Farewell, Margo St. James
San Francisco has lost another legend — sex worker rights advocate Margo St. James. There are coyotes roaming the streets of the virus-blasted city these days, but no more COYO)TE (Call Off Your Tired Old Ethics), the prostitutes union founded by St. James in 1973. With each death of a monumental figure from San Francisco’s wild years, the howl continues to fade in the city. I knew many of these larger-than-life characters, through my newspaper work or demimonde wanderings — or from writing “Season of the Witch,” for which St. James sat for a long interview. Carol Doda, Patrick and Terry Hallinan, Marty Balin, Spain Rodriguez.. I miss you all and the city loses more of its luster with each fadeout.
The obits have been filled with many of Margo’s greatest hits, and I won’t repeat them here. But allow me to stress what a tough, politically astute woman she was under the smiling, farm-girl veneer. Among her clients back in the day were members of the San Francisco police force — good Catholic boys who nevertheless used the services of St. James or her colleagues. One night, a friend of hers on the force tipped her off that disgruntled cops were going to kill progressive Police Chief Charles Gain that night. St. James tracked him down at a local college where he was scheduled to give a speech and told him to go home, “The cops are going to bump you off,” she warned the police chief.
St. James was able to save Chief Gain’s life — but not that of Mayor George Moscone, who had hired him, or his progressive ally Supervisor Harvey Milk, both of whom were assassinated by ex-cop Dan White in 1978.
Margo St. James’s more colorful antics got her regularly in Herb Caen’s column. But she was a serious if eccentric and unpredictable woman. Late in life, she married newspaper reporter Paul Avery, another gutsy San Franciscan who had pissed off dangerous people, including the cops and the increasingly unhinged Black Panther leader Huey Newton. I knew Paul too, briefly working as his editor in the colorful San Francisco Examiner newsroom — though nobody could really manage the buccaneering Avery, who continued to smoke himself to death through wracking, lung-scraping coughs.
Margo St. James… Paul Avery… they don’t make them that way anymore in the City by the Bay. Her ashes will be spread with Avery’s on her beloved Orcas Island during a ceremony this summer. (That’s Margo in the middle with supporter Jane Fonda.)
