Sex workers have put together an exhibit telling their story in the city of Vancouver, Canada.
Six former prostitutes, in collaboration with a local artist and the Simon Fraser University have put together an exhibit called “History of Sex Work: Vancouver” on at the Dominion Hotel until May. The exhibit, examining the history of prostitution in Vancouver, is timely as it coincides with the trial of Robert Pickton, a local pig farmer who has been charged with the murder of twenty-six women, mostly prostitutes and drug users from Vancouver’s downtown Eastside, also known as the “Low Track.”
The world’s oldest profession, as prostitution is often called, has existed in Vancouver since the city itself. The first brothel was established in 1893, just around the corner from the hotel where the exhibit is being held. Panels of pictures and texts give an idea of the clothes worn by the women, the saloons they worked in and how they played an integral role in the making of the city. The sex work business was big business in those days, when the Gold Rush drew a lot of people West. There was a moment in time when the city actually ran out of money and used fines paid by the women sex workers to pay its men.
Where and how the women worked also changed, depending on the economics and morality of the times. For decades, prostitutes worked out of hotels and bars, and were sometimes even offered on hotel room-service menus. Surprisingly, it is the white, upper-middle class members of the women’s suffrage movement and their morality squads that played a big role in demonizing the working women as carriers of disease and leading to their subsequent ghettoization into the worst parts of town. A poster on display shows Hitler, a sex worker and the president of Japan, claiming the prostitute is the worst of the three.
Sex workers were forced to take their work to the streets in 1975, when Vancouver’s major strip club was shut down. Starting out on downtown and surrounding streets, the women were eventually marginalized to the Lower East Side by residents and police. In the last 25 years, more than sixty sex workers have been reported as missing. For information about the exhibit, see www.historyofsexwork.com
This article was published Monday, April 16, 2007.
