ARCHIVING THE CLUB: THE DANSEUSE NUE GRAPHIC MEMOIR OF SYLVIE RANCOURT

Typing the words “Canada sex workers comics” into any search engine will inevitably lead you to Chester Brown’s acclaimed graphic novel, Paying For It. It’s ironic that the first (and almost only) book we encounter is written by a man, a client, and above all an outspoken hobbyist review board member.1 Brown, like other hobbyists, is a certain type of “John;” a client of sex workers who makes a hobby of reviewing and writing lengthy resumés of their encounters for other client-board members to evaluate. Is it surprising that a client wrote the most popular graphic novel on sex work? Where are the sex working cartoonists, and do they even exist? Using the career of Sylvie Rancourt as a leading example, this essay centers sex workers themselves in the Canadian landscape of graphic memoirs, comics and illustrated zines. Exploring themes of feminism and queerness within Rancourt’s oeuvre, I document the importance of self-publication and archiving as queer methodologies. Rancourt deserves recognition as a pioneer of graphic memoirs and sex worker literature, and this essay ultimately seeks to dethrone Brown as a pioneer in the genre.

An Introduction to Mélody

Internationally renowned, Sylvie Rancourt is a cartoonist, painter, and illustrator from Abitibi in Northern Quebec. She started to produce and self-publish her comic series Mélody while stripping in Montréal and small towns of Québec, documenting the comical misadventures of its titular character and photocopying them to sell to her clients at stripclub tables. Sex workers develop many skills that are not often recognized; as Eleanor Ty expresses, “not only was she an artist, illustrator, and writer, she was also a distributor, publicist, and saleswoman.”2 The Mélody series embodies the very unique characteristics of 80s Québec’s danseuses nues culture and the multifaceted dimensions of informal underground economies. Gaining little visibility through Québec newsstands and television programs, Rancourt faced many obstacles concerning her subject matter, including censorship, and did not reach notoriety during her time dancing the tables in Montréal.

I am not the first one to contrast Rancourt’s work to Chester Brown’s. Feminist cartoonist Julie Delporte stated in an hommage letter to Rancourt that she “almost laughed when [she] learned that [Rancourt] would be published by Drawn & Quarterly: Mélody became to [her], became the anti Paying For It.”3 Opposed to Paying For It, which tries to justify and politicize Brown’s use of sex workers’ time, Mélody simply exists; she is there to entertain and has no agenda behind the strips. Delporte notes that Mélody’s portrayal as a stripper is “devoid of propaganda of [herself], nor a victimization of [her] self, despite adventures that are sometimes demanding.”4 While Rancourt has often stated that she does not identify as a feminist, Delporte reminds us that “Chester Brown speaks of a topic that I don’t want men to speak about anymore, while I would like to put a pencil in the hand of every women experimenting sex work, from close or afar.”5 This comment highlights the political value of Rancourt’s work in de-stigmatizing sex work as presenting it as just ‘work;’ Mélody is the comical journey of a young working class francophone woman in the eighties.

Ty also contrasts Rancourt’s depictions of sex workers to those of Brown in “The un-erotic dancer: Sylvie Rancourt’s Mélody,” in which she offers a close analysis of the graphic memoir’s unique style and visual details. She notes that in order to maintain their anonymity, Brown chooses to not detail faces, but provides details of the lives of the sex workers he visits.6 This creates a mechanical effect in which sex workers are shown in an almost robotic, dehumanizing manner, where sex is just practical. Brown, devoid of emotion, does it to fulfill his needs. While stylistically the original drawings of Mélody are very simple and coded as naive, strong emphasis is put on each woman’s individuality. Ty notes that this is explicitly clear in how Mélody is portrayed as a creative woman, at one point even creating a stripping show with puppets.7 Unlike the women Brown visits, Mélody has various relationships with people; her deadbeat boyfriend Nick, her family, Nick’s Aunt, and other dancers she befriends, including Louiselle, a character with whom she also develops a romantic and sexual friendship.8 Mélody showcases the complexities of life for a rural woman living on low-income, while remaining hopeful and adapting to the various challenges she faces.

Censorship, Self-Publication and Mainstream Media

Rancourt’s particularly queer methodology lies in the DIY nature of her work. Mélody was self-produced, primarily due to monetary restrictions, but also because the nature of the work was extremely taboo at the time. Self-publishing allows the creator to escape censorship, something Rancourt often faced when she attempted to reach larger audiences and work with publishers.

After the success she encountered with stripclub audiences (both customers and dancers), Rancourt self-published six issues of Mélody in French in 1985, with covers illustrated by Jacques Boivin and distributed in Quebec newsstands. A seventh issue called Mélody en Cadeau didn’t make it to the newsstands, as pro- duction was costly, but did appear in the 1989 edition Archives Mélodie 1 à 7 published by Montréal underground cartoon press, Éditions du Phylactère.9 Bernard Joubert notes that as early as 1986, Rancourt received criticism for her work.10 In an open letter published in Le Journal de Montréal, columnist Solange Harvey wrote: “I respect you as a person and acknowledge the duties of your work. However I see no utilities whatsoever in your turning it into a pornographic publication. That’s unfortunate for you. Don’t count on any free publicity. You’ve fallen into mediocrity and facility.”11

The first English translation of Mélody occurred in 1988, when Rancourt and Boivin collaborated on a new Mélody series distributed through Kitchen Sink Press. To make Mélody appealing to an American audience, Boivin illustrated the comics in his illustration style which was less naive. Kitchen Sink Press published ten volumes of Mélody, as well as a collection called The orgies of Abitibi, which sold one hundred and twenty thousand copies.12 This success could have likely been echoed in Canada, but Rancourt faced controversy after the American magazine Family Circle denounced her books as “pornography in the guise of cartoons” in the early nineties.13 Despite the fact that Mélody was always distributed to an adult audience, the statement had repercussions in Canada where the bookstores distributing Mélody were targeted. Four employees of the small comic bookstore Planet Earth in Toronto were convicted of “possession and sales of obscene material,” leading to its permanent closing. About a month later, the Toronto Morality Squad raided another bookstore, seizing over four hundred Mélody magazines.

Andromeda, the company distributing Mélody in Canada at the time, was also raided shortly after and stopped distributing any material that could be described as “pornographic.”14 As a result, boxes of Rancourt’s work were sent back to her which influenced her to stop working on comics. In 2011, Mélody was redistributed by a Fantagraphics sub-division called Eros Comics throughout the United States and other countries, but could not be distributed in Canada due to censorship laws.15 According to Delporte, the defunct Montréal bookstore Fichtre (1996-2010) sold handbound anthologies of Mélody but they were very expensive and thus quite inaccessible.16 In 2013, Mélody was re-edited in its entirety in France through Ego Comme X editions, and it is only thirty years after its creation that in 2015, Mélody was made widely available in an English translation in Canada through the Montréal press Drawn & Quarterly. Most recently, Mélody was published by Spanish independent press, Autsaider Comics, in February 2022, who released a Spanish translation of the original comics as an anthology named Mélody: Diario de Una Stripper.

Rancourt self-published a wide array of comics and fanzines under her own label, Editions Mélody as well, including one thousand copies of the first edition of Mélody à ses débuts, printed in black and white (fig. 1). Éditions Mélody also birthed the six issues of Mélody that were distributed in Quebec newsstands, and Boivin explains that these editions were made to look more “professional.”17 Despite her retirement from stripping in later years, Rancourt continued to distribute her own work through various means. According to her Wikipedia page, she self-published many other zines in the nineties and early 2000s, including Club Mélody, Cheveuton, La Bible selon Sylvie Rancourt, L’Espoir, Bébé Mélody and Mélodie burlesque. Some of these zines can be retrieved at the National Collection archives of the National Library, as well as others which are not retraceable online. Her work has also been sold through the Montréal feminist bookstore L’euguélionne. To this day, Rancourt runs an Etsy shop where she sells original paintings (fig. 2), self-publications, and vintage Mélody memorabilia such as playing cards, a direct clin d’oeil of sex work culture in the eighties and early nineties. She is also known to make appearances at underground comic book festivals and national comics events.

Queerness and Mélody

When speaking on the queerness aspect of Mélody, it is useful to remind ourselves of this Jon Davies quote on queer curation: “I hope that ‘queer’ will always retain its associations with non-normative genders and sexualities, but it’s most important for me as a kind of doubled vision, a way of looking askance at the world—having a heightened, critical sensitivity to the fiction we live under and that shapes us.”18

Sex workers share this doubled vision with queer people, and we see this in how Rancourt’s unique perspective produces the result of her various marginalized identities combined—a stripper, a woman who wrote about sexuality despite censorship, and a working-class rural woman who left to the city due to lack of opportunities in her mining town. As Davies puts it: “Whether artists (or curators) use the word “queer” or not, I feel a kinship with those holding onto a sense of difference and apartness that evolves over time, people who consciously align themselves with past and present struggles and queer touchstones.”19 While queer people have always existed, the generation Rancourt is from—northern Québécois working class, didn’t use descriptives like queer to illustrate their lived experiences. Nonetheless, a queer affect is found in Mélody. Questions of sexual exploration and curiosity are omnipresent through Mélody. In Mélody et ses Orgies, she develops a close friendship with Louiselle and asks herself if she is a lesbian. In footage from a TQS Camera 87 segment about Rancourt and her work, this specific strip is shown on the screen. Twenty-nineyear-old Rancourt answers the host’s questions, claiming that orgies are now common, and that she likes to pick a girlfriend from time to time.20

In Mélody et ses orgies, Mélody and Louiselle become close to each other at work, and they end up living together with Nick and Louiselle’s boyfriend and children because they are not making enough money at the club. Ty notes that when the orgies are illustrated, the men are at the edge of the bed while Mélody and Louiselle are in the middle, which puts a strong focus on their connection.21 Mélody and Louiselle later on perform lesbian shows at the club, and Mélody finds herself desiring Louiselle.

A clear link can also be made between sex workers and queer communities as both are portrayed as deviant and highly criminalized. The criminalized aspect of queerness in the seventies and eighties is clearly expressed in a short video made to educate against discrimination towards LGBTQ+, where Rancourt explains that she “drew from the sexual orientation of the mid seventies.”22 Not only is queerness depicted in various aspects of Mélody’s adventures, but it is also deeply ingrained in the way Rancourt talks about sexuality and friendships. In her personal life, she had a close relationship with her brother who was gay and cross-dressing in the seventies. Rancourt explains that they would drive from Abitibi to Montréal together and that he would go to “gay, trans bars; that were very discreet, almost secret.”23 He died by suicide when she was fifteen. It is within this context in Abitibi and Montréal that we see the perception of queerness translated in Rancourt’s artwork.

Conclusion: On Archiving Sex Work Culture and the Legacy of Mélody

On the infamous Camera 87 episode, we see Rancourt entering the strip club L’axe in Montréal. Throughout the interview that was broadcast on TQS, we can observe her doing various things candidly, including working on her comic, calling distributors, and nude dancing. Club L’axe, which has recently closed, was one of the few remaining stripclubs of the era when Rancourt was dancing.24 The stripclub industry in Quebec has undergone changes partially due to lockdowns and limitations caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.25 Radio-Canada affirms that there were about two hundred strip clubs in Québec over a decade ago, and now there are about one hundred remaining. It is a business that is not as profitable as it was in the eighties, and sex workers are now turning to different options out of necessity.26 These establishments are part of Québec history, but also of local sex worker culture. Sylvie Rancourt’s work is a testimony of this era and is an important archive for the iconic universe of the notorious danseuses nues of Montréal and Québec.

Notes

1. Escort Review Boards are common for Canadian cities, and are platforms where clients (calling themselves hobbyists) write lengthy reviews of escorts they hired. These reviews can include physical description, age, and the services provided. While some service providers use these forums to advertise, a vast majority of sex workers are critical of review boards.

2. Ty, Eleanor. (2018). “The Un-Erotic Dancer: Sylvie Rancourt’s Mélody.” In Comics Memory: Archives and Styles, edited by Maaheen Ahmed and Benoit Crucifix, 121-141. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.

3. Translated from French: “J’ai presque ri en vous apprenant publiée par Drawn & Quarterly : “Mélody est devenue pour moi l’anti Paying For It” (a comic strip memoir about being a John); Delporte, Julie. “lettre à sylvie rancourt.” La Cité internationale de la bande dessinée et de l’image, 2015. http://neuviemeart.citebd.org/spip.php?article1232.

4. Translated from French: “Dans Mélody, il n’y a à l’œuvre ni propagande de vous-même, ni victimisation de votre situation – et ce malgré des aventures parfois éprouvantes.” Delporte, “lettre à sylvie rancourt.”

5. Translated from French: “Chester Brown y parle d’un sujet sur lequel je ne veux plus entendre les hommes s’exprimer, alors que j’aimerais mettre un crayon dans la main de toutes les femmes expérimentant de près ou de loin le travail du sexe;” Delporte, “lettre à sylvie rancourt.”

6. Ty, “The Un-Erotic Dancer,” 122.

7. Ty, 135.

8. Ty, 125.

9. Boivin, J. Préface to Archives Mélody 1 à 7 by Sylvie Rancourt. Éditions du Phylactère, 1989.

10. Joubert, Bernard. “High Culture and Good Manners Be Damned.” Afterword of Sylvie Rancourt’s Mélody: Story of a Nude Dancer. Translated by Helge Dascher. Montréal: Drawn and Quarterly, 2015.

11. Joubert, “High Culture.”

Fig 2. “Festival Guay #3”, Acrylics on Canvas, 2012. On this canvas, we can see Rancourt herself with a ghostly Melody. Note the spelling “guay” - spelling mistakes are common in Rancourt’s work, which can be understood as a particular style of Quebecois working class language. Retrieved from https://www.etsy.com/ca/shop/melodybandedessinee

12. Dee, M. “Sylvie Rancourt: Cartoonist.” Constellation 5-6, no. 1 (N.D.). Stella L’amie de Maimie.

13. Dee, “Sylvie Rancourt.”

14. Dee, “Sylvie Rancourt.”

15. Dee, “Sylvie Rancourt.”

16. Delporte, Julie. “lettre à sylvie rancourt.”

17. Boivin, Préface to Archives Mélody 1 à 7.

18. Barbu, Adam. “Queer Curating, From Definition to Deconstructing.” Canadian Art, 2018. https://canadianart.ca/features/queer-curating/.

19. Barbu, “Queer Curating.”

20. Camera 87. Feb 7, 2014. Melody 87 (video). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vc9Jk_Ua4g.

21. Ty, “The Un-Erotic Dancer,” 136.

22. Translated from French: “J’ai dessiné l’orientation sexuelle des années 1975.” Commission des droits de la personne et des droits de la jeunesse, 2020. https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=0AYuvu083YE.

23. Translated from French: “Mon frère allait souvent dans des bars gais, trans. C'était des bars très discrets, presque secrets.” Commission des droits de la personne et des droits de la jeunesse, 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0AYuvu083YE.

24. Club L’axe has closed business since writing this piece, marking the ongoing mass closures of strip clubs in Montréal.

25. Quirion, René-Charles. “Quelles sont les conséquences du déclin des bars de danseuses érotiques?” Ici-Radio Canada, February 4, 2022. https://ici.radio-canada.ca/nouvelle/1859877/effeuilleuses-declin-nudite-etablissement-estrie

26. Quirion, “Quelles sont les conséquences.”