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Queer/Sex/Work
Tickets
Join us for a program of rarely or never before screened short videos by Canadian queer and trans sex worker activists, or interviews featuring them, from the 1970s-1990s. This program foregrounds queer and trans sex workers’ own voices, speaking candidly to one another about their experiences, or engaging with straight media to explode myths and bust stigma faced by sex workers. This program is presented by the “Sex Worker Self-Authoring in the Canadian Women’s Movement Archive” project at Carleton University in collaboration with Maggie’s Toronto Sex Worker Action Project.
The screening will be followed by a brief talkback with programmers and co-presenters.
Films
The founder of Canada’s first sex worker rights organization, Better End All Vicious Erotic Repression (BEAVER), is interviewed by feminist journalist Lynne Gordon on an early consumer rights cable television program. Baba Yaga tirelessly responds to Gordon’s prying questions that mirror many of the presumptions of the mainstream feminist movement at the time.
Produced as part of the National Film Board’s Five Feminist Minutes, this collaborative work between Gwendolyn and fellow sex workers at the Canadian Organization for the Rights of Prostitutes (CORP) and Maggie’s is an examination of police harassment, safe sex peer education, and sex worker’s rights.
Three video-diary segments in which a transsexual prostitute recounts different circumstances that lead her to practice unsafe sex with clients.
In this raw unedited footage San Francisco sex worker activist Carol Leigh interviews Andrew Sorfleet (Maggie’s, Sex Worker’s Alliance of Vancouver, Triple-X Workers’ Solidarity Association of British Columbia) and Danny Cockerline (CORP, Prostitute’s Safe Sex Project, and Maggie’s). Each of these candid shot-from-the-hip interviews features a conversation between friends and fellow activists talking about the overlaps and conflicts between queer and sex worker scenes in Toronto.
Biographies
Ryan Conrad is an activist, artist, and educator who teaches at the Feminist Institute of Social Transformation at Carleton University. Conrad currently leads a SSHRC-funded research project, titled Sex Worker Self-Authoring in the Canadian Women’s Movement Archive, that explores the holdings of the CWMA housed in the Archives and Special Collections at the University of Ottawa. The project locates and animates written, visual, and audio/visual materials produced by sex workers and the sex workers’ rights movement in Canada from 1977-1992. Conrad was also a member of the now-defunct sex worker rights collectives Prostitutes of Ottawa of Ottawa-Gatineau Work Educate Resist (POWER) and Action Putes et Allie.es du Quebec (APAQ).
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