Early Activism: Safe Sex is Our Business

This CORP pamphlet's call for members and volunteers from the mid-1980s mentions Maggie's.

Maggie’s, “A Self-Help Project for Prostitutes” (“First Annual Report,” 1989), was founded in 1986 by sex workers who belonged to the Canadian Organisation for the Rights of Prostitutes (CORP). The founders sought to improve sex worker safety in the wake of the AIDS crisis by forming a dedicated public health initiative to provide peer-level support and education. This initiative, the Prostitutes’ Safe Sex Project (PSSP, alternately called the Toronto Prostitutes Community Service Project and the Safe Sex Corps), relied entirely on volunteer labour in its first years.

But this volunteer-only framework limited outreach capacity severely. As members of the community themselves, advocates were acutely aware of the financial precarity associated with sex work in the city. In an effort to improve outcomes for both workers and recipients of Maggie’s and PSSP programming, the organisations’ leadership dedicated considerable time to pursuing funding opportunities in the late 1980s. Danny Cockerline and Chris Bearchell’s names undersign multiple impassioned pleas for grant money from municipal, provincial, and federal sources in this period.

In early 1988, funding from the City of Toronto and the Ontario Ministry of Health allowed PSSP to hire three sex workers as full-time advocates and educators for a five month period. These workers distributed “1,202 condoms, 668 safe sex pamphlets, 322 safe sex buttons, and 1,326 “trick cards” [educational materials for sex workers to give to their clients]” in this short time frame (“First Annual Report,” 1989). Danny, Gwendolyn, and Ryan used their existing personal networks to reach diverse cohorts: male sex workers, strippers who occasionally engaged in prostitution, and street-level sex workers, respectively. A staffed phone line complimented these materials with live, human support. Weekly drop-ins offered activities and workshops. When the money ran out, outreach workers continued to volunteer their free time along with Valerie, a board member of Maggie’s (“First Annual Report,” 1989).

An invitation to the Maggie's drop-in lounge, ca. 1980s-90s

This first year of funding, albeit incomplete, proved that sex worker advocacy in Toronto was scalable. Most importantly, Maggie’s and PSSP demonstrated how effective advocacy designed by sex workers for sex workers could be. Advocates worked together to establish realistic documentation protocols and identified demographics they had yet to reach adequately, including trans sex workers and those working in the downtown core (“First Annual Report,” 1989). Subsequent funding applications and internal planning documents reflect Maggie’s and PSSP’s continued efforts to recruit and compensate a diverse roster of outreach workers – all of them from the city’s sex industry.

In 1991, Maggie’s became a registered charity. This status has allowed volunteers to count their engagement with the group toward court-mandated community service and post-secondary placement programs (Maggie's, "Our History," 2025).

A Prostitutes' Safe Sex Project pamphlet image, ca. 1980s

The founding principle of Maggie’s is that workers in the sex industry should be – and indeed, are! – experts in safe sex. After all, it’s literally their business. By compiling and distributing facts about safe sex to their colleagues and clients, Maggie’s and PSSP met a global crisis head-on without getting mired in preconceived notions about sex work. Furthermore, close industry ties allowed advocates to tailor their delivery to meet workers’ realities. As we will see in this exhibition, Maggie’s work was always about more than just outreach: it’s about fostering community. In the wake of a global medical crisis and the Toronto Bathhouse Raids, Maggie’s allowed sex workers to access support from peers, on their own terms, without fear of criminalisation or reprisal.