St. James, sex workers advocate, dies at 83
Margo St. James joined the world’s oldest profession by a circuitous route.
She was an artist working as a waitress and living the Beat life in San Francisco in the 1960s. Her home became a counterculture hangout, and, as she told The Windy City Times of Chicago in 2011, “there was a lot of pot-smoking and sex and, you know, whatever.”
It wasn’t the kind of sex that anyone paid for. But the police saw a lot of people going in and out of her house and concluded that it could be only one thing, and so arrested her in 1962 on prostitution charges.
“Your honor,” she told the judge, “I’ve never turned a trick in my life.”
As far as the judge was concerned, that response sealed her fate.
“Anyone who knows the language,” he told her, “is obviously a professional.”
Her conviction (she was jailed briefly) infuriated her and prompted her to take the college equivalency exam and enroll in law school. She didn’t get her law degree, but acting as her own lawyer she successfully appealed her conviction.
Still, with such a stain on her record, she couldn’t find work. And that, she said, drove her into sex work, which she kept up for four years.
St. James went on to become one of the nation’s most prominent rights advocates for sex workers, devoting her life to the cause of decriminalizing prostitution and destigmatizing its practitioners.
She died at 83 on Jan. 11 in a memory care facility in Bellingham, Washington, near the Canadian border. Her sister, Claudette Sterk, said the cause was complications of Alzheimer’s disease.
St. James, who called herself a sex-positive feminist, founded a group called COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics) in 1973 to press for health care, legal rights and financial security for sex workers. The group successfully fought to overturn San Francisco policies that required arrested sex workers to be tested for sexually transmitted diseases and to be quarantined if they tested positive.
In the process, St. James sought to reframe prostitution as a profession with legitimate workplace and human rights issues rather than as something sinful. (An ally, Carol Leigh, coined the term “sex worker” in the early 1980s, and St. James helped popularize it.)
“There is no immorality in prostitution,” she would often say. “The immorality is the arrest of women as a class for a service that’s demanded of them by society.”
A media-savvy activist, St. James invested her crusade with showmanship. She organized an annual Hooker’s Ball, a fundraising event that celebrated sex workers and drew politicians, police officers and movie stars. The balls reached their zenith in 1978 with 20,000 attendees filling the Cow Palace in San Francisco. St. James loved to make an entrance; that year she rode in on an elephant.
When she campaigned for a seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, she promised to keep a red light on outside her office when she was there. Although she was endorsed by Mayor Willie Brown and poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, a fixture of San Francisco bohemian life, she lost.
She also established a free health clinic, the St. James Infirmary, which was run by and for sex workers in the Bay Area — one of the first of its kind in the world.
Margaret Jean St. James was born in Bellingham on Sept. 12, 1937, to George and Dorothy (Wellman) St. James. Her father was a dairy farmer, her mother a secretary.