by SASHA

Montreal’s Coalition for the Rights of Sex Workers has galvanized its colleagues on an international scale for In Heat: The Festival for the Rights of Sex Workers. The event includes panel discussions that are work-, history-, legally- and politically-related, a film festival with selections from around the world, parties, cabarets, an award ceremony called the Golden Vibrators and a public action in the form of a giant love letter to prostitutes. It’s an event which many involved feel is groundbreaking.

“It’s the first time in Montreal we have so many sex workers standing up publicly, with so many international supporters, and it’s the first time we’re in personal contact with these sex worker movements that have been such strong and successful social movements in other parts of the world,” says Anna Louise Crago, a member of the Coalition. The following are just some of the luminaries who will be featured at the festival.

Feminist vanguard

Karina Bravo was born in Guayaquil, Ecuador, is 34 years old and has a 16-year-old daughter. Bravo has been a sex worker for nine years, was head of the Ecuadorean organization Autonomous Workers of June 22nd, and now works at LASALA, a centre in Machala (the capital of El Oro province in south-western Ecuador), run by sex workers for sex workers that teaches safe sex, self-esteem, worker rights, empowerment and gender politics.

“Right now, I coordinate this centre,” says Bravo through translator Crago. “I came to Machala and got to know the association and fell in love with it and all that was being done. They proposed that I participate and since then, I have been fighting for my rights and those of my sisters in the sex trade. It is important to me to be in contact directly with all of them and know what they desire and think, and especially to listen to them and accept everyone for who they are.”

Bravo has come to talk about LASALA, an organization that is highly respected by Ecuador’s feminist community. After the dictatorship fell in Ecuador in 1979, the prostitutes were the first women to unite, opening the path for other women to fight for their self-determination. In return, Ecuadorian feminists have given them incredible support.

Before she became a prostitute, Bravo “had the same prejudices and believed the same myths about sex work and sex workers as most people do. However, above and beyond that was my need and responsibility as a mother, so I let go of all that. I have learned so much that it has been like a second school of life, with all the joys and sadness. I am more human now, more centred in what I desire for me and my sisters in the sex trade. I still have my feet in sex workers’ shoes and I know that none of what they say about us is true. Every time I have a chance to say so, I do.”

Filling the transmen void

Anyone who makes ’80s-influenced goth punk tranny porn is either going to have a great sense of humour… or not. Christopher Lee most certainly does. Lee is a female-to-male transsexual who lives in San Francisco and whose all female-to-male transsexual porn, Alley of the Tranny Boys, is a favourite at San Francisco’s celebrated sex store Good Vibrations. Lee has also directed film and video “in a queer capacity” for television, and his work includes documentaries on gender identity. He was one of the Grand Marshals of Pride 2002 in San Francisco, where, as he puts it, “I shook babies and kissed hands.” He is also a co-founder of Tranny Fest, a weeklong festival in the Golden Gate City celebrating transgenderism in film, video, and culture.

Before Lee transitioned, he worked in the sex trade as a woman. “Because I was getting knocked out of my industry, I wanted to test the market for female-to-males.” Lee discovered there was little in the way of sexual material depicting transmen, “not even in Amsterdam.” When he brought Alley of the Tranny Boys to a gay male theatre in San Francisco called Knob Hill, they apparently thought they had seen it all. “Their tone of voice went from jaded to excited,” says Lee, “and they said, ‘Now, there’s something new.’”

Lee will be in town for a panel discussion called Sex Work and Film (which also features former sex worker, local filmmaker and Mirror 2003 Noisemaker Zoe Brown), as well as presenting his gothic-punk porno, Sex Flesh in Blood, “a hardcore tale where leathermen, skinheads, vampires, transpecies and cadavers collide.”

Lee does not consider himself to be too political but says, “I suppose the things I showcase could be conceived this way.” One of his stars sums up his perspective well: it is politically important that they (as transpeople) show their sexual relevance in this world.

The home office

“The sex industry has customers,” says pragmatic Bettie Page lookalike Seska, who runs www.seska.com, a fully amateur sex site featuring herself and her friends. “Many people from all walks of life buy our products and services. All voices in this partnership need to speak up and be heard. Customers and workers alike.”

Seska is 32 and began working in adult entertainment on the Internet when she was 27. She will be presenting a workshop called Independent Sex Work on the Web.

“I will be discussing the different kinds of sex work available to people on the Internet as well as sharing my personal experiences in the adult industry,” she says. “It is legitimate work and it needs to be seen as that. By making my voice heard, people can learn more about the different people who work in the sex industry. It isn’t all about the negatives that are portrayed by most media. It is richer and more complex than that. I have appreciated the independence my Web site has given me. I work from home, make my own hours and work with whom I choose.”

Seska does her work with the help and encouragement of her husband James, whom she refers to as her soulmate, and who can also be seen, in various states of enjoyment and undress, on Seska’s site.

Politics out loud

“I was already a political person before I became a prostitute,” says Mirha-Soleil Ross, a male-to-female transsexual videomaker, performer and activist. “I had previously been involved in various feminist, queer and animal rights organizations. So thinking critically about issues and oppression, and thinking about how to effect social change, was something I was already doing with regards to other issues.”

Ross is a native Montrealer. “I started working the streets in 1990, continued for two years until I moved to Toronto in 1992. From then on, I have worked mainly indoors as an escort. In the late ’90s, I also worked full-time for one year as an Internet porn model.”

Ross will be participating in the panel From Vancouver to Montreal: Confronting Violence Against Sex Workers. She will also be presenting a video of her one-woman show, Yapping out Loud: Contagious Thoughts From an Unrepentant Whore, which was presented in May 2002 in Toronto as part of MAYWORKS: A Festival of Working People and the Arts. “Most of my recent performance work has been in monologue form,” says Ross. “So I’ll take part in the cabaret on the Friday to present a monologue called ‘Sugar and Me.’ It details my one-shift sex adventure with an Internet porn model and co-worker named Sugar. It talks about my coming to terms with my attraction for other hyper-femme transsexual girls and my pleasure in eating Sugar’s ass inside out!”

Ross feels that her greatest contribution to the Festival will be Yapping Out Loud. “With that show I offer people, through humour and stories, some fresh and first-hand perspectives on issues related to prostitution. I talk about how various anti-prostitution discourses and campaigns - whether they come from social workers, feminists, the police, residents‚ groups - impact negatively on our working conditions and lives, and ultimately how they are responsible for the terrible stigma that’s attached to us and the violence that’s perpetrated against us.”

A guy thing

Sid is a playful yet proficient outcall prostitute who grew up in Quebec City and moved to Montreal when he was a student.

“I studied computer science but was never able to graduate,” he says. “After several part-time office jobs, some of which were in the communications field, when it was time to begin repaying my loans, I decided to try selling sexual services on the side. After six months, I left my job and this has become my main occupation, which I was happy to choose. I have no boss, I keep total control on what I decide to do, and now people finally appreciate what I do and are not afraid to tell me so. I expect my chosen career to last several more years, and bring happiness and gaiety.”

Sid’s “virtual sidewalk,” www.sid3x.com, is a testament to his past in computer science. It’s a highly detailed site, showcasing his various personas, a complete list of his working appareil and actual maps that give price according to location (Sid likes to take the metro rather than taxis), weather and time of day.

Sid will be part of the panel Stories From the Struggle. “I will talk about the challenge of organizing male sex workers and bringing us a sense of belonging and solidarity,” he says. “Repression and laws have turned most of us into ‘virtual’ beings, only ads in the same column, often inaccessible to each other, but it is together that we will make a difference. Each time one of us comes out openly in public, it eases doing so for every following one and will ultimately end the stigma and discrimination from which we are now suffering. The festival is a chance to go public, share our experiences, our love for this profession we practice. It can be the embryo of a new social scene, an exercise of solidarity, whatever we wish!”

Talking tough

Claudia is a male-to-female transsexual street prostitute who has been working for 18 years, logging the last four as a woman. She is a tireless activist, accumulating 600 names on a petition against police harassment (which included such classic lines as, “I have the right to eat my pizza in peace and smoke my cigarette in peace”) to present to the city council. She has appeared on talk shows and in francophone women’s magazines like Femme Plus as a straightforward, first-class paradigm of the independent street worker, and says the secret to her self-possession is to always maintain a consistent opinion. Claudia has faced irate vigilantes both on the job and at meetings in Centre-sud (her own neighbourhood), often diffusing tension with her candid, winning personality. When she went to apply at her present apartment, she turned to the landlord and said, “I’m a transsexual street prostitute. Do you have a problem with that?” Apparently he didn’t.

Despite the fact that Claudia has had some trouble with misrepresentation in the media (galling but not at all exceptional was a news show that went to the trouble of filming her in her cozy home with her cat, doing all the things that a transsexual street prostitute who doesn’t take drugs does, and then showed nothing but a clip of her standing on the corner, juxtaposed with the story of another street prostitute who fit the squalid stereotype a little better), she says, “I have found a passion. I love the cameras because they can hear your voice, it’s authentic, they hear you laugh, see your expressions.”

Claudia will be presenting “a resumé of my life till now.” The festival is significant to her because, “It’s the sex workers speaking, it’s our voice. We talk for ourselves. We talk good, we talk bad, but at least we’re talking.”:

All information on events, dates, times and locations can be found at the Coalition festival site, www.trsx.org