Best known for coining the phrase “sex work,” Carol Leigh was the co-founder with Margo St. James of the Bay Area Sex Worker Advocacy Network. Founding San Francisco Bay Times editor Priscilla Alexander, who also advocated for sex workers for decades, posted upon learning of Leigh’s passing: “In my work at the World Health Organization, I helped to promote that term to emphasize that sex work is a form of labor, appropriate to labor not criminal law.”
In 1997, Leigh worked with dancers at the Lusty Lady—a strip club that operated in North Beach from the 1970s until 2013—to establish their first labor union. She collaborated on numerous film projects with sex educator Annie Sprinkle.
In 1999, she founded the San Francisco Sex Worker Film & Arts Festival. Her books include Unrepentant Whore: The Collected Writing of Scarlot Harlot (2004) and Inventing Sex Work (2010). Harvard University’s Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America will house the archive of her papers.
Bay Times photographer Rink photographed Leigh in her role as Scarlot Harlot in 2013, and in 2017 at the Roxie Theatre with Kent State University professor Molly Merryman, a featured speaker at the 10th Biennial SF Bay Area Sex Worker Film and Art Festival.
Rink Remembers
Published on December 1, 2022
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