In Paying for It, Sook-Yin Lee films an unconventional relationship that hits home—literally
At VIFF, the Toronto-based artist dramatizes her former partner Chester Brown’s graphic novel about his explorations in hiring sex workers
Emily Lê and Dan Beirne in Paying for It.
Vancouver International Film Festival presents Paying for It on September 30 at 9 pm at the Rio Theatre, with a Q&A with actor Emily Lê, author Chester Brown, and editor Anna Catley; and October 1 at 8:45 pm at Fifth Avenue Cinemas, with a Q&A with Sook-Yin Lee, Brown, and Lê
IN 2011, CHESTER BROWN released the most hotly debated graphic novel of the year. Paying for It tracked his late-1990s experiences as a john—outing himself in a role that traditionally carries shame and stigma, and tackling the morality of sex work and the politics around it.
In the book, he explored paying for sex like a curious researcher, chronicling procedures for paying and tipping and studying web reviews of those he hired.
It was all prompted by his girlfriend admitting, as chronicled at the beginning of the comic, that she was in love with someone else. They agreed to an “open” relationship and to continue living together—Brown duly setting up a mattress in the basement of a notably non-soundproofed Toronto rowhouse. Eventually, he swore off romantic love and decided life was easier just paying for sex.
That girlfriend was Sook-Yin Lee, who was enjoying a career as a successful MuchMusic VJ at the time. And in the former Vancouverite’s new film, also called Paying for It, she dramatizes Brown’s story, drawing on the graphic novelist’s tonal and stylistic restraint and filling in details about her own trajectory along the way. Interwoven is a wider political conversation around sex work—picking up on the graphic novel’s advocacy for legalizing it.
“You know, it was an impossibility for us to break up, because we’re very, very, very close,” the famously energetic filmmaker tells Stir, still basking in TIFF’s warm embrace of the movie earlier this month. “So that idea of a couple breaking up never applied to us. We didn’t even dream of it. But there came a point where our romantic life began to fade, and I was the one who suggested opening up the relationship.”
Lee also, with almost three decades of distance from their live-in arrangement and several films under her belt, was the one who brought forward the idea of making a movie about their shared experience.
“When I read the book, it really struck me as not only being about a kind of political argument for the decriminalization of consensual sexwork, but it also had everything to do with labour rights to me, and by extension, women’s rights and human rights,” Lee says. “So it very much excited me. Chester is a shy person, he’s very bookish, and to know that he went through that exploration, and then came out the other side with that kind of compelling social argument took some courage.”
In its own way, shooting the film took guts too. For a start, Lee spent years adapting a screenplay that would turn the book’s episodic structure into more of a narrative arc. Brown had provided little identifying detail about the sex workers in his story, so Lee dove into research to flesh out their characters. And to cast the roles of sex workers, she knew she wanted to bring in people who had some knowledge of that world—or at least of sex positivity; Modern Whore author Andrea Werhun ended up playing Brown’s longest-term contractor, for one.
In some ways, Lee says her root approach to shooting movies hasn’t changed that much since her directorial debut, Escapades of the One Particular Mr. Noodle, shot in her Strathcona ’hood in 1990—a DIY short in which she made her own 10-foot-high-egg-noodle costume and asked her friends and neighbours to act. (In fact, her late, great art-pop band Bob’s Your Uncle was another bastion of upstart DIY energy.) For Paying for It, Lee shot the film in 19 days, often in the awesomely eclectic, “11-foot-wide” Toronto rowhouse where the real-life events unfolded—complete with art-strewn walls, mismatched sheets, and book-crammed shelves.
“Where Chester is in the basement is where he lived when we separated,” she says. “So if you feel there’s a vibe and it looks like it’s been lived in, it’s because it’s true! On my shoestring budget, I knew that I wanted to portray the Toronto that I love, and it’s a very sort of raw and dive-bar rough-and-ready Toronto of that time period. And there are those places that still exist. They’re very precious places.”
Sook-Yin Lee.
Among Lee’s concerns are the gentrification of neighbourhoods like her old Kensington stomping grounds in Toronto. In Paying for It, Lee points out, that same drive toward profit and commercialization is echoed in the reasons she leaves VJing at MuchMusic standin “Max Music” in the film.
Lee admits it was a touch surreal to direct Dan Beirne—note-perfect channelling the cerebral energy of the understated, unflappable Brown—and Emily Lê (from Riceboy Sleeps) as “Sonny”, a version of herself.
“A friend of mine said it’s an interesting film, because it’s a double act of portraiture,” Lee says. “We’re both doing self-portraits and portraits. I’m doing a portrait of him doing a portrait of himself. So it’s very meta, and it is kind of a strange combo, because he is very judicious, he’s very restrained, very unemotional—he sees things in a very, very judicious and restrained manner. And I tend to be more of a hothead. I tend to put relationships first and emotionality first. And I think the movie is a kind of combo of those two things.”
This brings us to the way Brown takes a straightforward depiction of sex in his work. The graphic novel might be indeed graphic, but never really eroticized. Lee tried to use that same approach in the scenes that involve nudity, sex acts, and condom-wearing.
“My movie is really more like National Geographic—you know, it’s like he wakes up with a shrivelled penis, and walks over to get a book from a shelf,” she says. “I try to make it very matter of fact. And in that regard, people can relate—I think because there’s a kind of cozy sweetness and uplifting positivity to the film in its portrayal of sex work, sexuality, and intimacy. And you know, you kind of are rooting for everyone.”
She adds: “It’s not like every narrative that ends with the tragic story of a sex worker dying. I do think that the media, the news and movies, are responsible for a great deal of misinformation in terms of depicting, you know, LGBTQ+ and sex workers in a kind of malevolent or bad or moralizing manner.”
Politically, Lee is as eager as ever to counteract that moralizing. As you have probably already figured out, she, like Brown, has strong feelings on Canada’s laws around sex work. In the wake of anti-prostitution laws getting overturned, Parliament made it illegal in 2014 to purchase or advertise sexual services.
“It was like, ‘Okay, you win, but we’re making another new law, and you can do whatever you want, but now we’re going to criminalize the johns,’” Lee says. “So that’s where it stands. It’s the same metaphor as ‘You can have a bookstore full of wonderful books, but you can’t sell them, nor can anyone read them.’ And what it does is put consensual sex workers in harm’s way.” (One of her frustrations on this press tour is members of the media who conflate sex trafficking and consensual sex work.)
On a more personal level, Lee never glosses over the mistakes and more painful moments she and Brown made amid their relationship experiments. Though making the film has, however, led her to discover one big difference between the two, who remain close to this day: “For me, sex is not as important as all of the other stuff. Camaraderie, friendship, affection, love, care, all of those things count for 95 percent, which means sexuality is only five percent for me,” she says candidly. “But he was like, ‘Yeah, not me.’ It was funny to make that realization! Because everybody has different things they value.”
For a certain generation who lived through the turn of the millennium, and came of age watching Lee on Much, Paying for It will also provoke a little nostalgia for a time when art and music took risks (check out the Cub and Pointed Sticks on the soundtrack) and it seemed anything was possible.
For herself, Lee has realized through the process that she can look back in admiration at the adventurous, uninhibited, strong woman she was in that era—and still is, in a way, today.
“I am very lucky to love my younger self,” reflects Lee, who has in the past been wide open about her tough upbringing as a child and leaving home at 15. “I’m like, ‘Hey kid, you’re okay, you know, you’re all right.’ That kid did good. And there’s something about youth and the openness to being curious about the world, of making a choice—and sometimes a scary choice—and making a big mistake, getting up, dusting yourself off, and moving forward.” 
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