SEX SELLS - AND THEY SHOULD KNOW : HOOKER-ACTIVIST BRINGS LEGION OF PROSTITUTES TO INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE IN VAN NUYS.

Byline: Jenifer Hanrahan Daily News Staff Writer

Norma Jean Almodovar slams down the phone. Her jade-green eyes, rimmed with false eyelashes and black liner, flash with anger.

``She wants to do massages at the hotel,'' Almodovar says, yanking on her hair, dyed a brassy red. ``No way!''

Almodovar, who quit her job as a civilian traffic officer for the Los Angeles Police Department to become a call girl, is stressed. For a year, she has worked the fax, the phone and the Internet to round up nearly 200 current and former sex workers and johns from around the world to come to Van Nuys for the three-day International Conference on Prostitution. The gathering, co-sponsored by the Center for Sex Research at California State University, Northridge, convenes Friday at the Airtel Plaza Hotel.

This will be the first time more than a token number of sex workers have attended a conference on prostitution, typically the domain of college professors, counselors, lawyers and public health experts.

``We want to speak for ourselves,'' Almodovar says. ``People are always trying to tell us how we feel about our own lives.''

Calling all prostitutes

But rounding up sex workers hasn't been easy. She lost contact with a prostitute from Ecuador after recent political instability. A male sex worker who lives in the Australian Outback couldn't be reached because he doesn't have a phone. Two prostitutes from Calcutta who boarded a plane on Monday haven't been heard from since.

And now, this.

One of the invitees wants to offer massages in her hotel room, undermining Almodovar's mission to show the world that prostitutes deserve respect, that they belong at an otherwise staid academic conference.

``Some of the people attending the conference don't understand the severity of the laws that could get them or me arrested,'' Almodovar says. ``We're already going to be scrutinized and, in this context, a gathering of prostitutes, things can be misconstrued.''

A crusade for sex

Since she left the LAPD 10 years ago, Almodovar, 45, has been shaking her hips while thumbing her nose at mainstream morality. She has made her case - that prostitution is a viable career alternative and a ``victimless crime'' when a woman chooses to ply the trade - on dozens of talk shows.

In 1986, Almodovar ran for lieutenant governor on the Libertarian ticket, garnering almost 88,000 votes. A campaign poster featured her nude, with the word ``Censored'' strategically covering her anatomy and a banner slogan across the top reading, ``Whose life is it anyway?''

And, along with Hillary Rodham Clinton, she attended 1995's United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, China, as a delegate from the sex-worker contingent.

From a cramped spare room in her three-bedroom Panorama City townhouse, she runs COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics) Los Angeles, a group dedicated to decriminalizing prostitution, or taking away criminal penalties. That's different from legalizing prostitution, which would permit government regulation of prostitution, such as confining it to red-light districts or subjecting prostitutes to medical examinations.

The bookshelves bow with the weight of titles such as, ``My First 2,000 Men,'' ``Whores in History,'' ``Lives of the Courtesans,'' ``Uneasy Virtue,'' and ``The Oldest Profession.'' ``Forty Reasons Why Whores Are My Heroes'' is posted on the door. (No. 7. Whores relieve millions of people of unwanted stress and tension. No. 37. Whores have the guts to wear very big wigs.)

Almodovar calls herself a ``Libertarian feminist,'' a therapist (only better), a hooker as a political statement, a whore.

``We're taking back that word, just like gays did the word `queer,' '' Almodovar says. ``We're saying, `You can't hurt us with that word.' ''

Her voice gets hoarse as she rails against a justice system that, the way she sees it, punishes women for doing as they please with their bodies.

In September 1984, a jury convicted Almodovar of pandering for trying to arrange a paid date for another woman traffic officer, a crime that carries a three-year mandatory minimum sentence. But a judge ruled it unduly harsh and granted her probation after she had spent 50 days in jail undergoing a psychiatric evaluation.

Then, in a highly unusual action, the district attorney's office successfully appealed the probation sentence, demanding she serve time. She spent 18 months in state prison.

``They say laws against prostitution are for our own good,'' she says. ``More often than not, those laws that are supposed to protect us are used against us.''

She whips out an overstuffed binder full of newspaper clippings about the mistreatment of prostitutes:

The Long Beach police officer sentenced to five years probation for forcing a prostitute to have sex with him in his patrol car. The Pasadena judge who dismissed rape charges against a man who allegedly raped and sodomized a prostitute, saying that a prostitute couldn't be raped. The Costa Mesa Police Department's practice of seizing the clothing of women who have been arrested for prostitution and sending them out into the night wearing white paper jumpsuits.

``This is for our own good?'' she says. ``I don't think so.''

Finding her calling

Almodovar's transformation from traffic officer to call girl to political activist is chronicled in her 1993 racy memoir, ``From Cop to Call Girl: Why I Left the LAPD to Make an Honest Living as a Beverly Hills Prostitute.''

She grew up in Binghamton, N.Y., to a mother she describes as a ``devout fundamentalist Baptist'' and a father who she says sexually molested her and her 13 siblings.

After high school, Almodovar opted against Bible college and instead made her way to California. She got married, then divorced not long after when she found out her husband had an affair with her sister. At age 21, she went to work for the LAPD. Ten years later, disgusted with the department's purported mistreatment of women, she quit.

``I'd rather be a whore than work for the LAPD,'' wrote Almodovar in her book.

Her mother, now 77, cried for hours when Almodovar told her about the career switch.

``She said, `It's not my job to judge you. It's God's,' '' Almodovar recalled.

Just a `country girl'

Almodovar's husband of 13 years, retired actor Victor Savant, whom she calls the ``nicest, sweetest, most patient man,'' says Almodovar remains a ``nice, sweet, country girl'' beneath her tough, activist exterior.

These days, that country girl can barely sleep, what with the fax machine in her home office whining well into the night and all the worrying over whether she can pull off the Hooker's Masquerade Ball.

The light-hearted, invitation-only finale, which the university has nothing to do with, is set for Saturday night.

But Almodovar worries COYOTE may fall short of money to throw the party that will feature the crowning of a ``Queen of Tarts,'' a sex toy giveaway and prizes for best costume.

COYOTE's budget, Almodovar says, is chronically short of funds. The group's 50 members are supposed to pay $5 dues at their monthly support meeting, but many don't pay. ``Our budget is whatever I can afford to spend,'' she says.

Nowadays, that isn't much. Her busy activist schedule and fear of arrest have put a crimp in her call girl activities. The townhouse rent is already more than a week late. She doesn't have enough money to buy a costume for the ball, so she figures she'll rummage through her closet filled with slinky gowns, some that were given to her by a former client in the garment business.

Most of the money Almodovar has spent on the conference has come from Fred Cherry, a 70-year-old Brooklyn man who says he has been a client of prostitutes since he was a young man. The retired civil engineer put up close to $25,000, including most of the $10,000 speaker's fee for former U.S. Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders, the keynote speaker.

Cherry is unapologetic about his paid-for trysts. He suffers from celiac disease, a digestive system disorder that left him frail, homebound and ``undesirable,'' he says.

``The only way I've ever been able to develop a relationship with women is by paying,'' he said.

The publicity Almodovar courts has put her at odds with the folks at the normally low-profile Center for Sex Research. James Elias, director of the center, complained that he has never received so many calls from the media.

But Almodovar defends seeking the limelight.

``We feel that this information is too important to let it be contained within the academic community,'' she says. ``This conference is a way to stop the stereotyping of prostitutes, to show people that we have lives, that we are viable human beings.''

CAPTION(S):

3 Photos

Photo: (1--Cover--Color) Call girl with a cause

Panorama City's Norma Jean Almodovar is organizing a sex workers' conference and a party - part of a mission to gain respect for prostitutes.

(2) Norma Jean Almodovar, author of ``From Cop to Call Girl: Why I Left the LAPD to Make an Honest Living as a Beverly Hills Prostitute,'' is making sure sex workers can attend a conference on prostitution in Van Nuys.

(3) Almodovar runs her activist group, COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics), from a spare room in her Panorama City townhouse.

David Sprague/Daily News