New Zealand was the first country to decriminalise sex work, in 2003. The law recognised it as work and meant those in the industry were afforded access to the rights and safety as employees.
Cheryl Ware, a sex, gender and health historian, received a Marsden Fund grant in 2018 to work on this book, and is also the author of HIV Survivors in Sydney: Memories of the Epidemic. What both books have in common is their focus on oral histories – which Ware refers to as narratives – to explore the intimate details of people’s lives, as well as showing the range of experiences as opposed to a stereotypical story. Ware frames the narratives of sex work within the social and political context of the time by reading mainstream media articles from the era, alongside community magazines and personal correspondence from the New Zealand Prostitutes Collective (NZPC).
The oral histories of those interviewed – some whakawāhine, fa’afafine and other trans and gender-diverse people, and many of Māori and Pasifika descent – are the strength of the book and bring out both the risks and rewards of sex work. From Shareda’s terror at being bundled into the back of a police car in the late 1970s and being stripped back at the police station, through to Renee recounting how some cars would drive up on to the footpath and try to hit the workers.
Moments of terror alongside moments of felicity – Shannon was a “lady of leisure on board a boat” where she was pampered and treated with great care by the seafarers. Renee’s story highlighted how sometimes clients just wanted compassion and companionship, and to talk. She said having regular clients was just like having the same hairdresser. Over time, “you just build a relationship, and you like them, they’re nice people”.
The book also shows how the workers promoted safe work practices and fought against stereotypes that the industry was a “vector of infection” during the Aids epidemic in the 1980s. The NZPC released messages that its workers were informed and professional and were “determined to keep the virus out of the sex industry”. Yet attempts to do so were at times thwarted by the police because having condoms on site could be used as evidence of sex-work-related offences.
At the same time, though, the newly formed NZPC received funding from the Ministry of Health to develop a community-based response to the virus that involved a nationwide condom distribution programme. There were also issues within the industry, with some massage parlours encouraging the workers not to use protection. The response to the virus, and Ware’s writing, shows how stereotypes, moral attitudes, power dynamics and prejudices worked against sex workers and threatened not only their physical safety but their health.
Ware also asked interviewees to reflect on whether their work was a feminist act. Liberal feminists viewed sex work as legitimate labour, while radical feminists denounced it as exploitative. To respond to these views, and to signify how lesbians felt excluded by heterosexual women in second-wave feminism, the lesbian separatist movement was also formed. One worker, Kate, recounts how she was involved in radical feminism as a teenager and would have considered her work as “harmful to women”, yet when she moved into sex work, her view changed. “I had a bit of a feminist take on the whole thing, like getting heaps of money from these guys and stuff and putting in minimum effort.”
Though there is only one chapter on the fight against discrimination, the preceding chapters illustrate the health and safety concerns sex workers were dealing with. The power imbalances are also shown: fear of the police, how some managers of massage parlours exploited workers, and the rivalries between workers who worked in different settings, from the street, to parlours, to ships and strip joints.
While the social and historical context is fascinating in what is quite an academic work, the voices of the sex workers are the heart of the book.
Untold Intimacies: A history of sex work in Aotearoa, 1978–2008, by Cheryl Ware (Auckland University Press, $39.99), is out now.
