The Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act (Bill C-36) is inspired by the Nordic Model of sex work laws; pimps and johns will be held criminally accountable but not the sex workers themselves. At first glance, this seems reasonable—it isn’t the sex worker who will be punished. However his or her safety, critics say, will be in jeopardy.

These new laws will prevent workers from discussing safe sex practices online with clients, Caroline Newcastle, a sex worker and representative with Prostitutes of Ottawa-Gatineau, Work, Educate, Resist (POWER), a non-profit group for current and former sex workers, told the Toronto Star. “It’s essentially full re-criminalization,” she adds, point to the phrasing of  the proposed laws. In the same Star report Valerie Scott—one of the original workers named in Canada V. Bedford—calls the bill “a huge gift to sexual predators.”

“This will simply move sex workers out into more isolated and more marginalized areas of the city,” elaborates Jean McDonald, head of sex worker support group Maggie’s, in an interview with the Globe and Mail.

Today, human rights group Pivot released a press release that links to an open letter to Stephen Harper signed by 200 legal experts from across Canada expressing their concerns: “Targeting clients will displace sex workers to isolated areas where prospective customers are less likely to be detected by police.”

Justice Minister Peter MacKay says the federal government wants to pass the new bill this week, CTV News reports, calling it urgent. However, NDP justice critic Francoise Boivin says she wants the government to slow down and thoughtfully craft a new, Charter-compliant law.

The safety of these women is not something to push through and get over with. Hopefully, the next five months will be spent actually consulting these workers in order to come to a decision with their safety in front of everything else.

Parliament has until this December to rewrite the laws surrounding prostitution, following the December 2013 Canada V. Bedford decision, which decided Canada’s prostitution laws violate the security of a sex worker’s right to security of person, and forces them to rush negotiations and skip thorough security screenings.

As part of that December 20, 2013 decision, Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin wrote:

It is not a crime in Canada to sell sex for money. However, it is a crime to keep a bawdy-house, to live on the avails of prostitution or to communicate in public with respect to a proposed act of prostitution. It is argued that these restrictions on prostitution put the safety and lives of prostitutes at risk, and are therefore unconstitutional.

Writing the new laws, however, won’t be easy—and feminists are keenly aware of this.  “This is three women [Terri Jean Bedford, Amy Lebovitch and Valerie Scott who brought this case to court] who have said, ‘We want to work as sex workers, and we want to do that safely,'”  professor Viviane Namaste told a Concordia University paper in early January. “That sends a huge challenge to feminists but also to society as a whole.”

The subject of prostitution has always divided feminists: is it a patriarchal institution that exploits women? Is it a woman’s choice to make a living out of something they already do regularly? The Edmonton Police Services site touches on the truth:

Unfortunately, from the beginning of time there have always been certain men who exploit the economic and personal vulnerability of women, children, and other men for sexual purposes. Impoverished neighbourhoods often become a gathering place for people struggling with disabilities, mental illness, and addictions. These communities also become the targets of those who further exploit the vulnerable, i.e. pimps and johns and drug dealers.

As bystanders discuss the ethics surrounding prostitution, the Canadian government should be thinking of one thing: the safety of these women. Robert Pickton is still fresh in Canadian minds, and he is only the most famous example of violence against women in sex work. According to Justice Minister Peter MacKay the new legislation is already being drafted and will be introduced before its December deadline. He says it will protect women from violence and sexual abuse.

Scott told CBC News earlier this month she isn’t buying it, “MacKay is only interested in consulting with those whom seek to prohibit sex work, under the guise of ‘saving us.’ It makes it crystal clear that this federal government is solely interested in its own political safety and could [not] care less about our lives.”

The lives of Canadians are exactly what the Canadian government is supposed to think about. Regardless of questioning women’s morals and the reasons for why these women are doing what they are doing—these are not the only important factors. Yes, it is necessary for us to examine how we can prevent getting to this point where some of us need to choose survival crimes, but that must come after. Right now, we must protect women’s safety, and that is what should be considered before drafting anything ahead of schedule.

Illustration by Sylvia Nickerson

Each year, hundreds of women and teens are sucked into Ontario’s human trafficking rings. An in-depth investigation into the Highway 401 loop and the hard, lonely fight to shut it down

It’s the afternoon on a Sunday in late October in 2012. Det. Const. Graham Hawkins’ is ready to work. He flicks on his computer and plants his tall, burly frame into the chair. His fingers hit the keys. As a member of Waterloo Regional Police’s criminal intelligence branch, Hawkins has spent the past two years investigating sex trafficking in Kitchener, Ont. By now, typing in the web address of his main source, a Craigslist-type site called kitchener.backpage.com, is second nature. Hawkins’ mouse clicks on “escorts.” There is a long list of women offering services for the night, and many new postings. A 19-year-old girl is listed as “new to the city.” A 21-year-old “exotic treat” is in Kitchener for her last day before moving on. There is a match for every fantasy: college girls, Japanese girls, small blondes. Most are in their early twenties, and a few are listed as 18 or 19, though in reality some are much younger.

Hawkins is part of a network of RCMP and provincial police officers fighting against sex-trafficking in the city. Day in and out, he looks for trafficking victims and their pimps. It’s a busy job. The region is a hotspot for Ontario’s sex trade. Wedged in between Toronto and Niagara Falls, Kitchener is a perfect pit stop for eager johns traveling to either nearby destination. Its location is well-suited for pimps, too: hotels dot Hwy. 8 near the city, ready-made rendezvous for pimps who shuffle unwilling women along a trafficking loop that connects Hwy. 401 with Queen Elizabeth Way. Every point is hit, so long as supply and demand calls for it, a human conveyer belt that stretches from the Greater Toronto Area, to Kitchener-Waterloo, to London, and then on to Windsor. Pimps also work along highway 403 going through London, Hamilton, and Niagara Falls.

Worldwide, the UN has estimated there are about 2.4 million people working as slaves. Human trafficking (which can include slave labour as well as sex labour) rakes in U.S. $32 billion each year. In Canada, media reports from late 2012 show the RCMP estimates between 600 and 800 traffickers operate here; non-government organizations say the number, realistically, is in the thousands. As for Kitchener-Waterloo, it’s even harder to tell. Few want to admit trafficking happens here and Hawkins says numbers are extremely difficult to track. After all, it’s not exactly like there’s a registry for sex slaves. He does, however, see about 30 to 50 postings on kitchener.backpage.com offering sex services daily, a number that gives some indication to how prevalent trafficking is in Kitchener—a hub for families and a city not unlike the rest across Canada.

Human trafficking can look a lot like prostitution. Sitting in his office in Cambridge, Ont. just outside of Kitchener Hawkins explains the differences. The first post he clicks on is for a blonde woman listed as early twenties, though she looks older. Her camera phone is visible in the photos, showing that she took them herself. For better or worse, this is classified as voluntary, not trafficking. He clicks on the next one. A tiny blonde girl in underwear appears on the screen in front of him. Her back is towards the camera as she leans against the wall of a hotel room. Her body looks teenaged, and she didn’t take these photos alone. He says he would call the young girl on the screen or visit her hotel.

Sadly, Hawkins says many women and girls who are exploited often slam doors in his face or become defensive. “They are living in a world of fear,” he adds. If they do agree to talk, he will try to get a statement and then refer them to victim help services, such as the Hamilton Ont.-based organization Walk With Me. (There are no such services in Kitchener’s region.) There is no standard work week. Along with his own sleuthing, tips from other police, hotels, and social groups come in daily. From there, it is the grind of investigation and due-diligence, whatever he can do to make an arrest.

The federal government defines human trafficking as forcing someone to provide labour or sexual services for the profit of the perpetrator. Prostitution on the other hand, is the consensual exchange of sex for money and is legal in Canada so long as the sex worker is not soliciting the public and is not being pimped out. Oftentimes, when girls walk the streets, human trafficking looks identical to prostitution. Hawkins describes prostitution as having two tracks: the high track, and the low track. The latter usually centres on addiction, where women exchange sex for drugs. Sometimes the price tag is as low as $20. Downtown Cambridge’s prostitution scene shows this track: a dirty mattress next to the Grand River gets a lot of attention and a building with a sign reading “Linda’s Gift Shop” is not a gift shop, but a place for those involved in the sex trade. This is not where trafficked victims linger.

The high track is where you will find the lost girls. It’s where women dress the part and advertisements label them “escort.” They work the hotels or street corners. In the high track, as Hawkins calls it, two girls might stand on a corner. One of the women entered prostitution on her own. The one who stands next to her, dressed nearly identically, works the streets servicing johns because if she doesn’t, she’ll be beaten. She works under a pimp who will threaten her or her family. To keep her there, he may have moved her to a different city, away from her support system. If he needs to, he will even destroy her government documentation. He will continue to move her every few days, both to lessen his chances of getting caught and to maximize clientele. Sex workers often have pimps, too, to whom they owe a cut of the money; a trafficked girl hands over almost everything.

Canada’s borders host warnings of fines and prison stays for trafficking; we are still a main source for child-sex tourism. Trafficking is a patient, sneaky crime. It exists when a plane of handpicked statuesque girls with false documentation make their way through customs, claim their luggage and then disappear. Eastern European countries are easy targets. Political instability there has led to poverty-stricken households, each member of the family desperate to save the others. They think they are on their way to a promised job maybe as a nanny or waitress or model—one that never existed. This is called transnational human trafficking. The RCMP, however, has found that the majority of sex slaves in the country are Canadian by birth—as of April 2012, 90 percent of convicted cases or cases before the courts were domestic.

Jasmine is from a middle class home in Sault Ste. Marie. She grew up with the influence of both the Christian and Catholic Churches. At 17, she travelled south to London, Ont. to study at the University of Western Ontario. The stress of mimicking the lifestyles of her well-off classmates became a burden. “I used my OSAP and all my loans for school for just clothes so I could keep up with my friends,” she says. “I just wanted to fit in.”

It was a demand she couldn’t meet. One day, in her first year of university, her biology partner convinced her to visit a nearby strip club on a study break. Inside, the server told her she could make hundreds nightly. The next day, Jasmine started as a server. She stayed there for a year, until an underage drinking penalty force the club to close. Another waitress suggested they strip at another club to keep their income. When Jasmine started serving, the idea of stripping disgusted her. After a while, though, that feeling dulled. Many of the strippers were working to put themselves through law school or make money while earning their PhDs. At 21, she felt that if she had an end goal like the other girls, it was okay. After a month at a club in Windsor, the good money acted as a lure to Toronto strip clubs. There she met the man who would become her trafficker.

They had a drink. He was charming. He told her that he was a pimp, but that he was the kind who rescued girls, got them a house, and got them on their feet. “I didn’t fully know what a pimp was because I come from northern Ontario, a small town,” she says. “It’s pretty sheltered and very clueless.” They started dating. He said all the right things, she says, mentioning marriage and kids. He even paid her rent at her Toronto condo and gave her a car to commute to school. She even started working at TD Waterhouse, a step toward quitting the strip clubs—or so she thought.

He started small. There were always other girls around, ones he had working in the strip clubs and doing extras: sex, blow jobs, and hand jobs. He kept telling her how much the girls were making, slipping it into conversation. He would say a girl made $3,500 the night before. Or, he would get a girl to tell her about making $10,000 in just one night; Jasmine made $1,000 from dancing. This subtle manipulation worked. Almost six months after meeting him, she was doing “extras” in the clubs. The first time was traumatizing. Afterwards, her pimp beat her, choked her, and called her a dirty whore. He forced her to have sex with him without a condom. “I was balling and screaming saying I never wanted to have sex ever again,” she says, “and he just kept touching me, and choking me and telling me to shut up. He opened my mouth and spat in it.”

She didn’t stop, though, and it got worse. Her pimp’s control tightened. He required her to put her money from the extras in a drawer. He would dictate how much she could spend, reminding her they were saving to buy a house. She told herself it was managing finances. There were other things, though. He wouldn’t let her look at another black man; she had to keep her eyes down. She had to say “yes” not “yeah” and get good grades. The house had to be spotless. She had to shower three times a day. Only white linens were allowed on the bed. He would also take her to family events and cook her wonderful Haitian food and teach her to dance. “Then all of a sudden the next day,” she says, “for no reason, he would just beat the shit out of me.”

He talked about having a child with her. By then, Jasmine had realized she needed to get away. She told him she didn’t want a baby. He told her it wasn’t her choice. She was his for life. He raped her. She became pregnant. Though she had tried to leave before—he had tracked her down and forced her to return—her unborn child galvanized her to escape for good. She turned to her youngest brother, who took out a restraining order against Jasmine’s pimp.  During those 10 months, Jasmine started going back to church. She was afraid of what her pimp would do once the restraining order finished,  but four months after it ended, Jasmine finally gave her statement to the police. In November 2011, her pimp began serving 19 months for assault, living off the avails of prostitution, causing bodily harm, and uttering death threats.

Jasmine’s time in the strip clubs doing extras for her pimp lasted three years. While she was not trafficked along the 401, Jasmine identifies as a trafficking victim—someone else profited while she was forced into sex work. She is also one of the few survivors of sex trafficking I found who would share her story, the abuse so similar to what is happening to girls and women along the loop. Jasmine would know. She now works as an activist for Sex Trade 101, an organization of women that raises awareness of the truths of the Canadian sex trade by giving public presentations. She is happily married and raising her two daughters. Soon she will go back to school in Toronto.

Traffickers don’t just seek out the girls who want designer clothes and money to pay tuition. They look for girls with troubled pasts, appearing like Santa on Christmas Eve, lugging around a sack with a gift that’s just right. Trish’s pimp found her when she was living in a group home. Trish was in Calgary, but similar homes exist in Kitchener-Waterloo—Lutherwood, Ray of Hope, the Pioneer homes—and, indeed, all over Canada. Trish’s grandfather had molested her from age eight. Her would-be trafficker preyed on all her weaknesses, doing and saying everything to make her feel good and safe. Two weeks before her thirteenth birthday, Trish lost her virginity to him. He bought her a short pleather skirt and a see-through top with a heart that barely covered her nipples. “Two days later,” she says, “I was working the streets.” Her pimp trafficked her between Calgary and Edmonton, hotel to hotel.

Trish was expected to bring in a minimum of $1,000 per night and was allowed to keep $20. Hawkins says pimps from the GTA can make $3,000 in a day from just one girl who averages $300 per trick. “I rebelled,” says Trish, “not realizing that when you rebel, the consequences are worse. The same curling iron that we would have to curl our hair with, he would wait until it was really hot and insert it into our vaginas. There were times when even after we screamed and screamed, he wouldn’t stop. There were times when your body was in so much shock you couldn’t even scream. Then he would send us back out to work.”

At 18, Trish finally escaped her pimp. Not knowing anything else, she joined an escort company. The men were even more violent than those on the streets. After being choked unconscious when she was 21, she left the business for good. Years afterward, she spotted her pimp in a Calgary mall, an experience that left her body frozen with fear. Now 29, Trish lives in Ontario, the mother of two boys. Her marriage of five years ended when her husband, after learning of her past, became abusive. She is now completing a degree at Brock University. Her intention is to help abused women.

Fairview Mall is a cluster of hotels—a Radisson, a Holiday Inn, a Howard Johnson, a Best Western, a couple no-names, and a Hampton Inn a few kilometres away. Kitchener is best known for filling hotels with business people and tourists coming to Oktoberfest or visiting students at Conestoga College, but housing cheerful visitors is not their only purpose. Within these innocuous hotels, the girls work. Hawkins says his department’s research and ongoing investigations show traffickers don’t favour any particular hotel chain. Any vacancy will do.

It’s December 2012 and I’m standing in the parking lot of the Holiday Inn. Entwined trees sparkling green and blue, and someone has set up a tree fit for a catalogue Christmas inside, glowing a warm yellow. I enter and am immediately overcome with a chlorinated waft of air. The scent of a swimming pool used to excite me as a kid. I wonder if the signature hotel smell means something different to another girl my age. It’s midnight and there’s nobody here. I can’t imagine how it would feel to be one of those girls. Jasmine told me the very first night she was supposed to turn a trick, she couldn’t do it. She pretended she did, but was too nervous. Trish shaved her head to make herself less attractive so she wouldn’t have to do it anymore.

I step out of the elevator onto the fourth floor, walk down the hall, and stop at the window outside room 485 to look out at the view. There it is, the highway that Hawkins knows shuttles girls from this city to the next. I wonder who else has stood at this window. A john waiting to be serviced in 485? A girl waiting to be free? I wonder if the people at the front desk suspect anything when they book rooms. I wonder if the cleaning staff hear anything as they wheel their carts down the hallways, or if they know as they turn down the sheets. I wonder if there’s ever any evidence that gets tidied away when the room is made pristine for the next guest.

“We don’t see anything suspicious,” says Kitchener’s Hampton Inn manager Tom Stangl. “We are 90 percent corporate travellers from the U.S.” He suggests that his is not the type of hotel where it happens. Howard Johnson’s manager Kamal Patel says that once they know of this sort of activity, they check them out of the hotel. When asked how often this has happened or how they make sure they don’t come back, he doesn’t answer. Radisson Hotel refused to comment and Holiday Inn’s manager claims cluelessness about human trafficking. “No, I’m not familiar with it at all,” says Manager Naji Kotob. “Never has a policeman come in to talk about it.”

Hawkins says he is in touch with the hotel staff and managers daily. In fact, once when we speak, he says he is sitting in a hotel parking lot during a periodic check. “We are doing training with local hotels and managers and keeping them informed on what the crime trends are,” says Hawkins. But spotting the pimp or client in this real-life game of “where’s Waldo” is a little more complicated.  “These people aren’t coming in with a neon sign,” he says, “They are coming in looking like you or I, booking a hotel room. So it’s really hard to tell.”

In Canada, trafficking across borders can earn a person life in prison, plus a $1-million fine. Human trafficking within our borders can be punished with a sentence of up to 14 years or life in prison. If the victim is a minor, there is a minimum mandatory sentence of five years. In Canadian courts, the all-encompassing charge “human trafficking” refers to the actual crime, benefitting from it, or destroying or withholding legal documents as a way to assist a trafficker.  These trafficking-specific laws were introduced into the Criminal Code in 2005. As of April of last year, there had been 25 trafficking-specific convictions involving 41 victims and 56 ongoing prosecutions involving 85 accused and 136 victims (that have come forward).

“This isn’t a drug investigation or a gun investigation,” says Hawkins, “where I can take the evidence and put it in a locker for a year until we go to trial.” Part of the reason we don’t see more traffickers jailed, he explains, is because the courts rely on victims to testify, and some of the girls are just not ready for the emotional battle. The other problem is the clandestine nature of the crime. Criminals work behind closed doors and are constantly on the move. Traffickers are very discreet and for obvious reasons don’t welcome police presence. Last year, six offenders were convicted for trafficking-related offenses—sexual assault and living off the avails—but there were only three human trafficking-specific convictions.

That puny number motivates a group of nuns and laypeople in Waterdown, Ont., located just outside of Hamilton. Together they form The Waterdown Stop Human Trafficking Committee and have been travelling to schools and parishes in southwestern Ontario since 2004. “Human trafficking is such a hidden crime,” says one nun, Theresa Nagle. “We believe that increasing awareness and inviting action to change laws is the best thing for us to do.” Right now, they’re tackling the prickly subject of police officers’ misunderstanding of a trafficking victim’s situation. All of the members promote the Nordic Model—a system that punishes the johns, not the women involved.

“At this point in time, we are trying to change attitudes,” says Donna McKay, one of Waterdown’s lay members. “Many of the women that are involved in massage parlors or the sex trade really are victims, and I don’t think many police officers see them as victims.” After presentations in schools McKay says, people will admit that they had no idea criminals target the girls next door. They think it’s an international problem, she adds, but can’t believe it’s happening in places like Kitchener-Waterloo.

In December of last year, I sit in a bar in uptown Waterloo. The lights are slightly brighter than dim, and the walls are decorated with vintage beer posters. It’s 11 p.m. on a Thursday night in an area that is like a village for students of either Wilfred Laurier University or University of Waterloo, which are less than a kilometre apart. I think about what Hawkins told me about the predators.

“They are going to the university scene, the post-secondary scene, to the bars and things like that, looking for potential victims.”

It’s a slow night, but the group of students to my right seem happy with each other’s company. I have no way of knowing if someone like Jasmine’s trafficker ever visits this bar scanning the faces in the crowd for a girl to bring into the sex trade.

“Those guys are really smart, they are sneaky. They prey on people who are in a yucky part in their life. They are easy to manipulate, they are easy prey. I guess he saw that in me when he first laid his eyes on me.”

I see a girl I used to know, a model. She chugs back a beer before leaving for a cigarette with two guys she’s with. I think about what Jasmine said about meeting her trafficker after he begged her to have a drink.

“I sat down and had a red bull with him and he was just a smooth talker and he convinced me to start dating him.”

The guy with the guitar onstage to the side sings Tom Petty’s “Mary Jane’s Last Dance,” occasionally cracking a joke to a crowd too busy to care. For all I know, here is where it starts.

Illustration by Ethan Rilly.

Chester Brown, 51, is an accomplished graphic novelist whose new book, Paying for It, depicts his decision in 1999 to abandon romantic relationships in favour of paying prostitutes for sex. Along the way, however, he still seemed to find a version, unconventional though it may be, of true love.

This: How long did it take to do the book?

Brown: One year to write the script and four years to draw it.

This: The primary trigger for going to sex workers was when your romantic relationship with Sook Yin-Lee [the actor and CBC journalist] ended in 1999. When she had a new boyfriend move in with the two of you.

Brown: Right. But we’re still very close friends.

This: Why were you through with romantic love?

Brown: It brings people more misery than happiness, in a nutshell.

This: Haven’t I read that the most miserable creatures around are men who don’t have a relationship?

Brown: I think in large part that’s because of romantic love. They have this ideal in the mind and they’re failing to bring that into their life. If they didn’t want romantic love they then wouldn’t be miserable. It’s the ideal that’s the problem.

This: How many prostitutes did you go to over the years?

Brown: Twenty-three. Some I saw multiple times. Every single experience is in the book.

This: How much did you spend on them?

Brown: I’m not sure. I’ve never been asked that before. At roughly $200 each time…hmmm. I guess we could do the math.

This: In January 2003 you saw a sex worker you call Denise. Since then you have been monogamous with her and she’s been monogamous with you for the last four years. What is different about her?

Brown: She seemed more open. As time went on the connection between us seemed to grow. There were other things that happened to help establish a bond that unfortunately I can’t get into.

This: Because she doesn’t want her personal information revealed?

Brown: She told me to put her in my book as little as possible. I will say she’s an amazing person. Really wonderful and extremely trustworthy.

This: But you still pay her.

Brown: We have sex about every two weeks and, yeah, I pay her.

This: How do you define your relationship with her?

Brown: Hmmm. It’s not a boyfriend/girlfriend relationship. It’s not a romantic relationship.

This: You must have feelings for her.

Brown: I admit I have romantic feelings for her. And when you feel that way about a woman you want to talk about her. I wish I could blab away about her wonderful qualities.

This: Do you double date with friends?

Brown: No. Never.

This: Share holidays, like Christmas, together?

Brown: No.

This: What if she wanted you to stop paying her.

Brown: All of a sudden it would be like every other relationship. I think romantic relationships tend to fail. I’m happy with things the way they’re working.

This: Have you ever asked her to move in with you?

Brown: No.

This: It would ruin things?

Brown: Oh yeah. I think so.

This: Don’t many men who go to sex workers want the talking, the touching, the cuddling even more than the sex? Was that the case with you?

Brown: I definitely know that’s true of a lot of men. But I did want the sex.

This: They want the intimacy, even if it’s forced.

Brown: Yeah. Most of the prostitutes I saw would jump up and go to the shower after [we had sex]. Denise was one of the few who seemed to like to cuddle afterwards.

This: Was the intimacy you felt with her what was missing with the other sex workers?

Brown: Probably.

This: Which suggests that’s what you were looking for all along.

Brown: I hadn’t known that that’s what I was looking for but, sure, yeah.

This: Isn’t that what we’re all looking for?

Brown: Hmmm. I guess so.

This: You still down on romantic love?

Brown: I do change my mind at the end of the book. I come to think of it in a different way and I decide what I have a problem with isn’t romantic love but what I call possessive monogamy.

This: Where do you think your relationship is headed?

Brown: I’m pretty sure Denise is fine with the way it is right now. She doesn’t want me to be a conventional boyfriend. I think everyone else wants there to be a Pretty Woman type of story where we end up in a conventional marriage. But we don’t. No.

Still from 'Continental, un film sans fusil' (2008) directed by Stéphane Lafleur.

The title of Quebec director Stéphane Lafleur’s Continental, un film sans fusil (Continental, A Film Without Guns) is not only a playful warning to viewers seeking the adrenaline hit of an American action movie. A classic on the Quebec line-dance circuit, The Continental Walk is an American dance tune written by Hank Ballard—the man behind The Twist and The Hoochie Coochie Coo (line dancing is very popular with Quebec singles’ clubs). Their backs rigid, dancers of the Continental glide across the floor in sync, moving backward, then forward and to the left and right, occasionally jumping up and clicking their heels together. Like the characters in Lafleur’s feature, the lone dancers cross paths without touching each other. Lafleur pointedly drew from American popular culture for the title of his film, which follows the lives of four quintessentially North American characters lost in the circumstance of their suburban lives.

Lafleur is one of a generation of thirtysomething Québécois filmmakers, coming to be referred to as the “Quebec New Wave,” who explore the disquiet and confusion of life on this continent. Although these young filmmakers justifiably reject being labelled as a collective, taken together, their work reflects a new sensibility in Quebec cinema. While the characters speak French, their experience as members of North America’s largest francophone minority barely registers. Their cultural reference points are universally North American, not specific to Quebec. Questions of language and nation are conspicuously absent.

Critically acclaimed at home and increasingly recognized on the international festival circuit, Quebec New Wave directors include Yves-Christian Fournier (Tout est parfait, Everything is Fine); Henry Bernadet and Myriam Verreault (A l’ouest de Pluton, West of Pluto); Maxime Giroux (Demain, Tomorrow); Rafaël Ouellet (Derrière moi, Behind Me); Denis Côté (Carcasses, Carcass), Simon Lavoie (Le déserteur, The Deserter); and Guy Édoin (Les Affluents, a trilogy of short films).

Still from 'A l'ouest de Pluton' (2008), directed by Henry Bernadet and Myriam Verreault.

New Wave films are minimalist, reflective, and marked by the austere influence of distinctive, deliberate filmmakers like Roy Andersson, Pedro Costa, Ulrich Seidl, Darren Aronofsky, Gus Van Sant, and Bruno Dumont. They focus on the seemingly mundane, morose aspects of daily life, often with painstaking slowness. The dialogue is sparse and the takes are long. The themes they explore are dark: social isolation, the breakdown of the family, teenage suicide, and prostitution. And while they draw heavily on the work of Northern and Eastern European auteur filmmakers for their harsh, in-your-face realism, the Quebec New Wave is firmly rooted in the landscape and culture of North America. Many of their characters seem trapped in uninspired suburbs where they are cut off from nature and other people—except for their dysfunctional families.

Most of these New Wave directors came of age in the politically uncertain period after the 1995 separatist referendum defeat, when the Quebec nationalist movement was deflated and rudderless. They later practised their art with the thriving Kino experimental short film movement.

Their films respond to the blistering speed of contemporary media and to the wave of crowd-pleasing, nostalgic Quebec films released to considerable commercial success in the past decade, such as La Grande Séduction, Les Boys 4, and C.R.A.Z.Y., which portray modern Quebec culture as homogenous, insular, and cheerfully Norman Rockwellian in its ability to resolve conflict. Three of the filmmakers—Fournier, Ouellet, and Giroux—spent the early part of their careers immersed in consumer culture making video clips and advertising. Côté was a well-known film critic notoriously contemptuous of mainstream box-office hits.

Still from 'Continental, un film sans fusil' (2008) directed by Stéphane Lafleur.

It’s as if these young filmmakers are collectively saying “let’s slow down a minute and really take a look at what’s going on in this culture.” In Continental, which was awarded the prize for best first feature at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2007, lonely people try to connect, but can’t. Chantal, a single woman invited to a party on a blind date, is so ill-at-ease she drops a squirming baby to the floor with a thud. Is it a comment on Quebec’s declining birthrate that a woman in her early 30s panics when she touches a baby? In an equally uncomfortable moment, Louis, the travelling salesman, is invited by the couple next door to him at the hotel to watch them have sex. Lonely, he agrees. In what feels like an interminable shot he sits observing them, with a Styrofoam cup of wine in his hand, completely unaroused. Embarrassed, he abruptly leaves, mumbling his thanks.

Still from 'Tout est parfait' (2008), directed by Yves-Christian Fournier.

Yves-Christian Fournier’s Tout est parfait probes the taciturn world of five adolescents who feel so alienated they make a collective suicide pact (suicide is the number one cause of death among men aged 20 to 40 in Quebec). Written by Guillaume Vigneault—son of Quebec’s unofficial national poet Gilles Vigneault—and nominated for seven Genies, Tout est parfait screened at festivals in Seattle, Namur, and Belgium and was awarded the Claude Jutra Prize for best first feature from the Canadian Academy of Film and Television.

Using footage he shot in rural, urban, and suburban Quebec, Fournier created a generic North American post-industrial city. The five friends attend a massive high school and pass their time smoking dope and aimlessly driving around. Lower middle-class, they are bright but poorly educated. And while all five speak Québécois French, two of the boys are of ambiguous ethnicity: one appears to be Central American, another Scandinavian, though we never learn their origins.

Fournier and cinematographer Sara Mishara—an exceptionally talented artist who also shot Continental and Demain—jolt the audience with visuals juxtaposing both the possibility and despair of youth. In the slow-moving opening scene, a smooth-faced adolescent boy sits on a bus filled with sunlight and blue sky. Before he gets off at his stop, he hands his iPod to a radiant young woman who smiles at him. A few moments later, he shoots himself in a graveyard. In the following scenes, Josh, the central character, discovers one of his friends hanging from his bedroom ceiling in a sequence that is so tightly shot and harsh that it’s claustrophobic. Throughout the film, Fournier highlights the cultural and spiritual poverty of their domestic lives: the dark bungalow with neglected, greasy kitchen cupboards where one boy lives with an alcoholic father; or the sterile dining rooms where families sit around the dinner table staring at each other in silence.

“As human beings we are confused,” Fournier told me when I spoke to him last spring, shortly before the Jutra Awards. The 36-year-old director believes that the complexity of modern life, including technology overload, environmental problems, and lack of spiritual guidance, overwhelms young people. “Thinking about these issues we are faced with brought to my mind a character who is feeling empty, although he is full,” Fournier says, referring to the lead character, Josh. “I wanted to explore that emptiness.”

Still from 'Derriere moi' (2008), directed by Rafaël Ouellet.

Derrière moi, which opened TIFF’s 2008 Vanguard section last year and A l’ouest de Pluton, which won the Special Jury Prize in the Narrative Features category at the 12th Bermuda International Film Festival, also portray the vulnerability of North American adolescents with exceptional clarity. In A l’ouest de Pluton, directors Henry Bernadet and Myriam Verreault recruited a group of 14- and 15-year-olds, all non-actors, from a Quebec suburban high school and followed them for a 24-hour period. While the film is scripted, much of the dialogue was improvised. The shots are long and the camera hand-held. The film’s central drama is a house party where an unpopular girl invites a group of fellow students to celebrate her birthday. A group of them trash the house, stealing the family pictures off the wall and throwing them in a field. One boy is violently beaten. Another girl is seduced by a young boy then abandoned by him after they have sex. The teenagers are wild and uncontrolled—overconfident, hypersexual, ignorant, greedy. Yet they also seem utterly lost, navigating new experiences without wisdom or the guidance of adults.

Derrière moi is a slow-moving, cynical tale of Betty, a prostitute who travels to a small town and recruits lonely 17-year-old Lea into prostitution. The seduction of Lea by Betty is the centre of this psychological drama, although the film is nearly plotless until the final scenes.

Shot in dark indoor settings, the film’s shadowed, grainy texture is at times like a B-horror film: Betty is a vampire, preying on Lea’s sexual energy and youthful innocence. Ouellet wrote Derrière moi because he’s interested in how young North American women are drawn into the sex trade. “I worked at MusiquePlus for seven years,” explains Ouellet. “I was responsible for trying to sell adolescents a lifestyle based on consuming the latest iPod and being like everyone else. But young people have so much curiosity and naiveté and idealism. With my films I want to try to show them something else.” As in A l’ouest du Pluton, in Derrière moi it appears that no one is around to protect the young.

While their stories are at times opaque and frustratingly slow-moving, what is remarkable about these New Wave films is their careful attention to the detail of character. Unlike the films of celebrated Quebec filmmakers such as Denis Villeneuve (Polytechnique, Maelström) and François Girard (The Red Violin), which feature exquisite images but often suffer from weak scripts, New Wave films are obsessively character-driven: the cameras meander through their stories, revealing nuanced emotions with facial expressions, body language and long, uncut sequences. And in contrast to the practised and frequently dogmatic cynicism of celebrated Québécois director Denis Arcand, the New Wave films compassionately (and often humorously) portray a society in the midst of a spiritual and social crisis.

The culture they evoke is an uneasy mixture of American excess and Nordic austerity. It seems utterly appropriate for this wintry nation that has somehow produced two of the splashiest, most commercial acts on the Las Vegas strip: Cirque du Soleil and Céline Dion. What’s not present in New Wave films is the warmth and easy-going chattiness—the so-called joie de vivre— that anglophone filmgoers often associate with Canada’s other solitude. And the backdrops of these stories aren’t the romantic historic neighborhoods tourists flock to see, but the dreary suburbs and small towns where most Quebecers—most North Americans—live.

Post-war Quebec was rigidly Catholic and conservative until well into the 1960s. Five decades ago, the large, rural Quebec family was promoted as the ideal. Along with the church, it was viewed as one of the central pillars of the nation. Today, Quebec has one of the lowest birth and marriage rates and one of the highest male suicide rates on the continent. Quebec has transformed from a highly religious culture, where community and church were central, to a highly urbanized, secular society with a deeply ingrained media culture in half a lifetime. It appears that this new generation of filmmakers are measuring the fallout of such rapid, irrevocable change. In the process, they have reached beyond the boundaries of their own culture to develop a cinematic language that is both universal and yet—if it’s not too loaded a term—distinct.

John Mathenke, a Nairobi sex worker, was diagnosed with HIV in early July. He is working with the Sex Workers' Outreach Program to educate other sex workers about HIV prevention. Photo by Siena Anstis.

Blended into the colourful storefronts of Nairobi’s River Road area is the Sex Workers Outreach Program (SWOP), a discreet but accessible clinic offering HIV and STD testing and treatment to the estimated 7,000 prostitutes who work in the central business sector of Kenya’s capital city.

While the clinic was created in close consultation with Nairobi’s sex workers, its origins are the result of a partnership between the University of Nairobi and the University of Manitoba that dates back to 1980.

Shortly after the two schools first collaborated to start exploring the murky world of HIV-AIDS transmission through prostitution. Despite being a whole continent away and exploring a disease that was not yet a “hot topic,” the University of Manitoba was determined to continue the research it had started in Canada in the 1970s on STDs, and later HIV. The school’s initial findings attracted the attention of Herbert Nsanze, the then-new chair of medical microbiology at the University of Nairobi, who invited the U of M to work from Nairobi’s streets.

This partnership has resulted in some groundbreaking research, most notably, the discovery that some prostitutes are immune to HIV despite having more than 500 partners a year. The two universities have also launched two research and treatment clinics, including SWOP, which recently celebrated its fi rst anniversary.

Over the past year, SWOP has grown from a quiet start-up to a busy clinic that regularly treats 2,600 female and 65 male clients. To Joshua Kimani, the Kenyan-born, U of N-educated doctor who now oversees the clinics run by the two schools, these numbers are a sign of success.

Kimani is particularly excited to see the growing presence of male sex workers. “It takes a long time to win the confidence of men,” explains Kimani. “There is a double stigma, adding insult to injury, of men who have sex with men and who are also sex workers.” In Kenya, both homosexuality and prostitution are illegal.

Together, the University of Manitoba and the University of Nairobi have made a significant dent in the HIV rate among Nairobi’s sex workers. Majengo, one of their other clinics, saw the HIV rate drop from 10 percent to 1.5 percent over the past two decades. With research and technical support from the University of Manitoba, SWOP expects similar results in the coming years.

John Mathenke, a Nairobi sex worker, was diagnosed with HIV in early July. He has gone public with his story and started a health education organization to help other young gay sex workers avoid contracting the disease. Photo by Siena Anstis.

John Mathenke was once arrested for being gay but, after failing to pay the customary bribe, was forced to have sex with the policeman. He had an orgy with a priest who publicly excoriates homosexuality, along with five other Masaai boys. And his Arab trader clients curse him during the day, but come back looking for sex at night.

Such is the life of a homosexual prostitute in Nairobi, Kenya. “It’s better to be a thief than a gay in Kenya,” he says. Both are often punished by death, but being the latter means never revealing yourself to the public and remaining perpetually closeted. It means dealing with homophobes at day and pleasuring them at night.

Mathenke, a quiet-spoken young man, is forthright with his story. His gay identity has not been shamed or hidden by years of abuse. His ability to tell his intimate story to a stranger is testament to his bravery. He tells me that he wants to be openly gay – and to help those who want to do the same – in a country where all odds are stacked against him.

His forced silence is not only affecting Kenya’s gay population. According to the BBC, gay men in Africa have 10 times higher HIV rates because of homophobia. These gay men often have “cover wives” who are also eventually affected by HIV. It’s a vicious cycle in a country where the government has proved reluctant to address the mental and physical repercussions of homophobia.

In 2002, Mathenke left his poor community and followed other dream chasers to Nairobi. He paid a barber $30 to be trained as a haircutter. His perfect English eventually landed him a job selling textbooks in a lavish Westlands shopping center. This was the scene of his first same-sex experience. While, subconsciously, he knew it had always been a part of him—he says he used to wear long shirts when he was small and tied a rope around his waist to pretend it was a dress—he had never experienced sex with a man.

A Frenchman would come in, day after day, he says. He would open thick African history books and look at pictures of naked men. He bought many books; some that Mathenke would help him carry to the car. He never thought much of this flirtation, until the man took him out for dinner. Inebriated, they went back to the Frenchman’s home and had sex. The man took him home almost every night after that. In the same store, Mathenke encountered the priest with whom he had a five-person orgy.

At this time, Mathenke was discovering his sexual identity and decided to move to Mombasa, an area rumored to be less hostile to gay relationships. $700 in his pocket, he put himself up in a hotel. Eventually the money dried up and he was left desperate. He went to Mercury, a local bar, and was offered money for sex with an older European.

“When you’ve had sex with someone once, they don’t want you again,” explains Mathenke. Customers became few and far between and he continued to sleep on park benches, washing in the seawater in the morning. He also faced continued stigma: “Arab traders would insult us at day, and come looking for sex at night.” A lot of his clients were—and are—popular religious leaders who would curse homosexuals in public and find pleasure in paid homosexual company in private.

Mathenke eventually returned to Nairobi, where he settled in with a new boyfriend. He continued to see clients from the big hotels: the Hilton, the Serena, the Intercontinental. He had yet to use a condom.

Community outreach by Sex Workers Outreach Program (SWOP) in Nairobi eventually led him to his “second-home.” Provided with free health services and counseling, he tested positive for HIV/AIDS three weeks ago. So did his partner. Instead of bemoaning his future, Mathenke has launched himself into a new project. He is bringing together groups of young gay sex workers and helping them form an advocacy organization, Health Options for Young Men on HIV/AIDS. He is teaching these young men—some only 12 years old—about using condoms and lubricant when having sex with men.

Mathenke’s work is necessary. Many of the bars and hotels on the coast and in Nairobi are, by default, gay bars. The men frequenting these places pay off the police so that they’ll be left alone. But violent raids continue to happen. At the same time, homophobia ensures that these men are never reached by HIV/AIDS awareness. Changing public behavior is key to lowering the HIV rate and protecting all Kenyans, gay or otherwise.

While the government has long been reluctant to address the role of homophobia in increasing HIV/AIDS rates, there have been some positive changes over the years. Gloria Gakaki, a social worker at SWOP, highlights the brave role of Dr. Nicholas Maraguri, Head of the National AIDS and STD Control Programme (NASCOP), who is pushing the government to address HIV among Kenya’s hidden gay populations. Maraguri has also been meeting directly with male sex workers to get a more in-depth idea of what their problems are, and how government can help.

For further information on SWOP or to donate to Mathenke’s new organization, please contact Gloria Gakaki at Ggakii@csrtkenya.org.