Puta Lives:
Gabriela Leite, Carol Leigh, and Sex Worker Activism from Brazil to the Bay
Thursday May 22, 2025 | 6-8pm
At the Tenderloin Museum | 398 Eddy St. SF, CA 94102
$10 Suggested Donation + NOTAFLOF | Register to attend via Humanitix
A book launch, film screening, and panel discussion celebrates legendary sex worker activists Gabriela Leite and Carol Leigh and explores how their legacies shape the present. The panel is moderated by Juana María Rodríguez and features features Luisa Rivera, Kate Marquez, Celestina Pearl, Esther Teixeira, and Meg Weeks.
As a preview to International Whore’s Day on June 2nd, Puta Lives will celebrate organizing efforts by sex workers, past and present. This event, a collaboration between the San Francisco Bay Area Sex Workers’ Film and Arts Festival and the Tenderloin Museum, will feature two films, Outlaw Poverty, Not Prostitutes, a documentary chronicling the World Whores’ Summit in 1989, directed by San Francisco legend Carol Leigh, and Fight Like a Puta, a contemporary short presenting the history of the Brazilian sex workers’ movement, co-founded by Gabriela Leite.
Following the screenings, historian Meg Weeks will read from her translation of Leite’s memoir, Daughter, Mother, Grandmother and Whore: The Story of a Woman Who Decided to be a Puta, recently published by Duke University Press. Finally, Weeks will join collaborator and literature scholar Esther Teixeira, and activists Celestina Pearl, Kate Marquez, and Luisa Rivera in a panel discussion about the book, the legacies of sex worker leaders such as Gabriela and Carol, and activism in the Bay Area, moderated by UC Berkeley Professor Juana María Rodríguez, author of Puta Life: Seeing Latinas, Working Sex. As Carol Leigh and Gabriela Leite, both deceased, left behind significant personal archives, the panel will also explore the connections between archiving, aging, and activism within the context of sex work.
Organized to coincide with the annual Latin American Studies (LASA) Conference in San Francisco, the event will be an opportunity to invite conference participants to a local San Francisco venue with local sex workers and other community members.