SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Carol Leigh, a San Francisco activist who’s credited with coining the time period “intercourse paintings” and who sought for many years to enhance stipulations for other people within the grownup leisure industry, has died. She was once 71.
Kate Marquez, the executor of her property, mentioned Leigh died Wednesday of most cancers, the San Francisco Chronicle reported Thursday.
Frederic Larson/San Francisco Chronicle by means of AP
A former intercourse employee, Leigh faithful herself to campaigning on behalf of the ones within the “intercourse paintings business,” a time period she coined because the identify for a panel dialogue she attended at a feminist anti-pornography convention in 1978, in keeping with an essay she wrote.
The time period has grow to be in most cases utilized by public well being officers, educational researchers and others.
“Carol outlined intercourse paintings as a hard work factor, now not against the law, now not a sin,” Marquez mentioned. “This is a activity executed through 1,000,000 other people on this nation who’re stigmatized and criminalized through running to make stronger their households.”
“In the long run, Leigh argued that till intercourse employees are incorporated within the conversations about feminism, sexuality and legality -– conversations from which they have got traditionally been excluded -– intercourse employees will stay fragmented relatively than collective, and stigmatisation will abound,” mentioned a tweet Thursday from SWARM (Intercourse Employee Advocacy and Resistance Motion), which describes itself as a intercourse worker-led collective based in the UK in 2009.
Leigh co-founded BAYSWAN, sometimes called Bay House Intercourse Employee Advocacy Community, which in keeping with its web page works with human rights activists to deal with issues comparable to human trafficking within the business in addition to hard work and civil rights violations.
Leigh was once deeply all for advocacy for and support to intercourse employees each in america and in a foreign country and her considerations ranged from decriminalization to poverty, drug use and HIV. She additionally was once a video artist and produced award-winning documentaries on “ladies’s problems and homosexual/lesbian problems,” in keeping with her BAYSWAN biography.
She wrote and incessantly carried out a one-woman political satire play known as “The Adventures of Scarlot Harlot,” and wrote a 2004 e book titled “Unrepentant Whore: The Accumulated Paintings of Scarlot Harlot.” She additionally helped produce the San Francisco Intercourse Employee Movie and Arts Pageant.
Born in New York Town, Leigh had a bachelor’s level in inventive writing when she moved to San Francisco in 1977. She started running as a intercourse employee to become profitable however her focal point modified after she was once raped through two males at a intercourse studio in 1979, she instructed SFGate in a 1996 interview.
She couldn’t report against the law record as a result of her place of job would had been closed.
“The truth that I couldn’t cross to the police to record the rape supposed that I used to be now not going so as to give protection to different ladies from those rapists,” she mentioned. “And I vowed to do one thing to switch that.”
Leigh’s papers can be archived at Harvard College’s Schlesinger Library at the Historical past of Ladies in The us, Marquez mentioned.