This Toronto pair put their unorthodox sex lives on film in ‘Paying for It,’ premiering at TIFF

An interview with the multidisciplinary artist Sook-Yin Lee and the cartoonist Chester Brown must begin with a few definitions, since the Toronto duo defy easy categorization.
Lee’s sexually charged new movie, “Paying for It,” which she directed and co-wrote and which is world premiering Friday at the Toronto International Film Festival, is based on Brown’s bestselling 2011 graphic novel of the same name.
The abundantly bewhiskered Brown is the best friend of the raven-haired Lee, who’s also an actor, musician, broadcaster and former MuchMusic VJ.
For about four years in the early 1990s, Brown was Lee’s romantic partner when he was in his early 30s and she was in her 20s.
Then Lee announced she wanted to explore other romantic options, while Brown opted to hire sex workers to fulfil his physical needs. The two decided to keep living together in their brightly decorated but tiny Kensington Market row house, where Lee still lives. Brown moved to the basement while Lee lived (and loved) in the rooms upstairs.
“It never occurred to us to break up,” Lee says in a new foreword to the recently reissued book. The film and novel document the emotional and logistical tumult, much of it funny but some of it not, that flowed from this unconventional domestic arrangement.
So does this make “Paying for It” a docudrama, since actors Emily Lê and Dan Beirne play Lee and Brown? “I would say it’s a comedy drama or dramatic comedy,” Lee says, as Brown sits by her side.
“It’s all based on what happened,” he elaborates. “But of course, you’re fudging things a little bit because you can’t remember the dialogue exactly. I worked as close to what I remembered as possible, but you know, you’re trying to do an entertaining graphic novel.”
The character based on Lee is named Sonny rather than Sook-Yin because the director says she needed a bit of distance to assist her creative process.
Neither she nor Brown felt the need to change the name of his character. Brown even agreed to cameo in the film. He also contributed illustrations and titles; his hands are seen arranging them for the camera.
Real sex workers in the film blur the lines further. One of Chester’s partners, Denise, is played by Andrea Werhun, the author of “Modern Whore: A Memoir,” which is soon to be made into a movie executive produced by Sean Baker, the writer-director of “Anora” (also screening at TIFF).
Lee also describes her film, her second feature this year (the experimental “Rest and Relax” premiered earlier this summer), as “a double act of portraiture.” But she wants it to be viewed as more than that.
“The movie is a lot about labour, and it’s about sex work, and it’s about queer rights, as Chester articulated so well in the graphic novel,” she says. “There’s a whole kind of continuum of the parallel between sex worker rights, queer rights, and by extension, POC rights. There are very many human rights involved there.”
She compares “Paying for It” to Richard Benner’s “Outrageous!” a dramedy of friendship in adversity starring Craig Russell as an aspiring drag queen and Hollis McLaren as a pregnant woman with schizophrenia. It’s a landmark Canadian film about mental health and LGBTQ+ rights that screened at TIFF 1977.
“Paying for It” is a distinctly Toronto film by design and circumstance. Torontonians will recognize local landmarks, including Kensington Market, Spadina Avenue and Sneaky Dee’s, the restaurant and live music venue on College Street where Sonny goes to check out new bands and new boyfriends. “Literally, we shot in the house where the real-life events took place, including the basement, and also around the neighbourhood,” Lee says.
“The funny thing is, I think our place was a brothel at one point, because people keep knocking at the door and asking if ‘Lips’ still works here.”
Sex is, of course, a big part of “Paying for It,” and Lee didn’t shy away from depicting it. There is full-frontal nudity and realistic intimate encounters, which is what you might expect from a filmmaker who engaged in unsimulated sex in John Cameron Mitchell’s erotic dramedy “Shortbus.” (Mitchell is an executive producer of “Paying for It.”)
For Lee, the sex and nudity in “Playing for It” is neither gratuitous nor excessive. “It’s really just the human form in its nakedness,” she says. “As you would see in National Geographic magazine: a man wakes up, scratches his balls, walks across the room to get a book from the shelf, and you see his penis. It’s not fabulous, it’s not romanticized. It’s extremely natural. It’s not intended for sensationalism or to get you off or anything. It’s the human form.”
The film’s emotional nakedness, Lee and Brown both concede, was much rawer, as they acknowledge hurting each other more by accident than design. Sonny keeps bringing new men home while Chester is there, and Chester violates a promise to not invite sex workers into the house.
All these years later, Lee and Brown still consider themselves best friends, ones with a better appreciation of what it takes to maintain any kind of personal bond.
“We definitely had arguments,” Brown says.
Adds Lee: “In real life, I was making a lot of mistakes and getting myself into all kinds of situations. And, as in the movie, we were unable to break up.
“We’re each other’s family. So what began as ‘Oh, let’s open the relationship’ evolved into this other thing.”