Untold Intimacies: A History of Sex Work in Aotearoa, 1978–2008

The stories of sex workers in New Zealand as they changed the world.

In June 2003, New Zealand became the first country to decriminalise sex work. Through the lived experiences of twenty-five individuals who worked on the ships and the streets, in massage parlours and as private escorts, Untold Intimacies tells the story of sex work and its transformation in Aotearoa over thirty critical years.

This history carries readers from the regulation of brothels with the Massage Parlours Act of 1978, through the struggle for decriminalisation to the legally mandated national review of the law in 2008. Drawing on new and archival interviews, the story is told through the first-hand experiences of sex workers themselves – how they dealt with police, violence and health risks, and how they organised to change their world.

Untold Intimacies presents an in-depth historical investigation into the lives of some of the first people in the world to experience the transition to the decriminalisation of sex work.

Dr Cheryl Ware is a historian of sex, gender and health in late-twentieth-century Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia. She is the author of HIV Survivors in Sydney: Memories of the Epidemic (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) which received endorsement from internationally recognised leaders in oral history, Australian history, and histories of HIV and AIDS.