Margo St. James

Margaret Jean "Margo" St. James (September 12, 1937 – January 11, 2021) was an American sex worker and sex-positive feminist. In San Francisco, she founded COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics), an organization advocating decriminalization of prostitution, and co-founded the St. James Infirmary Clinic, a medical and social service organization serving sex workers in the Tenderloin.

Early life and education St. James was born on 12 September 1937 in Bellingham, Washington, to George, a dairy farmer and Dorothy, a secretary. She was the oldest of three children; her sister is a gospel singer and her brother is a sailor. Growing up, Peggy, as she was called then, attended Bellingham High School and established herself as a realist painter. After she entered and won a New York contest, one of her works was chosen to be displayed at Carnegie Hall.

She married Don Sobjack one month after her graduation and they had a son soon after.

Career After her marriage ended, she moved to the heart of beatnik San Francisco to pursue an art career, living first in North Beach and then Haight-Ashbury. She lost all her canvasses to theft and a fire at her studio.

The conviction excluded her from many jobs, so, she wrote in 1989, and she became both a sex worker and a feminist.

During 1970–73, she was living in Marin County with carpenter-musician Roger Somers. Her next door neighbour was Elsa Gidlow, a lesbian poet, who pushed feminist literature under her door. In 1973, St. James founded COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics) to push for financial security, health care, and legal rights for sex workers. Its forerunner was Whores, Housewives and Others (WHO), the "others" being lesbians. She also organized similar organizations in other states, She also served on the Board of Supervisors' Drug Abuse Advisory Board.

St. James sought the Republican Party nomination for President of the United States in 1980 but the extent of her efforts is unknown. In 1996, she campaigned for a seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and promised to install a red light outside the City Hall that would be turned on whenever she was present. She claimed to have the support of "the bohemians, the old hippies, the gays" in addition to "the veterans and the longshoremen and the politicians". After she started showing signs of Alzheimer’s, her sister, Claudette Sterk, moved her back to the mainland. She was diagnosed in June 2020, and died on January 11, 2021, at a memory care facility in Bellingham, Washington.