User:Lumberjack Banana Splitter/sandbox

From 1981 to 1982 he wrote a series of letters challenging gay writer and activists Larry Kramer in the New York Native. Among his concerns were Kramer's role as an alarmist and his claims that the sexual habits of gay men in New York was connected to Kaposi's Sarcoma. In Chesley's letters he asserted that Kramer's works had an ulterior motive, to associate gay promiscuity with death and stating that Kramer's warnings represented "homophobia and anti-eroticism."

= Labor roles = The Gold Rush brought many American migrants to California. As a result, this rapid population increase required an increase in food production. Many bound laborers are thought to have been used in California's new agricultural economy. A majority of the laborers leased were Native women and children, who were leased in response to California's population shortage of white women and children. Many would serve as domestic workers while others would be forced into prostitution by the often role outside of the auxiliary of the household needs.[22]

= Trafficking of Indigenous Women = '''Even before the Gold Rush, the informal mechanism of forced labor for women was present in California. In the Mission period, Spanish soldiers who accompanied the missionaries and their supply lines were stationed near tribe settlements. Routinely assault or sexual extortion was compensated with food and money to avoid repercussions for soldiers to avoid punishment from the local mission authorities by claiming it was a trade of prostitution instead. (13) These rape was common through the Mission period leading to several altercations of Native Tribes and Soldiers due to the assault of indigenous women.'''

'''The assault of indigenous women worsened into the Mexican period as greater autonomy over California was given to the loyalists during the Mexican independence movement, with large sums of authority and land given to Californios rather than returned to the tribes upon the mission's dissolvent. The resulting collapse of the formal institution of agriculture for the indentured indigenous families led to an increase in famines, then saw an increase in dependency-based prostitution among indigenous women trying to provide for their families. (Page 87) This informal system prevailed into the Mexican-American war annexation of California as new incursions of migrant male workers entered from all sides of California, exposing and dragging new tribes into the demand of the American West Sex trade. American notions of ethnic and racial values place indigenous women at the lowest stratification under Chinese and Mexican women. Making them prime candidates for physical abuse, economic exploitation, and trafficking for male sexual gratification. Page 79'''

Driven by the demand for labor because of the Gold Rush, specifically in the field of domestic work, Californio communities crept further and further into the state's interior to capture Native American women and girls. These abducted individuals would go on to fulfill a variety of purposes, including sex, domestic labor, marriage, and even childbearing for their captors. Over time, this exchange grew increasingly lucrative and highly profitable, attracting the attention of white entrepreneurs in the state.

In the decade following the California Gold Rush, the capture and exchange of Native American women and girls would become an integral part of the social fabric of Northwestern California. Legal frameworks in the region, especially wardship and apprenticeship laws, only partially covered the market of bound and trafficked women, with a significant portion being forced and bound illegally through captivity.

Regardless of the status of their captivity, either legal or illegal, Native American women and girls trapped in the traffics of their labor faced dual forms of exploitation as they were bought and sold to satisfy the needs for labor and sexual lust. Once ripped away from their families and communities, these women and girls suffered differing fates. Captive females often experienced control over both their labor and their sexuality as their captors would exchange them in the trafficking market to serve as domestic laborers and coerced sexual partners.

By 1860, the involuntary market of captive Native American women and girls had become so widespread that it drew the attention of the Sacramento Daily Union, a newspaper with ties to the northern branch of the Democratic Party, which officially declared that a new form of slavery was occurring in California at the hands of the white men who dominated the trade by the mid-1850s and that it degraded the free-state status of the state.[23]

= Trafficking of Chinese Women = The rapid influx of Chinese migrants to California in the 19th century led to further diversification of the region's population. Many Chinese migrants were male workers, often working jobs to send money to their families back home. This rapid influx of male Chinese workers to California saw an influx in the male population without a proportional increase of women, leading to the commodification and exporting of Chinese women to the United States.

'''In San Francisco, the division of ethnicity along social disreputable stratification associated with Anglo-Americans that women of other ethnicities in these places as inherently immoral and made the generalization of all present ethnic and racial women participated in prostitution or were available for denigration with the intent of sexual gratification through coercion or violence. Page 86'''

In the year 1980 there were 27 Chinese men for every one Chinese woman in the United States. With this low percentage of the population, the stigma of Chinese women being prostitutes, as the total number of Chinese women in the state was low, and the number of prostitutes in this low demographic meant that the public eye saw all Chinese women as prostitutes. Chinese women who migrated to the United States often found themselves forced into prostitution, known as "yellow slavery" which in turn created a large stigma associated with Chinese women being lewd and prostitutes whether they found themselves in the industry or not.

Many of the women who were brought to California in the 19th century experienced this form of "yellow slavery" by being brought to California with the idea of becoming brides of the Chinese male labor force or the white Americans already there. Upon their arrival to the state, they found themselves forced into concubines or in worse conditions.

Many of the women who were not concubines for wealthy merchants found themselves in Chinatown brothels, forced to service the men of San Francisco. Many of these brothels saw a large influx of women, resulting in the older, less "desirable" women being forced into small rooms with windows facing the street with the job of attracting men from off the street to their location.[24]

'''Women like Ah Toy, the first Chinese Prostitute in California, were able to claim an active role in the self-management of her sex work, like later Anglo prostitutes, but racially motivated retaliation forced her to return to China. Yet upon her return, she was relegated to racial stratification as Anglo Women and prostitutes' presence in San Francisco stratified Chinese women into similar denigration of low value-high demand forced labor. At the same time Chinese triads began to facilitate the growth of the sex industry in California through the trafficking of Chinese and other Asian women. Page 91'''

= Trafficking of Other Women of Color = '''While heavily focused on indigenous and Chinese Women, other affected groups in the forced sexual labor market of California, such as Hawaiian, Polynesian, and Latina women, were trafficked into prostitution because of the gender imbalance in California. Women of color made up the majority of the prostitution in California, and their limited economic opportunity in an increasingly Anglo-centric California society exacerbated their conditions and vulnerability, making them sustainable to sexual violence and trafficking into the late 19th century. 92'''