LOS ANGELES—The four years of the Donald Trump presidency were an era of increased activism by sex workers, as the sex industry faced an increasing crackdown both at the federal and state levels — a crackdown that culminated in the COVID-19 pandemic which saw sex workers largely excluded from economic relief packages, despite losing most or all of their income.
The FOSTA/SESTA law, attacks on internet freedom, and a number of state-level moves to restrict adult content were also among the newly resurgent attacks on sex worker rights, and the adult industry overall.
But the political activism of sex workers is not a recent phenomenon. In fact, it stretches back more than 100 years — and this week marked the 103rd anniversary of the first recorded public protest march organized and carried out by sex workers.
The march took place on January 25, 1917, in San Francisco, where a powerful, religiously-driven “anti-vice” movement was then taking hold. Earlier that January, the “morality” crusaders staged a rally dubbed “Purity Sunday,” to inveigh against the supposed evils of prostitution, while claiming that “victims” of the city’s brothels would be “saved.” At the center of the San Francisco “purity” movement was a clergyman, Reverend Paul Smith.
According to Ivy Anderson and Devon Angus — whose book Alice: Memoirs of a Barbary Coast Prostitute gave a first-hand look at the early-20th-century sex industry in San Francisco — sex work was illegal, but had long been mostly tolerated in the city as among the “foundational pieces of the mythic West.” But in 1917, San Francisco passed a law called the Red Light Abatement Act aimed at closing down the “red light” districts that emerged almost 70 years earlier at the height of the California Gold Rush.
The brothel shutdowns starred with the infamous Barbary Coast — where today’s by San Francisco neighborhoods of North Beach and Chinatown are located — and next targeted the Tenderloin district.
“Reggie Gamble and Maude Spencer, two madams from the Uptown Tenderloin district, aimed to confront ‘Purity Sunday’ by storming the church of one of its main proselytizers,” recounted Anderson and Angus, in a historical account if the event.
That was the Central Methodist Church located at O'Farrell and Leavenworth Streets, where Smith was pastor. The clergyman would later call his confrontation with 300 sex workers demanding their rights as laborers, “the most dramatic incident of my life.”
According to the San Francisco history site FoundSF, Smith was genuinely shocked to hear the sex workers tell him that their jobs were the only way for women to earn a decent wage, and that most of them were mothers who had joined the sex industry to support their children.
While he was apparently moved by their plight, however, Smith never gave up his crusade against sex work. He did later take up the cause of promoting a minimum wage law — but in February of 1917, a series of police raids closed down the Tenderloin brothels, leaving the sex workers who depended on their employment there to fend for themselves and their children.
A national nonprofit, sex worker rights organization, the Old Pro Project, organizes its activities around the January 25 anniversary every year. More information on the group can be found at this link.
Photo via Tenderloin Museum Facebook
