Sex worker fights for victims of rape, assault

Kristen DiAngelo cries after the victims' compensation board's vote in Sacramento. Kristen DiAngelo cries after the victims' compensation board's vote in Sacramento. Photo: Lacy Atkins, The Chronicle Photo: Lacy Atkins, The Chronicle Image 1 of / 9 Caption Close Sex worker fights for victims of rape, assault 1 / 9 Back to Gallery

Like many expert witnesses who testify in front of Sacramento bureaucrats, Kristen DiAngelo announced her name and occupation before she spoke at a public hearing last week.

"Sex worker," she said.

DiAngelo and other activists had visited the Capitol on Thursday to lobby against a law that bans rape victims, if they had been attacked while involved in an act of prostitution, from receiving victim compensation funds.

After members of the California Victim Compensation and Government Claims Board listened to DiAngelo's plea - which included a story of her own rape on the job - they promised to return with a verdict later in the day.

"I'm always nervous about saying what I do for a living in public," DiAngelo said before the meeting. "People can target you. You're out there. But I take a deep breath, and when I say it, I'm proud."

DiAngelo, who lives in a tony suburban neighborhood outside the Bay Area among neighbors unaware of her occupation, is still getting used to her new life as a crusader for sex workers' rights.

It's a role she took on publicly last year, after more than 35 years in the business, when she released a documentary, "American Courtesans." It examines the lives of a dozen sex workers and their family members to make a simple point: They enjoy their work.

"We have nothing to be ashamed of," said Pearl Callahan, who appears in the film and has known DiAngelo since they worked together in the 1980s. "This lifestyle helped me raise my son. The relationships I've made through it enriched my life. I look at where were we came from and where we are now, and I feel good about my life."

'Not victims'

DiAngelo and the women in her film seek to make a clear distinction. They are not coerced or trafficked into the trade. They do not need saving.

Several of the subjects, including DiAngelo, detail the traumatic events that led them into sex work at a young age. But they - like anyone else, DiAngelo said - work as adults to make peace with those painful episodes.

"We are not victims anymore," DiAngelo said. "I not only survived sex work, I flourished in it."

Activists for sex worker rights have battled on a number of fronts recently: In Florida, they've fought "antiprostitution zones" that are becoming a popular tool for police to up criminal charges for repeat arrestees. In family courts, they've opposed the practice of judges taking children from a mother who is arrested for soliciting.

Efforts to decriminalize prostitution, though, have often failed, with opponents viewing the act as immoral, dangerous and repressive to women.

Early abuse

As a youth, DiAngelo had a family member she described in the film as "handsy." The early abuse, she said, cratered her self-esteem and gave her a stark perspective on self-image.

"Whatever I had," she said, "from that moment I knew it was powerful enough that it could make good men do bad things."

In her teenage years, some of which were spent in a Marin County commune, the sexual abuse continued. Estranged from her parents and looking to support herself, DiAngelo responded to a newspaper ad for a job as a massage therapist.

Looking back, she laughed at her naivete: "I really thought I'd be giving massages."

The job became what DiAngelo and activists characterize as "survival sex" - making a living so as not to return to worse conditions at home. It's not an uncommon way in, DiAngelo said.

The streets, however, turned out to be brutal in different ways. She soon learned the police and the justice system pursued sexual assaults against prostitutes with little vigor.

Bad beating

One night in the 1990s, DiAngelo said a john picked her up and took her to his home in Sacramento. Her instincts told her he was a bad date, but when she ran for the door he grabbed her by the hair. He beat her so severely, "I wondered if the taste of blood in my mouth was mine or his."

Half-conscious, she escaped and flagged down a motorist. The officers who arrived, she said, told her she could file a complaint, but that they would also have to arrest her for prostitution.

Incensed, DiAngelo went to the district attorney, who she said filed an assault charge that didn't stick. The attack, years later, turned out to be the impetus for her activism.

"I was so tired of being silenced," she said. "We are an integral part of our society. And yet, our lives aren't worth anything to anyone else."

After the assault, DiAngelo left sex work and earned a degree in finance paid for by her regular clients. She worked a corporate job for a few years, but was nagged by the thought someone would expose her past.

But she wasn't ashamed of it. She felt she had helped people - war veterans desperate for companionship, disabled men who had never been intimate, repressed men who opened up.

"I know I add to people's lives in ways that no one else will understand," DiAngelo said.

In 2002, she returned to sex work and launched an escort website, but found that women who chose the work were no closer to acceptance.

"If we don't put a face out there and show people we're human, we don't have a chance at equal rights," DiAngelo said. "They'll keep trying to criminalize us, which is easier if they don't think we're human beings."

Film's message

Maxine Doogan, an activist with San Francisco's Erotic Service Providers Union, recalled meeting DiAngelo in 2012 when "American Courtesans" first made the rounds at film festivals.

Doogan said it was among the first to show sex workers living healthy lives with supportive families.

"It's something the American public has never gotten to see," Doogan said. "I think her film has the ability to change minds."

Still, Doogan said support for legalizing prostitution ebbs and flows, she said, and the boldness of many activists recedes because of disapproval and harassment.

The film has drawn social media invective from religious groups, and DiAngelo's 800 number was hacked. One of the film's subjects was arrested at her home in Minnesota, and DiAngelo believes it was not a coincidence.

But in Sacramento on Thursday, the victims' compensation board gave her and her allies a victory, voting to revoke the rule that excluded sex workers who were beaten or raped.

"We don't have any obligation to tell the story of our past or what we do to anyone," DiAngelo said afterward, "unless it will help others."