The Military is Fucking Christina Lea Gilchrist

This is the second installment in a series of interviews I am carrying out with various sex workers. The purpose is so that people can hear various perspectives from sex workers who aren’t necessarily immersed in the philosophy/theory world. My hope is to paint a more realistic image of the various professions that fall under sex work, show what sex workers actually think about what they do, and give some women an opportunity to talk about their jobs. If you want to read the first interview I did you can find it linked here.

Christina Lea Gilchrist is a full service sex worker, kink educator, and activist living in and working out of Kingston, Ontario, Canada. In 2024 she became the subject of national attention after the local military base discovered that she was offering troops a 25% discount. A base-wide memo went out to warn potential customers away, and legal action was threatened against Gilchrist. The story received attention from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (our version of the BBC), The Daily Mail (yes that one), and Vice among others. I caught up with Christina to get a sense of how things turned out in the end, and what changes, if any, this turbulent attention had caused in her work.

AA: Do you want to start talking about the rather nebulous and uncomfortable position you were put in by the military police?

CLG: So that all started with me advertising a 25% discount to the military members, and this started due to me having a military fetish. I just personally enjoy seeing them in their uniforms, and so the discount started because I wanted them to keep it on while they were hiring me. In some of my promotional material, I’m wearing outfits that are made from Canadian Forces items that have been cut up and pieced together and whatever, and they were kind of mad about that, I guess. Nothing did come of it, and they did drop the threatening charges that they issued.

AA: There seems to be a distinction between the discount and the wearing of the clothing. It seems that the concern was twofold, but was it the fact that you were offering a discount, or was it the idea that you were somehow desecrating the Canadian Forces?

CLG: I am quoting articles there, and I guess they have misspoken when they have wrote that. It’s not really the discount that concerned the military themselves. It was Canadian Armed Forces uniform material being used in the advertising services and the fact that military members were breaking their code of conduct. They were accused of engaging in “sexual exploitation”. So because they were breaking the law, they were saying that in the future I was able to blackmail them for classified information. They also accused not me personally, but they accused sex workers and sex workers like me of being engaged with organized crime. We were considered a threat to them.

AA: Obviously that’s horrific, but it must be a little exciting like ooh, I could be a spy.

CLG: That was funny. I had a bunch of people accuse me of being a Chicom spy, a Chinese communist spy.

AA: Incredible. This is probably a good direction to go in, because a lot of my readership is American, despite the fact we’re both Canadians. Let’s talk a bit about Canadian sex work laws.

CLG: Canada has what is called half decriminalization, and half decriminalization means that I am treated like a sex trafficking victim. So I am personally not breaking the law when I am advertising myself for my own services. But the people paying for my services are breaking the law, and they are legally treated like pimps. So sexual exploitation in that regard is not inaccurate as a term, because that’s technically what they’re being charged with, even though I am a consenting individual. The really funny part about this that hasn’t been covered in the media is that I tried to get a military member fired after he removed a condom in the dark. I did multiple interviews with the military police, and they did basically nothing. They did fuck all. He got a promotion, and he has gone on to rape another one of his subordinates, and they wouldn’t do anything about him, as far as I know. If he had any classified information status or security clearance, it hasn’t been revoked. But they were threatening people who consensually pay for my services with that.

AA: So even though he legally was the “exploiter”, it’s you the military police went after?

CLG: Yes.

AA: This is mostly for my American audience, but the Americans have laws that they never use about desecrating the flag. I don’t know if Canada has similar laws, so I’m surprised to find out that a civilian wearing second-hand military equipment would be an issue.

CLG: It’s really not, considering that they sell them in army surplus stores and thrift stores all over the place. Unless you’re going to prosecute every homeless person on the street wearing stuff that they’ve broken into a car and stolen. And that’s the other thing, precedent. There was people attending remembrance services wearing uniforms and full-on real medals, and pretending to have been enlisted for clout, basically. And these people were slapped on the wrist and given community service. I’m fully stating that I’m not military, have never been military, do not represent the Canadian Armed Forces in any capacity, I’m not a veteran, haven’t served in any other military. What the fuck are you going to possibly do to me?

AA: Let’s talk a bit about your activism. You’ve obviously used your platform to promote changes to Canadian sex work laws, and it’s clearly very needed. Do you want to talk about that?

CLG: I have only recently taken over the Sex Workers Action Group in Kingston, but our initiative now is trying to get harm reduction kits specifically targeted towards sex workers. So we’ve ordered things like small condoms that are just impossible to get. I went to every single sex shop, harm reduction, health services, drugstore. There’s no small condoms to be seen. You can find extra-large condoms, but you cannot buy small condoms without ordering them from, I think, they came from Lithuania. So we have sampled a bunch of those and are trying to promote the use of those to get the health services to buy them, on the basis of preventing HIV. Not only for people who have smaller equipment, but for those who have erectile dysfunction, no matter their age. That loss of erection could result in the fluid leaking back out of the condom, and that could be inside you to cross contaminate, right? So we want to prevent that. We are also trying to get internal sex sponges, which are kind of like a tampon but smaller and more comfortable, made of a special internal sponge (please do not use your makeup sponges, that’s not what I’m saying!). But they can prevent you from spotting. When the condom comes back out they can prevent blood from being on it if you’re only lightly having your period, or if you have polyps or other kinds of medical conditions that would cause just a little bit of bleeding. You could still possibly be able to work without anyone knowing that that was going on.

AA: It’s incredible, the difficulty in getting sponges or small condoms, which is certainly an issue that affects the trans community. And in trying to get dental dams too. Everyone says to use them, but they’re incredibly difficult to track down.

CLG: And just in case anyone listening doesn’t know, you can cut the end off of a condom and then cut along it lengthwise to make a dental dam.

AA: So you got into the discount via fetish for military uniforms. Can I ask, has this experience, has actually interacting with the military community in this capacity affected that at all?

CLG: No. If anything, it’s been overwhelmingly positive. A lot of people in the military, aside from the higher-ups, are full-on supportive. It was amazing, the outreach when I went viral from all over Canada, the people that were excited about it.

AA: That’s very wonderful. What do you think is the average opinion of Canadians towards sex work? I mean, clearly it’s not something that we talk about as a society much, and yet it’s something that’s very common. My presumption was that people would be quietly indifferent, or perhaps against it, but you’ve been in the spotlight.

CLG: Online, anonymous people suck. Anonymous people generally suck, and they’re the people that will treat you the worst, obviously. But I am very out and in public a lot, and end up talking to a lot of strangers about what I do for work. And this is probably not a typical experience, but in Kingston, Ontario, talking to the general public, I have never been treated poorly in person for being a sex worker.

AA: That’s wonderful to hear, especially - I don’t want to, you know, insult Kingston or anything - but it’s not the place in Canada that’s known for being particularly progressive, or what have you.

CLG: That being said, if you’re afraid of someone punching you in the face, maybe you’re not going to be a dick to me.

AA: Yeah, fair.

CLG: (Laughing) I can’t say whether they’re just nice people or whether I look like someone that’s gonna punch them in the face, so I don’t know.

AA: I mean, the leather jacket is really badass.

CLG: Thank you.

AA: I have two more quick questions for you. The first is a very general question, which is how did you end up in sex work?

CLG: So, Ontario has a program called OSAP [Ontario Student Assistance Program], and it’s for high school students to get a loan from the government to go to school. I was having trouble getting access to that because I’m not on speaking terms with either of my parents. I don’t know who my biological father is, and I’m not on speaking terms with my mother. Because of that, I couldn’t prove how much money she made and whether or not I deserved to get this money or not, regardless of the fact that I hadn’t spoken to her in three years or whatever. So while I was desperately waiting for my OSAP loans, it was when I started to do sex work, maybe more than 15 years ago.

AA: As someone who started doing it to handle university fees, I very much get it. I’ve got some OSAP loans too.

CLG: We’re just going to pretend that doesn’t exist and not talk about that.

AA: How do you feel about your work in relation to other work. Like, this is something you’ve kept doing.

CLG: It’s definitely not something that I’m ashamed of. I had zero hesitation about them letting my face and name go into the paper. A lot of that is because I was already out and about doing kink education. I have a booth at Kingston Pride every year for the last more than a decade. Like 12 years, where I’ve been doing kink education. So people already know I’m a fucking weirdo.

AA: Why did you stay in it?

CLG: I’m disabled and I am not on the Ontario Disability Support Program because they make it so difficult to get on. Not only from lacking family doctors for everyone, but just due to how hard the fucking process is. They spend more money on rejecting people and fighting them about it than they would if they just fucking gave everyone who applied the money. As a disabled person, I can’t work a fucking eight-hour shift standing all day. To be honest, I can’t work an eight-hour shift fucking sitting in one spot all day either. So, this allows me the adaptability. It allows me to be my own boss. It allows me to work when I feel like it. And it allows me to reschedule appointments when I’m not able to work because of pain.

AA: That makes a lot of sense. I mean, it sounds like it’s a good fit for you.

CLIG: I mean, I’d rather be a commercial scuba diver (laughs).

AA: That would be sick. I know you pushed for full decriminalization in the past. Do you want to give me an idea of what that looks like for Canada?

CLG: So we definitely do not want legalization. Legalization brings its own slew of problems. We don’t want to give cops new reasons to harass us. We just want cops not to harass us, right? So decriminalization just involves removing those laws specific to sex work. There’s already laws against exploitation. There’s already laws against abuse. We don’t need to make it harder for migrant workers to stay in Canada. Just in case anyone doesn’t know, migrants are not allowed to work in massage parlors or strip clubs, and if they’re caught doing sex work, they can be deported. So we want this abolished. They don’t need the government to protect them. We don’t need the government to protect us. We need to be allowed to keep ourselves safe.

AA: So, the idea is to let regular labor laws that exist for everyone else also regulate sex work and no other additional laws?

CLG: Exactly.

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