On Feb. 10, 2026, the Vancouver Community Sex Work Alliance hosted a screening of the 1984 film Hookers on Davie to provide the public with insight into sex workers’ lives, the barriers they face, and what has—and has not—changed. The following is a speech from SWAN Vancouver.
Kelly Go, Program Manager, SWAN Vancouver
SWAN Vancouver supports the health, rights, and safety of immigrants, migrants, and newcomers who engaged in indoor sex work in the Lower Mainland. We support over 500 people every year through outreach, online support, case management, community programs, and advocacy, with much of it focused on navigating systems that were never designed with this community in mind.
Before we watch Hookers on Davie, I want to take a few minutes to share about something that is still happening right now: how sex workers continue to be excluded from systems that claim to protect public health and safety.
The film we are about to watch documents a moment in Vancouver’s history where sex workers were framed as a problem to be solved, as something to be cleaned up, and pushed out. The language was about safety, morality, and order. But the outcome was displacement, criminalization, violence and harm.
What is important to understand is that this logic didn’t disappear. It just changed its language, and it hasn’t only targeted sex workers. Today, when we are not hearing about “cleaning up the streets,” we hear about risk management, regulation, and rescue. But for many sex workers, especially immigrants and migrants, the result is still surveillance, exclusion, and care that is conditional on compliance.
This becomes especially visible around major public events. As Vancouver prepares to host the 2026 FIFA World Cup, SWAN is actively working to address the impacts on immigrant and migrant sex workers. Historically, these events are often accompanied by increased policing and heightened anti-trafficking campaigns, despite a lack of evidence showing increases in trafficking. These responses are driven more by myths than data, and they tend to result in greater surveillance, displacement, and harm, particularly for those facing language barriers or criminalization.
In our frontline work, one thing we hear over and over is that people are trying to access healthcare, and they can’t do it safely. More than 70 per cent of the calls we receive are from community members seeking help to access healthcare because healthcare settings can be sites of surveillance. Clinics ask intrusive questions, make assumptions that exploitation is happening simply because of people’s work, and sex workers are treated with suspicion and stigma. For migrant sex workers, there’s always the underlying fear that a healthcare visit could lead to police involvement, immigration enforcement, or future consequences they can’t predict. So, people delay care or avoid it altogether.
This is where SWAN’s mobile sexually transmitted and blood-borne infections (SWAN Mobile STBBI testing) project comes in. It is not an innovation, but a workaround.
In partnership with the Vancouver Infectious Diseases Centre, SWAN launched a mobile STBBI testing pilot in August 2025. The service brings low-barrier, anonymous, and language-accessible testing directly to people across 13 municipalities in the Lower Mainland.
Instead of requiring community members to go to clinics where they may be scrutinized, SWAN staff go to workplaces, homes, or wherever people feel safe having us. Through this program, we collect urine samples and facilitate dried blood spot testing, and people can test for a host of STBBIs without having to disclose information that could put them at risk, ultimately, allowing people to access testing privately, without having to enter clinical spaces that feel risky or unsafe.
Test results are shared confidentially, in the person’s preferred language including Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, or English and SWAN provides ongoing support to help people access medication and treatment if they are diagnosed with an infection. It is not just testing, it is continuity of care without punishment, judgement, or surveillance.
This model exists because the mainstream healthcare system has failed to create conditions where immigrant, migrant sex workers can access care without fear, even in so-called low-barrier clinics. And that failure is not accidental.
Just like in Hookers on Davie, sex workers are still treated as needing to be managed rather than people to be cared for. Surveillance did not disappear; it has just been absorbed into institutions that claim neutrality.
So when we talk about healthcare access, we have to ask: access for whom, and on whose terms? If accessing care means risking being outed and judged, then the system does not care–no matter how progressive it sounds on paper.
And when people say the community we support is small, that the system has already stretched too far, what they are really saying is that equity feels inconvenient. That care should be rationed, and some people should expect less. We reject that entirely. This argument only works if you believe care is something people must earn. When equity is treated as a favour instead of a right, all it does is reproduce hierarchies of who is seen as deserving of care.
A system that requires sex workers to make themselves legible or understandable to the state in order to receive care, is not a system built on trust, but one that builds on control.
SWAN’s mobile testing doesn’t solve these structural problems, doesn’t dismantle criminalization, doesn’t end surveillance. Also sexual health is not the only healthcare that this community needs. But it does create a small pocket of care that is led by community trust rather than state oversight.
Hookers on Davie shows us what happens when cities decide that safety means removal, and that order means exclusion. Today, the language is more sanitized, but the outcome is often the same. Sex workers are still pushed to the margins, expected to navigate systems that do not see them as deserving of privacy, dignity, or care.
The question we should ask as we watch this film is not just what has changed but what hasn’t? Who is still being pushed out in the name of public good? Whose safety is prioritized? Who is expected to be displaced, erased, or made invisible so that others can feel comfortable?
SWAN Mobile STBBI testing exists because the alternative is a healthcare system that continues to exclude sex workers unless they are willing to be policed.
As we move into the screening, I invite you to hold this tension: between care and control, between visibility and safety, and between systems that claim to protect and the people they continue to leave behind.