Margo St. James founded the St. James Infirmary in San Francisco to help provide health care to the sex worker community, but she wasn't always such a well known prostitution activist. What's a nice girl like you? was the usual reaction of men to my becoming a feminist as well as my becoming a prostitute. The difference for me was I chose to be a feminist, but I decided to work as a prostitute after being labeled officially by a misogynist judge in San Francisco at age twenty-five. It was 1962. I said in court, "Your honor, I never turned a trick in my life!" he responded, "Anyone who knows the language is obviously a professional." My crime was I knew too much to be nice girl.

The forerunner of COYOTE was WHO, Whores, Housewives and Others. Others meant lesbian, but it wasn't being said out loud yet, even in liberal bohemian circles. The first meeting of WHO was held on Alan Watt's houseboat. The name COYOTE came from novelist Tom Robbins who dubbed me the COYOTE Trickster. I was living in Marin. Richard Hongisto, a liberal sheriff elected in San Francisco about that time attended my parties. He had been a cop, and had a sociology degree. I cornered him at a party once and asked him what it would take to get NOW, and Gay rights groups to support prostitutes' rights, because he seemed to have most of the support of the liberal groups in town. He said that we needed someone from the victim class to speak out, and that was the only way the issue would be heard.

I began attending international conferences starting with the United Nations Decade of Women Conferences in Mexico City, the 1976 Tribunal of Crimes Against Women in Brussels and the 1977 International Women's Year Conference in Houston, the 1980 Decade of Women Conference in Copenhagen, and 1976 Democratic Convention in New York, where St. James orghanized 'loiter-ins,' and the Republican Convention in Kansas City. She worked closely with Gail Pheterson, (editor of Vindication of The Rights of Whores from Seal Press and author of Prostitution Prism from University of Michigan Press) beginning in 1983 in Rotterdam, and with Priscilla Alexander (co-editor of Sex Work from Cleis Press) since 1977. In 1984 COYOTE hosted a Hooker's Convention and drafted a Bill of Rights which was the underpinnings for the World Whores' Charter drawn up by the International Committee For Prostitutes' Rights in the European Parliament in Brussels. The conservative swing in the US and the women's movement prompted me to move to Europe so I could put more energy into international organizing, Although those wanting to abolish prostitution were more active than ever, there are politicians and women's groups willing to stand up for prostitutes in many countries.