NYT, Jan. 22, 2021
Margo St. James, Advocate for Sex Workers, Dies at 83
By Katharine Q. Seelye
Margo St. James was an artist working as a waitress and living the Beat
life in San Francisco in the 1960s when her home became a counterculture
hangout. 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
for only one reason, and so they 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.
Ms. 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,
Wash., near the Canadian border. Her sister, Claudette Sterk, said the
cause was complications of Alzheimer’s disease.
Ms. 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, Ms. 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 Ms. 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, Ms. St. James invested her crusade with
showmanship. She organized an annual Hooker’s Ball, a fund-raising 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. Ms. 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. Though she was endorsed by Mayor Willie Brown and the
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.
A charismatic speaker, Ms. St. James was popular on the lecture circuit
and often began her speeches by saying, “It’s so nice to see so many
familiar faces.”
To critics who complained that sex workers were splitting up families,
she insisted otherwise. The vast majority of customers are married, she
told a television interviewer in 1974, adding, “If we weren’t taking
care of them and listening to their troubles, they might be beating up
their wives more than they do.”
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.
Peggy, as she was called then, did not care for farm life. “She didn’t
mind working,” Ms. Sterk, her sister, said in an interview, “but you’re
out in the country and you don’t see a lot of people, and she loved
people.” She took up watercolor painting and won a contest in which one
of her works was shown at Carnegie Hall, Ms. Sterk said.
In high school, Ms. St. James met Don Sobjack, whom she married after
graduating and who became a commercial fisherman. She had a child with
him soon thereafter. But she knew she was not cut out for marriage or
motherhood, her sister said. Leaving her husband and son behind, she
headed for art school in San Francisco in 1958. The marriage ended in
divorce.
Although she was based in San Francisco, Ms. St. James helped the
sex-worker rights movement grow nationally. Sister groups to COYOTE
sprang up, including PONY (Prostitutes of New York), HIRE (Hooking is
Real Employment) in Atlanta and PUMA (Prostitutes Union of Massachusetts).
But the so-called feminist sex wars of the late 1970s and ’80s, driven
by a powerful anti-pornography movement, were pitting women against one
another, making it a challenging time to win sympathy for sex workers.
Debates swirled over whether they could be considered feminists and
whether prostitution was legitimate work, as Ms. St. James contended, or
whether it was a form of coercion and violence against women.
Facing a conservative backlash in the 1980s during the Reagan years, Ms.
St. James set her sights on Europe, partnering with other groups to
mobilize an international rights movement. With Gail Pheterson, a
feminist activist and scholar, she organized the First World Whores’
Congress, in 1985 in Amsterdam, and a second one the next year in Brussels.
The gatherings were held at the height of the AIDS epidemic, and a major
topic of conversation was how sex workers could protect themselves and
their livelihoods from a disease that was typically transmitted sexually.
While working on the international movement, Ms. St. James and Ms.
Pheterson renovated a 16th-century house in the south of France, where
they lived for several years.
In the early 1990s, Paul Avery, a friend and longtime Bay Area
journalist who had emphysema, proposed that he and Ms. St. James get
married so that she could share his health care benefits and also take
care of him. They were married on Valentine’s Day in 1992, and she moved
back to the United States the next year.
In time, she moved Mr. Avery to Orcas Island, north of Seattle, where
her family had a cabin.
He died in 2000. Ms. St. James stayed on the island until her symptoms
of Alzheimer’s appeared, and her sister moved her to the mainland.
In addition to her sister, Ms. St. James is survived by her son, Don
Sobjack Jr.; a brother, George Robert St. James; a half brother, John
Wachter; three grandchildren; and nine great-grandchildren.
By the end of her life, her goal of decriminalizing prostitution was
unmet. It remains a crime everywhere in the United States except for
certain counties in Nevada.
But she had empowered sex workers. She had given them voice and agency
and may even have helped diminish the stigma against them.
“Over the years I went to every event Margo did that I could, because
they were about the liberation and empowerment of people like me,” Annie
Sprinkle, a former porn star and sex worker for two decades, wrote
recently on Facebook.
“She was our fearless leader,” she added, “and she birthed so much of
today’s sex positive culture.”
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