Laura LeMoon: Sex Workers With HIV Got a Legal Win. It’s Not Enough

People living with HIV have a long history of being discriminated against – as do sex workers. As a sex worker of 20 years, I have always been treated as if my HIV status was assumed by everyone – from clients to law enforcement to social workers and medical staff, and even from men I have dated in my personal life. Within the first 30 minutes of a conversation with a man I once met off a dating app in which I disclosed what I did for a living, he inquired abruptly, “So do you have HIV then?”

For more than 30 years, the state of Tennessee operated with “aggravated prostitution” laws, which make the criminal act of prostitution – normally a misdemeanor – a felony class offense for sex workers who are living with HIV, regardless of whether or not protection is used. In 2010, the state of Tennessee compounded its primitive legal stance by adding sex workers who work while living with HIV to a sex offender registry. The state was then sued by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) for violating the Americans with Disabilities Act by charging sex workers living with HIV with “aggravated prostitution.”

Fortunately, this charge was removed from the list of offenses required to register as a sex offender after the state reached a settlement agreement with the DOJ that led to a new law that also puts in place processes for people previously convicted to have their name removed from the registry. But this feels like only a minor victory when the felony charge is still in play in Tennessee and so many other similar laws exist nationwide. In Missouri, anyone arrested for prostitution has mandatory HIV testing for which they must comply. No studies have proven conclusively that people who engage in sex work in the U.S. have a higher incidence of HIV than the general population.

Ten years ago, when I received a preliminary positive rapid HIV test before a confirmatory RNA came out negative, the first thought I had was that I was such a stereotype. What were people going to say if they found out I acquired HIV from doing sex work? Other sex workers will roll their eyes that I betrayed them by confirming people’s stereotypes of us. Basically, everyone else will roll their eyes and chuckle internally while nodding in a fake-sympathetic fashion. “Of course you tested positive, you are a prostitute,” they will inevitably think.

We now know that a person with a sustained, undetectable viral load can’t transmit HIV and that PrEP works. There are good options for HIV treatment and prevention that did not exist 30-plus years ago when many of these draconian laws were created. The laws need to catch up with science, and it’s frankly unacceptable that they have been left untouched and outdated this long when the stakes are so huge.

The double bind of being a sex worker and living with HIV can create immense shame that not only has the power to silence people from having open conversations (or even from wanting to know their status), but also endangers people’s mental and physical health. Due to the 2018 legislation signed into law by Donald Trump called Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA)—in combination with the federal shutdown of the popular escort site Backpage—full-service sex work (i.e., sex work involving sexual intercourse) has been driven even further underground. The result is a community of people who are more strongly criminalized than ever before and who have to go about their whole lives without the ability to access law enforcement, legal help, or medical help without risking arrest.

Not only are these laws not helping to prevent sex trafficking whatsoever, as they claim to be doing, but they are harming those engaged in consensual sex work and increasing vulnerability to HIV. Sex workers cannot receive any legal or medical help when they encounter a violent client, and we cannot talk to each other or share information about dangerous clients nor share information to help us keep safe. Due to the shutdown of Backpage, a significant number of sex workers are still out of work or working the streets, where the money is less and the danger is extreme.

What can be done to combat the criminalization of sex workers living with HIV? For starters, we need to address the factors that drive people into sex work to begin with. Poverty and racism are two points where HIV and the most vulnerable sex workers intersect.

Sex workers living in poverty have the most minuscule ability to control their physical safety, and that’s similar to people living with HIV who experience poverty. And yet states are woefully inept at addressing these very real root vulnerabilities that allow HIV to proliferate as an epidemic. We know this is especially the case in the Southern states, where young Black and Latino men make up the majority of cases, according to the CDC. This is not by mere happenstance. We need to end the moral judgment placed on HIV status and the moral judgment assigned to sex workers that says a sex worker living with HIV is deserving of such a diagnosis or can be automatically presumed to have such a diagnosis.

State governments seem to think by keeping these laws criminalizing our existence, we will disappear. And the DOJ victory aside, new federal legislation threatens us even more. Make no mistake, in a country that operates from the criminalization approach to prostitution, we are not wanted around. Our lives are deemed worthless, and because our very bodies are a threat to society in multiple ways, we must be collectively herded off the edge of the cliff. The powers that be do not care whether we live or die; they care that they should not have to look at us or hear us.

For sex workers, especially sex workers living with HIV, refusing to be silent and invisible is the answer – regardless of whether anyone is listening. When it comes to exercising our power as sex workers and railing against HIV criminalization, silence = death.

Text Laura LeMoon

Published on January 10, 2025

Source thebody.com