Rentboy.com isn't the first website to be shut down for allegedly promoting an illegal business. But federal prosecutors may not have expected the backlash stemming from last week's bust of the 19-year-old gay escorting site.

Six Rentboy employees, including the company's CEO Jeffrey Hurant, have been charged with violating the Travel Act by promoting prostitution. They each face up to five years in prison.

In describing the bust, acting US Attorney Kelly Currie denounced the site as a thinly veiled "Internet brothel," that made millions promoting prostitution.

Anger over the bust began with blog posts and Twitter diatribes, and yesterday it spilled onto the streets. A group of several dozen people marched in a small but well-organized protest in front of the US District Court in Brooklyn, home to the prosecutors who took down the site last week. Protestors carried signs reading "Sex work is real work," "We see no crime," and "Legal = Safer."

"This is an updated, digital raid, just like Stonewall," one protester told Newsday, referring to the police raid on a gay bar that sparked a riot and spurred on the gay rights movement. "Now they don't have to go to our bar; they just go online."

Before it was shut down, Rentboy operated fairly openly, even hosting an annual awards show called the "Hookies." The site's motto was "Money can't buy you love—the rest is negotiable."

The site also maintained policies that forbade offering money for sex acts. Users had to click through an agreement stating that the site could not be used as a forum for exchanging money for sex before logging in. A lawyer for Rentboy CEO Jeffrey Hurant said the case raises free speech issues. "We don't advertise sex, we advertise people who want to meet people," he told Newsweek after the bust.

The takedown of the site by the Department of Homeland Security—ostensibly tasked with catching terrorists—wasn't just questioned by street protesters, either. Last Friday, The New York Times ran an editorial questioning the "peculiar prosecution" of Rentboy, calling it "somewhat baffling" that taking down a nearly 20-year-old website "suddenly became an investigative priority." Federal authorities should consider other ways to spend their time and money, the article concluded.

Writing in The Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf felt similarly. "Having pondered how many man hours the Department of Homeland Security should spend trying to stop men paying other men for consensual sex, there’s a strong case [that] can be made that the answer is 'zero,'" he wrote in an essay published shortly after the raid.

The bust comes at a time when some civil and human rights groups are pushing to stop prosecutions over sex work. Amnesty International recently called for sex work to be decriminalized, and Amnesty's call was recently joined by Lambda Legal and other gay rights groups.

There are explicit sexual details in the criminal complaint (PDF) against Rentboy, and while those details may be needed for prosecutors to prove their case that sex was on offer, there are several paragraphs where the investigator goes into oddly detailed descriptions of what gay escorts offered.

For instance, the investigator at one point delves into the profile of "Brandon," who apparently told users he was "hairy handsome versatile & uninhibited." He had a "sling and rimchair," objects about which Homeland Security Special Agent Susan Ruiz goes on to offer her expertise, writing:

Based on my investigation, I have learned that a sling, also known as a "sex sling," is a device that allows two people to have sex while one is suspended and a rimchair is a seat resembling a raised toilet seat designed so that the anus is accessible while someone is sitting on the seat. I have also learned that "rimming" refers to the touching of the tongue to the anus.

The site charged for the publication of escort profiles, which began at $59.95 per month and went up to several hundred dollars. It pulled in about $10 million over the past five years, according to prosecutors. As the Times editorial notes, that's less than an average McDonald's franchise.

Some of that cash will likely be kept by the law enforcement agencies that pursued the bust. The feds have confiscated $1.4 million in Rentboy's six bank accounts, which will likely end up in the coffers of the DHS and the New York Police Department, which assisted with the bust.