The activist who invented the term ‘sex work ’

Carol Leigh 1951–2022

Before Carol Leigh, prostitution was seen as a crime, not a labor issue.The former prostitute—a fearless performer who sported red curly hair and went by the stage name “Scarlot Harlot”— reframed the conversation around sex for hire in 1982 when she spoke up at an anti-pornography panel, objecting to the use of the phrase “sex-use” industry. “How could I sit amid other women as a political equal when I was being objectified like that, described only as something used?” she said. “I said, ‘No, we should call it “sex work” because that’s what the women do.’”

Leigh was born in New York, said The Washington Post, under a name she kept private. After studying creative writing at Empire State College, she moved to San Francisco in 1978. The restaurant work she found didn’t pay the bills, so she took a job as a “sex massage girl.” But in her first year in the business, two clients raped her, and she didn’t report the assault for fear the massage parlor would close. That experience inspired her activism, which became “a mix of performance art, civil disobedience, and political networking.”

Over the next four decades, said the San Francisco Chronicle, Leigh became a leading advocate for sex workers’ rights, founding the Bay Area Sex Workers Advocacy Network in 1990 and the Sex Workers Film & Art Festival in 2007 and writing Unrepentant Whore: The Collected Work of Scarlot Harlot. Insisting that many sex workers enjoyed their jobs and deserved labor protections, she strove to destigmatize the profession. “I became very, very dedicated to changing conditions,” she said, “so that other women would not have to deal with what I dealt with.”