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In Paperback
Now! Thursday July 28th/Friday 29th: Tracy on BBC-5's Up All Night 9:30 pm Eastern USA/2:30 am GMT with Dr. Petra and Dotun Read an excerpt |
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| Sunday, October 10, 2004 Paulo Longo My colleague, Paulo Longo, died Friday in Rio de Janeiro of a heart attack at a very young age. He was a founder of the Network of Sex Work Projects and you can read about his recent doings here: http://www.nswp.org/ Right up to the end, he stayed quite active, representing prostitutes' rights in many countries. He was in Bangkok this past July for the AIDS conference. In London a month ago, for the International Conference on Population Development. He's one of the people who brought hookers' rights to the United Nations and carved out a space for talking about the rights of rent boys and bar girls. Paulo lived in Ipanema, to which I've never been. He was a natural leader, and his death is a tragedy for the prostitutes' rights movement. Everybody is in a state of shock. He was extremely diplomatic, widely admired and hard-working. He could be serious and bureaucratic when it was needed, but he was also very down to earth. We discussed food quite a bit, and one of his unfinished projects was a collection of recipes by sex workers. I still owe him a recipe... In 1994, he contributed this piece about the hustlers or michês of Rio to the New Internationalist. "The meeting of the michês" http://www.newint.org/issue252/miches.htm In the spring of 2003 when I interviewed him, he spoke a little about his own history. http://www.alternet.org/story/15306/ Wherever Paulo went, I felt that he was my human rights ambassador. That was his special gift. |