Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor Highlight

A century later, in 2017, sex workers gathered on the steps of San Francisco’s Central Methodist Church once again to remember that history and affirm their community’s onging struggle for basic human rights. As representatives from the Erotic Service Provider’s Union, the Sex Worker’s Outreach Project, and the US PROStitutes Collective, a multiracial sex workers’ rights network founded in 1982, read out a new list of demands for sex workers’ rights in the twenty-first century, those assembled held signs reading “No Bad Women, Just Bad Laws!” and “Outlaw Poverty, Not Prostitution!” Their words bore a deep similarity to those that had been spoken in that same spot one hundred years before. “[Women] will always be coming into [sex work] as long as conditions, wages and education are as they are,” Madam Reggie Gamble had raged from that pulpit a hundred years before. “You don’t do any good by attacking us. Why don’t you attack those conditions?”