Yes Means Yes, No Means No
The first time I was homeless I was seventeen years old. It was not safe, had never been safe, for me to be in the house of my parents. I ended up on the streets in San Diego. I remember standing inside a phone booth, and calling the operator, and saying that I was 17 and had no where to go. I was told that there were ten beds for homeless youth at that time in San Diego, and that all were full.
It was safer for me to work as a prostitute, in which case I would have money to rent an SRO hotel room for the week, than sleep in the park, so that is what I did.
Many homeless youth and adults use prostitution as the only tool they have available to them at the moment to get off the streets.
Sometimes prostitution is a choice, sometimes even an empowered choice, and sometimes people, including children, are forced into prostitution to escape homelessness, whether they are already homeless and trying to get off the streets, or trying to pay the rent so that they, their families, and their children don’t become homeless. Working as a prostitute can be a much safer, healthier option than sleeping on the streets or staying in a shelter.
The risk of violence on the streets and violence in shelters is often much greater than the risk of violence people face working as prostitutes. The greatest violence I experienced as a homeless youth using prostitution to get off the streets was police violence. When people experience violence at the hands of the police and the violence of incarceration as a result of working as a prostitute, quite often they are experiencing further violence as a result of being homeless and being poor.
I believe in the complete decriminalization of adult consensual prostitution, and that it should be every person’s civil right to decide who they do or do not want to have sex with, and whether they are going to give their sexual services freely or charge for their sexual services. I believe that it is criminal of our society to criminalize children and subject them to the dehumanizing violence of arrest and incarceration for prostitution. No youth should ever be arrested for choosing to work as a prostitute, especially since most youth working as prostitutes are not making a career choice but trying to stay off the street. Sometimes, in a society where we spend millions on our prison industrial complex while social services continue to get cut, youth and adults working as prostitutes are making the healthiest choice available to them, and avoiding the violence they are more vulnerable to sleeping on the streets and in the parks. It is our responsibility as a society to ensure permanent safe housing, and that no child or adult is ever forced into prostitution because it is the only option that separates them from the violence of the streets and the violence and abuse in our current shelter system.
Many people in San Francisco today use prostitution to escape and avoid homelessness, and these children and adults are subject to the violence of arrest and incarceration for exercising what should be their civil right to make their own decisions about their own bodies, in a society that would rather pay for jail cells than housing for poor people.
I went from working as a prostitute to working as a stripper, and have witnessed that while people get arrested for working as prostitutes independently outside the strip clubs, women and girls inside the strip clubs, many of whom just want to work as dancers, are being forced into prostitution to pay illegal fees to strip club owners.
The arrest and incarceration that prostitutes face working outside the strip clubs, and the fact that the District Attorney’s office refuses to enforce pimping and pandering laws against the strip club owners, creates a situation where the San Francisco Police Department and District Attorney Kamala Harris are trafficking women and girls into the strip clubs for prostitution.
I was working on a rainy Tuesday night at a strip-club-turning-into-a-brothel in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district. There were a dozen dancers on the schedule there that night and at 1 a.m. there were only two customers in the building. We were required to pay an illegal “stage fee”of $150 per dancer. We did not receive any wages but worked for tips directly from the customers, out of which we had to pay the fee.
Myself and another dancer, a 19-year-old girl, were sitting in front of the stage in the dark theater. One of the two customers in the building was lurking nearby.
My teenage friend said to me, “Daisy, I know you don’t like to do this, but that customer does $20 bare-back blow jobs (oral sex without a condom) and he comes really quick, and I know he has more money. I know you don’t like to do that, but I’ve done two for him, and now I have $40 towards my stage fee and I know you don’t have anything and I don’t know what you’re going to do.”
A teenage girl was counseling me to have unsafe sex for $20 so I could pay an illegal stage fee so the dance club owners could pay their lobbyists and the corrupt politicians they pay off and their $350-an-hour lawyers.
Since at least 1988, San Francisco strip club owners have been violating labor laws by illegally misclassifying their dancer employees as independent contractors, not paying them wages, and forcing them to pay to work through various illegal tip-sharing schemes.
The illegal fees dancers are forced to pay to work can run to over $400 per shift. One dancer reported to the Labor Commission that she had been held hostage in the locked dressing room of a strip club on Broadway because she did not make the money they wanted from her. Another young dancer made a statement to the San Francisco District Attorney’s office that included how a San Francisco strip club owner told her that since she “owed” him money (in illegal work fees she had not been able to make) she should have sex with him in order to work off this “debt,” which she felt compelled to do in order to keep her job.
Even though since 1994 the Labor Commission has decided repeatedly in favor of the dancers that they are employees, not independent contractors, should be paid wages, and should not be required to participate in illegal tip-sharing or so-called “commission” schemes, the State Labor Commission has neglected to bring its Bureau of Field Enforcement in to enforce the labor laws on behalf of the dancers, so the clubs continue to operate in flagrant violation.
In 1996 Willie Brown, who had been the personal attorney of one of the dance club owners, became mayor, and Terrance Hallinan, who is currently one of the lawyers for the Mitchell Brother(s) strip club, became District Attorney. One of the managers at a strip club on Market Street (partially owned by Brown’s past client) operating in violation of labor and criminal laws, said to the dancers, “Now that Willie Brown is the mayor, we can do whatever we want.” Strip club owners built dangerous private booths in the clubs which dancers were expected to go into one-on-one with customers. Managers began to instruct women to commit acts of prostitution in order to collect the illegal fees they were demanding.
I worked in these private booths with so-called “panic buttons” and video cameras which the dance club owners claimed would increase our safety but which did not. I am five feet tall and a quarter inch, and wearing high heels and a bikini, or less, customers with an intent to sexually assault or otherwise harm me can easily hold me down and prevent me from reaching the “panic button” behind me or on the wall next to me. One of my close friends was assaulted by a customer in a private booth with a panic button. She was able to press the button but no one came to her assistance.
I was sexually assaulted in private booths with video cameras and no one ever came to my assistance. I never witnessed or heard of any dancer ever being helped because of the presence of video cameras in the private booths. Video cameras and “panic buttons” in private booths do not make private booths a safe working environment.
After the institution of the private booths in the dance clubs, I left work many times with finger print bruises and bite marks on my body after attempting to fight off customers who expected and wanted sexual services in these booths that I did not believe my job as an exotic dancer should require me to provide.
In 2004, A San Francisco police officer gave oral testimony to the San Francisco Commission on the Status of Women that a fourteen-year-old girl was gang raped in one of these dangerous booths in a San Francisco strip club.
Within months of the beginning of the construction of these dangerous booths, dancers organized and went to the police asking for help, as women and girls were (and still are, almost ten years later) getting raped, sexually assaulted and coerced into prostitution in these booths. From 1996 until the current time, dancers have repeatedly met with and made multiple police reports and taped statements to the police and District Attorney’s office (under both Terrance Hallinan and Kamala Harris), but the conditions have only worsened and the dancers have received no help. The few times the police have actually brought charges against strip club owners and managers, both DAs refused to prosecute (Harris, Brown’s ex-girlfriend, has also taken money from dance club owners through campaign contributions from their lobbying group, the San Francisco Late Night Coalition.)
We are asking our brothers and sisters to support the dancers refusing coercion into prostitution, sexual assault, and rape in the dance clubs, and to support sex workers’ right to work independently outside the dance clubs. We ask our community to hold accountable all those violating the labor, human, and civil rights of sex workers, whether those violating our rights be the dance club owners, the police, the District Attorney (who prosecutes independent, consentually working prostitutes while refusing to prosecute dance club owners who are coercing women into prostitution), city or state politicians, or “service providers” on the take, many of whom are trying to convince you that the freedom patriarchal capitalism gives bosses such as the dance club owners to exploit their workers, is sexual freedom. Worker exploitation does not equal sexual freedom.
Prostitutes in San Francisco either work independently outside the strip clubs and face the violence of arrest and incarceration, or work as prostitutes in the dance clubs (in violation of the dancers’ labor and safety rights) and pay hundreds of dollars per shift in mandatory pimp fees to the club owners, which the owners share with various politicians and organizations.
This situation is racist, classist, and transphobic because it means that if you are a prostitute and you can’t get hired in the strip clubs, which have a racist and transphobic hiring hierarchy, you will suffer the violence of arrest and incarceration for working independently. It also means that if you don’t want to work as a prostitute and just want to work as a dancer and have your rights as a dancer respected, you are out of luck and will have to face violence on the job, unless you work at San Francisco’s only union-shop, worker’s co-op strip club, the Lusty Lady.
In the twenty-first century in San Francisco, this is as unacceptable as homelessness.
I don’t need a private booth to dance if I am working as a dancer, and if I work as a prostitute I am not going to give any of my money to a dance club owner so that he can share it with people like Terrence Hallinan, Kamala Harris, or any one else trying to get a cut of the pimp fees.
Please support sex workers organizing to decriminalize adult consensual prostitution outside the strip clubs. Monies being used to inflict the violence of arrest and incarceration on children and adults working as prostitutes should be supporting social services and permanent housing for everyone. No child or adult should be forced into prostitution to leave or avoid homelessness. Please support sex workers organizing to allow dancers who want to work as dancers to do so in a safe environment without being coerced into prostitution. No one should be coerced into prostitution on the job or have to work in an environment where they are subject to sexual and physical assault and rape. YES MEANS YES AND NO MEANS NO!
Sex Workers Organized for Labor, Human, and Civil Rights
Daisy