IWD
protests to remember
Summer begins and I begin to drift in my mind. I imagine travel and time travel. I wander through histories. June 2nd was International Whore’s Day (IWD). The internationally marked day of protests, celebrations, and other events commemorates the 1975 strike and occupation of St. Nizier Church in Lyon, France by over one hundred sex workers for eight consecutive days to protest recently increased policing, the closure of forty-one hotels where they worked, and the torture and murder of at least six of their cohort. Upon occupying the church, sex workers hung a banner from the steeple that said, Our children do not want their mothers to go to jail. Among other goals, the strikers were protesting a proposed law that would charge sex workers themselves with “pimping” for working together in an apartment. In the next few days, sex workers occupied other churches in Marseille, Grenoble, Montpellier, and Paris. French feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir visited occupied Chapel of St Bernard in Paris, and American feminist Kate Millet said, “What you have here in France is so fantastic . . . they are fighting the fight.”1
The St Nizier occupation was not the first large-scale protest by sex workers. In 1917, in San Francisco, roughly three hundred white and Black sex workers marched through the streets of the Tenderloin District to doors of the Central Methodist Episcopal Church where they demanded to speak with Rev. Paul Smith, a prodigious lecturer against “vice.”2 San Francisco had recently adopted the Red Light Abatement Act, which would close down the last of city’s brothels, and Smith had called for a “Purity Sunday” on January 25th to encourage the gentrification and eviction of sex workers that San Francisco was in the process of enacting. It was on Purity Sunday that Reggie Gamble and Maude Spencer - two women who owned one of the brothels to be closed. Gamble took to Smith’s pulpit to speak. She asked, “How many of the women in your church would accept us into their homes, even to work? You would cast us out - where to?” In 2017, sex workers and activists re-enacted this march to commemorate its 100th anniversary.3
Some historians have called the occupation of St Nizier a “failure,” because the workers gathered there did not accomplish their immediate goals and no laws were repealed or stopped from passing. After eight days, the strikers were evicted from the church by police, who responded to the peaceful protest with batons and riot gear. But afterwards, their arrests were less frequent and less onerous. The police went for one and four more came to her aid.4 The workers had discovered the power they held as a collective. Afterward, we would rise up again and again. The lessons of St. Nizier would not be lost. In 2001, the red umbrella would become the international symbol of our movement, after the Venice Art Bienalle where workers collaborated with Slovenian artist Tadej Pogocar and walked in the first Red Umbrellas March.5
I have marched under red umbrellas and I have tattooed one on my arm as a reminder. A reminder that thought the work can be isolating, though it can be dangerously so, a sex worker never walks alone. How can a protest have been a failure when we continue to commemorate it year after year and fifty years into the future? How can it have been a failure if we never forget, if we always remember who has come before us and how they stood for all of us? Even for us who were not yet born. I will always be grateful for the striking sex workers of St. Nizier, and for those who joined them. I will always be grateful for the members of my cohort who have stood with me in times of protest and commemoration, who have agreed to hold a collective memory. I will always hope that all of us get the opportunity to know the power of collectivity.
Eurydice Aroney, The 1975 Sex Workers’ Revolt: A Narrative of Influence, Sexualities Vol 23 (2020)
Katie Dowd, In 1917, Hundreds of San Francisco Sex Workers Humiliated a Trash-Talking Preacher, SFGATE, March 21st, 2021 (https://www.sfgate.com/sfhistory/article/1917-San-Francisco-sex-workers-march-tenderloin-16030567.php)
100 Years of the Sex Workers’ Rights Movement, Tenderloin Museum, 2021 (https://www.tenderloinmuseum.org/public-programs-2017-1/2017/1/25/100-years-of-the-sex-workers-rights-movement)
Aroney supra, note 1
NSWP, Twenty Years of Activism Under Red Umbrellas (https://www.nswp.org/news/twenty-years-activism-under-red-umbrellas). See also ICRSE, Under the Red Umbrella (archived: https://web.archive.org/web/20190422004721/http://www.sexworkeurope.org/campaigns/red-umbrella-campaigns).