Since the early 1980s, Canada's media have continually promoted the stereotype of the male sex worker as AIDS vector. An example is an opinion piece in the Vancouver Province concerning the difficulty of curbing the irresponsible behaviour of sex workers and their clients. Though the article, entitled "A Deadly Dilemma," reported on an HIV antibody-positive female sex worker, it was illustrated by a quarter-page photograph of two male sex workers, with the caption "male prostitutes wait for customers ... difficult issues for health officials."248

In 1993, Canada's press had a field day as tales of gay pornography in the city of London, Ontario, filled the country's newspapers.

Exaggeration and misrepresentation have characterized the London story from day one. There is said to be a child porn ring, but most of the men who have been arrested don't know each other, and only two of them have made any porn, none of which was ever distributed to anyone else. If anything it is a child-porn duet. Distinctions have completely collapsed. Seventeen-year-olds, at the height of their sexual vigour, are called "children." The reporting makes it sound like these angelic boys were all lured from their well-to-do nuclear families, when in fact they all, with maybe one or two exceptions, come from broken, dysfunctional homes, to use the words of the court record. They found, usually with each other's help, gay men who would give them money and clothes, and in some cases a place to stay. This subculture of men and boys has been relentlessly attacked in London by three institutions acting in concert: the police, the social welfare agencies, and the press.249

The typical 1990s media frenzy surrounding the London sex trials had implications not only for the men and youth of this mid-size Ontario town, but for male sex workers and their clients in cities across the country:

I'm going to stick to the things I know. The boys in London are being treated like criminals for trying to earn a living as hookers, which is their business. Their private lives have been splashed all over the press and all over their communities. But London is not the only place young male prostitutes are being harassed. Over the past eight months in Toronto four young males have been arrested and many others have been questioned around a so-called "kiddie porno ring."250

Footnotes

248. Vancouver Province, October 5, 1990. [back]

250. Matthew McGowan, quoted in Sorfleet, A. and Bearchell, C., "The Sex Police in a Moral Panic: How the ŒYouth Porn' Law Is Being Used to Censor Artists and Persecute Youth Sexuality," Parallelogramme, 1994, 20, 1, p. 19.