Today marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall riots. We reached out to some of our authors to reflect on the impact of this landmark and turning point in the centuries of queer history in America and the ongoing fight for queer equality. We share their statements with you below. Read more →

By Melinda Chateauvert | This year on the fiftieth anniversary of Stonewall, I won’t be participating in the parties and parades that celebrate a movement for LGBTQ equality. It’s not JOMO (Joy Of Missing Out), really. I won’t be “gay” on June 25, because I want to honor the transwomen of color who started this protest and still haven’t gotten what they wanted. Stonewall was a riot. It was led by sex workers, street kids, drug users and hustlers, by marginalized African Americans and Latinx who were pissed off with police harassment and police violence. As World Pride approaches, I’m going to remember what caused that 1969 riot, and refuse to participate in the historical amnesia. Read more →

Women’s History Month not only celebrates the social, economic, cultural, and political accomplishments of women. It reminds us that history is in the making, at this very moment, as the fight for intersectional gender equity continues. We must engage with the struggle to make the just society we want a reality. To that end, we offer the following list of recommended reading from our catalog for your perusal. Read more →

Today is International Women’s Day, a global day to honor and celebrate the social, economic, cultural, and political accomplishments of women. Observed since the early 1900s, it marks a call to action for accelerating gender equality. This year’s campaign theme, #BeBoldForChange, implores us to help build a more inclusive, gender-equal world. It also coincides with the “Day Without a Woman” general strike, organized to bring attention to the inequalities women still face, including lower wages, vulnerability to discrimination, sexual harassment, and job insecurity. Women in thirty-five countries are participating in the strike. Read more →

By Melinda Chateauvert

Hysteria Alert! We’re heading into another international sporting event, so the predictable, hysterical, and utterly fantastical stories about international sex trafficking are on the rise. We heard this claptrap about “sex tourism” two years ago when Brazil hosted the World Cup, when some NGOs claimed “40,000” women and girls would be involved. Time Magazine’s numbers were moderate compared to the exaggerations made by others. They claimed 250,000 children would be working the streets during the tournament—or one in every sixty-eight adolescent girls in the country. Read more →

By Melinda Chateauvert

Three decades before “Nothing about us, without us” became the axiom for policymaking by the sex workers’ rights movement, the national prostitutes’ rights organization COYOTE conducted a “Prostitute Study” which demonstrated that community-based participatory research had the power to revolutionize scientific paradigms. At the start of the AIDS epidemic, almost no one used community-based research to study critical health issues. But San Francisco sex workers, working as peer researchers interviewing and testing marginalized women like themselves, mapped the epidemiology of HIV in 1985. This forgotten study by sex workers on HIV/AIDS was an essential element of their political activism, using evidence-based research for making public policy, designing future medical research and changing public attitudes about the sex industry. Read more →

By Melinda Chateauvert

Over the last week and before the print edition appeared, Emily Bazelon’s cover story “Should Prostitution be a Crime?” for the New York Times Magazine, sex workers and their allies were sharing and discussing it widely through Facebook, Twitter, and their blogs. I was thrilled to see people I know, activists I’ve admired and worked with, being given a national platform to have their say. This was and is a phenomenal media moment for the sex workers’ rights movement. Read more →

I’d been following the domestic workers movement here in Massachusetts as they campaigned to pass the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights. In 2014, Massachusetts became the fourth state to approve the domestic workers bill of rights which guarantees basic work standards, such as meal and rest breaks, parental leave, protection from discrimination, sexual harassment, etc. I wanted to know more about the movement and this lead me to Premilla Nadasen, who was involved as an activist and historian. Read more →

Sex Workers Unite! is about sex workers who became political organizers and cultural activists to fight against stigma. “Brazen hussies,” “crack ‘hos,” “American gigolos” and “screaming queens” dare to believe that they deserve respect and human rights. Read more →

For International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers, Melinda Chateauvert, author of SEX WORKERS UNITE, debunks the myth of the “Swedish Model” of prostitution and similar “end demand” laws that not only fail to protect sex workers, but actively put them in harm’s way. Read more →

According to Melinda Chateauvert, author of 'Sex Workers Unite,' the shocking law in Hawaii that had allowed police officers to engage in sexual acts with prostitutes as part of their entrapment strategy is just part of a larger system of unfair targeting and abuse against sex workers. Read more →

Historian and activist Melinda Chateauvert explores the growing movement for sex workers' rights in her new book Sex Workers Unite. Read more →

Melinda Chateauvert, author of Sex Workers Unite, writes about the movement to end violence against sex workers. Read more →

For Human Rights Day, Melinda Chateauvert, author of "Sex Workers Unite: A History of the Movement from Stonewall to SlutWalk," makes the case for treating the rights of sex workers as a human rights issue. Read more →