Remembering Margo St James, a Pioneering Sex Worker Organizer
The legacy of Margo St James, the trailblazing sex worker organizer who died earlier this month at 83, is more than her brazen personality, more than her bold and flamboyant tactics. She recognized that economic exploitation and gendered harassment are inextricably linked to police violence.
Margo St James on September 10, 1980. (John O’Hara)
On January 11, we lost an icon in the fight against police violence. That day, Margo St James, founder of COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics) and a matriarch of the sex workers’ rights movement, died at the age of eighty-three.
In the days since, she has been eulogized in a number of places, including in the pages of the San Francisco Chronicle and the Washington Post. These pieces have lauded her flamboyance, her passion, her unapologetically radical fight for the rights of those who sell sex. But few of these obituaries have dwelt at any length on the context for her activism.
As a result, those who have only heard of St James in passing — or who might only learn about her by reading her memorials — might miss the centrality of the fight against police violence in her own activism, and in the broader movement of which she was a shining avatar.
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