Carol Leigh, a famed San Francisco activist and artist who championed the rights of sex workers and was widely recognized for establishing the term “sex work,” died at her Park Merced apartment Wednesday.
The cause was a seven-year battle with uterine cancer, according to statements from the executor of her estate, Kate Marquez, as well as her friend Annie Sprinkle, a fellow activist and performance artist. She was 71 years old.
“Thankfully it was a good death, as deaths go,” Sprinkle wrote. “What a magnificent, productive, meaningful, powerful, creative, love filled life this beautiful woman has led. Rest in peace. Rest in power. You did so much good in the world Carol Leigh. So many of us love you and will miss you, all around the world.”
Leigh, who was also known by her onstage persona, the “Scarlot Harlot,” was born in New York City on Jan. 11, 1951 and grew up in Queens. She obtained her bachelor’s degree at Empire State College and studied at Boston University’s masters program in creative writing before eventually moving to San Francisco in 1977, where she started pursuing sex work as a flexible and lucrative form of income that buoyed her creative pursuits in film and writing.
Her involvement with sex work made her a fierce advocate of the trade as she sought to raise awareness and change the public’s perception of it. Leigh wrote that she attended a conference in San Francisco organized by Women Against Violence in Pornography and Media in 1978, with the goal of sharing her own experiences in sex work to the people in attendance.
“I found the room for the conference workshop on prostitution,” Leigh wrote. “As I entered I saw a newsprint pad with the title of the workshop. It included the phrase ‘Sex Use Industry.’ The words stuck out and embarrassed me. How could I sit amid other women as a political equal when I was being objectified like that, described only as something used, obscuring my role as an actor and agent in this transaction?”
When the workshop began, Leigh suggested changing its title to “Sex Work Industry.”
“Because that described what women did,” she wrote. “Generally, the men used the services, and the women provided them. As I recall, no one raised objections.”
FILE – Scarlet Harlot demonstrates on Wall St for the legalization of prostitution, New York, New York, May 24, 1990.
The term stuck, and it is now universally known and discussed by scholars, writers and public health providers. She went on to become a spokesperson for COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics,) a sex workers rights organization founded by Margot St. James, and herself co-founded BAYSWAN, the Bay Area Sex Worker Advocacy Network, where she and James fought to decriminalize sex work.
In a 1996 interview with the Chronicle, Leigh recounted how, in 1979, she was sexually assaulted by two men who broke into the sex studio where she worked with her friends. She did not report the crime to police because she feared that their operation would be shut down, and she and other sex workers would lose their housing and income.
“That was when I became very, very dedicated to changing conditions so that other women would not have to deal with what I dealt with,” Leigh told the Chronicle at the time. “I saw that the criminalization of prostitution, the fact that I couldn’t go to the police to report the rape, meant that I was not going to be able to protect other women from these rapists. And I vowed to do something to change that.”
Leigh was an original member of HIV and AIDS activist organization ACT UP and a lead writer of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors Task Force on Prostitution Report. She supported dancers at the Lusty Lady in North Beach as they bargained for a labor contract and ultimately formed the world’s first stripper’s union, becoming worker-owners of their own cooperative theater until the club’s closure in 2013.
FILE – Dancers cheer after cutting a large garter belt to officially re-opening the Lusty Lady strip club June 26, 2003 in San Francisco. The dancers and support staff of the Lusty Lady made history by saving the famous strip club from going out of business by becoming the first employee-owned, fully unionized strip club in the nation.
Justin Sullivan / Getty Images“One of the things that we’re missing in the sex trade in San Francisco is advocacy from a labor perspective,” Leigh said in the 1996 interview. “One of the most serious questions that the task force dealt with was the decriminalization of the sex business. How do we advocate for the workers?”
Leigh also founded the Sex Workers Film & Art Festival in 1999, which still runs to this day, and went on to pen two books — “Unrepentant Whore: The Collected Work of Scarlot Harlot,” which was published in 2004 by Last Gasp, and “Inventing Sex Work,” released in 2010. She was a fixture of San Francisco’s theater and comedy venues for decades, performing at the Great American Music Hall and the Holy City Zoo, among other clubs. Her satirical one-woman play, “The Adventures of Scarlot Harlot,” was featured at the 1983 National Festival of Women’s Theater in Santa Cruz. She also received awards from the American Film Institute for her short films, “Yes Means Yes, No Means No,” and “Outlaw Poverty, Not Prostitutes.”
Leigh is survived by a brother. Her work will be archived at Harvard University’s Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, where it will be free to study, according to Sprinkle.
“Carol Leigh had the soul of an artist-poet, the brain of a scholar, and was a hooker with a heart of gold,” Sprinkle wrote. “She inspired and empowered legions of sex workers around the world who will carry her torch. No doubt Carol Leigh will be continuing her work from that big brothel in the sky.”
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