How Scarlot Harlot Made Sex Worker Rights Her Life's Work

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If you look up Carol Leigh or “Scarlot Harlot” online, you’ll learn that she’s credited with coining the term “sex worker.” Today, it’s used by activists, public health officials, lawmakers and the media to describe those working in the sex industry, and it’s revolutionized the way we talk about the profession.

The term came to Leigh in 1978 when she attended a workshop hosted by a group of feminists in San Francisco. The group, Women Against Violence in Pornography and Media or WAVPM, thought all women in the sex industry were being oppressed by men and held anti-sex work points of view.

Leigh was familiar with this argument, but she made it a point to understand their opposing perspective. She writes in her memoir “Unrepentant Whore: The Collected Works of Scarlot Harlot” that she identified herself as a prostitute to the group. She said the name of the workshop referenced the “sex use industry.” That name embarrassed her. So, she spoke out against it.

“If we’re a feminist, we should be defining it not by what the men do – the men use the services – but by what the women do. Women do sex work,” Leigh recalls saying. She said she didn’t remember anyone objecting to her reasoning.

Getting into the Business

Leigh grew up in Queens, New York, with parents who were part of the Socialist Party. She refers to herself as a “red diaper baby.” While growing up in the 1970s, she and her mother became avid feminists. She loved the movement, but, Leigh said, feminism wasn’t a perfect fit.

“There were problems within feminism that I hadn’t really understood in regards to sexual expression and sexual identity,” Leigh recalled.

At this point, Leigh wasn’t a sex worker yet, but she was drawn to it.

She said the feminist movement, which taught her that all men oppressed women, led her to repress her sexual desires. “I thought that was capitulating to the patriarchy,” she said.

It wouldn’t be until her mid-20s, when Leigh moved to San Francisco, that she seriously considered sex work. She asked friends about the city’s massage parlor scene in the Tenderloin neighborhood. Leigh said she saw storefronts with signs that said “sex, massage, girls” in the neighborhood. She walked into one, a massage parlor called The Hong Kong on Jones Street.

“I had heard once you agreed to sell it, you crossed a line,” Leigh wrote in her book. “There was no turning back. I couldn’t resist. I took the dare.”

After her first day at work, she said she rode the BART train home and recalls looking at her reflection in the train car window. She looked at herself and said proudly, “Now there’s a prostitute.”

Leigh and other sex workers she met say they enjoyed the financial stability and flexibility that came with sex work.

“It worked well for me with the work/life balance,” said Kate Marquez, a former sex worker at The Hong Kong and a good friend of Leigh’s. Marquez worked to support her 8-year-old daughter while putting herself through school. “Doing sex work was a great choice. I found this thing that actually worked for me.”

Leigh was fascinated by the strong way many of the workers at The Hong Kong dealt with sex work.

“I met women who seemed like they were robust, rebellious and funny. And this is not what I expected,” she said.

Leigh’s budding activism for sex work

Except for certain parts of Nevada, prostitution laws make full-service sex work illegal throughout the country. Public attitudes about fully decriminalizing sex work have swung back and forth over the years, in part because of the work of the sex worker rights movement.

At the center of that movement in San Francisco was Margo St. James. She was a media darling and former sex worker turned activist who made sex work a labor issue. She fought for decriminalizing prostitution.

In 1973, St. James helped found Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics or COYOTE, a sex worker rights activist group. COYOTE meetings were a safe space for sex workers to trade notes on clients and warn each other about undercover cops.

Soon after Leigh and Marquez became good friends at The Hong Kong, they began attending COYOTE meetings together. Leigh was immediately drawn to St. James’s sex-positive take on feminism, which imagined a fully empowered woman able to make any choices she desired.

“She made feminism make sense to me,” Leigh said.

A central focus for COYOTE was advocating for the decriminalization of sex work.

“I worked at a massage parlor for a few months, but of course, the place got busted,” said Annie Sprinkle, a former adult film star from New York and another friend of Leigh’s.

Massage parlors have often been targets of undercover police stings. If a sex worker solicits an undercover cop, the parlor could be shut down. Advocates and former law enforcement have said these “drug war tactics” don’t do much to stop illegal sex work. Workers often return to other parlors or continue sex work in other ways that are potentially more dangerous.

From the pleasurable to the political

While Leigh was coming into her own as a sex worker and becoming more active with COYOTE, she wrote poetry and performed for audiences in coffee shops. She started taking acting classes with a teacher named Joya Cory.

Cory said Leigh was open with her classmates about her life as a sex worker and had a great stage presence. A year later, Leigh shared that she was working on a project based on the poems she had written – a play about her life as a sex worker.

“She told me about it, and she said, ‘Would you like to direct it?’ And it was about her career as a call girl,” Cory said.

Cory had never directed anything professionally before, but the material excited her.

The play became a one-woman show called The Adventures of Scarlot Harlot. Leigh would play Scarlot Harlot, a character she created that was an alter ego of her sex worker persona. She chose to spell the name Scarlot instead of Scarlet to suggest a ‘lot of scars.’

Although Leigh dyed her hair deep red for the role, Cory said the name Scarlot suited who she truly was, both on and off stage. “Carol was kind of a vanilla name. And Scarlot was not vanilla, she was anything but vanilla.” Scarlot wore sequin costumes, boas, wigs and occasionally lingerie.

Despite Scarlot’s playful nature, Leigh wanted the character to deliver a political message in her play. She aimed to introduce audiences to the term “sex worker” and demystify their work.

“This paper bag symbolizes the anonymity prostitutes are forced to adopt!” Scarlot shouts at the top of the play with a paper bag overhead. Then she rips it off.

“We won’t remain anonymous. Sex workers unite!”

In another scene from the play, Scarlot is appalled after learning the definition of prostitution. “The act of selling one’s talents for an unworthy cause,” she reads aloud. “Well, that definition tarnishes my reputation!”

Cory said Scarlot would turn to the audience and ask if they had ever done anything for money that went against their core values. “Half of them would raise their hands. And she’d say, ‘Ah! That’s prostitution,’” Cory said.

The play toured the Bay Area for about four years. It was part of the National Festival of Women’s Theater in Santa Cruz and Scarlot even performed on a bill alongside Whoopi Goldberg.

“It’s really hard to do political art and make it interesting. And she did that,” Cory said.

Leigh had ambitions of taking The Adventures of Scarlot Harlot off-Broadway in New York. But the play closed in 1984, and by the mid-1980s, the AIDS crisis was in full swing. Leigh made the hard decision to put her play on hold and focused on AIDS activism.

Sex workers and AIDS activism

At the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, there was a lot of confusion about how the virus spread. Lawmakers across the country went into a panic and started drafting laws to criminalize people who might spread the infection in hopes of stopping it. They put sex workers in that group.

“It was a very scary time for sex workers,” Leigh said.

She joined Citizens for Medical Justice, an early AIDS awareness group in San Francisco, before joining ACT UP.

In 1988, Leigh and members of COYOTE lobbied against a bill that required sex workers who were arrested to be tested for HIV. If they were positive, they could face criminal charges.

“This means that if a prostitute is convicted and she is antibody positive if she even does a hand job, she can actually be convicted of a felony,” Leigh explained to a reporter at the time.

She and other members of COYOTE spoke to lawmakers and protested outside the Capitol in Sacramento.

“Carol Leigh was very interested in women’s body autonomy,” Sprinkle said. “Whether that was abortion, or the right to a clean needle, or the right to do sex work. She felt a woman should have agency. Who she wants to have sex with, who she wants to go out with. And she should be safe.”

Despite their efforts, the bill was signed into law.

Leigh wouldn’t see her activism pay off for almost 30 years later. In 2017, the state legislature repealed the law along with other similar HIV criminalization laws like it and annulled all previous convictions for sex workers affected by it.

A new chapter for Scarlot Harlot

That experience had galvanized Leigh and showed her that to win the rights of sex workers, she needed to take Scarlot to new heights. She did talk show appearances, spoke on panels at universities, wrote music about safe sex and traveled the world as Scarlot Harlot, meeting with sex worker groups in Taiwan.

Over time, the term “sex worker” would appear in academic journals and public health studies because of advocacy from COYOTE members Margo St. James and Priscilla Alexander. However, it was Leigh’s character, Scarlot Harlot, who would popularize it within the sex worker community.

“I just thought that I was doing something dirty, secretive and shameful,” said Savannah Sly, co-founder of New Moon Network, a philanthropic organization for sex worker activists. As a sex worker, Sly said she looked up to Scarlot Harlot. “[She] gave me a word that was dignified and described it as a labor form.”

Sly adds that Leigh knew there was always work to be done in the sex worker community. That included recognizing that the term “sex worker” is not a one-size-fits-all.

“As the movement evolves, I’ve seen erotic laborers, professional lovers, exotic dancers, adult content creators,” she said. Sex work will always be the root of these professions, Sly said, but adds, “Not all sex workers are comfortable with the phrase ‘sex work’ because it does sound like it describes prostitution.”

Friends of Leigh said she was always learning from younger sex worker activists and recognized that not all sex workers have the same experiences and many come to the profession from different backgrounds or for different reasons.

Leigh cements her legacy

In 1999, Leigh helped create the Sex Worker Film and Arts Festival or Sex Worker Fest. The film festival features independent films from sex workers, workshops and community events throughout San Francisco. Elizabeth Dayton, the current Director of Sex Fest, said Leigh thought it was important for sex workers to be able to share their own stories in “a dedicated space for the community to celebrate their art.” The festival runs every two years.

That same year, Leigh, Margo St. James and members of COYOTE started the St. James Infirmary clinic in the Tenderloin. This free clinic, the first of its kind in the country, offered confidential medical and legal services to sex workers in the Bay Area and housing assistance for the trans community.

In the early 1990s, Carol Leigh started working with Joseph Kramer, a sexologist and sex educator. They made hundreds of sex education videos that focused on sexual massage for couples. The job allowed Leigh to hone her video editing skills.

She kept a record of her work by filming her own activism, then producing interviews and short documentaries. Her archives can be found at the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at Harvard University alongside those of Margo St. James.

Leigh died from cancer on Nov. 16, 2022. She was surrounded and supported by her close friends, Beth Stephens, Annie Sprinkle and Kate Marquez, in the final days of her life.

“I got to go over there and be with her body and put some flowers on her,” Sprinkle said. “And be there when they rolled her out in a red velvet body bag. She did a really good job planning for her death. Amazingly well.”

Before she died, Carol established a trust, one that she didn’t tell anybody about. It included an inheritance from her mother, who supported her daughter’s sex worker career from the beginning.

The beneficiaries included 86 different sex workers and sex worker organizations in need, including the New Moon Network, Third Wave Sex Worker Giving Circle and Red Umbrella Fund.

“[It] was amazing to see this person who never made a lot of money become a big philanthropist,” said Kate Marquez, now the executor of Leigh’s estate.

Annie Sprinkle said Carol Leigh never stopped trying to keep sex workers safe.

“She was a whore mentor and a whore mother to many sex workers. She was truly the whore with a heart of gold.”