Sex-workers' advocacy service closes (budget cuts)

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[chance33_98]

Sex-workers' advocacy service closes

05/27/2003

Associated Press

After eight years promoting safe sex, needle exchanges and clean, well-lighted strip clubs, the Portland nonprofit Danzine is falling to a weak economy and shrinking public health budgets.

Activist and exotic dancer Teresa Dulce, 31, started Danzine as a magazine for Portland-area sex workers. In 1996, she registered it as a nonprofit, offering needle exchanges and health services.

(AP File Photo)

Other agencies will continue some services but most will stop by June.

Danzine never had direct government funding, but got some in-kind help such as use of a computer from the Multnomah County Health Department and a steady supply of needles. Those kinds of help are drying up.

"We took a beating in these last (budget) cuts, I'll tell you," Dulce said.

"I see a lot of community organizations not being able to make it in this environment," said Loreen Nichols, a Multnomah County HIV prevention worker. "It's a real loss."

Danzine offered information about disease prevention and free or inexpensive health care to sex industry workers, legal and otherwise.

They were more inclined to trust Danzine than the government, health officials said.

"They are strong advocates for people who work in the commercial sex industry," said Margaret Lentell, who runs Multnomah County's sexually transmitted disease programs. "They've done a lot of work to make things safer."

Losing Danzine severs one link to industry workers, which "could have far-reaching effects in the community," Lentell said.

Dulce won a 2001 Price Fellowship to learn more about HIV prevention at the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, a "very prestigious" award that goes to three people a year, Multnomah County Health Officer Dr. Gary Oxman said.

Dulce said she started dancing in Texas clubs and reached Portland in the mid-1990s. In 1995, Dulce was dancing in Chinatown and thinking about the boom in self-published magazines when she decided to write about her experiences.

Danzine was born -- as one photocopied page of information. Sixty copies were passed out in local strip clubs.

"I've heard us described as a trade 'zine, a health publication," Dulce said. "But for us it was, initially, how can I make more for less risk?"

Early issues addressed which clubs, in which cities, had the best pay and working conditions. They also included tips on safety, law, needle exchange programs and where to buy dancing clothes.

She edited 18 issues in eight years. Distribution extended throughout the United States and beyond.

In 1998, the group started the Bad Date Line after "one of our friends got hurt on an escort job," Dulce said. That service started as a phone tree, where industry workers could pass on descriptions of dangerous clients.

Now, an anonymous phone line takes reports of shady characters, which are typed up and distributed to roughly 40 Portland-area social agencies.

Danzine also started offering needle exchanges and has disposed of 183,650 syringes since 1996, Dulce said. Multnomah County will pick up that program.

[chance33_98]

Danzine also started offering needle exchanges and has disposed of 183,650 syringes since 1996,

Wonder how these numbers pan out nationally?

[glorgau]

Actually, it kind of makes sense to have this type of "service". If only on a cost-to-society basis. The losers of this world are going to mess themselves up anyway, this is just cheap mitigation.