Montreal museum spotlights sex workers history of activism and resistance

MONTREAL — When community group Mile End Chavurah held an event in 2023 to name Jewish Montreal’s “new patron saint,” Maimie Pinzer was the winning choice.

As an activist, Pinzer established a community space for her fellow sex workers in 1915.

Decades later, she is honoured with a black, white and hot-pink mural in the Mile End neighbourhood. She has also become the namesake and inspiration for sex worker advocacy group Stella, l’amie de Maimie.

Now she, and generations of other “defiant women,” are at the heart of a Montreal exhibit highlighting sex worker activism, both in the defence of their way of life and as part of other social causes, from the fight against AIDS to anti-poverty.

Timed to coincide with Stella’s 30th anniversary, the exhibit is “to demonstrate our 30 years of resistance and what that looks like, and most importantly, how sex workers in this city have been resisting for so long, beyond the 30 years, of course,” said communications coordinator Jenn Clamen.

Titled “By and For: 30 Years of Sex Worker Resistance,” the exhibit features a mix of artwork, historical photos and newspaper articles, as well as information about the organization’s mission. It will run until March 15 at the Centre des mémoires montréalaises.

Black and pink panels show sex workers participating in protest marches, symposiums and ad campaigns for various social causes, in Montreal and internationally. Their activism spans multiple sectors of society because of their intersecting identities, Clamen said.

“Sex workers are part of two-spirit LGBTQ communities. Sex workers are part of homeless communities, part of Asian communities, part of Jewish communities, part of Indigenous communities,” Clamen said.

Tamara Kramer, of Mile End Chavurah, said the collaboration with Stella provided an opportunity to learn more about the group’s mission. It also allowed her to meet people in her community that were connected to the organization — “Jewish people that we never probably would have met at Mile End Chavurah who came out because they were drawn by this kind of art and activism,” she said.

The museum exhibit also features a photo of a march to Montreal’s Chinatown in 2021 that sex workers joined in order to denounce a rise in anti-Asian racism and the deaths of eight people, including six Asian women, shot in massage parlours that year in Atlanta, Georgia.

“This was a really special moment because we didn’t know that we could find solidarities in Chinese communities necessarily,” Clamen said.

May Chiu, who helped organize the anti-Asian racism march, describes the event and the collaboration with Stella as “amazing.”

“We were only expecting 100 or 200 people, and in the end, the news reported about four or five thousand showed up,” she said in an interview.

She said Stella helped organize a vigil for the women who were murdered in the massage parlour, in what she described as “a very solemn and beautiful gesture to remember women who died of anti-Asian hate.”

Stella’s involvement, she said, was a reminder the murdered women were “doubly vulnerable,” targeted because of their racial background and their sex work. But the group members don’t just focus on victimhood, she said.

“It was nice to work with a group who defend the rights of sex workers not just as victims but as women who can fight,” Chiu said.

The exhibit features a large patchwork quilt, made by inmates from the now-closed Tanguay women’s jail in Montreal. There are matchbooks collected from strip clubs, and a neon pink-lit room filled with sex workers’ personal items, from an old cellphone to empty vials that used to contain hormone medication, stored in a perfume box.

However, the exhibit’s main focus is on sex worker activism. Clamen said sex worker groups are naturally aligned with fights such as HIV/AIDS patient advocacy and harm reduction, “because we share the fight for bodily autonomy and against criminalization.”

But she notes sex workers have also become involved in neighbourhood concerns, including the fight against the gentrification of the once-gritty St. Laurent Boulevard, where luxury condos and restaurants in some sections of the thoroughfare have edged out the brothels and strip clubs where they used to work.

People who come to the exhibit expecting X-rated content will, by and large, not find it. “This is actually a very not nude exhibit, it’s quite PG-rated,” Clamen says. It’s not about sex work so much as resistance, she says.

“People don’t know what sex workers are fighting for,” she said. “They think it’s often just fighting for the right to be a sex worker, and that’s not it. It’s really fighting for basic human rights.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Dec. 1, 2025.

Morgan Lowrie, The Canadian Press