Despite its somewhat cleaner reputation nowadays, San Francisco was built on vice. Gambling halls, saloons and brothels ruled The City’s streets.
But as times have changed, one of The City’s and the world’s oldest professions — prostitution — has come under increasing scrutiny, and lawmakers are still scratching their heads trying to work out a solution.
The issue came to a head in February when the activity on Capp Street became so out of hand that city officials installed barricades to deter motorists from engaging with the sex workers lining the street.
“The supervisor described it as being unlike anything that she had ever seen on Capp in the past,” said Jackie Prager of Supervisor Hillary Ronen’s office. “So much chaos, a lot of really unsafe behavior, bumper-to-bumper traffic, dozens of individuals who were naked, lining the street walking down to the cars, just like pandemonium.”
“So in an attempt to address the unsafe conditions in the neighborhood, the barricades went up,” she said.
But while the barricades did address the traffic issues, they did nothing to help the sex workers themselves. So, Ronen, whose district includes Capp Street, announced a resolution asking the state to legalize consensual sex work and announced plans to hold a hearing on the issue.
However, as the months have gone by, it’s become clear that the issue is far more complicated than the supervisor and her office initially considered. Activists, advocates and sex workers themselves have voiced their concerns about the plan.
“After the resolution was introduced, we got a lot of feedback,” Prager said. “What we realized is that the language of the resolution didn’t fully align with what this community wanted or needed.”
Even among those involved in the sex industry, there isn’t much consensus on the best stance or solution.
Ronen has retreated from her initial resolution, instead focusing on what existing city programs could be used to support the sex worker community as The City’s budget is awaiting finalization.
In the meantime, besides the barricades, there is no short-term solution.
Although there are some pockets where it is legal, like in Nevada in the United States and Amsterdam in Europe, governments have taken wildly different approaches to sex work.
There is the so-called “Nordic model,” or abolitionist model, which has been adopted in Sweden, that essentially only criminalizes clients and third parties involved, not the sex workers themselves. This model assumes that the sex workers are victims and also involves means of support for them.
There’s the criminalization model, which is currently the status quo in most of the United States, where all parties are penalized, including sex workers.
Legalization is exactly what it sounds like — it removes all legal penalties and turns sex work into a legitimate business. And there’s decriminalization, which removes the penalties but doesn’t include regulation.
In California, steps have been taken to remove some of the challenges facing sex workers, but these efforts have been piecemeal.
In 2019, Senate Bill 233 gave sex workers immunity when reporting crimes and prohibited law enforcement from using condoms as evidence in prostitution cases. More recently, the state legislature decriminalized loitering in a public place last year when intending to exchange sex for money, which many argued unfairly targeted the transgender community.
But all of this is not enough for Maxine Doogan, who identifies as a prostitute and founded the Erotic Service Provider Legal Education and Research Project, a San Francisco-based nonprofit that provides education and legal advocacy for the sex worker community.
“We want to be treated like any other workforce that comes before legislative or policy bodies to talk about what type of support we require,” said Doogan, who was not one of the sources with whom Ronen’s office has spoken so far.
For Doogan, Ronen’s actions over the last few months have been a hollow effort in an ongoing fight in California, where so far only a few pieces of harm reduction legislation have been passed.
“I think they just were trying to just keep a lid and do some placating for certain people,” she said.
In Ronen’s initial resolution, she used the term “legalization” instead of decriminalization, which is a different model and not one that Doogan is supports.
“We’re not for having some sort of regulation scheme put upon us,” she said. “We’re not for having restricted work hours. We’re not for being restricted in where it is that we can work,” Doogan said. “We’re already criminalized, so we’re already everywhere. That’s one of the consequences of criminalization, is that we have a very self-regulated industry that, in large part, works for us.”
Doogan and her community are unlikely to approve of the state coming in and enacting regulations on an industry that has been running on its own up until this point.
Starchild, another San Francisco sex worker — known for his ongoing role in The City’s Libertarian party and running for local office — is inclined to agree with Doogan.
“The ideal would be full legalization, on libertarian terms, by which there are no criminal laws on the books relating to prosecuting people for consensual sex, and there’s no government regulation or taxation of it,” said Starchild, whose “companion name” or escort name, that he goes by with clients, is Chris Fox.
He said what he and others wouldn’t want is what’s been happening to the cannabis industry since it was legalized in California, with taxation and controls being added.
“As a sex worker, I don’t need OSHA looking over my shoulder telling me how to do my job,” he said. “One of the reasons why people gravitate to it, one of the reasons I did, is because it’s one of the few things where you can — because it’s not highly regulated — you can be your own boss, you can set your own hours, you don’t have to deal with a lot of corporate or bureaucratic bulls---.”
While the issue is frustrating to see play out on the local and state level, Starchild said he has a more forgiving perspective of Ronen’s efforts than Doogan.
“She’s basically just passing the buck to the state level, potentially, although at least trying to do so in the form of a resolution by the board, which is something I don’t want to be too hard on her for,” he said. “Because something is better than nothing.”
And this type of regulation could also affect those in the industry for whom sex work can actually be a life-changing service.
When Bacchus was born in Oakland in 1951, he was one of many babies of his generation that suffered side effects of diethylstilbestrol, or DES — a hormone drug given to pregnant women to prevent miscarriages.
The drug is no longer prescribed for pregnant women after it was found to cause complications in children exposed to it in utero. In male babies, it was found to cause testicular abnormalities such as undescended testicles.
Bacchus, who asked to go the name of the Greek god of wine for this story, underwent surgery to correct the effects of the drug when he was a young boy, but it was “botched.”
In his teens and into his 20s, he became more aware of how he didn’t function the same way as his peers. Dates would go wrong, and as his friends entered relationships and got married, he was alone.
“I felt like an outcast. I felt like the people I met, the male people I met, were married or in a relationship,” he said. “They would go home to a woman or a girlfriend or a wife, or a guy, whoever their lover was, and have a loving, physical, intimate relationship, and I wasn’t.”
Ex // Top Stories
Here's The Examiner's guide to navigating one of baseball's biggest vacation destinations
General's Residence will be transformed by Detour Dance when they premiere 'The Twilight Aristocracy,' an immersive theatrical experience combining drag, dance and sto…
A recent Examiner op-ed would have us believe that The City’s nonprofit human-services sector is a politically powerful, unaccountable behemoth with a self-interest in…
It was in his early 20s that he first engaged in sexual services to help with his condition.
He started out with a sex therapist and a sex surrogate. But this proved to be too expensive long-term, and so he turned to sex workers. This began his lifelong relationship with the sex industry, becoming what is often referred to as a “john,” but to the people in the industry now, a “client.”
“When I started engaging in sex with a professional, all of a sudden, I felt like a member of society,” he said. “I felt like I’ve made it. And the fact that I was paying for it didn’t diminish that.”
Bacchus has had a long history with the Bay Area’s sex industry — not only as a client, but also as an activist. He helped run a couple of “john schools,” an effort started in the 1990s to educate men who wanted to engage in sexual services on how to behave appropriately.
Those efforts have fizzled out, but Bacchus said he still views the people in the industry as friends and confidantes — including Starchild — and feels that the local government and law enforcement would be better off if they used sex workers as resources, rather than penalizing them.
But this all assumes that the sex workers are willingly in the profession. Another part of the puzzle of this issue is that a good portion of sex workers — unlike Doogan, Starchild, or those who work with Bacchus — are not in the industry voluntarily.
Initially, Ronen’s resolution called on several members of the state government to legalize “consensual adult prostitution in the State of California; legalization is a proven effective method to protect the health and safety of sex workers while reducing crime and violence.”
It seemed likely at first that a hearing would be the next step in the process, but almost immediately Ronen’s office was deterred by those who might be negatively affected.
Over the last couple of months, sex trafficking organizations and advocates reached out and explained that such a hearing could be retraumatizing for victims of sex trafficking, citing one such hearing in Washington D.C. in 2019 that lasted some 14 hours due to the sheer influx of people wanting to speak, according to Ronen’s office.
The hearing possibility was dropped while Ronen’s office considered other options. But Doogan said this reasoning doesn’t sound realistic to her.
“That’s a scare tactic that’s used by the anti-prostitution people who use the sex trafficking rhetoric as the excuse to oppose prostitution,” said Doogan. “Where they conflate prostitution with forced labor.”
“It’s been very effective to force politicians [away] from publicly supporting decriminalization,” she said.
But for Yasmin Vafa, the executive director of Rights4Girls, a Washington D.C.-based sex-trafficking nonprofit, reverberations from the 2019 hearing are still felt by many of the survivors she works with today.
“I’ve heard other survivors describe it as comparing trauma and competing traumas,” she said. “And what it ends up doing is pitting individuals with different traumas against each other.”
For Vafa, regardless of how someone identifies — as a trafficking victim, a sex worker, a sex trade survivor or a prostitute — being in the sex trade for any period is traumatic.
Despite the difference in perspective from others like Doogan, Vafa doesn’t support a legalization strategy, instead advocating for a “partial decriminalization” method.
“We don’t punish people for acts of survival; it decriminalizes the sale of sex and ultimately offers individuals access to services and supports,” she said. “So it pairs that decriminalization of the sale of sex with access to services and exit strategies, because one of the things that we commonly hear from individuals in the sex trade is there is not enough viable and meaningful paths out of the industry.”
This would include criminal record relief, sealing or expungement, access to affordable housing, and drug treatment. At the same time, the approach maintains legal ramifications for other parties involved, such as fines.
Some European countries, such as France and Norway, have adopted these models.
But while some strategies have worked abroad, it’s still unclear what the consensus would be for a local solution.
At 16, Elizabeth Quiroz was trafficked and sold to purchasers on Capp St. and Shotwell. Now, she and fellow survivor Lisa Diaz are the co-founders of Redemption House of the Bay Area, a local anti-sex-trafficking nonprofit.
Quiroz and her organization reached out to Ronen’s office pretty quickly after her resolution was introduced. During a 20-minute conversation, they voiced their concerns and shared their experiences.
For them, legalization or decriminalization would worsen the situation.
“It will make it more dangerous; it will make it to where people in the sex trade will continue to repeat the cycle of this type of trauma,” Quiroz said. “And even though it might not be trauma at first, it will become a trauma.”
For her, it was not even the traffickers that were the most dangerous at times, as some buyers were worse. In one instance, she was raped and thrown out of a car by a buyer. And her concern is that there just aren’t enough willing sex workers out there to fill the demand
A legalized or fully decriminalized model might make it easier for willing sex workers to conduct their business, but Quiroz worries it would enable those trafficking unwilling sex workers.
“Under legalization and full decriminalization models, we see increases in demand, which in turn promotes sex trafficking to meet the increased demand,” she said.
Exploiters, criminal gangs, traffickers, and others will continue to “target individuals from whom they can make the greatest profit,” she said.
Quiroz wants to see a model similar to what Vafa described, where the sex workers are provided with resources and points of contact to support them leaving the industry, while the traffickers and buyers are penalized.
Achieving that is a long way off, but Quiroz is hopeful that more discussion will take place now thanks to Ronen’s resolution.
And the discussion has continued, albeit in a different vein than initially thought.
Looking back on the last few months and thinking about what she has learned, Ronen acknowledged in a statement to The Examiner that the approach could have gone differently.
“Before introducing the resolution, I could have spoken to more advocacy organizations to better understand the nuances among advocates,” she wrote.
As her office moves forward on the issue, it has identified three areas that it wants to work on: making sure the laws criminalizing sex trafficking are adequately enforced, doing more outreach to offer exits from sex work for individuals who are in the industry because they believe they have no better options, and providing wraparound services and legal aid for people who want to be doing sex work.
“So that way, the people who are engaging in sex work, who want to be doing it feel like they feel like their rights are protected, they feel safe, they feel empowered to continue doing the work that they enjoy doing,” said Prager, of the supervisor’s office. “And for the people who are only involved to make ends meet have other opportunities to earn a living, and those who are forced to do it have a safety net.”
“This is going to be a bit of a learning process,” she said.
The conversation will likely pick back up sometime this summer.
In the meantime, the Capp Street barriers remain.