Sex work is ‘just another option in London’s gig economy’, says Sebastian filmmaker Mikko Mäkelä

Moving to London after university in the early 2010s and beginning to discover the queer scene here, in my home of East London in particular, I was initially somewhat struck by the realisation of just how many young gay men were involved in sex work of some kind or another. People who at the time I might not have immediately associated with more traditional ideas of sex work, but rather students and recent graduates – young people trying to forge careers in the creative industries but struggling to make ends meet, or just looking for a bit of extra cash on the side to help fund their studies.

Having heard multiple stories of peers beginning their journey into sex work perhaps by casually accepting a paid proposition on an app like Grindr – and having enjoyed the experience, then perhaps going onto set up a profile on an escorting website – it’s clear that the emergence of app-based hook-up culture has lowered the threshold for people experimenting with sex work and generally blurred the lines between different types of transactional relationships.

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Facilitated by the digitalisation of our lives, sex work as it is mostly experienced by young gay men in London in 2025 has significantly shifted away from outdated notions of the profession – working the street or in a Soho walk-up.

In my film Sebastian, I was interested in crafting a portrait of queer sex work within this newer context, particularly thinking about it as existing within the city’s gig economy, where sex work may form just one arena in the life of a character who is caught in the middle of a number of pressures on his existence and identity in London.

In a way, I really wanted to explore sex work as just another option in the big city’s fast-evolving gig economy, and through this juxtaposition with the other aspects of Max’s life, seek to interrogate any still lingering stigmatisation and the devaluing of sex work in comparison with the other kinds of work that the character in the film engages in, namely, being a journalist and a fiction writer.

Through the juxtaposition of this double life, I also wanted to question any perceived incompatibility between these two pursuits: Why should sex work continue to be so stigmatised; why shouldn’t a person be publicly and openly allowed to be a sex worker at the same time as, say, a journalist, without judgement?

Above all I didn’t want the film to question sex work as a legitimate choice for a person, but to approach it non-judgementally yet frankly. Never glamorizing but also never questioning the inherent validity and value of sex work.

So much of previous sex worker representation has focused on or implied the presence of trauma – either as a reason behind going into sex work, or as its inevitable consequence – and this is something that I very much wanted to avoid. As if a person has to be somehow damaged to want to engage in sex work, or that a sex worker’s life is bound to result in tragedy. Both of these are prejudiced notions that it was important for the film to move beyond.

While the potential for exploitation in sex work is of course real, this shouldn’t be taken to define the profession as a whole. And what seems in many ways revolutionary about the kind of digitally facilitated sex work of today, as compared to older forms of it, is a foundational idea of entrepreneurship. Working for yourself, on your own terms.

The fact is that there are plenty of happy, empowered sex workers who enjoy their work and are well rewarded for it.

What was also very important for me was to approach the client characters from an equally non-judgemental perspective. Too often past depictions have shown sex worker clients as one-dimensional antagonists or characterised them as somehow pathetic for ‘having to’ pay for sex. It was really important in the film to counter this kind of reductive representation.

Every client has their slightly differing reasons for hiring a sex worker. Sometimes this is convenience, sometimes a desire to explore a different side to one’s sexuality, but often the mere fact of loneliness – an issue accentuated among queer elders – a desire for connection, intimacy, touch – all extremely human needs.

I really wanted to make a film that didn’t problematise the depiction of sex in any way, from either a moral or an aesthetic standpoint. For me a film about sex work had to approach sex frankly, objectively and from a position of sex positivity. From a position of not feeling the need to question the necessity of depicting sex on screen, acknowledging it as a fundamental fact of human life, and thus according its depiction the same dramatic value as the depiction of any other essential human activity.

At its most basic level, Sebastian is a coming of age story of a young man who is exploring himself both through his art and through sex which, in his project of writing a novel about sex work, become intertwined. Thus, the story also highlights the potential of sex and sexual encounters to function as means for self-expression, self-discovery and ultimately an affirmed sense of self-worth.

It was very important for me to ensure the authenticity of the representation of this world through research and many conversations had with people in the world of sex work. I wanted the details to feel accurate, lived-in, authentic.

And much of the most meaningful and rewarding feedback on the film has indeed been from sex workers on having felt seen, on having felt that their experience has been captured sensitively and truthfully.

Sebastian is in UK cinemas now.

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