Video excerpt featuring Danny from the 2016 documentary Our Bodies, Our Business by Geraldine George. Excerpted with permission from Triple-X Workers' Solidarity Association of British Columbia. Full video available here.

ACT UP/Montreal formed in January 1990, six months after the Fifth International AIDS Conference. Danny’s influence and work with the PSSP can be seen in an early safer sex poster produced by ACT UP/Montreal that utilizes Danny’s writing translated into French. Poster courtesy of l’Archives Gaies du Quebec.

In 1989, a contingent of sex worker activists from all over the world participated in, and protested against, the V International AIDS Conference, which was held at the Palais de congrès in Montreal. Danny Cockerline, Valerie Scott, and Tracy Tief from Toronto, alongside members of the short-lived Réaction Sida from Montreal, played hosts as representatives of the Canadian sex workers’ rights movement. Together with their international sex working allies they held rallies, shared information, read manifestos, disrupted panel proceedings, intervened in question-and-answer periods, and most notably, staged theatrical civil disobedience in the exhibition hall by actively soliciting their unsuspecting audience with “safe sex for sale.”  All of these activities were captured in Geraldine George’s 2016 documentary Our Bodies, Our Business, which used archival footage of the conference shot by Catherine Gund/DIVA TV. The footage is archived in the New York Public Library’s AIDS Activist Videotape Collection.

Two moments featuring Danny in George’s documentary stand out. One is Danny’s frustration about HIV/AIDS researchers poking and prodding into the lives of sex workers. This is most evident when he notes that many people have asked him how he feels about men who sell sex not being included in much of the social scientific research on sex workers and HIV/AIDS. He responds by saying how he feels lucky and glad that men who sell sex have not attracted the same invasive, scrutinizing, and blaming gaze of researchers that women who sell sex have. Danny’s distrust of and disdain for academic and public health researchers alike is palpable. Second is Danny’s close friendships with members of sex workers’ rights organizations across the globe, particularly with Carol Leigh of the United States and Cheryl Overs and Andrew Hunter of Australia. These international connections and the increasingly networked global movement for sex workers’ rights led Danny to spend a significant amount of time traveling the world in the early 1990s.