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January 18, 2021 5:25 PMLegal
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SAN FRANCISCO Margo St. James, founder of COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics) and the St. James Infirmary health clinic, died at a memory care facility on January 11, due to St. James continuing problem with dementia. Born in Bellingham, Washington on September 12, 1937, St. James moved to San Francisco on St. Patrick’s Day in 1958, securing a room above the El Matador on Broadway. She would later join the beatnik scene, hanging out in jazz clubs in North Beach. St. James once said, “This was all before desegregation so finding hip places like Jimbo’s Bop City in the Fillmore and 181 Eddy in the Tenderloin were a reprieve.”
Margo St. James, a noted sex-positive feminist and pioneer of the sex workers rights movement, died January 11 at age 83. Ms. St. James had been living in a memory care facility in Washington state and was moved to hospice care after a fall, according to her longtime friend Carol Stuart.
Ms. St. James founded the sex worker activist group COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics), organized the infamous Hooker s Balls in the 1970s, was nearly elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1996, and is the namesake of St. James Infirmary, the nation s first health clinic for sex workers.