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Carol Leigh a.k.a Scarlot Harlot
Carol Leigh has been working as a prostitute, activist and artist in the Bay Area for the past fifteen years. As a founding member of ACT UP (in San Francisco), she organized a campaign against mandatory HIV testing of prostitutes. She was recently seated on the San Francisco Board of Supervisor's Task Force on Prostitution representing San Francisco's Commission on the Status of Women. For the past four years, Leigh has coordinated a street outreach program through the San Francisco Coalition on Prostitution, providing condoms, and health and safety information to street workers in San Francisco. Leigh provides referrals and support services in collaboration with a number of health service providers in the Bay Area including the Women's Needle Exchange. Leigh attended Boston University's Master's Program in Creative Writing, studying poetry with Anne Sexton. She teaches a course titled, "Prostitution 101" at San Francisco's Harvey Milk Institute. She also teaches video production for San Francisco's Community Television, and at Street Survival Project, an outreach service providers/employment program for young women. Since the late seventies, Leigh has written, performed and produced work in a variety of genres on women's issues including work based on her experience in San Francisco massage parlors. Leigh's one woman play, The Adventures of Scarlot Harlot, was featured at The National Festival of Women's Theater in 1983. She received numerous awards for her video documentaries on women's issues and gay/lesbian issues, including three awards from Visions of Us at the American Film Institute. Her videos include Die Yuppie Scum (First place- Experimental Documentary-Athens International Festival), Safe Sex Slut (distributed by Video Databank, Art Institute of Chicago) and Yes Means Yes. No Means No. (First place - Fiction-American Film Institutes' Visions Contest). She completed an arts residency at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center in Buffalo, New York. Leigh has appeared on Donahue, Nightline, Access America, Geraldo and numerous other national and international TV and radio shows. "The Collected Work of Scarlot Harlot," a series of activist documentaries, has been running on San Francisco public access cable since 1988. Leigh also produced WAC Attack, Women's Action Coalition TV for several years. Over 100 articles have been published by or about Leigh/Harlot in books, newspapers and magazines. Leigh's video, Outlaw Poverty, Not Prostitutes was censored at the University of Michigan Law School, and won a settlement represented by the Arts Censorship Project at the ACLU. The video won an award in 1992 at American Film Institutes' Visions of U.S. contest. Leigh was nominated for a 1993 Rockefeller Fellowship in the category of "Interdisciplinary Film/Video documentary." She is a contributor to several anthologies, Uncontrollable Bodies: Testimonies of Identity and Culture (Bay Press 1994); Gauntlet: Exploring The Limits of Free Expression- Issue #7; Policing Public Sex (South End Press, 1996); Sex Work (Cleis Press 1987) and others. Leigh is a member of COYOTE, Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics, a prostitutes' rights organization; Action for Police Accountability; the Harvey Milk Democratic Lesbian, Gay Bisexual Democratic Club; and the National Organization for Women. more articles: |
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