Take a Card, Honey: Street-Level Outreach in Technicolour

An illustration from a PSSP safe sex brochure, ca. 1980s. Illustration by Richard Redwood.

Street-level outreach is certainly the most recognisable feature of Maggie’s first 20 years. By employing sex workers to design and distribute snappy, portable educational materials, Maggie’s/PSSP tapped rich sources of knowledge and capitalised on established communication networks. They relied on Xtra! Magazine’s production facilities to print fliers and pamphlets. The Ontario AIDS Network, Aware Street Kids, and the Streetwalkers’ Coalition – just to name a few – distributed these educational materials far and wide. Educational brochures and zines listed helplines, including PSSP’s own.

The cover of a Maggie's pamphlet about dealing with the police, ca. 1980s-90s.

Maggie’s outreach was not only concerned with AIDS, either. In addition to discussing other infectious diseases (including sexually transmitted infections and viruses like tuberculosis), pamphlets gave tips for harm reduction while using drugs, instructions on dealing with police, and educated workers on their rights under legislation.

The cover of a Maggie's pamphlet on using condoms for oral sex, ca. 1980s-90s.

These pamphlets addressed the reality of sex work in the city in straightforward terms. They advertised “hassle free” clinics and spoke directly to youth working in the sex trade about their unique risks. By emphasizing workers’ agency and experiences, Maggie’s refused to talk down to the people they were trying to reach.

A promotional button for PSSP, ca. 1980s-1990s.

In the 1990s, Toronto sex work activists and associated organizations made dedicated efforts to reach demographics they had yet to adequately serve. Local trans activists, including Christina Strang and Monica Forrester, conducted on-the-ground focus groups to understand what trans sex workers needed – and wanted – most (Whittall, 2000).

An excerpt from The Happy Transsexual Hooker, published by the 519 in 2000.

With trans women – especially women of colour – overrepresented in the field and disproportionately subject to criminalisation and harassment, having friendly faces from the community performing outreach was crucial. As we saw in the last page, Maggie’s understood this need intimately.

These combined efforts yielded works like 2000’s The Happy Transsexual Hooker, which followed fictionalised trans woman Sasha and her romantic partner, Tony. The Happy Transsexual Hooker uses the frank, practical, yet fun tone pioneered by Maggie’s earlier pamphlets. Published by the 519, funded by the AIDS Committee of Toronto and Toronto Public Health, and written by Strang, it was widely distributed in Toronto by Maggie’s and others, including Forrester. Forrester would go on to join Maggie’s formally as an outreach worker and coordinator, where she focused on supporting trans and Indigenous sex workers in the city.

Throughout this period, outreach workers moved within multiple organizations, including Maggie’s, to fund their projects and provide on-the-ground support. These overlapping networks insulated advocates from the instability that plagues this kind of work. However, Maggie’s would still have to reckon with reinvention, social schisms, and external threats throughout its long tenure.