enrolled in law school. She successfully appealed her conviction, worked as a process server for criminal defense attorney Vincent Hallinan, and became one of the first women private investigators in California. The conviction excluded her from many jobs, so, she wrote in 1989, she became both a prostitute and a feminist. She listed restaurant hostess, valet parking attendant, and deckhand on dinner cruises as other jobs she had held. During 1970-73, she was living in Marin County with carpenter-musician Roger Somers. Her next door neighbour was Elsa Gidlow, a lesbian poet, who pushed feminist literature under her door. In 1973, St. James founded COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics) to push for financial security, health care, and legal rights for sex workers. Its forerunner was Whores, Housewives and Others (WHO), the "others" being lesbians. The first meeting of WHO took place in 1972 on Alan Watts’ houseboat (“The Vallejo”) in Sausalito. The name COYOTE came from the author Tom Robbins, who dubbed St. James the ‘COYOTE Trickster’ after one of their “mushroom-hunting expeditions.” The group was instrumental in the fight against San Francisco policies requiring arrested sex workers to undergo mandatory testing for sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) and face quarantine if the test came back positive. In the process, St. James worked towards reframing prostitution as a lawful profession with legitimate workplace and human rights concerns instead of something sinful. To finance COYOTE and its newspaper, COYOTE HOWLS, she organized annual Hooker's Balls; the highest attendance was 20,000 in 1978. She also organized similar organizations in other states, lectured in 1974 on college campuses including Harvard, and in 1976 attended both the Democratic and Republican National Conventions, organizing "loiter-ins" at the former. In 1984, with the scholar and coinciding with the Democratic National Convention in San Francisco, she organized the Women's Forum on Prostitutes' Rights and the COYOTE Convention. She also attended the United Nations Decade Face of Women Conferences in Mexico City, the 1976 Tribunal of Crimes Against Women in Brussels, the 1977 International Women's Year Conference in Houston, the 1977 Libertarian Party Convention, and the 1980 Decade of Women Conference in Copenhagen. From 1985 to 1994 she lived with Pheterson in the Netherlands and then the South of France. They co-founded the International Committee for Prostitutes' Rights and organized the first and second World Whores' Congresses, held in Amsterdam in 1985 and at the European Parliament in