‘The police see us as disposable’: what life’s really like in New York’s maligned ‘red light district’

As rightwing media and the mayor target a Queens neighborhood, sex workers say they’re just trying to survive

In 2000, Cecilia Gentili worked late nights as a sex worker on Roosevelt Avenue, a dusty corridor linking Queens’ most diverse communities, under the shadow of the clattering 7 train. It was the only way she could survive as a new immigrant. After coming out as trans, she had been shut out by employers in her native Argentina, and in New York, “I really thought that things would be different,” she says. “But in a way, it was a double level of discrimination: being trans and being undocumented. So again, I found myself engaged in street sex work.”

She rented a $150-a-month room in a shared apartment in Jackson Heights, a neighborhood full of other immigrants and queer and trans sex workers trying to help each other scrape by. “When I needed a place to live, it was not the city of New York that facilitated it, it was another sex worker. When I needed to eat, it was another trans person,” she says. If she felt unsafe on the street, she’d walk to a late-night street vendor and stand in their lamp’s warm glow.

Roosevelt Avenue has been a hub for immigrant sex workers for decades – particularly Asian cis women and South American trans women, says Mateo Guerrero, a trans justice organizer with the Make the Road non-profit. Jessica González-Rojas, a queer New York state assemblywoman whose district includes a long stretch of Roosevelt, often runs into sex workers at marches and when she’s out at gay bars. “These workers are just as much a part of the community as anyone else,” she says, “and many are just trying to survive each day.”

But the number of street-based sex workers in Queens has increased since the pandemic, due to increasing economic pressure. Living near Roosevelt has become much more expensive in recent years, and as wealthier residents move into newly built luxury high-rises, it’s led to a familiar pattern: a middle-class backlash against street workers, followed by pledges from authorities to “clean up”.

Over the weekend, the conservative tabloid the New York Post ran stories “exposing” the sex work on Roosevelt, which it described as a “sex-plagued …red light district taking over the neighborhood filled with families with children”. The coverage – picked up by Fox News as well as the major Spanish-language broadcaster Univision – criticized police for targeting sidewalk food sellers while ignoring the “hordes of hookers”. It quoted a newly formed neighborhood of “concerned moms” and a local city councilman, Francisco Moya, who demanded that Mayor Eric Adams “get enforcement in here to clean up Roosevelt Avenue”.

Adams responded quickly. At an unrelated press conference on Monday, the mayor said he had taken a late night trip to Roosevelt Avenue to see the neighborhood for himself. “It was filthy,” he told reporters. “There was just a state of disorder … and it was clear, there was prostitution.” Adams – a former cop who as mayor has led highly publicized police sweeps of subway trains and homeless encampments – vowed to launch “an operation to deal with the sex workers”, though he offered no other details.

But sex workers say more policing won’t do anything to stamp out their industry – and will only leave the entire neighborhood worse off.

Sex work has always been a service industry at the edges of society, and in Queens, it’s often inextricable from the immigrant experience. Many sex workers’ clients are also undocumented people – “workers who are in construction, people who may be all alone in this country and are looking for company”, says Guerrero. “What many of the sex workers that I work with talk about is how often the men cry. Or they talk about how lonely they feel. So it’s not just sexual services, but sometimes it’s like a conversation to release some of the emotional things that are coming up for them.”

It also points to why there are growing numbers of visible sex workers in Queens: more people are struggling. “In a post-Covid world, people who were already on the margins have just been pushed deeper into economic and social desperation and isolation, and this is only going to be magnified in the sex industry,” says Melissa Broudo, a prominent sex worker advocate and defense attorney.

That creates a sense of solidarity – contrary to tabloid narratives – between sex workers and street vendors, who are also harassed by city officials.

Rene Tlecuil Luna, a Mexican snack vendor on Roosevelt, says he views street-based sex workers as part of the community. Like sex workers, “we just want to work and earn our money honestly”, he says. Yolanda, an Ecuadorian food truck worker down the block, says sex workers don’t deserve to be policed. “They are also working,” she says. “I know that it is frowned upon by people, but it is their job.”

Or, as Gentili puts it: “The reality is that people who engage in sex work in the streets are customers of street vendors, and street vendors are customers of sex workers. So we’re all a whole economy supporting each other.”

But street-based sex work is particularly tough, and a reflection of inequality. White, light-skinned, and more highly educated workers tend to market themselves online as escorts to high-paying customers – whereas Black and brown workers are more likely to do street-based sex work, which is often riskier.

Francesca is a trans sex worker who came to Jackson Heights from Mexico a year ago and sees no choice but to work on Roosevelt. Her apartment costs $2,200 a month, and she has to stay extremely focused to survive. “If I could get good employment without discrimination, then I wouldn’t be doing sex work,” she says. “The truth is, I’ve worked in the streets since I was young.”

One of the biggest dangers is the police. Prostitution is a jailable offense in New York, and sex workers have long been an easy target for police abuse, says Gentili, who says she’s been harassed, arrested, and beaten by cops. “The police see us as disposable. It’s not the same way they arrest a Wall Street investor,” she says.

For many years, New York police, led by the infamous “vice squad”, have prowled poorer neighborhoods like Jackson Heights, targeting people who appear to be sex workers or trans – whether they’re working or even sex workers at all.

Guerrero rattles off a list of trans women he knows in the neighborhood who have been harassed by cops for doing nothing: going to the grocery store. Walking to the park. Going to the pharmacy. One trans woman was walking down the street when someone pulled up offering her a ride home – the driver turned out to be an undercover cop. “There was no sexual exchange in that ride. They drove one block and then the police cars came and surrounded them,” Guerrero says, and that woman was deported.

When the policing of sex work meets immigration enforcement, the results can be deadly. Jackson Heights’ trans community is still reeling after the loss of the longtime neighborhood figure Melissa Nuñez, a Jackson Heights street-based sex worker and trans rights activist who was deported last fall to Honduras – where she was shot and killed by unidentified gunmen weeks later. Her arrest record for sex work had made her ineligible for permanent status in the United States. “She was very lovely, very bubbly, and very committed to social justice,” Guerrero says. “We don’t want anyone else from our community to have the same story as Melissa. And that’s why it’s so dangerous what Eric Adams is attempting to do with more police units on the ground.”

While cities have long targeted sex work on morality grounds, in recent years officials have increasingly reframed enforcement around human trafficking concerns. But FBI data shows that in 2021, there were 8,888 arrests for prostitution nationally compared with just 625 for sex trafficking. Melissa Broudo, a longtime sex worker defense attorney, says criminalizing sex work only makes it harder to fight trafficking. “Police are actively hurting the trust that needs to be established, the relationships that need to be built, in order to actually target traffickers,” she says.

Criminalization doesn’t reduce the amount of street-based sex work either, Broudo says. One reason sex workers work on the streets at all is that many online platforms were effectively banned by Fosta/Sesta, a federal law passed in 2018. Sex workers who work exclusively indoors have also been targeted by police, including in the 2017 raid on a Queens massage parlor that resulted in the death of a 38-year-old massage worker, Yang Song, when she fell from the fourth floor.

Esther K, an activist at Red Canary Song, which organizes with Asian massage workers in Queens, says police often seize all the assets they find when raiding a massage parlor: “phones, jewelry, and cash that massage workers have been trying really hard to save to send back home to family or to provide for their children”. All this does is push workers to make even more desperate decisions and take more risks to survive, she says.

The problem is that authorities aren’t providing real solutions. “Unless the police are going in with buckets of cash and visas, they’re not getting to the root of what people really need,” Broudo says. “There’s simply, ‘We’re going to chase you into these massage parlors; now we’re going to chase you into the street.”

In a statement, the NYPD said: “We have significantly reduced the number of arrests for prostitution itself as we work in every case to connect the victims of human trafficking with the services they need. Yet prostitution in all forms remains prohibited by law. The NYPD deploys where crime is reported and we enforce the law impartially.”

Gentili sees the situation in Jackson Heights as a reflection not only of what’s happening in New York, but also the rest of the country. “Even if we’re in a progressive city, anti-trans legislation from other states gets to us. People from Texas, Florida – where people can’t even get their hormones – they don’t go to Alabama, they don’t go to Schenectady. They come to New York City. And if you’re Latina, you go to Queens. And they find themselves unemployed, with an incredible lack of services.”

It’s also the latest example of a well-worn cycle in New York City history. Queer people find refuge in a neglected urban neighborhood – from the gay men of Times Square’s former porn theaters, to the trans sex workers of the Meatpacking District. Then that neighborhood starts becoming attractive to middle-class professionals, who try to force out street workers: “Because they want a luxury apartment in Queens, and they don’t look at who is getting the short end of the stick.”

What would actually help, advocates say, is the decriminalization of sex work, so that workers can make a living and access essential resources without fear. One of the most prominent efforts is the Stop Violence in the Sex Trades Act, a state bill that would eliminate penalties for consensual sex work and strengthen labor protections for sex workers. González-Rojas, a sponsor of the bill, says decriminalization simply acknowledges “the reality that sex work will continue to exist and prohibition is not a model that has ever worked. It didn’t work for cannabis and it won’t work for this”.

That still leaves the question of whether Jackson Heights’ increasingly wealthy residents can recognize street workers as their neighbors.

Gentili says she hopes there can be more conversation. “What are some things that we can change as sex workers to help the community? And what are some things the community can do to stop being such a pain in the ass?

“People will say, ‘We care for sex workers, just not in my block.’ But the folks that are complaining are folks who are just getting into Queens. And Queens was Queens before they got here,” she says.

What those people should realize? “Sex work, not for nothing, is the oldest profession. People need to survive. And we’re not going anywhere.”