too much to be nice girl.” Once she had a criminal record, she found that she could not get any other work, and so decided she might as well do what she had been accused of. And though she only worked for four years, she continued to identify with the hookers and eventually founded an organization called WHO:
…Whores, Housewives and Others. Others meant lesbian, but it wasn’t being said out loud yet, even in liberal bohemian circles. The first meeting of WHO was held on Alan Watt’s houseboat. The name COYOTE came from novelist Tom Robbins who dubbed me the COYOTE Trickster…Richard Hongisto, a liberal sheriff elected in San Francisco about that time attended my parties. He had been a cop, and had a sociology degree. I…asked him what it would take to get NOW, and Gay rights groups to support prostitutes’ rights…He said that we needed someone from the victim class to speak out…I decided to be that someone…and I hoped the hookers would join me. The PR people responsible for getting the sheriff elected volunteered to help me with COYOTE…I started organizing internationally with…Jennifer James, an anthropology professor…[who] coined the word decriminalization and was responsible for getting NOW to make it a plank in their 1973 convention. COYOTE published a newsletter from 1974-79 and the Hooker’s Ball became popular, attracting 20,000 people in 1978…
Let that sink in: the largest mainstream feminist organization actually supported sex worker rights for a short time, though the neofeminists destroyed that within just a few years. Still, it looked for a while as though there was nowhere to go but up. COYOTE chapters sprang up in Sacramento and Florida, and similar organizations were formed elsewhere; there was PONY in New York, PUMA in Massachusetts, CUPIDS and PEP in Michigan, KITTY in Kansas City, PASSION in New Orleans, OCELOT in San Diego, KAT in Los Angeles, ASP in Seattle and DOLPHIN in Hawaii. On June 2nd, 1975 French whores in Lyon held the protest which led to the formation of the French Collective of Prostitutes, and a sister organization soon formed in England; they and several others joined with COYOTE “to form the International Committee for Prostitutes’ Rights (ICPR), the organization whose work and example helped to win prostitution law reform in a number of European countries and provided an example which inspired similar campaigns in many other parts of the world.” In 1976, COYOTE filed the lawsuit which led to decriminalization in Rhode Island, and by 1977 even well-known journalists and politicians were listening.
Had HIV not arrived on the scene a few years later, criminalization might have been merely a black period of history by now. But arrive it did, swinging the balance of power to the neofeminists and their fundamentalist Christian allies. Margo moved to Europe to help sex worker rights efforts there, and COYOTE was directed by Samantha Miller and Gloria Lockett, who worked to make the organization more responsive to the concerns of minority sex workers and those who weren’t escorts (including strippers, phone sex operators, etc). During the AIDS panic of the ‘80s and the neofeminist ascendance of the ‘90s, COYOTE was too busy fighting disinformation and stigma to make any actual progress, and by the time new organizations like SWOP started to appear around the turn of the century it had run out of steam. Margo (who had returned to the US in 1993) decided to concentrate on sex worker health, and in 1999 COYOTE became the St. James Infirmary, which provides free medical care and social services for sex workers. The only other remaining chapter is the Los Angeles one, which has been inactive since about the same time. But though the mother of all sex worker organizations has ceased to exist in its original form, every current activist group owes it – and Margo – a debt of gratitude for showing that it could be done.
Took most of my life before I realized that moral courage is greater and more difficult than physical courage.
Women like Margo St. James (and actually you too, Maggie), have moral courage in spades and it’s a point that I envy in girls like you.
It takes a lot to stand up to the system and I’m thankful that a handful of people out there are doing it.
It’s weird to think how close decriminalization was before HIV/AIDS.
Every time I read something like “neofeminists and their fundamentalist Christian allies” my mind gets whiplash. Do these two groups actually cooperate? Based on what I overheard and/or read back about 1990, the neofeministas (at least publicly) tended to denounce fundamentalist Christians in about the tone one would expect from an Israeli discussion Joseph Mengele.
Mind, I don’t dispute that, on the issue of Prostitution, their policies and obsessions tend to make them run in tandem. I just have difficulty thinking of them as “allies” in any active and cooperative sense.
“The enemy of my enemy is my friend”. Oh, yes, they cooperate; in fact on sex work issues you’ll now hear fundies spouting neofeminist “objectification” dogma. The alliance is actually a troika; cops are the third part, as can be seen in campaigns against strip clubs, the spreading of “sex trafficking” myth and the recriminalization campaign in Rhode Island.
I’d think that it would be worth trying to drive a spike between them. They strike me as natural enemies. It reminds me of the classic cartoon about the Hitler/Stalin pact;
http://www.markville.ss.yrdsb.edu.on.ca/history/american/websites/HIST10/andy_z5.gif
Allies kind of like way the Iranians and Taliban are allies. Yeah sure – they’ll cozy up to beat the great Satan – but without him – they’d be at each other’s throats.
It’s really not that hard to comprehend and it happens all the time. In fact, the Iranian revolution saw the alliance of Fundamental Islam with Communism. Once the shah was put down – they went at each others throats.
They cooperate all the time. Without Senator Brownback (Kansas Fundamentalist Christian Senator) the International Marriage Broker Regulation Act would likely not have gotten anywhere.
Without prudes, neofeminism would be a kooky fringe political ideology with zero clout. The ultimate goal of neofeminism, after all, is to undermine and destroy all straight male-female coupling, (No one will ever convince me that isn’t true.)
Well, that doesn’t just leave out fundamentalist Christians that leaves out anyone who is part of a straight couple, including straight progressives. (This doesn’t mean neofeminists are Lesbians, either, some advocate an asexual lifestyle.)
However, there are a lot of prudes, and neofeminists are good at churning out plausible sounding ideological justifications for the psychological defect of prudery. They fulfill the same role that religious prudery used to fulfill before it became unfashionable. I mean, take the recent attack on Beyonce for wearing provocative garments on stage. The ideology may be different, but it’s very reminiscent of that old time religion when it was attacking rock and roll music. I mean, Hell, the whole “leading young girls into bad behavior thing” could practically be part of a sermon at my Mom’s church.
cspschofield wrote:
I distinctly recall hearing a radio program circa 1985 discussing USAG Meese’s Commission on Pornography . Needless to say the Meese Commission was heavily laden with religious whack jobs, including James Dobson and Bruce Ritter.
On the radio program, defending the Meese Commission were Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin. Arguing against the commission was Alan Dershowitz. That discussion did the neofeminist-fundamentalist math for me.
A most telling exchange demonstrated the bizarre ugliness of the neofeminists, and what I hoped at the time would become an inherent weakness: their assumption that everyone was as stupid or as emotionally unhinged as they were.
Dershowitz used a common rhetorical short form “I can give you countless women who …” for the intended statement “I can give you countless examples of women who …” At that, the neofeminist cranial fecal matter hit the fan.
Both MacKinnon and Dworkin shot back variations of “See! This male chauvinist pig thinks he owns women that he can give away!”
I didn’t realise COYOTE was no longer active. I’d wondered why you rarely mentioned them.
The truth of the underbelly of politics can be found in it’s victims. Demonize the harmless and you have a common enemy to fight. Morality was the WORST thing that could have ever happened to politics… (I’m not talking ethics here)
I’d say it’s more like demonize the harmless vulnerable ones who would have extreme difficulty defending themselves such as an one example of whores and johns, and you have a common enemy to fight.
Precisely what I meant with the added bonus of blaming the ignorance of politics on the false morality of religion … at least in the USA
The madness of criminalizing prostitution.
I agree with Krulac (no, it’s not the end of the world) moral courage is more difficult than physical. Why? Because if you screw-up in an act of physical courage, you usually aren’t around to be made fun of. If you screw-up on an act of moral courage, you have to live with it forever.
Oh yeah, the fundies and the neofems work together. They both see sexual pleasure as the equivalent of Hitler.
Each other they see as merely the devil.
And both the fundies and the neofems think that those who disagree with them are inferiors: children who have not yet seen the light, and must be guided (controlled) by people like themselves until we learn that they are right.
A plague on both their houses, preferably antibiotic resistant gonorrhea.
Which will be easy for them to catch, since any sex they have will be of the “I was swept off my feet!” variety, meaning no protection (after all, only a slut or a whore would carry condoms around, expecting to have sex).
[…] Day. … In a very real sense, today is the birthday of the sex worker rights movement; though Margo St. James had already founded [sex worker rights organization] COYOTE two years before, the French protests were the first ones […]
[…] dictators. Did you know that as the result of the 1980 political deal which settled the lawsuit Coyote vs. Roberts, prostitution was decriminalized in the state of Rhode Island, and remained so for almost 30 years? […]
[…] the “accidental” decriminalization was nothing of the kind. In July 1976, the first sex-worker rights organization, COYOTE, filed a lawsuit challenging the Rhode Island law which criminalized the sale or purchase of sex by […]
[…] the “accidental” decriminalization was nothing of the kind. In July 1976, the first sex-worker rights organization, COYOTE, filed a lawsuit challenging the Rhode Island law which criminalized the sale or purchase of sex by […]
[…] the “accidental” decriminalization was nothing of the kind. In July 1976, the first sex-worker rights organization, COYOTE, filed a lawsuit challenging the Rhode Island law which criminalized the sale or purchase of sex by […]
[…] “accidental” decriminalization was nothing of the kind. In July 1976, the first sex-worker rights organization, COYOTE, filed a lawsuit challenging the Rhode Island law which criminalized the sale or purchase of […]
[…] RIP Margo St. James. (Maggie McNeill) […]
[…] rights movement in the US died in January. Maggie McNeill paid tribute to her in 2013 here. The San Francisco Chronicle published an obituary on 13th […]