Whoring is paying off a lot of student debt these days, especially since the
advent of Only Fans.
On Friday, January 22, 2021, 09:58:44 AM EST, Louis Proyect
<[email protected]> wrote:
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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