Carol Leigh

In 2006 Leigh received a grant from the Creative Work Fund to establish, in collaboration with the Center for Sex & Culture, the Sex Worker Media Library.

From 1993, Leigh was one of the main contributors to the San Francisco Task Force on Prostitution, who's report calling for the decriminalization of prostitution was published in 1996.

Leigh has been making videos since 1985, and has received awards from the American Film Institute for Yes Means Yes, No Means No; Outlaw Poverty, Not Prostitutes and Mother's Mink. The San Francisco Sex Worker Film and Arts Festival was founded by Leigh in 1999, which she also co-produces with Erica Elena and Jovelyn Richards.

In 1983, Leigh wrote her one-woman satirical play The Scarlet Harlot, which she performed at that year's National Festival of Women's Theater in Santa Cruz. She has since performed the play in at clubs, theaters, rallies and as part of the Sex Workers Art Show tour.

During the AIDS crisis in the early 1980s, Leigh was an advocate for safe sex but opposed mandatory HIV testing. Leigh decided to leave San Francisco, where HIV was dominating everybody's thoughts and headed to Texas where she intended to form an organisation: T.W.A.T. ("Texas Whores And Tricks"). During the journey to Texas her car broke down in Tucson, Arizona. Whilst in Tucson she answered a classified small-ad from media-life-artist Dennis Williams, who had a weekly 2 hour live comedy programme on Tucson Western International Television. Leigh joined the show and created and developed several characters for it. After two years Leigh decided she needed a more bohemian setting to develop her individuality and returned to San Francisco.

In 1977 Leigh moved to San Francisco and started working as a prostitute. Two years later she was raped by two men at the establishment she worked at. She did not report this to the police for fear of the establishment being shut down. Leigh describes the rape as a defining moment in her life and prompted her activism for sex worker's rights.

She is credited with coining the term "sex worker" at a Women Against Violence in Pornography and Media conference in the late 1970s. The terminology used at the conference for the sex industry was the “Sex Use Industry”. The phrasing bothered her because it objectified sex workers and trivialized the agency they had when organizing their labor. She suggested that the panel be renamed “Sex Work Industry” and began to use the term in her one-woman plays before the first published use of “sex worker” appeared in a 1984 Associated Press newswire. She explains in a later essay named “Inventing Sex Work” that

Leigh was born in New York and grew up in Jackson Heights, Queens. She later attended Binghamton University (1968-70), Empire State College (1972-74), where she obtained a BA in creative writing, and Boston University (1974-75).

Carol Leigh, a.k.a. The Scarlot Harlot (born 1951, New York City) is an American artist, author, film maker, and sex workers' rights activist. She is credited with coining the term "sex worker" and currently chairs the Sex Worker Film and Arts Festival and is the director of BAYSWAN, the Bay Area Sex Worker Advocacy Network.