InFocus Magazine — The Brothel Project

Feb/Mar ’10
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The Brothel Project
Two Comox Valley women connect to collaborate on a documentary film.

By Ian Lidster • February, 2010

What is a nice Comox Valley girl like you doing in a place like this? In fact, what are two nice Comox Valley girls doing in a place like this?
The place in question is—at this point at least—a metaphorical brothel and two locally-connected women ended up having, quite by accident, a connection with that place of business. No—not in a bad way, but in fact in a highly positive way.
One of those women was raised and educated in this community, and the other spent many of her formative professional years honing her craft here.
The first is well-known and equally well-regarded Victoria journalist and community activist, Jody Paterson. The other side of the duo is an astute and talented film director who was once the youngest program manager at Comox Valley Cablenet. She is April Butler-Parry.
The Brothel Project director April Butler-Parry got her start in film-making at Comox Valley Cablenet. Photo by Photo by Walt Nicholson
Paterson and Butler-Parry are connected via The Brothel Project. This 52-minute film was a feature in the Victoria Film Festival in late January, and is to be shown on Global Television, likely in March. This is where the pairing of Paterson and Butler-Parry takes place, for Paterson is a featured player in the film, which concerns the quest of Paterson and her cohort, Lauren Casey, to establish Canada’s first legal brothel in the sometimes staid BC capital. More about the film and the quest and its reasons later in the story.
Jody Paterson, though born in Saskatchewan, grew up in the Comox Valley and went right through school locally, first at Courtenay elementary, and then Lake Trail. She graduated from GP Vanier in 1974.
“The Comox Valley was a great place to grow up in and I still feel thoroughly connected,” she says. “I even married a Cumberland boy. I still come back because I have kids and grandkids who live here.”
Then, in 1981, she left the community. She had an ambition that she vitally wanted to realize, and that was to be a journalist. She said she’d had a dream of being a journalist when she was a child, and that impulse had never left her.
“It’s quite funny in retrospect, but I was once asked in a questionnaire in high school what my ambition was, and I said I wanted to be a housewife,” she says. And she was that for a few years. She was also a piano teacher for eight years, but the thirst to do more hadn’t left and she knew she had little choice but to act on her childhood dream.
She went to Kamloops to take the journalism program at Cariboo College, and then she stayed on in that interior city for eight more years, plying her newfound trade at the Kamloops Sentinel and Daily News.
Then, wanting a larger paper in a larger community, where she felt her writing would gain more notice, she returned to the coast in 1989 and took a reporting job at the Victoria Times-Colonist. That she did well at that paper would be to state the case mildly. She covered virtually every beat in her early years there and ultimately became managing editor. Starting in 1996 she became a noted columnist, and continues in that realm to this day. But, in 2004 she left her full-time job with the TC and became the executive director of the Prostitute Empowerment Education and Resource Society (PEERS). Therein lies her direct connection to the Brothel Project.
Meanwhile, back in Kamloops there was a young woman who also had journalistic aspirations. That was April Butler-Parry. In one of those little twists of connectedness, or serendipity, if you will, Paterson, near the end of her Kamloops sojourn, was, as an alumna, a guest speaker at Butler-Parry’s journalism class at Cariboo College.
Butler-Parry began a career in community television programming at Kamloops Cablenet. After a brief stay there she moved to the Comox Valley in 1989 where, at age 21, she became the youngest programming manager for Comox Valley Cablenet. She continued with community programming for a number of years in the early 1990s and it was in doing so that she learned many of the skills that were to serve her later in her career, and also enabled her to direct a complex project like the Brothel story.
“I really enjoyed my life in the Valley,” she says, “and Cablenet was a good place to work. I had a home in the Valley and my children were born there. It was good. At the same time I found myself growing increasingly fascinated with the idea of creating documentary films.” More than anything else, Butler-Parry’s experience with Valley Cablenet was a significant learning experience and it granted her skills that still serve her today.
“Cablenet was so volunteer-driven, and that gave me some strong ideas about what people wanted and needed in terms of programming,” she says. “At the same time I pushed volunteers to get involved in directing, and by the time I left we had some excellent volunteer directors. Of course the process sometimes demanded a ton of patience, but it paid off in the end, both for community programming and for my skills as a professional director. For me my job demanded that I be actively involved in the community and it pushed me to up my game. I came to realize in short order that adequate wasn’t good enough.”
It wasn’t all peaches-and-cream in her early days, Butler-Parry confesses. She remembers how late Comox District Free Press columnist and community historian, Isabelle Stubbs wrote a scathing review of her skills behind and in front of the camera shortly after she started in the Valley.
“In those days I wasn’t just behind the camera, but was also in front of it,” she says. “I wasn’t very good in front, let’s say, and that’s what she picked up on. She said I needed to look up more and elocute clearly. It was mainly about my professional poise, which she saw as lacking.”
Not to be deterred by the ‘review’, Butler-Parry took the criticism in the spirit in which it was intended and improved those areas of her bearing.
“I contacted her and we met for coffee,” she says. “She told me I had improved, so that pleased me.”
It was quite by accident that during those years she had the opportunity to create her first documentary. It was a 20-minute documentary that concerned an oil spill that had manifested on the Island’s West Coast, near Ucluelet. She was alerted to the spill by pioneer Valley environmental activist, Ruth Masters. “Doing that resulted in an interesting shift in my thinking,” she says. “I got so much out of it that I realized my goal was to do a real documentary for a larger broadcast TV station. To get what I needed I knew I had to move on. I was reluctant in the sense that I liked my life in the Valley, but I had to go to where there was more opportunity.”
That said, she was to create what she considers her first “real” documentary, and it was one that maintained a Comox Valley theme. That was the Swan Documentary of 1996, which explored the huge proliferation of Trumpeter swans that wintered in the Comox Valley. The documentary ran in conjunction with the then Swan Festival.
The swan documentary was self-financed but she says it was worth the expense because it was a good and “gentle” introduction to the process of making a documentary.
“It was a great learning experience and was very demanding,” she says. “It involved being up at first light when I could access the swans. Now, with the Brothel Project, because it involves sex workers, I have to be available at the other end of the day.”
If the Swan Documentary was the kick-off for Butler-Parry, it has only grown from there. She worked for all the TV networks operating out of Victoria and was also director for VI television news and helped launch that station in 2001. Ultimately she reached the point where she realized she wouldn’t complete her dream unless she left the security-blanket of TV and moved exclusively to directing documentary films. The Brothel Project is the culmination of those efforts to date.
The Force Four production, directed by Butler-Parry and produced by Gillian Hrankowski, is a documentary that vividly captures the quest of Paterson and Casey, and shows dramatically the pitfalls along the way in a thus far vain attempt to change the law of the land regarding love for sale.
“While my connection with The Brothel Project didn’t happen entirely by accident in the sense that Jody let it be known that she and Lauren wanted to make this film, I was just a person who bid on it,” she says. “Fortunately mine was the bid they accepted. Ultimately it proved to be great subject matter, and they were also great people to work with.”
On Paterson’s side of the equation the idea of contracting a documentary seemed like a natural at a certain point in the quest she and Casey had embarked on.
“Lauren and I were considering ways to raise money to help the street sex workers,” Paterson says. “The work we were doing in advocacy was attracting media attention, and that’s a good thing. But the big issue for PEERS is that it’s a non-profit, and like all non-profits, it’s always strapped for cash. Money limitations were keeping us from helping those who desperately needed it.”
Then Casey suggested that she and Paterson should open a brothel, with the irony being that money raised from the escort business could be used to assist those whose lives were pretty wretched. And that was how it all began.
“Lauren said it almost as a joke,” Paterson says, “but there are so many problems for those working in the streets. Most people take jobs out of necessity, and any work can be exploitive, but the streets are more so. It’s a highly dangerous workplace, so I said, ‘What if?’ Maybe we could do that. We could establish a non-profit co-op and have the house fee (the money that goes to the business) funneled back to the outdoor sex workers. We’d be generating revenue and helping the women.”
Two things Paterson and Casey wanted to do were to test the legalities of attempting to establish what would be, by the laws of the land, an illegal business, and secondly to publicize their quest in the hope of getting a sympathetic community ear. So, they decided they must have a documentary to that end.
There were times when Paterson and Casey were caught up in the almost schizoid nature of the project.
“Making the documentary was a pretty rough year for us,” she says. “In a way you feel like you’re actors in somebody else’s story. At the same time, we were suffering no delusions. I had no belief that we’d be able to accomplish anything during that year. I had no thoughts that within a year we’d be able to set up an illegal business.”
So, the question that could be asked of Paterson and Casey would be: Why would you bring in a film crew rather than just going about it quietly.
“It’s designed (The Brothel Project) mainly to promote discussion,” Paterson says. “The Criminal Code has to change to make what we’re trying to do happen. There are bad laws around the sex trade and the current laws harm the people that work in the calling. It’s a thriving industry, yet anytime anyone can be charged, because that’s what’s on the books. So, we wanted to expose some of those legal realities.”
One facet of the year-long process involved those involved with both the project and the film itself, including Paterson, Butler-Parry and Casey going to a country where prostitution has been decriminalized: New Zealand. For the sake of the well-being of those in the trade, this fellow Commonwealth Country decided to move it out of the realm of a criminal activity. The visitors found the results to be commendable for the most part.
“Many things in New Zealand were better for the sex workers,” Paterson says. “For one thing, there was no longer any fear of the police. Under decriminalization, the adult sex trade is considered a workplace and is to be free from harassment. It’s not much of an exaggeration to say New Zealand is a million miles ahead of Canada in its acceptance of a certain reality. Their attitude is that people are buying it, so why are we punishing the people who are selling it?”
In New Zealand there are both brothels and independent escorts. In many cases the women left the brothels and began to work out of their homes, since that was now legal. That was virtually the model Paterson and Casey were seeking in wanting to open their bordello, but that wasn’t etched in stone for them.
“People thought we were trying to promote one particular model, but that wasn’t really the case,” Paterson says. “No blanket statement can be applied to the sex trade.”
In order to understand the business better, about six months into the project Paterson and Casey brought in escort agency booking agent, Harvi, along with escort, Mia. Harvi shared her business acumen—which was astute, Paterson says—and Mia provided the insights stemming from being active in the trade.
Harvi’s perspective was invaluable and she also provided Paterson and Casey with some insights into the reality of the business. She is possessed of an astute business sense, Paterson says, and she was able to indicate the pitfalls they would face. Eventually, however, Harvi would depart from the project when she realized that she was under threat, due to the excessive exposure, of being closed down and losing all she’d gained in her years in the business. She began to question why she was collaborating with the two in their quest.
“I’d love a reason why I need you,” she says of Paterson and Casey in the documentary. She has begun to see it as a case of them needing her more than she needs the Brothel Project team. At the same time, escort Mia begins to question why she needs to be involved in a brothel at all, and tells Harvi she doesn’t want to give a house fee and declares, during a clothes-shopping expedition, that she really likes working as an independent. This leads to Harvi severing the connection between the two.
With support for an indoor brothel seeming to crumble, Paterson also realizes, especially when they were told by both their legal advisor and a spokesman for the Victoria Police Department, that what they were attempting was illegal, and the Criminal Code denies anybody the right to establish what is referred to as “a common bawdy house.”
Escort agencies get around the law quite simply by not suggesting any sexual transaction takes place, and what transpires in an encounter is strictly a contract between the escort and the purchaser of ‘services’, whatever those might be. Escort agencies are governed by local bylaw and they are not established under a roof anywhere.
“I realized that by publicly talking about it we were jeopardizing sex workers and putting escort jobs in jeopardy,” she says. “We were inflaming the issues and that was exactly what we didn’t want. That seems like a pretty lousy win, to me. So, we’ll continue to quietly work with people in the industry, and we’ve come to realize that decriminalization is a bigger conversation. That discussion is just not going anywhere per se. The best bet at some future point would be a constitutional challenge.”
At the same time, Paterson says she wouldn’t have missed spending the time, effort and money to attain what they did—increase public awareness. And on Jan. 31, the showing of The Brothel Project at the Victoria Film Festival gave the ticket-buying public (incidentally, it sold out) a chance to see what it was all about.
“I thought it was a fascinating journey,” Paterson says. “As a journalist I was welcomed into a world that journalists are not normally welcomed into. Now we carry on.”
For Butler-Parry the association with Paterson, Casey, Harvi and Mia has only served to enhance her career as an independent maker of documentaries.
“I hope when people see the documentary they will see it as a group project, and I couldn’t have done it without those individuals being the players,” she says. “They were wonderful.”
In similar context, she is effusive in the praises of producer and scriptwriter Gillian Hrankowski, without whom none of it would have been possible, she says. This was the person, Butler-Parry says, under whose guidance they were able to take 100 hours of footage and reduce it to a powerful 55-minute documentary.
“Gillian was really integral to making a great story,” she says. “And the narration by (actress) Carly Pope couldn’t have been better. We had to have somebody who believed in the project to do the narration, and Carly did.”
The learning experience, she says, was vital to the success of the documentary. There were some basic ground rules to be followed, including making certain they did not show the location of the brothel. In fact, Butler-Parry’s own home does double duty as a stand-in in that regard. Furthermore, she learned as she worked with women in the sex trade that even though they might have had friendly interactions during the filming, it was taboo for her to show any recognition of the escorts if they were to run into each other on the street.
“It was important to the success of the documentary that I didn’t make anybody uncomfortable,” she says. “And it worked out really well. Harvi and Mia were terrific people to work with.”
Meanwhile, she reminds the viewing public that even though they missed the Jan. 31 showing of The Brothel Project, it will be broadcast on Global Television in the spring—likely in March.

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One Response to The Brothel Project

By Dale Redfern • June 5, 2010
Sex is a basic need in the same category as water, food, air, and shelter. People in need will satisfy that need in any way they can. A person with any inteligence is going to choose a Brothel over rape anytime. As a boy I was sexually assualted on several occasions, by women and men. But I always had the ability to rationalize and study people; and I came to pity the attackers. They were desperate to fullfill their sexual needs. Needs that were being ignored or denied. I have always believed that a real Democracy is never controlled by a minority of pompous, prude, controlfreaks that are obviously bad at sex and never practiced at getting it right. Prostitutes have done more to keep sanity in this world than any religion or Head Doctor. I am very spiritual and I know full well that a ‘God of Love and Peace’ does not sanction any violence or forcing women and men to etch out an existence on the cold, vicious streets of our society, for supplying a basic need. The Creator created sex (and that includes the Clitoris) and any human being that can feel good about these Human Beings suffering like this is one sick, hatefilled, emotionalless, controlfreak who will never see any heaven. I pity them as I pitied the people who attacked me.

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