Margo St. James

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Margo St. James (b. 1937), a sex-positive feminist and a political activist, advocates prostitute's rights. She has been a candidate for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, but has never been elected—she received 76,000 votes in the 1996 election and finished fifth in an election where the top four took office, and then ran again in 1998.

[edit] History

Margo St. James was President of the San Francisco Sexual Freedom League in 1967-1969. She advocated women's rights and organized sex parties and orgies. She claims to be a "former prostitute", and for this reason, she has been criticized by anti-pornography feminists including Dorchen Leidholdt. The claim to be a former prostitute is based on a 1962 prostitution conviction.

Margo St. James founded the St. James Infirmary in San Francisco to help provide health care to the sex worker community. She founded COYOTE in 1973. The forerunner of COYOTE was WHO: Whores, Housewives and Others; Others in this case meant lesbians. The first meeting of WHO was held on Alan Watts' houseboat; and the name COYOTE came from novelist Tom Robbins who dubbed her a coyote trickster.

She began attending international conferences: the United Nations Decade of Women Conferences in Mexico City, the 1976 Tribunal of Crimes Against Women in Brussels, the 1977 International Women's Year Conference in Houston, the 1980 Decade of Women Conference in Copenhagen, the 1976 Democratic Convention in New York—where St. James organized loiter-ins—and the Republican Convention in Kansas City.

She worked closely with Gail Pheterson—editor of Vindication of The Rights of Whores from Seal Press and author of Prostitution Prism from University of Michigan Press—beginning in 1983 in Rotterdam; and with Priscilla Alexander—co-editor of Sex Work from Cleis Press—since 1977. In 1984, COYOTE hosted a Hooker's Convention and drafted a Bill of Rights which underpinned the World Whores' Charter drawn up by the International Committee For Prostitutes' Rights in the European Parliament in Brussels. The conservative swing in the US and the women's movement prompted her to move to Europe, so she could put more energy into international organizing.