Ryan Conrad

The Sexuality Studies Association has released its 2022 Conference Call for Proposals!  This year we’ll be virtual once again with every intention of being back to in-person gatherings in 2023.  This year’s conference marks the associations 10th anniversary and we’ve confirmed Dr. Ann Cvetkovich as our keynote speaker. We’re very excited and looking forward to hearing how she’ll assess the state of sexuality studies as an interdisciplinary field within both Canada and North America more broadly.

While my colleague Emma McKenna and I continue to work on our formal write up based on our data from the COVID-19, Social Safety Nets, and Sex Work in the Capital study done in collaboration with POWER, we have written a short accessible summary of the study with some of the main findings: that most sex workers pay their annual income taxes; and that most sex workers have navigated social safety net programs successfully. Contrary to the anecdotal stories about sex workers being excluded from new programs like the CERB and EI in Canada during the pandemic, our data suggests this was a small minority of sex workers. Sex workers are smart, savvy, and far from helpless—as researchers and allies we should stop talking about them as if they are.

I was invited to write a short reflection on the current exhibition titled “Don’t Ask, Do Tell” on display at the Stonewall National Museum and Archive in Ft. Lauderdale, FL. The piece appears in the museum’s quarterly journal Archeion, edited by curator and writer Andy Johnson. My short piece turns a critical spotlight on the colonial framing of the exhibit and thinks through some of the absences in the collection from which the exhibition is drawn. Specifically, I ask where are the queer draft dodgers, counter recruitment activists, and AIDS activists that demanded “Money for AIDS, Not for War!” who are missing from the exhibition?

On World AIDS Day 2021, Yes! Magazine published an excerpt from my essay “Looking for Gaëtan” that appears in the new book Between Certain Death and a Possible Future: Queer Writing on Growing Up With the AIDS Crisis. The book was just published this past October and is already in its second printing.  Congratulations and much thanks to Mattilda who included my piece and did an excellent job corralling together a fantastic collection of writers.

Little Joe, the fiercest queer cinema magazine, has returned after a many year hiatus and has published “An Intergenerational Dialogue on HIV/AIDS Activist Video History,” that I co-authored with John Greyson. The interview was conducted just before COVID-19 became a global pandemic and touches on our mutual interest in revisiting the Toronto artist/activist scene of the late ’80s and early ’90s to think about what lessons can be drawn from this period of explosive AIDS video activism in Canada.

Lastly, a former Concordia sexuality studies student that I taught has interviewed me as part of her internship with sexologist Dr. Jess O’Reilly. As part of this internship, Maggie has been working on the podcast program Sex with Dr. Jess. Her interview with me is titled “Sexuality: Activism, Anarchism & Academia” and covers a lot of ground in 25 minutes. Give it a listen if you want to know more about me or how I got into the field of sexuality studies.

Between Certain Death and a Possible Future: Queer Writing on Growing Up with the AIDS Crisis is out October 5th 2021. My contribution to the book, “Looking for Gaëtan,” reflects on my childhood growing up alongside a plethora of film and media depictions of both HIV/AIDS and queer culture, and how these moving-image representations shaped my understanding of, and relationship to HIV/AIDS as a non-urban queer white kid growing up in the ’80s and ’90s.  I’ll be participating in a few virtual book launch events with anthology’s editor Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore and a number of other incredible contributors to this volume. On October 14th  at 7pm will be Zooming with the Harvard Book Store in Boston and November 1st as part of the Ottawa International Writers Festival.

Emma McKenna and I are finishing up our research collaboration with folks at POWER and we will be launching the COVID-19, Social Safety Nets, and Sex Work in the Capital Report in November. This report will discuss the findings from our survey of nearly 300 sex workers in Ottawa-Gatineau last spring. The survey focused on how COVID-19 impacted sex workers’ working conditions and how sex workers navigated new and existing social safety net programs.

A few weeks ago I began teaching in person again at Carleton University’s Pauline Jewett Institute. This academic year I’m teaching the two semester long first year seminar course titled Intro to LGBTQ Studies that I developed and taught last year for the first time. The course was redeveloped over the summer in collaboration with a student from the previous cohort and I’m excited to see how teaching it again with a new and improved syllabus pans out.

I assumed a leadership position within the Sexuality Studies Association last summer as the Chair of the Steering Committee. In this role over the next two years I will work with the rest of the Steering Committee to further professionalize the organization and build the necessary internal structures to leave the organization stronger than when I joined. I’m hopeful for the organization’s future and for a return to in-person annual conferences health guidelines permitting.

Lastly, I published a short preview of my analysis of Lizzie Borden’s 1986 film Working Girls in The Conversation. This short read discusses what makes Borden’s film so fascinating even 35 years after its release, and what the film can teach us about sex work today. My full length monograph on Working Girls will be out sometime late next year on McGill-Queen’s University Press’s Queer Film Classic book series.

The “Locating Media Archives” course I co-taught through the A/CA Summer Institute has come to an end last week. Video recordings of two guest panels with Karen Knights, Richard Fung, Ian Iqbal Rashid, Darien Taylor, and Alison Duke will be available soon. I also finished up regular Spring 2021 teaching at Concordia and Carleton, and it looks like I will be teaching the same class at Carleton again next year—perhaps even in person!

The COVID-19, Social Safety Nets, and Sex Work in the Capital 2021 Survey that was created in collaboration with folks at POWER is now live and we are collecting responses through the end of June 2021. I’ll be part of a small team analyzing the data later this summer with the intention of producing a bilingual report come the fall. To our knowledge this is the first scholarly research into the economic impact of COVID-19 on sex workers, as well as their ability to access federal income replacement programs for workers who lost their income due to the pandemic, in Canada.

John Greyson, Sarah Flicker, and I have received three years of SSHRC funding for our project, Viral Interventions: Artists, Communities and AIDS Activist Media. We’ll be hosting three one-year residencies for cohorts of five artists all making new video work about HIV/AIDS in the present, cellphilm workshops, and launching an I-doc project. The project has just begun this month, but we’ll be launching a website later this year with lots of exciting content and details about all the artists involved and forthcoming screenings!

Lastly, I’m set to finish my book manuscript on Working Girls for the Queer Film Classics book series on McGill-Queen’s Press by the end of summer. I did a fantastic interview with director Lizzie Borden last March in preparation for writing and it turns out the film will be fully restored and re-released by the Criterion Collection this summer as well!

My article “Cable Access Queer: Revisiting Toronto Living With AIDS (1990-91)” is finally out in the “Queer TV” special issue of the open-access media journal Jump Cut. This piece provides insight into how the extraordinary TLWA program came to be, how it was received by various imagined publics, how it ended, and why revisiting this series is useful for today’s video activists. I will also launch a public-facing research website with Vtape over the summer that will include transcripts of interviews I conducted with surviving contributors to TLWA, short commissioned reflections on each of the tapes in the series by contemporary activists and artists, and lots of visuals in the form of frame grabs and digitized ephemera. In a similar vein, I’ll also be conducting a two week summer school workshop series on Canadian HIV/AIDS film and video research from June 8th – 17th, 2021 as part of my continued work with Archive/Counter-Archive.

This June I will assume the role of Chair of the Sexuality Studies Association‘s Steering Committee for a two year term after having served as Vice Chair the previous two years. This year we have joined the BCSA-led boycott of Congress and will be hosting our own independent gathering June 1-3.  More details on that will be forthcoming on SSA’s website in the coming weeks.

I’ve been invited to participate in the “Sex and the Pandemic” lecture series organized by Ricky Varghese. I’ll be giving my talk, “Distinct and Dissimilar: COVID-19, HIV, and the Desire for Meaning” alongside Rinaldo Walcott’s paper “Open to Infection: Two Viruses and Black-Queer-Life” on May 21, 2021. For more information about the series and subsequent monthly lectures, check out the details here.

Emma McKenna and I have submitted our chapter, “Lessons Learned, Lessons Shared: Doing Research in Collaboration with Sex Workers and Sex Worker Organizations” to the forthcoming anthology titled Facilitating Community Research for Social Change: Case Studies in Qualitative, Arts-Based and Visual Research edited by Casey Burkholder, Funke Aladejebi, and Joshua Schwab Cartas. This chapter outlines our collaboration with folks at POWER on an ongoing research project about the impact of COVID-19 on sex workers in Ottawa-Gatineau and their ability to access state benefits during the pandemic.

In addition to finishing up teaching sexuality studies courses at Carleton and Concordia University this winter/spring, I also joined a number of other classes to give guest lectures on various topics related to my research: University of Ottawa (Sex Work), Concordia University (Queer Theory), and York University (Research Methods). I also joined a panel sharing my postdoc experience along with a few other postdoctoral fellows at Carleton University for graduate students thinking of applying for one.

On World AIDS Day 2020 I was interviewed by my colleague (and project lead for Archive/Counter-Archive) Janine Marchessault. The interview is part of the Talking Archives series where scholars discuss their archival research conducted as part of A/C-A. In the video below you’ll hear me discussing my work researching the Toronto Living With AIDS (1990-91) community cable program spearheaded by video artists Michael Balser and John Greyson with the support of Vtape and Trinity Square Video.

 

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Much of this research will be published as a journal article in the upcoming special issue of JumpCut on “Queer TV”. My research contextualizes, historicizes, and analyses the TLWA series through oral history interviews I conducted with the surviving contributors as well as through examining archival documents (press clippings, posters, letters, press releases).  The article will go to press this winter with over 80 stills and digitized ephemera accompanying the text.

My colleagues in Criminology at University of Ottawa, Emma McKenna and Chris Bruckert, and I were awarded a grant to do a research project in collaboration with POWER on the impact of COVID-19 on sex workers in the Capital region. Specifically we will be talking with sex workers about how their exclusion or perceived exclusion from social safety nets have negatively impacted their lives, as well as the mutual aid strategies they have employed.  More on this project in January!

My article “Generated Vulnerability: Male Sex Workers, Third-Party Platforms, & Data Security” was accepted for publication as part of a forthcoming anthology from University of Washington Press edited by Patrick Keilty entitled Queer Data. My piece documents the inherent vulnerabilities when working through third-party websites like Rentboy and Rentmen and possible alternatives to these unaccountable and exploitative corporate entities. I take up Ottawa Independent Companions as an example of sex worker self-organizing in the face of exploitation. OIC is one of the first large-scale all-gender sex worker-owned cooperatives that emerged after the 2013 Supreme court of Canada ruling that struck down Canada’s anti-prostitution laws. The anthology is due out in late 2021.

Back in November, shortly after the US election I gave a talk at the University of Southern Maine as part of their LGBTQ+ community dialogue series. The program was organized through the LGBTQ Special Collections at the Jean Byers Sampson Center for Diversity where I did much of my doctoral research. I presented a paper on Maine’s drawn out statewide and municipal referenda regarding sexual orientation-inclusive non-discrimination laws and by-laws through a close reading of Maine’s gay and lesbian periodicals published throughout the 1990s.

I’ve also just concluded Fall teaching at both Carleton where I am teaching the first year seminar Introduction to LGBTQ Studies and Concordia where I am teaching Introduction to Theories of Sexuality. I will continue teaching the same course at Carleton for the Winter semester while I will teach a second offering of the Theories course at Concordia this Winter as well.

My chapter on HIV/AIDS and immigration in Canada is due out this October in Eithne Luibhéid and Karma Chavez’s new anthology Queer and Trans Migrations: Dynamics of Illegalization, Detention, and Deportation. This chapter examines my own experience immigrating to Canada alongside an analysis of Canada’s medical inadmissibility/excessive demand clause that bars people with disabilities and most medical conditions, including HIV, from immigrating to Canada.

This summer I facilitated a panel discussion on immigration and male sex workers following a screening of the short film Marco (2019). The event was organized by MAX Ottawa for Capital Pride and included Josh from MAX and Elene from Butterfly. Josh and I have also co-authored a soon-to-be-released report titled On the Move based on a needs assessment conducted pre-COVID by MAX for guys who do sex work in the Quebec-Montreal-Ottawa-Toronto corridor.

Friend and colleague Emma McKenna and I have submitted our piece “Beyond Social Safety Nets: COVID-19, Sex Workers, and Universal Basic Income’s Equitable Base” for publication. Along with Chris Bruckert we also applied for a grant to do a research project on sex worker mutual aid organizing in Ottawa-Gatineau during COVID-19 in collaboration with our pals at POWER.

Since late April I’ve been involved in efforts to support sex workers in Ottawa-Gatineau during the COVID crisis. I’ve helped raise funds for the POWER Emergency Relief Fund and fielded numerous media requests (1, 2) as the Media Spokesperson for the group. This experience led me to co-author an article on sex workers’ exclusion from social safety nets like the Canadian Emergency Response Benefit (CERB) and the necessity to both decriminalize sex work while also instituting a universal basic income guarantee with my colleague Emma McKenna.  “Beyond Social Safety Nets: COVID-19, Sex Workers, and Universal Basic Income’s Equitable Base” will be published online in a few weeks. In the mean time, check out Butterfly’s migrant sex workers and COVID-19 report.

The Sexuality Studies Association held its virtual AGM in early June, welcoming new members to the Steering Committee and thanking those outgoing. While we were not able to hold our conference face-to-face this year, we still produced a beautiful conference program to keep members up to date on what one another are doing in the field.  Much thanks to Mark Lipton for the endless work on the program and to Carol Dauda for her years of service as the Program Coordinator.

I’ve been forging ahead with a few writing projects with forthcoming coming pieces in Montreal’s lurid fagazine Crooked on archival research, finding pornography in the library, and HIV/AIDS and sex worker activist Danny Cockerline. My other piece, “Looking for Gaëtan” will appear in Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore‘s forthcoming anthology Between Certain Death and a Possible Future: Queer Writing on Growing up with the AIDS Crisis.  There’s a few more ambitious writing projects in the queue for the fall, so stay tuned!

Lastly, I’ll be teaching at Carleton and Concordia for the 2020-2021 academic year, primarily online. At Carleton I’m developing a new First Year Seminar Introduction to LGBTQ Studies at the Pauline Jewett Institute for Women and Gender Studies. At Concordia I’ll be returning as adjunct faculty in the Interdisciplinary Studies in Sexuality program at the Simone de Beauvoir Institute, teaching one of the major’s foundational courses Introduction to Theories of Sexuality.

The COVID-19 pandemic has cancelled many upcoming conferences, in-person teaching, research travel, and research with human subjects, putting many of us on pause and delivering course content through cumbersome and disadvantageous online tools.  While most of these cancellations have been stressful and career-disrupting, I’m happy for the slow down. Many of us in academia are overworked, underpaid, and on precarious contract-to-contract work like myself. Finding time to read and write while also fulfilling obligations of part-time teaching and research contracts often leads me to put my own work on hold. In the coming months I’ll be refocusing on my own writing, returning to pieces that have been percolating for years that never got the undivided attention they needed to finally be published. I’ll wrap up teaching the foundational research methods course for the Interdisciplinary Studies in Sexuality program at Concordia through online teaching tools, but then it’s back to writing more or less full-time.

I am also putting some of my newfound time and energy into editing footage I shot in January for a short experimental video on sero-discordant relationships. While most tropes about these types of relationships revolve around a young naive HIV-negative risk-taker and an older wiser HIV-positive teacher, I’m interested in the reverse relationship that mirrors my own experience (younger and poz with older and neg). My collaborator and I are trying to think through the difference in meaning the two of us attach to HIV in our lives, how it impacts our relationship, and how HIV feels along uncommon generational lines.

My manuscript proposal for the Queer Film Classic series edited by Tom Waugh and Matthew Hays on Lizzie Borden’s groundbreaking sex worker film Working Girls (1986) was accepted and will be forthcoming in 2022. I am very excited to be writing about one of my favourite films of all time and to bring greater attention to this brilliant feminist indie film. Much ink has been spilled on Borden’s first feminist dystopian sci-fi film Born in Flames (1983), while less attention has focused on her second feature film. My small monograph will fill that gap in sustained scholarly attention.

I’ve begun doing one-on-one in-person interviews with past contributors to the 1990-1991 cable-access community television show Toronto Living With AIDS as part of my book research. So far I’ve spoken with John Greyson, Richard Fung, and Kaspar Saxena. I’m setting up interviews with other contributors for the spring and I’ve already ransacked the organizational archives of Vtape and Trinity Square Video. I’m hopeful about publishing a definitive history of the series some time in 2020.  There’s also talk, through the Archive/Counter-Archive project of launching some sort of Toronto Living with HIV/AIDS series reboot in 2020.  Stay tuned!

This coming semester I’ll be guest lecturing at Brock University in Dr. Emma McKenna‘s labour studies course focusing on sex work/ers.  I’ll be doing a lecture on the crossover between queer, sex worker, and HIV/AIDS activism in Canada, focusing in particular on the work of the Prostitutes’ Safe Sex Project and under-recognized activist Danny Cockerline. I’ll be teaching Andy Sorfleet’s writing (Busting Sex Work Stigma: You Can’t Catch HIV from Money) and screening George Stamos’ brilliant short doc Our Bodies Our Business (2016) on sex worker activism at the Montreal International AIDS conference in 1989. Video still of Danny and Valerie Scott from OBOB to the right.

After launching the Research Repository (RR) with POWER folks this fall, I’m working on a systematic review of sex work research in/on Canada since PEPCA in December 2014. I’m interested to see what kind of research is being done, by whom, and to what ends. As sex workers are one of the most over-surveilled, overly criminalized, and misunderstood group of people, the type of research being done has the potential of fuelling already devastating social policy and further entrench various long-held stigmas. Other writing projects will likely come out of the RR committee of POWER after we meet early in the new year.

My review of Malynnda Johnson’s 2018 HIV on TV book review should be out any day now in the Canadian Journal of Film Studies (Vol. 28, No. 2).  While the book is worth checking out, my review points out a few epistemological gaps worth further investigation.  The book is prohibitively expensive, so definitely encourage your library to order a copy if you’re interested.

From August 16th-25th my new video Don’t Believe the Hype was on view as part of Knot Projections 2019: Imagining Publics in Ottawa. I organized a panel during Capital Pride with Tom Hooper, Ummni Khan, and Darrah Teitel to reflect on the video and the context of the 1969 Criminal Code reform that my video focuses on.  News coverage has appeared in the Ottawa Citizen, CBC’s All in a Day, and La Rotonde. In November, the Toronto Queer Film Fest (TQFF) and the concurrent Stonewall 50: The Future of Global Queer Liberation Art & Media symposium will be screening the video and hosting another panel with Andil Gosine, Tom Hooper, and Emma McKenna.

On September 12th a group of activists re-launched Prostitutes of Ottawa-Gatineau Work Educate Resist (POWER). As part of my contribution to the group I helped organize and launch POWER’s Research Repository, a clearing house of Canadian-focused sex work research that has been published in the aftermath of the Conservative’s Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act (Bill C-36). MAX Ottawa has also hired a new male sex worker outreach staff member based on the work plan recommendations I made late last spring. Between POWER and MAX things are getting organized in Ottawa-Gatineau!  POWER even had a contingent at Capital Pride in August where I gleefully shamed Liberals for doing nothing about Bill C-36 with a majority in Parliament after voting as a block against it while in opposition.

My Upping the Anti interview with Gary Kinsman (Against the Mythologies of the 1969 Criminal Code Reform: An Interview with Gary Kinsman) and my contribution to the QED forum on remembering Stonewall (I Still Hate New Year’s Day) should be live any day now. Although they were intended for a summer time audience of pride season readers and were written this past spring, academic publishing timelines have thwarted a timely release of both.

The Sexuality Studies Association‘s annual conference CFP will be available soon along with information about next year’s conference at Western University in London, Ontario in late spring 2020. It will be our first year awarding the Thomas Waugh Emerging Scholar Award and there are lots of exciting events already in the works.  Stay tuned!

I’ll be giving a number of talks this academic year so keep an eye out for me at: Ruderman Conference on Cartography (10-12 October); Nat Taylor Tuesdays Lecture Series at York (16 November); and guest lectures at McMaster University (30 September), UC Berkeley (15 October), and Brock University (winter semester).