Who wants to be neighbors with sex workers? For a time anyway in New York, the American Communist Party did, or had to, share a building with a brothel. Gay Talese has a marvelous little bit about this in his classic participant-journo account of the American sexual revolution, Thy Neighbor’s Wife, that also gives some sense and scope to another reluctant neighbor to sex workers who’s having a hard time in the press today, the Village Voice. In a sale that effectively splits their company in two, the Voice has jettisoned the sex ads that have made them an easy target for politicians, NGO-niks, and grandstanding journalists who want to end the sex trade altogether. The Voice, of course, has long been funding their papers on the backs of these ads, until (*maybe, it’s all still shaking out) today.

Back in 1970, wrote Talese, the occupants of the ninth floor of 11 West Seventeenth Street used the Village Voice to kickstart their own business, placing ads in the back pages of the Voice seeking “figure models” or “masseuses.” Many women answered the ads, and while some turned away from the euphemized sex work, others signed on for what was really a handjob gig, which, in 1970, could pay $350 a week.

But “the Communists on the tenth floor,” Talese continued,