Sex work is big business in Canada. How big? No one knows. There are a number of reasons for this.

First, sex work is largely illegal and many sex workers are hidden or invisible, often working indoors. Second, people don't always agree on how to define male sex work. Finally, sex workers can move around and drop in and out of the industry. It is particularly difficult to estimate the number of escorts and independent advertisers in a city, as these men sometimes change their names, addresses and telephone numbers to avoid contact with police.15

Not the oldest profession

Contrary to popular myth, sex work is not the oldest profession in Canada. Though there are some accounts of prostitution-like relations among First Nations peoples, it is generally believed that sex work was first introduced on Canadian soil by Europeans.16

Early writings on female sex work from the late 19th and early 20th centuries cover mainly public, or visible, sex workers. There is no early writing on the more hidden aspects of commercial sex, as these have historically fallen outside the jurisdiction of the law and the police.17

Much of the public's discomfort with sex work is rooted in the fear of the sex worker as carrier of sexually transmitted disease.18 This fear is not new, and can be traced to the period leading up to the First World War, at which time there was great public concern regarding the spread of venereal disease from sex worker to soldier. This was because "venereal disease was rampant in the Canadian military."19 So the control of sex work was closely intertwined with the control of the spread of sexually transmitted diseases. And predictably, "little attention was paid to the male role, whether it be passing VD on to their wives" or spreading it among sex workers.20

Male sex work in an era of STDs

Most of the information gathered for this document was initiated in the mid-1970s, when, for example, there was a noticeable increase in male street sex workers in Vancouver, with estimates of 200 adult and younger male sex workers in the downtown area on a regular or part-time basis.21 Some of the first media reports which introduced male sex work to the Canadian public were published in the late 1970s, when street sex work in Toronto began to be seen as a community problem. There is a consensus that it was clean-ups like those of Toronto's Yonge Street that led to the growth of visible street sex work in Canada.22

And visible it became. In the late 1980s, the Department of Justice estimated23 that between 10% and 33% of street sex workers in a number of large Canadian cities were men.24 In Halifax, "the male prostitution stroll25 on Citadel Hill had in the past and still has 4 or 5 prostitutes working on any evening."26 More recently, sex workers themselves have estimated that in a major city like Toronto there may be approximately 200 male workers working indoors and 150 male sex workers working outdoors during any one season.27

Certainly, estimates of the numbers of males involved in prostitution vary. A study conducted in Victoria in 1997 reported that nearly an equal number of male and female youth responded to advertisements requesting interviews, and a 1994 Ottawa study reported that 54% of sex worker respondents recruited by street outreach workers were male.28

As estimates of the numbers of females and males involved are usually dependent upon arrest statistics, the gender differences may be exaggerated by police enforcement practices such as a reluctance to sting males who sell sex.29

Footnotes

15. International Conference on Prostitution and Other Sex Work, Participation Kit, Montreal, Quebec Public Interest Research Group at McGill University, 1996. [back]

26. Fleischman, J., Violence Against Prostitutes in Halifax, Criminal Law and Young Offenders Research Unit, Research, Statistics and Evaluation Directorate, Policy Sector, Department of Justice, Technical Report #TR1996-16e, Ottawa, Department of Justice, 1995.

27. Prostitutes' Safe Sex Project, Prostitutes' Safe Sex Project, What Is It and How Does It Work, Toronto, Prostitutes' Safe Sex Project, 1991; Andrew Sorfleet, written communication.

28. Research Subgroup of the Sexually Exploited Youth Committee of the Capital Regional District, A Consultation with 75 Youth Involved in the Sex Trade in the Capital Regional District (CRD), Victoria, Capital Regional District, 1997; Caputo, T., Weller, R. and Kelly, K., Phase II of the Runaways and Street Youth Project: The Ottawa Case Study, Policing Division, Solicitor General of Canada, Final Report #1994-11, Ottawa, Ministry of Supply and Services Canada, 1994a, cited in Federal-Provincial-Territorial Working Group on Prostitution, Report and Recommendations in Respect of Legislation, Policy, and Practices Concerning Prostitution-Related Activities, Ottawa, Department of Justice, 1998.

29. Federal-Provincial-Territorial Working Group on Prostitution, Report and Recommendations in Respect of Legislation, Policy, and Practices Concerning Prostitution-Related Activities, Ottawa, Department of Justice, 1998, p. 34.