Margo St. James

SEPTEMBER 1937 to JANUARY 2021

USU's Sex Worker Organizing Group honors Margo St. James. Founder of St. James Infirmary--the first health clinic by and for sex workers in the world--as well as the founder of seminal organic shine WHO (Whores, Housewives, and Others [Lesbians]), and COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics), she created foundational alliances between sex workers and civilian women with the wages for housewives campaign. COYOTE successfully overturned SF policies which mandated coerced STI testing for those arrested for prostitution, with those testing positive held in quarantine. She was and is a hero to many of us, and we are profoundly changed because of her ground-breaking activism.