Margo St. James, Advocate for Sex Workers, Dies at 83 She founded a group called COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics) and devoted her life to the cause of decriminalizing prostitution. Margo St. James in 1975 at the World Conference on Women in Mexico City, where she sought support for decriminalizing prostitution in the United States.Credit...UPI Published Jan. 20, 2021Updated Jan. 21, 2021 Margo St. James was an artist working as a waitress and living the Beat life in San Francisco in the 1960s when her home became a counterculture hangout. As she told The Windy City Times of Chicago in 2011, “there was a lot of pot-smoking and sex and, you know, whatever.”