Melinda Chateauvert

Melinda Chateauvert is an activist and historian, located in Washington, DC and New Orleans. Her new book, Sex Workers Unite! A History of the Movement from Stonewall to Slutwalk will be published by Beacon Press in January, 2014. She has taught courses on Community Organizing, the Modern Black Freedom Movement, Sex Work, and Gender & Sexuality in African American Families for over twenty years, and will soon offer classes at the New Orleans Free School. She is a high school drop-out from Iowa who hitchhiked to San Francisco in 1976, back when we still strolled Union Square, the Tenderloin, The Fillmore and Broadway. Years later, she earned a doctorate in U.S. History at the University of Pennsylvania, by way of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and George Washington University. At present, she serves on the board of the Leather Archives and Museum in Chicago, and is a past board member of HIPS (Helping Individual Prostitutes Survive) in D.C. and an advisor for Women With A Vision in New Orleans. [The above photo was taken by Todd Franson.]