It then queers Brown by considering both aesthetic choices and depicted life episodes, with a focus on his rejection of romantic labor, and fostering of alternative kinship arrangements. Part II begins by analyzing comics as a genre teeming with queerness. Part I surveys the changing construction of sex trade clients from ordinary to deviant men, and reviews scholarship that reads sex work as queer activity. This article uses Paying For It to situate Brown, and sex trade clients in general, as queer subjects in their rejection of relational normativity and engagement with criminalized consensual sexuality. In this 2011 Canadian memoir, Brown chronicles his journey from being a monogamous boyfriend to becoming a client of multiple sex workers. Chester Brown’s "Paying For It: A Comic-Strip Memoir About Being a John" marks an autobiographical intervention into the literature. Regardless of one’s position, almost all of the discourse is authored by non-clients (or those who do not identify as clients). Some construct clients as exploitative and inherently deviant, while others destigmatize them as complex and varied. Sex trade clients have become a contested identity in academia and mainstream media.
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