Happy International Whores’ Day! Celebrating the Birth of the Sex Worker Rights Movement

Today is “International
Whores’ Day,” a day commemorating the 1975 occupation
of the Church of St. Nizierof in Lyon, France, by more than
100 prostitutes. The event is considered to be the birth of the
modern sex workers’ rights movement. 

Here’s a good
summary of the sit-in from the blog Prized and Reviled:
 

On the 2nd of June in 1975, around 100 street-based sex workers
decided they’d had a gutful of police being more interested
in harassing and arresting them, than in solving murders and
other crimes committed against them. They took over a church and
staged a sit-in, in protest.

As the days wore on, the police became more and more impatient.
Instead of attempting to negotiate with the sex workers and resolve
their issues, the police just threatened them with increasingly
harsh penalties. When the protesters still showed no sign of
backing down after a full week in the church, the police announced
that they were going to have the sex workers’ children removed
from their homes.

This cruel threat outraged the women of Lyon, who promptly
walked into the church and joined the sex workers in
solidarity. If you’re going to remove the sex
workers’ children, the women said, then you’re going to have to
remove ALL our children-because how can you tell the
difference between one mother and the next?

So, that’s awesome, right? Only sadly, after a few days, police
did what they do and busted in with some batons. The protest ended
with the women being arrested and beaten. But many of the Lyon sex
workers had their fines written off; legit police investigations
into unsolved sex worker murders were launched; and the event
sparked similar protests in Marseilles and Paris. 

Maggie McNeill of The Honest Courtesan explains
the significance of International Whores’ Day to the sex worker
community: 

As I’ve explained before, there are three major days observed by
sex worker rights activists: the Day To End Violence Against
Sex Workers (December 17th, the anniversary of the 2003
sentencing of the Green River Killer); Sex Worker Rights
Day (March 3rd, the anniversary of a 2001 festival in Kolkata
attended by over 25,000 Indian sex workers despite efforts from
prohibitionist groups who tried to prevent it by pressuring
the government to revoke their permit); and today, Whores’ 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 large and vociferous enough to gain media attention, and led
to the formation of the French Collective of Prostitutes (which in
turn inspired the founding of the English Collective of Prostitutes
and a number of other, similar organizations). And had its growth
not been stunted by the unwelcome arrival of AIDS (and its
attendant demonization of anything sex-related), decriminalization
might very well have been the rule among advanced countries by now
rather than the exception.

For a brief time, St. James and sex workers’ rights activists
were able to win support from mainstream feminists, including the
National Organization for Women. That didn’t last for long (though
I’d argue younger feminists today are trending back toward
supporting sex work decriminalization). In a
paper comparing French prostitute protest movements in 1975 and
2002, sociologist Lilian Mathieu notes that the earlier protest
movement “immediately garnered broad support from the feminist
movement.” In its later incarnation, however:

Not only did a majority of feminists refuse to support the
prostitutes’ cause on the second occasion, but the focus of debate
shifted from challenging police repression to a controversial
debate about the very existence of prostitution itself, and about
the legitimacy of the people who practice this “profession” to
enter as such in public debate.

These days, McNeill writes, “the most outspoken and effective
activism in the world is being done by the sex workers in
… India, Bangladesh, Korea, Cambodia and Thailand,” as well
as in African countries such as Kenya, Malawi, South Africa, and
Zimbabwe.