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It all began as a graphic novel written by a young man in Toronto named Chester Brown.
The autobiographical story told inside was about Brown’s own relationship with his girlfriend in Toronto in the early 2000’s, how they opened up their relationship, and how he ultimately ended up turning to sex workers to satisfy his intimacy needs.
That graphic novel has now been turned into a movie called Paying For It, which is screening until the end of this month at Dave Barber Cinematheque in Winnipeg’s Exchange District.
The film’s director is Brown’s former girlfriend, Sook-Yin Lee, the former MuchMusic VJ and former host of Definitely Not the Opera on CBC Radio 1. For her, the story behind Paying For It goes far beyond cataloguing Brown’s experiences with sex workers. “He draws this incredible parallel between the fight for queer liberation and the struggle for consensual sex worker rights around the world,” she said in an interview on Morning Light. “To me, it had to do with labour rights and human rights and women’s rights.”
Lee appreciates that the conversation surrounding sex work in Canada is a complicated one, and that people might have an adverse reaction to the idea of this film. She notes that it was one that she had herself in the real-life version of this story. “When Chester told me that he was visiting a sex worker back in the day, I had the same feelings. I was like, ‘Whoa!’ Here I was trying to be so political and a cool kind of riot girl growing up in Vancouver, totally ensconced in a political community, a progressive community, but still, I was like, ‘What?!’”
One of the key distinctions that Lee makes with this film is that everyone involved in this story is a consenting adult. “Oftentimes, people think that consensual sex work is the same as sex trafficking, and they’re different,” she explains. “We have to be able to denote the differences. When people in the media conflate the two, that means we don’t have to actually talk about labour rights.”
“I don’t glamourize nor denigrate sex work,” Lee continues. “I view it through a lens of labour. Not all sex workers are victims, not all clients are vile. There are so many nuances.”
While Lee wanted to convey the message that sex workers are just as deserving of rights as any other class of worker in this country (she points to other nations that have provided sex workers with paid leave and benefits in recent months), she also wanted to make a movie that was compelling without being too preachy. “What I wanted to do was tell a story about flawed people making choices and transformation and tell a good story that, instead of leading with politics first, leads with the story.” This approach helps to humanize Lee’s portrayal of the sex workers and allows for a nuanced look at relationships in many forms.
“There’s many permutations of intimacy and vulnerabilities and tendernesses, and I think the sheer fact that it’s a comedy helps everything go down,” Lee says.
Lee also notes that the film’s labour lens will have extra resonating power in this community. “Winnipeg has a long history of caring about people,” she says, citing her observances over fourteen years of hosting Definitely Not the Opera which was based out of CBC’s Winnipeg offices. “I also know that there’s also people that aren’t so caring as well. It’s a big, kind of intense pot of perspectives. I try to walk the right path... an internal right path. And I think this is a movie that hopefully can appeal to all kinds of people from all kinds of situations.”
Paying For It is screening at Dave Barber Cinematheque until February 28. A conversation with director Sook-Yin Lee presented by McNally Robinson Booksellers is planned for February 23 at 7 p.m. For tickets and more information, moviegoers can visit the Dave Barber Cinematheque website.