“Yes! They’re calling Biden President Elect Biden on the news!”
I was ecstatic and somewhat in disbelief, because personally I was sure Trump’s dirty pool tactics would get him another four years in office.
Madam VP Elect, your win as a woman and especially as a woman of color is absolutely historical and worthy of excitement. But as a sex worker, it is a mixed bag for me.
Your history with our sex working communities has been ambivalent, at best, and a complete disaster at worst. This being what it is, sex workers have still done a lot of work to get you and President Elect Biden into the White House. Sex workers, those who are able, are typically deeply political people, because our identities are so maligned. So many current and former sex workers that I know really worked hard for the Biden/Harris campaign. We have done this despite the ways in which you and the policies you have promoted have impacted us.
You have never formally apologized for the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act of 2018, which has rolled back Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 and essentially allowed for mass conflation between sex trafficking and sex work and prosecution of sex workers as sex traffickers. You have never apologized for leading the maligning of Backpage dot com, a venue that most sex workers, especially lower income sex workers and sex workers of color relied upon. You have never apologized for the mishandling of Celeste Guap’s case, a sex worker who was being raped, abused and exploited by over 50 cops within the Oakland Police Department. Ms. Guap’s case just sat on your desk, unaddressed, because the exploiters and traffickers in question were the police, and maybe you saw Celeste as bearing the fault for being a sex worker?
To be fair, it is not you alone who should shoulder the blame for these things. I voted for Bernie Sanders in the primaries, and he voted yes on SESTA too. There were other politicians and legislators who supported SESTA, but you were a key player in the almost simultaneous shutdown of Backpage and the implementation of SESTA and FOSTA (Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act of 2018). You are the only one who has been a consistent player AGAINST sex work and sex workers in the USA in ways no other singular political figure has consistently been.
We want to trust you; our lives would be infinitely easier if we could. But we need an apology, a mea culpa, something for the ways in which the closure of Backpage and the implementation of this now two year old legislation has effected us and continues to effect our communities. My life, for one, has been infinitely harder since the closure of Backpage and the passage of SESTA. I know so many people in the sex industry — most of them, who STILL — two plus years later- can’t get their heads above water. I fear for my life every day because of the caliber of clients that are out now — these exploiters and abusers. These policies you have been a leading figure in creating has promulgated so much more poverty and sex trafficking, and I don’t think that was your intent, but that IS what has happened. I have seen the increase in girls working the streets having to sell bareback anal for $20 because the only thing that remains are the most awful and predatory of leeches. The child abusers, the rapists, the pimps, the johns that look at us like we deserve an STD, we deserve to be raped, because we’re human garbage. We’re not smart, we’re not “upstanding” citizens, cause if we were, we would be doing something else, like be doctor’s or computer engineers. John’s will partake of our bodies while relegating them simultaneously to the trash. Our lives have become infinitely cheaper than they once were.
You can be both problematic and a watershed figure in modern and one day historical politics. Despite what we have been put through, I think most sex workers recognize the power of having a woman in such a high political office, and how important, positive and unprecedented this is. But the question is, if sex workers can still support you after everything, why can’t you admit to the negative impact of your political work on a highly stigmatized population? I think our sex working communities are owed AT LEAST that much.
Back in June of 2019 I left Kamala Harris a copy of my book “TheDonnaGentileStory” @ her Los Angeles office with a letter. I said: “I hope that after reading this book you are humbled and open minded and supportive on the topic of “decriminalization of prostitution”, being instrumental in guaranteeing sex workers civil rights and providing for their safety and social equality. I am sure she remembered the story of 1985.
A Summary of Donna Gentile:
When Donna Marie Gentile, escaped from a home for delinquent girls and made her way to San Diego she had big dreams. She worked in security for a while and even dreamed of joining the police department. But things didn’t work out as she planned. Donna, like many other innocent runaways, became a victim of the street walker life. While in survivor mode she was groomed, exploited, and coerced into prostitution, a path that took control of her life and ultimately led to her death at the age of twenty-two. Donna Gentile allowed herself to be befriended by several police officers thinking that this would afford her some protection in her dangerous life on the streets. Instead she was harassed and ultimately victimized by some of the same police to whom she had turned for help. But Donna was a fighter. Rather than taking the abuse, which included sexual harassment, she reported it to the San Diego Police Department. She testified against two officers, one of whom lost his job on account of her testimony. Her life became further complicated when the Internal Affairs Division exploited and coerced her into becoming a police corruption informant .
Donna was scared. She left a voice recording with her attorney beginning with the words, “In case I disappear,” and going on to state that “someone wearing a badge may turn out to be a serious criminal.”
In March 1985 while she was serving a sentence in Las Colinas jail the Philadelphia native wrote “My life is in danger when I get out.” Then three months later her brutally murdered body was found on Mt. Laguna in the rural part of San Diego county. Gravel was stuffed in her mouth, something the mob does when it wants to warn others against being a “snitch.” Donna’s autopsy was sealed – the first and only autopsy ever to be sealed in the city of San Diego.
Someone wanted to silence Donna. But who? “The Donna Gentile Story,” written by Donna’s first cousin Anita DeFrancesco, lets you decide, and it gives voice to future runaways forced to survive on the streets as sex workers. It shows how Donna Gentile was a trailblazer who carved a path for women by not remaining silent in the face of harassment and abuse. In this way she was an early pioneer of the “Me Too” movement which, at long last, is telling women that not only can they speak out, but that they can also act.
This high profile story exploded in the media and was nationally televised. Artists unveiled a billboard with the logo NHI, “No Humans Involved,” bearing Donna’s picture and facing toward the SDPD headquarters. We believe her murder was a “cover-up,” perhaps of police incompetence, or perhaps of something much more sinister.
The police try to label all sex workers as criminals. In fact many young women are victims of sex trafficking who have been coerced into prostitution, and sometimes the police are complicit in this.