Carol Leigh
As the “Scarlot Harlot”, she coined the term “sex work” – and brought humour and safer-sex messages to the early AIDS protests in San Francisco.
Carol Leigh grew up in a Jewish family of left-wing activists in Queens, New York. She studied creative writing and in the late 1970s moved to San Francisco, where she began working in the sex industry. In 1980 she was raped by two men at her workplace; she did not go to the police for fear the business would be closed. She later called this the moment that made her an activist.
At a feminist conference against pornography around 1980, the industry was referred to as the “sex use industry”. Leigh objected that this made the women objects, and suggested “sex work industry” instead – because that described what the women did. She is credited with coining the term “sex work”, which is now used worldwide. “I invented sex work,” she wrote in 1997. “Not the activity, of course. The term.”
As her stage character the “Scarlot Harlot” she performed satirical one-woman shows and made award-winning videos. She was an early member of ACT UP in San Francisco; a fellow activist called her the “fairy godmother” of the city’s AIDS direct-action groups, known for her humour and her sex-positive safer-sex messages. She co-founded the Bay Area Sex Worker Advocacy Network in 1990, worked on the city’s task force on prostitution, which called for decriminalisation in 1996, and in 1999 founded the Sex Worker Film and Arts Festival.
Leigh was bisexual. She died of cancer in 2022, aged 71. Her papers are held at the Schlesinger Library at Harvard.