SAN FRANCISCO — On Jan. 25 the Tenderloin Museum and the Center for Sex & Culture will celebrate the 100th anniversary of San Francisco's 1917 sex worker march.
On January 25, 1917 Reggie Gamble and Maude Spencer, two madams of the Uptown Tenderloin red light district, organized a demonstration against the planned Valentine's Day eviction of San Francisco brothels.
Targeting anti-vice reformer Rev. Paul Smith, nearly 300 prostitutes stormed the reverend's church and took over the pulpit, demanding that the congregation hear their concerns.
Gamble's speech, which was covered by every one of the city's major newspapers, demanded economic justice and a halt to the looming evictions that threatened to displace the thousands of sex workers that lived and worked in San Francisco's vice districts.
The 1917 march sits alongside the protests at San Francisco's Compton Cafeteria and the New York's Stonewall Inn as important historical events reclaimed by communities, and an important milestone in the struggle for sex worker’s rights.
The program will begin at the Tenderloin Museum, where authors Ivy Anderson and Devon Angus, co-editors of “Alice: Memoirs of a Barbary Coast Prostitute,” will give a talk examining the history of sex work in San Francisco from 1849-1917.
Afterwards, members of the Erotic Service Providers Union (ESPU), the US PROStitutes Collective (US PROS) and Sex Workers Outreach Project (SWOP Bay Area) will address the 100-year progression, and the continuing fight for sex worker’s rights.
Following the presentations will be a march to the site of the original protest — Leavenworth and O’Farrell — where Gamble's 1917 speech will be read by Carol Queen (founding director of the Center for Sex & Culture), along with speeches by some of the leaders of today’s sex worker’s rights movement.
Following the march, a gathering will be held to celebrate this centennial at the Gangway bar, located at 841 Larkin St.
100 Years of the Sex Worker’s Rights Movement will begin on Wednesday, Jan. 25 at 5:30pm.
A $10 suggested donation will be taken at the door, but no one will be turned away for lack of funds.
The procession to the original protest site, just two blocks from the Tenderloin Museum, will leave at 8:15pm.
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