Queer History: Issue 7/8

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$3.95 CA

Today, Vancouver’s queer community is at the foreground: from the West End to East Vancouver, it is a visible

and intrinsic thread of the city’s cultural fabric. The city’s queers are here, and for most Vancouverites, this is to state the obvious. But this was not always the case. It was not easy for Vancouver’s queer community to arrive where it is today, and its journey from a quiet subculture to a prominent voice in the city was not always a joyride. Historically, the LGBT people were often marginalized from the foreground altogether.

Why, then, has the community’s history remained hidden as its people once were? The city’s queer culture is evident, but its past less so. This past, a dense, complex, multi-part, and multi-voiced history, has remained a quiet outlier of Vancouver’s chronicles. Perhaps this is because the city is still young and has precious little history of its own, or perhaps because we take the LGBT community’s development for granted due to its continued growth and presence.

Sad Mag has always featured queer content, but until now it’s something that we didn’t make a big deal about. For us, queer content was and is an important part of our mandate: the queer community contributes to our city’s arts and cultural development. This issue, though, we mean it more than ever. We track the workings of the Dogwood Monarchist Society in the ‘60s, and we piece together sequins of Vancouver’s queer disco scene in the ‘70s. We speak to a queer artist that fought a political battle for the treatment of AIDS victims in the ‘90s, and we try to figure out what it means to be gay in the 21st-century suburb.

It’s a bit of a stretch, but boy do we have some new old stories for you. S editorial team seven/eight 13

sAD MAGAZINE IS deanne beattie editor in chief brandon gaukel creative director jeff lawrence & adam cristobal managing editors monika koch lead designer megan lau copy editor

Contributing Writers Deanne Beattie Derek Bedry Tony Correia Adam Cristobal Dave Deveau Steph Hallett Jeff Lawrence Tyler Morgenstern Leanne Perry Michelle Reid Benjamin Riley Matt Roy Esther Tung Daniel Zomparelli

Contributing Artists Mischa Bartkow Daphne Chan Lon Garrick Brandon Gaukel Grant Harder Brennan Kelly monika koch Parker McLean Laura Nguyen Sarah Race Monique Wells

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featured contributors 1. mischa bartkow is a Vancouver-born photographer who loves blurring the line between ugly and beautiful. An image he captured of lightbulbs against a stark background in Hong Kong was selected as a design for a Scotties tissue box, which you can see in stores now.

2. tony correia has worked as a columnist and contributor for Xtra since 2005. Tony’s essays and articles have appeared in The Globe & Mail, The Vancouver Province, San Francisco Courier, SubTerrain, and Vancouver Review, as well as the anthologies, Second Person Queer and I Like it Like that.

3. dave deveau is an awardwinning playwright who explores queer work for a broad audience. He also makes fun queer parties happen in East Van including the weekly drag show Apocalypstick, Queer Bash, and the hip-hop night Hustla where you can find his drag alter ego Peach Cobblah.

Sad Mag would like to thank: The City of Vancouver B.C. Gay and Lesbian Archives Jan Altshool Robert Bittner Guy Babineau Nicole Hurley Sian Hurley Deb LeRose Ted Northe Nathan Pachal michelle reid rebecca slaven pinq.ca gayvancouver.net Vancouver Queer Film Festival East Van studios The Cobalt Katie Stewart Sad Mag is published four times per year by the Sad Magazine Publishing Society, Suite 534, 2818 Main St., Vancouver, B.C., V5T 0C1. Email: hello@sadmag.ca.

Contents © Sad Mag 2011 All rights reserved. www.sadmag.ca www.facebook.com/sadmag www.twitter.com/sadmag

4 dispatches 6 a long walk 8 dressed to empress 16 wide-eyed adrenaline

vancouver’s first pride parade ted northe gussied up for change

24

the glitzy dancefloors of ‘70s lgbt nightlife

queens of the castle history of the landmark beer parlour

28 designing davie 31 speaking volumes 35 rainbow reels 36 the quiet fighter

urban planner alan herbert nancy pollak tells queer stories

put on your gablevision glasses

40

tiko kerr on finding his voice in the battle against hiv/aids

a tough pill: the art of general idea canada’s art stars instruct a new generation

43 borderline riot 46 this magical place 48 tough in transit 53 free spirit 52 gay in the suburbs 61 denis, everyone.

62 to serve and collect 64 photo essay:

legit evolves canada’s immigration laws leaving behind a life of fear in jordan

a culture of strength in the dtes

jaylene’s transformation new frontier of lgbt integration

remembering denis simpson ron dutton’s lgbt archives

photo printed with permission from the B.C. Gay & lesbian archives.

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illustrations by Parker McLean

MATT ROY TORONTO Toronto is so big, who knew? When I moved here from Vancouver I instantly found myself a small town boy with a West Coast drawl and not the city man I claimed to be, slowly but surely mapping out the “New York of Canada,” a navigation that included sussing out the gays. “Turn left on Church Street,” says my iPhone.

Ten times bigger than Vancouver in practically every way, Toronto has shown me a new version of queer, of community, of responsibility. And I’m learning a lot. For instance, it is not cool to make trans jokes because you have no inkling of who may be trans— especially the hot bear you’ve been chatting with at the bar. My ‘Couve apathy will be the death of me yet.

People take their politics seriously here. With Mayor Rob Ford planning to cut AIDS funding off at the 4 sad magazine

knees, among nearly every other essential social service, queers and generally all compassionate liberal (human) souls are assembling, and I’ve been swept out to sea (or into lake I suppose). Whether I’m marching in Slut Walk, or discussing my role as queer on a rooftop deck, partially (fully) inebriated, there’s no escaping the fact that I’m now a participant and not the voyeur I once was. S

STEPH HALLETt LOS ANGELES In 2008, Larry King was an eighth grade student at E.O. Green Junior High in Oxnard, California.

By most accounts, he was bubbly, gentle, and liked to dress up his otherwise-blah school uniform with high-heeled boots, jewelry and makeup. He was also openly gay from the age of 10.

Three years ago, King’s life was taken by a fellow student.

Brandon McInerney, now 17, shot him twice in the back of the head. Being re-tried as an adultafter and initial mistrial, McInerney faces 53 years to life in prison on pre-meditated murder and other charges. McInerney’s lawyers argue the boy was pushed to a breaking point when King called out to him, “I love you, baby!” after a science class on Feb. 11. He brought a gun to school the next day.

Would teaching the stories of queer American heroes like Harvey Milk have kept King safe?

Advocates of a new California law, which mandates the inclusion of important queer Americans in social science curricula, say yes. They argue that teaching gay history will engender a climate of tolerance, keeping students like King safe.

Anti-gay activists have vowed to see the new law reversed. But with horrific stories like King’s cropping up across the country, compassion may be their foe. S

BENJAMIN RILEY MELBOURNE A while back I wrote some promotional material for the biggest Bear Pride in the Southern Hemisphere, held annually in Melbourne.

During the week-long event, hairy and chunky gay men from all over the region descend upon Melbourne to drink, hang out and touch each other. I’m gangly, six-and-a-half feet tall, with limited body or facial hair. No one would ever call me a bear.

But while I’ve never been into the mainstream Melbourne Pride, the guys in the Bear Pride

promo shots were pretty damn sexy. It was the kind of pride I could get behind.

And so, after much thought, I began to wonder if deep down I was a bear.

Signing up to a local bear organization gave me legitimacy, a membership key ring, and a newfound and burning sense of pride. Any comments disparaging the bear community in my presence were met with an almost religious fury. “Don’t discriminate against my people!” I shouted at a stranger who mentioned he wasn’t into hairy guys.

I even decided I’d participate in all the Bear Pride events. I’d be the model bear community member.

When Bear Pride Week finally arrived, I walked into the opening night party and my heart sank. A sea of burly, furry bodies buffeted my lanky, hairless frame and I realized the truth: I was a pretender. I shuffled out of the bar.

When I got home I pulled out my house key and stared at my bear membership key ring. At once a feeling of immense pride surged through me. It didn’t matter how I looked, I felt like a bear.

I turned around and hailed a taxi. S

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a long walk

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Images from Vancouver’s first Pride. Printed with permission from The B.C. Gay & Lesbian Archives.

is a dazzling, splashy spectacle of throbbing bass, rainbow glitter, topless lesbians roaring down Robson on muscular motorbikes, and shirtless studs lobbing Mardi Gras beads into a crowd of more than 500,000 giddy spectators. Along with the visibility of queer people in this city, the parade has certainly grown from humble beginnings.

Vancouver’s first officially sanctioned gay pride parade took place on August 1, 1981. The route began in Nelson Park and proceeded to Alexandra Park via Thurlow, then Beach and Pacific—and instead of completely occupying these streets, the parade was given one side of each, while traffic proceeded otherwise uninterrupted. An estimate by the Vancouver Sun puts roughly 1,500 participants at the parade.

Bill Siksay, former Burnaby-Douglas MP and the organizing committee’s UBC representative in ‘81, says it was more of a demonstrative march: “It was about claiming our place in the streets of Vancouver for the first time. The spirit of it was we’re here, we’re your neighbours, we’re part of the community and we’re not going away.”

In years prior, proposals to establish official pride celebrations were deftly struck down by councillors’ votes. In 1981, Mayor Mike Harcourt signed a proclamation naming the week of August 1-7 Gay Unity Week, fulfilling an election promise.

Siksay says the ability for queer people to announce themselves in broad daylight was a major step forward for Vancouver’s LGBT people. “[Before 1981] you often felt isolated, like it was a long slog to do the work you wanted, have the relationships you wanted, to be the person that you were. You felt like every place you turned there was a challenge, and I think having that moment of pride really made a lot of other things possible for folks,” he says.

The marching queers were not entirely embraced by onlookers. Siksay recalls some strange looks and comments from vehicles driving by, and one group of young men in particular who shouted at Siksay, his partner Brian, and their great Dane.

“They said, ‘Is the dog gay too?’ And I think it was the only time in my life I’ve ever had a retort for something like that.

I said, ‘Why, no. She’s a lesbian.’”

However, Siksay says more people were supportive or curious than hostile. The celebrants were so happy, nothing was going to dampen their spirits on the sunny day they marched for diversity on the streets of Vancouver.

“That work isn’t done yet,” says Siksay. “I think Pride is still about claiming our place in the life of the city, the culture of Vancouver. [Today’s Pride parade is] broader, much broader than it was back then, but the root of it remains the same. I think everybody who goes to Pride today has that kind of feeling.” S derek bedry Vancouver’s pride parade today

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ted northe gussied up for change

Dressed to Empress deanne beatty illustrations by monique wells

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previous pages, accompanying photo: the lady herself, ted northe. image from coronation program. printed with permission from the b.c. gay & lesbian archives.

T

he movie trailer for Auntie Mame, the 1958 film starring Rosalind Russell, starts with the frame tight on a hand in a red silk glove tapping seductively on a bejeweled cigarette holder, then motioning to the camera come hither. It’s a flirty gesture that gives off the sort of sparkly aplomb one would expect to inspire a young ted northe (who does not capitalize his name).

The 73-year-old drag dynamo and founder of the Dogwood Monarchist Society, the longest-running LGBT organization in Canada, wasn’t so much inspired by the film as he was by the drag queen of the same name who came roaring into a San Francisco costume ball in the early '60s. An argument had broken out at the gathering when Portland’s Auntie Mame, the drag persona of David Hamilton, stood up in her full show make up and dress. Oh, shit, she screamed, now just listen to me for a minute—none of you are making any sense!

“Every man in that room and every woman in that

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room stopped,” laughs northe. “We said, ‘Who is she?

The bitch!’ So, I thought, I’m going to check up on this—I want to meet her.”

Northe recognized Mame’s socially strategic advantage as a drag queen. “Nobody wants to see a man getting up there and giving a lecture,” he says. “Women don’t like it especially. And gay men don’t like it, because it’s too much of the stereotype telling them what to do.” Northe admired Mame’s ability to speak and hold the attention of others, and saw drag as a way to do that.

Northe strode up to Mame and introduced himself, professing he wouldn’t have the courage to do what she had done that night. She responded, “Ted, it’s the easiest thing in the world to do. Once you get the make up on, the rest is easy. You’ve got a mouth!”

Mame whisked him back to her hotel and dressed him up in her wigs and make up. “We went out that night in San Francisco, and I had such a hoot!” northe recalls of

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left: 1980s Emperor and Empress nomination flyers. above: A shot from a Coronation Ball 1979, from the Seattle Gay News.

Printed with permission from The B.C. Gay & Lesbian Archives.

his first night in drag. Realizing the effectiveness of drag for meeting and connecting with people, he decided to bring the act home with him.

Vancouver was a sleepy, coastal town before the '60s when a generation of drop-outs, naturalists, gay people and hippies discovered the city’s spectacular beauty and laid-back charm. Vancouver’s burgeoning gay community connected with more established scenes in Portland and San Francisco, and it was common for the cities to take turns hosting costume balls for the West Coast gay community to reunite.

Histories of the gay rights movement in North America typically begin with the Stonewall riots in New York City in 1969. However, Vancouver, Portland and San Francisco established strong gay communities years before the riots began, and were met with relative acceptance. In contrast 12 sad magazine

to the homophobia and police violence experienced on the East Coast, the West Coast community opened gay bars, hosted gay parties and started fighting for equal rights much earlier with comparative ease.

It was in this context in 1964 that northe established the Imperial Empire of Canada. The society was based on his concept for a coronation ball where ‘monarchs’ known as empresses were to be elected. The event was intended to celebrate the accomplishments of people in the gay community who worked hard to be the voice of Vancouver’s queer population and to make the city a better, safer place for gay people to live.

“You don’t want to spend your life fighting with people,” says northe. “After a while, it becomes a real chore.

When you’re fighting you’ve got to have good things happen to you once in a while.

“That’s why I thought the coronation ball could be a big celebration—we’d put on a big ball and say thank you to the emperor and empress for doing hard work that year, and then we’d all have a big party.”

The Imperial Empire of Canada was re-established as the Dogwood Monarchist Society in 1971, and celebrated its 40th anniversary this year. The organization still operates in much the same way it did at its start. The elected empress and emperor for the year represent the organi-

zation at community events and raise money for various causes. The Dogwood Monarchist Society has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for local HIV/AIDS and LGBT charities.

The Dogwood Monarchist Society also helped northe and countless others to find their voice among the clamour. Like Auntie Mame did in the '60s, the society used fun, glamour and humour to de-stigmatize gay issues in Vancouver.

“Some of my biggest adversaries would come to our parties,” explains northe. “They found out that we weren’t a bunch of sex-hungry people, that we’re all just great people out and having fun. They’d see the appreciation people in the community had for one another when they saw someone getting an award—the thunderous applause, and people hugging and kissing them because they were so happy for that person, and because they worked hard for it.”

Even after many years of service, northe regularly plans and attends charity events around North America and shows no signs of slowing down. He exhibits the same unstoppable confidence and wit that made him an unforgettable Vancouver role model.

“Everything I wanted to do was in my head,” he says, “so I just put the crown on, and made it happen.” S

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glitzy, risky and gay: the dancefloors of '70s disco nightlife

Wide-Eyed Adrenaline jeff lawrence photography by grant harder

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disco can be found just about everywhere; from beer parlours in suburbia, to the meat markets on Hornby Street, people are flocking in unbelievable numbers with a common goal—dancing, which has replaced LSD as the number one form of mind expansion.

Charles Lyall, “Disco Nooz,” Bi-Line Oct. 1978

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A coupon flyer from the Odyssey. Printed with permission from The B.C. Gay & Lesbian Archives.

A

s protest groups stormed their way through the 1960s into the early '70s, the radical new left movement brought a massive change. For gays, this meant for the first time being out and open with their sexuality. The Stonewall riots and inaugural pride parades told the public, “We’re not going away.”

If the '60s were about pride, then the '70s were about celebration. The freedom gays desperately fought for was suddenly attainable and gave way to a hedonistic tidal wave. Gays suddenly found themselves riding the crest of a subculture that defined an entire decade: and that was disco.

A $4-billion industry in the U.S.A. at one point, disco music was the soundtrack to the '70s for gays and straights

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alike, says Vancouver journalist and fashion intructor Guy Babineau. He fondly remembers when disco was emerging from the funk and soul sound filling America. The Staple Singers, Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson, Sly and the Family Stone: they paved the way for artists like Gloria Gaynor and Donna Summer to break out in the mid to early '70s.

“Disco was an underground phenomenon, a hybrid of gay and black culture,” Babineau says. “White guys took it from black clubs, and that served as the transfer point to the mainstream community. Before Saturday Night Fever in 1977, disco was actually kind of cool.”

In that time, Babineau grew up in a progressive, accepting family in Vancouver’s Dunbar area that never

considered his homosexuality a problem. “I came out in the summer of 1973, the summer I turned 15,” he says, asserting how extremely rare it was for a young man to be out in school. A child of the liberal '60s, Babineau rarely had a problem expressing himself to the other kids.

He still endured the same old attitudes of discrimination from kids who didn’t understand his flamboyance and fuck-you mindset, though. “One morning I woke up to discover that a bunch of guys from school had glued homo-milk cartons to the front door of our house,” he says, chuckling. “But because I came out blazing down the hallway in my platform shoes and eyeshadow, there was nothing anyone could really do about it,” he says.

“My feeling was that I wasn’t even thinking politically.

When you’re a teenager, you’re not political in that way.”

And that, Babineau says, was the overwhelming feeling surrounding the disco years. In a 1979 Village Voice piece, “The Dialect of Disco: Gay Music Goes Straight,” Andrew Kopkind writes, “Disco in the '70s is in revolt against rock in the '60s. It is the antithesis of the ‘natural’ look, the real feelings, the seriousness, the confessions, the struggles, the sincerity, pretensions and pain of the last generation … All the sparkle, speed, cynicism, and jaded irony associated with metropolitan life is attached to disco. It is far from wholesome.”

And in the metropolis of Vancouver, there were many people just like Babineau who craved the dimly lit, smokefilled dance floor of the disco club. The disco club was a place they could get together to be themselves, no matter how cynical and jaded they were, sans judgment.

“In the group of gays I was hanging out with—I was usually the youngest one—they were runaways or hus-

tlers and here I was, this straight-A student from Dunbar,” he recalls.

“There was this house on 4th Ave, it was in Kitsilano, which, back then, was still hippy-dippy. We nicknamed it ‘Mondo Homo’ and it would always be guys in their 20s, 30s; rock ’n’ roll guys, hustlers and drag queens hanging around there. It was a way station for people who had nowhere else to go.”

On any given Friday night in 1975, Babineau and his friends would have a few beers, share a joint (cocaine and poppers, popular in large cities such as New York, were not as rampant in Vancouver, though certainly present) and then head across the bridge downtown to 795 Seymour Street, the epicentre of Vancouver’s disco movement, a club called Faces.

“It is definitely, without a question, the iconic club of Vancouver that we associate with the birth of the gay movement,” he says. “It was the favourite club, the focal point, it was the one place where everyone wanted to go.

This was the cool one, this was where everyone went to be seen, where people put on rhinestones and sequins wanting to be David Bowie and Lou Reed.”

It was an unassuming and small club. In those days, when liquor licensing was harder to get, you would bring your own bottles of booze and give them to the bartender, who would then re-serve the alcohol back to you upon request. “It was really small but always packed with fabulous people,” Babineau remembers. “There was a little mix of everybody and people were really friendly then.”

Once you were in, you might stay all night, listening to the man behind the turntables play nonstop singles. This was the advent of the DJ as we know it.

“The developed their own media form, the 12” single,” says Darryl Cressman, a PhD candidate at SFU studying musical culture. “The reason for this is the gay community at the underground clubs at this particular time, they liked the ideas of records being played together. That sort of epic, six hour set.

“At a purely aesthetic level, disco transformed music as we know it, man.”

While the music started the movement, everyone was fascinated with clubs as a status symbol. “It wasn’t the music that was underground, it was the clubs,” explains Cressman. “That’s where it was at. That’s why rock hated disco. Disco was like, ‘No, let’s go to New York City and find the hippest clubs that only 50 people know about.’”

In Vancouver there was no shortage of cool clubs. Faces was “it,” but there was also Luv-A-Fair, a sleek, lavish club at 1275 Seymour that was initially a gay-frequented disco club, but became best-known as the city’s premiere seven/eight 17

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previous: 1251 Howe St, the old home of the Odyssey. these pages: A selection of club flyers, Printed with permission from The B.C. Gay & Lesbian Archives.

new wave club in the '80s. The Playpen Center at 856 Seymour and the Shaggy Horse at 818 Richards were also popular destinations, and the Gandy Dancer was also one of the first bigger gay disco clubs where the music of Sylvester and Divine would whip the floor into frenzy.

“There were actually more clubs than there are now,” says Babineau. “They were more like American pubs and bars, but there must have been a dozen of them. I think we have about four or five now.”

The reality is that the number of clubs belonging to the LGBT community is in decline. Some time between the heyday of gay nightlife in the ’70s and now, Vancouver became a nightclub morgue. The most recent obituary belongs to The Odyssey, the community’s beloved-yet20 sad magazine

derided, seven-nights-a-week destination for drag shows, strippers and general debauchery. The Odyssey was the Faces of my generation, and Lick was its lesbian counterpart. The destruction of both venues signifies a greater change in queer club culture altogether.

Disco music has morphed over the years from one genre to the next. From house music to techno, to rap and indie rock, its far-reaching influence has been felt everywhere. Yet it has returned to simply be called ‘disco’.

Meanwhile, the clubs are changing. We don’t require spaces for meeting each other to identify who is gay, who is on our side and who is against us, as much as we did then. We now have the Internet for that. We still dance in the name of having a good time, but the necessity of

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socializing in a safe space has been removed. Want to meet somebody? Go on the Internet. Want to sleep with someone? Download Grindr. Do we have less fun in our chosen queer spaces because of it? Babineau thinks so.

“People were happier then,” he says. “It was a lot of fun, a lot of excitement, and a lot of adventure.

“What has happened with the change in gay society, is we’re now all about status and the care of superficiality,” he says. “That’s not what we were coming out for.

We just wanted to make the choices we wanted to make without being judged. This word ‘community,’ what does it mean? It needs to be discussed, we need to revise it, because there is a disconnect between the generations which 22 sad magazine

didn’t exist when I was coming out.” Today, he asserts, inter-generational mingling at a club is a rare event.

In the '70s, swarming the dark dance floor of a packed club equated with refreshing your Facebook feed every five seconds or publishing your every passing thought via status update. “It was all about dancing and it was all about being with people, it was not about being isolated,” Babineau says.

“It was so innocent, we were wide-eyed. It was new, exciting. I never got addicted to anything at that point, we weren’t going to the gym every day. We were really just kids discovering who we were.” S

The old home of 616 Club (left), 495 seymour street, the former site of faces (right).

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queens of the castle A historic day for the landmark beer parlour tony correia illustration brennan kelly Little is written of The Castle Pub at 750

Granville Street. Fraser Biggs, founder of the West End Softball Association, and Bobby Fraser, (a.k.a. Buffalo Babs) a bartender there, share their memories about the landmark beer parlour and that day in the spring of 1990.

Bobby Fraser

I got a job on Canadian Pacific Railway working on the dining car. There were 12 of us; ten of us were gay.

Someone suggested we go to The Castle Hotel, it was right downtown. That was '72, '73. After I started working there in 1980 I ran into a couple of tourists who were at The Castle in 1930. They told me, “We remembered that this is where men go to meet men.”

Fraser Biggs

When I first started going there in 1966, it was split in two; “Ladies and Escorts” and “Men’s Only.” Women weren’t allowed in “Men’s Only” and they were only allowed in “Ladies and Escorts” if a man accompanied them. When they got rid of “Ladies and Escorts” they made it into one big round main section with an upper section.

BF

They had names for the different sections because they were all blocked off. The entrance was Welfare Flats.

There was Gay Heights.

FB

The main section had a fireplace that looked like a spaceship.

BF

They had this massive fireplace surrounded with chairs and big beams supporting it. It was the perfect place for meeting people.

FB

The Castle was the home pub for all the drag queens.

That was where they felt the most comfortable entertaining and got the best reception. And it was called The Castle. The Queen’s portrait hung there for years. seven/eight 25

It always had a spot of prominence. It didn’t matter where you sat in the bar, you could see this picture of Queen Elizabeth II.

Softball Association], he was our first sponsor. You couldn’t serve drinks on Sundays. That’s one of the reasons we started gay sports: to get together and drink beer.

FB

BF

Then, in the mid-seventies, the owners wanted to get rid of the gay people.

BF

Terry Wallace and The Castle were fundamental for raising money when the AIDS epidemic came. And we weren’t shy about it. We raised thousands and thousands of dollars.

If you were gay or were known to associate with gays they wouldn’t serve you.

FB

FB

The owners sold the property and it was going to be redeveloped, so they gave notice that they had to close.

BF

So we made a pact—everybody knew each other—we’d all meet on Friday night, order a drink and then get up and walk out of the place en masse—which we did—and we walked across the street to The York, which is now Sears. A week-and-a-half later the management asked us to come back.

BF

The owner was getting older, his kids were growing up and none of the kids wanted to take over the business. It was a full-time job because you had the hotel, the restaurant and the pub. They just weren’t interested.

BF

FB

This went on for about six to eight months and their business went down. Finally, they came to the conclusion business is business, and then they went back to the way it used to be.

A few of us were really sentimental and wanted to stay with Terry to the very end. When the moment came we decided maybe we should take the Queen with us.

Terry was pretty emotional and he said, “Great idea.

Let’s do it.”

FB

It became the gay community centre and kept going from there. It never slowed down.

BF

In 1975 or 1976 they hired a bar manager named Terry Wallace. That’s when it really became the center for everything that was gay in the city.

FB

He looked like a troll from under a bridge, but he had a heart of gold.

BF

The Castle had a very small bar area—four or five seats to the right of the cash register, and certain people sat there every day for years. One of them was a chap named Ray; he was always known as Ray-chel.

FB

We all finished our drinks and we took the Queen off the wall and I carried it very high—it was pretty big but somehow I managed.

BF

BF

Terry was a very serious man. He could never do enough to promote the gay community in Vancouver. He was very fashionable. Loved suede jackets. Always wore a tie.

They decided to make it official. The Queen was leaving The Castle and moving to a new castle: The Royal Hotel. They took her portrait off the wall, and Ray-chel, leading this group on an April Fool’s Day at 1 p.m., marched down Granville street holding the picture of the Queen.

FB

He was one of the first to step up to the plate and support the first gay bowling league at the Commodore Lanes. When I helped found WESA [the West End 26 sad magazine

FB

There were about 12 of us. We marched down the west side of Granville Mall with the queen held really high.

Left: The closing night of the Castle Pub. Right: Kitty Litter performing the same night. Printed with permission from The B.C. Gay & Lesbian Archives

A few gay people joined. It was an incredible feeling.

The Royal Hotel was packed. The place went absolutely crazy. They didn’t stop cheering, hollering, and crying for almost ten minutes, which is pretty long for any gay person not to stop and at least have a beer. They kept that energy going for at least two or three hours. Everybody was on this super high. The Castle was closed, but a bit of it moved to The Royal.

BF

Without the spirit that that hotel and its clientele developed, I don’t think gay people would be as far as we are today in Vancouver. S seven/eight 27

designing davie for AIDS Vancouver?” The loaded question met Alan Herbert after the first tumultuous and emotionally charged meeting of AIDS Vancouver, the first organization that addressed HIV/AIDS in Canada. In the early '80s, HIV and AIDS were still largely misunderstood. Alan Herbert’s answer was a decades-long career as a gay rights and AIDS activist in Vancouver, helping shape the culture and city as we know it, and earning him Xtra!

West’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2004.

Herbert served on the board of many pivotal organizations, including the Vancouver Pride Society, often as the chair. He founded McLaren House, the first housing for people living with HIV and AIDS, and Hominum, a support group for gay men married to women.

In 1996, Herbert ran and was elected for city council. During his first and only term as city councillor, he fulfilled his campaign promise and obtained licensing for The Fountainhead Pub—a victory that led to no endorsement for a second run. As a city planner, Herbert understood the importance of civic design and how The Fountainhead could change the character of the street and dynamic of the neighbourhood by providing a legitimate, safe space for the gay and lesbian community in Vancouver. It was from this beginning that the Davie Street Village was born.

Now, Herbert hopes the younger community will remember the history. Remember the struggle, the fight. Remember everything that has been accomplished, and hold it dear, so nothing gets lost. S LEANNE PERRY

“so, what are you going to do

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PHOTOGRAPH daphne chen

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nancy pollak on the printed word, voice, and getting out of one’s own ass

Speaking Volumes tyler morgenstern photography by brandon gaukel

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“There’s a lot more cock than cunt. You know? ‘There’s a lot more cock than cunt’ would be a way of putting it.”

T

hat, in a nutshell, is what Nancy Pollak makes of the state of queer media in Vancouver today. I laugh, maybe a bit uncomfortably, probably giving myself away as green. There’s a pause. Pollak, who sits across the table from me at Commercial Drive’s Prado Café, cracks a smile and laughs along with me. The moment passes and we settle back into easy conversation over the sound of spoons knocking against porcelain.

We’ve spent the morning together, wandering around and through the history of local LGBT publishing, unpacking the question of how we tell, create, and circulate stories that chart the queer experience; how the printed word, hung in constellation with passionate communities and political bravery, might change the voices we hear and how we hear them.

A long-time member of Vancouver’s feminist and lesbian publishing community, and now an instructor of Wom-

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en’s Studies at Langara College, Pollak knows all too well that certain narratives, particularly those of women, are often left out of textbook queer histories. That’s why she’s spent most of her professional life trying to write them back into visibility.

Almost immediately after moving to Vancouver from Ontario in 1978 (she claims she stayed for the salmon), Pollak began working with Press Gang Printers and Publishers, a radical feminist print shop that operated out of a “cavernous, productive, creative, wonderful” warehouse space on Powell Street.

From its founding in the early '70s until its dissolution in 2002, Press Gang was the heartbeat of queer women’s publishing in Vancouver. An explicitly anti-sexist, antiracist, and always eclectic organization, it found stories worth telling in places that most people wouldn’t even bother to look. Press Gang gave voice, through prose, poetry and narrative, to the experiences of women, lesbians and feminists at the leading edge of the liberation years.

Counted among the collective’s collaborators are artists and writers the likes of Daphne Marlatt, Ivan E. Coyote, and Persimmon Blackbridge, many of who remain active in the community today.

Pollak worked at the Powell Street space full time for five years, taking home a meagre $85 dollars a week in wages (the collective had talked her up from her original offer of $65). For young writers in Vancouver today, such pay is the stuff of rent-due nightmares, but Pollak is quick to reassure me that, at the time, it was plenty livable. “I don’t remember thinking, ‘Oh god, cat food for dinner again.’ It was fine. You could live on nothing—many of us did, and cultivated ourselves as activists, as artists, as cultural workers.”

After leaving her post at Press Gang, Pollak, quite by accident, found work in 1987 with Kinesis, Vancouver’s feminist, lesbian, anti-colonialist, anti-sexist newspaper, published by Vancouver Status of Women. She recalls walking into the office to submit an ad to the paper’s events section, and being invited to join in on a retreat to Saturna Island. “I was in the market for new friends, so I went on that retreat. And I got the newspaper bug.”

Kinesis, like Press Gang, had emerged in the early 1970s, when newspapers were, in Pollak’s words, “bursting up like mushrooms among all of those liberation movements, whether it was gay liberation, women’s liberation, civil rights, aboriginal people; it would be a newspaper in no time at all. ” This is especially true of Vancouver’s queer activism scene. Nineteen sixty-four had seen the founding of Canada’s first homophile organization, the Association for

Social Knowledge, and it’s associated paper, the aptly-named ASK Newsletter. Nine years later, the Vancouver chapter of the Saskatoon-based Gay Alliance Toward Equity began publishing Gay Tide, a magazine that soon earned a reputation for its radical queer and anti-capitalist politics. By 1985, the newsletter of the Vancouver Gay Community Center (now Qmunity) had become structurally independent and established itself as Angles. A critical, politically engaged, and often-controversial paper, Angles more-or-less steadily remained in print until 1998, when the editorial collective, faced with a number of commercial pressures and new competitors, disbanded.

All the while, Vancouverites had access to a number of magazines and papers published well beyond city limits, including long-running activist magazine The Body Politic, based in Toronto. Eventually, Vancouver’s current gay and lesbian biweekly, Xtra!, joined the mix. Xtra! had spun out of the original Body Politic editorial collective when it was incorporated in 1975 under the non-profit enterprise, Pink Triangle Press. By the mid-1990s, the paper had established itself on the west coast under the Xtra! West banner.

As a women’s paper, though, Kinesis was different. It opened up questions of queer sexuality and identity from a feminist perspective at a time when female and lesbian voices were often marginalized in the city’s gay community. Beyond

this, it had what Pollak calls “a particular history, a real journalistic sensibility” that other liberation papers tended to lack.

“People had things to say! A lot of [what other papers printed] was opinion, and there’s no problem with that.

It wasn’t really news focused, and didn’t really get what journalism was about.” As she puts it, Kinesis printed stories that would “inflame because they were informing, not inflaming because you were inflamed.” It was a paper for news and features, rather than opinion and commentary.

It embodied, in every sense, its ambition to track down news about women that’s not in the dailies.

Pollak pulls out an old, yellowed, slightly curled-atthe-edges copy of Kinesis and takes me through it, story by story: “An issue about violence against women, an issue about midwifery, news stories, an obituary about an amazing woman, news about a health center, pay equity in the Hospital Employees’ Union, another story about violence against women, a story about prisons—the penitentiary for women in Kingston, which was constantly scandalous, awful, awful. A coalition about AIDS and disabilities, then a whole feature section on unlearning racism.”

It’s extensive coverage, to be sure; the kind of coverage we can mostly only wish for from most of today’s papers.

There’s international news, arts and culture, debates about seven/eight 32

the constitution and the Meech Lake Accord. This isn’t just what was happening around town. This is news— hard-hitting news—for women, lesbians, and queers, by women, lesbians, and queers; reports from the front lines.

When I ask if Kinesis ever took flak for this dense and sometimes-controversial content, Pollak reaffirms the spirit of the paper. “Why would we get in trouble for doing that? It was totally in the air. Indeed, people cancelled their subscriptions, but we never talked about at Kinesis whether we would do it or not. It was a no-brainer that we would publish it.”

Even AIDS, painted in broad strokes by the mainstream press as an exclusively gay male story, was taken up early by Kinesis and explored as an issue that weighed heavily on the community, writ large.

Kinesis, like Press Gang, operated on collective grounds, and was supported almost entirely by enthusiastic volunteer workers. Philosophically, it was a structure underpinned by a real belief in participatory democracy, committed to opening new lateral and horizontal spaces of hearing, learning, and voice.

Of course, Pollak is well aware that even in the best meaning of collectives, privilege will always rear its head, a reality to which Kinesis was never immune. “The collective was predominantly white,” she says. “People who are used to speaking, speak. People who are used to being heard get heard.”

Even so, the practice of collective publishing, for Pollak, allows us to think larger and imagine beyond ourselves. “Embodying things, by that I mean, being with other people in rooms or in streets” carries with it “that difficult magic that happens when you’re in a room with people and you don’t know what’s happening.” Love for the written and printed word notwithstanding, “We shouldn’t ask our disembodied media to do the work of our bodies.”

The intimate negotiation between author and text, while invigorating, is no substitute for those shaky spaces of tension and opportunity that emerge when we experience one another as more than the sum of our words.

The long and short of it? “Make sure you don’t spend all your time up your own asshole. There is a big difference between journaling and talking to yourself, and publishing and talking to a wider world.”

Even though I still bristle at the thought of braving Vancouver on $85 per week, as we talk I flirt with a strange prosthetic nostalgia. I’m wading happily through fond memories of a history that I never experienced.

In an amazing feat of chronological acrobatics, I find myself looking from an adopted past into my native fu34 sad magazine

ture, and I’m a bit dismayed at what I see; perhaps more importantly, at what I don’t. Rest assured, this isn’t meant to be another woeful declaration on the death of ‘real’ journalism.

Instead, maybe it’s a plea for a type of storytelling my generation lacks, for the embodied, fragile work that happens between people before it happens between the writer and the page; that uncertain process of always making, unmaking, and remaking in the hopes of finding a fuller sense of meaning.

For those out to tell queer stories, in particular, this seems to me of paramount importance.

Pollak mentions that in publishing, there’s a lot of “delayed gratification. It’s very intangible for a long time, and then suddenly there’s a product, right? And then it’s obsolete. And then you start working in the virtual realm of creating once again.” This is a relatively nuts-and-bolts statement, an accurate reflection of the delightful frustration that is part and parcel of working with text. But there’s a bigger message to be mined here.

In early June, The Grid TO published an essay by Paul Aguierre-Livingston entitled “Dawn of a New Gay.” The argument is rife with troubling denials of privilege, but the take away message is as follows: “My parents have never actually heard me say the words “I am gay” because I don’t need to and it really doesn’t matter because they love me all the same … I’m not fighting the good fight.

It was never mine to fight.” In essence: the queer story is over because my queer story is over.

The fight to find and share queer voices has always been one of delayed gratification, marked as much by moral shaming and silence as by tremendous victory and celebration. It parallels the kinetics of the liberation movement: decades of intangible organizing, discussing, and collaborating, punctuated by fleeting moments of elation that seem obsolete as quickly as they flare up. In Aguierre-Livingston’s world, the point at which we see that flare is the point at which the story ends.

Pollak, though, knows that this simply isn’t how storytelling—good storytelling—goes. Once that moment fades, you “start working in the virtual realm of creating once again.” The moment the story comes off the press, new searches begin, new narratives emerge, new questions demand answers, and new struggles begin fighting for visibility. In that instant, just when the case seems closed, you start all over, “talking to people who scare you, talking to people you don’t like. You stretch.” S

rainbow reels

was Canada’s — and possibly the world’s — first gay and lesbian cable access show that thrived on Vancouver’s West End Cable 10 between 1980-1986. Anyone with enthusiasm and an idea could create or contribute to the show. The directorial team was willing to train and develop new, inexperienced talent, and there’s no doubt that the show’s accessibility was necessary for its longevity.

One of the co-founders of Gayblevision, Mary Anne McEwen was a UBC alumnus who was kicked out of her sorority in 1965 for being a lesbian. When Gablevision was first established, she was the only staff member who had any media background, with a half-decade stint as Creative Director of Creative House. McEwen passed away earlier this year, but was present at a screening of select episodes at last year’s Vancouver Queer Film Festival for a post-show discussion of gay news and culture of the era and putting together Gayblevision.

The program aired weekly, with hour-long episodes that mixed short and long segments. The first episode of Gayblevision chronicled the opening of the infamous Hamburger Mary, a gay-friendly burger joint that was one of the first establishments to open along Davie Street in 1979 and still exists today.

Other notable segments included an interview with out-of-the-closet American playwright Tennessee Williams of A Streetcar Named Desire fame, as well as a documentary on another popular gay venue of the time: a shady bar by the name of Vanport.

Gayblevision once held a dear place in the heart of the '80s queer community, and it remains one of many genesis stories of Vancouver’s history of queer culture. S esther tung

gayblevision

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tiko kerr,

artist and community activist, reflects on the work and community that kept him alive.

The Quiet Fighter michelle reid photography by sarah race

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F

or his first show after getting healthy, Vancouver artist Tiko Kerr created self-portraits using the medical debris of a life-altering illness. Syringes, boxes and pill bottles were all transformed into art.

“The series goes from my very worst, with my face sunken in and my eyes yellow from jaundice, and up to today where my health has been completely restored,” he says. “One of my main missions is to really be sustainable with my art making, so that all this stuff that’s leftover: the brushes, the empty tubes, the pills I’m on. Everything that is my by-product I’m trying to incorporate into my work, so that there will be none of that left by the time I’m dead, and all of it will be art.”

He speaks of death with ease, a far cry from how he first felt on that day in 1985 when a doctor uttered the words that would forever change his life.

“Go home and get your affairs in order.”

This was how Kerr received his HIV diagnosis. In those days, no drug therapies were available. “The news was delivered in a very brutal way, because there was no medication in those days,” recalls Kerr. “People were dropping like flies.”

Today, Vancouver might be known best among tourists for hockey riots, Olympics, and unseasonably grey summers. But in the medical world, it is known for some of the most significant breakthroughs in HIV/AIDS

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research and treatment: the city hosted the 1996 World AIDS Conference. But in the 1980s, Vancouver’s medical community struggled to respond to the emergence of the disease, and many artists such as Kerr found themselves facing an unknown future with a fatal disease that doctors could newly diagnose but not yet treat.

At the time of his diagnosis, Kerr was 30 and living in Australia. After coming home to be with his family, he focused his dwindling energy on producing as much work as he could. “A big motivation for me was just to finish another painting. I’d come into the studio every day and just get something done.” For many years, Kerr did not publicly disclose his status as HIV-positive. “I didn’t want to play the victim or anything, so certainly family and friends knew what my status was, but I didn’t want it to be a public issue. I’d actually seen how other artists were using that, either for making the public to feel sorry for them, or to say, ‘Maybe the work is a good investment because I won’t be here in a while.’ That really revolted me.” Kerr continued to live and work in the West End as his health declined, and regularly donated art pieces to community events and fundraisers for HIV/AIDS. The first antiretroviral treatments for HIV were approved in 1987, and after an early diagnosis, Kerr was put on new medications as they were released, developing resistances to them as fast as they were created.

“In 2005, I reached a point where none of the medications were working anymore. They were throwing everything at me and nothing was helping.” Kerr and five other men, 20-year survivors of a disease that was expected to kill them long ago, found themselves out of options.

Dr. Julio Montaner, one of the world’s leading researchers in the field and the Director of the British Columbia Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS, applied for access to drugs that had shown promising results in European

trials but were not yet approved in Canada. The Special Access Program is an exception in the Canadian Food and Drug Act that allows physicians to request experimental treatments in situations like Kerr’s wherein all other treatments had failed.

The request was denied. They reapplied, with the same results. Kerr suspected that there was a bias against Montaner. “He is quite vocal, he’s ruffled a lot of feathers,” says Kerr, “but he’s the best advocate we could possibly imagine. Finally he called me into his office and he said, ‘You know, the politics of this are against me. And I’ve come to realize that I can’t do anything more. So it’s up to you to get the drugs.’”

“I had no idea how to do that. But I spoke to a friend at the Vancouver Sun who I knew for many years. He said, ‘Leave it to me.’”

The story was an overnight sensation. Kerr, who had been private about his status for two decades, suddenly found himself as the face of a political battle over the rights of HIV-positive individuals.

“Within two days it was a national news story. So basically I had to spearhead this very public campaign on behalf of the men who really needed the drugs,” he says.

“Just by luck the government decided to call an election, and it became an election issue. It was in all the newspapers, it was on television, it was everywhere. And what was great was I had been participating so much in the community and donating art for various causes that people were telling the local media, ‘This guy has helped us out in the past, and its time for you to help him.’ There was a huge groundswell of support.”

The campaign for the drugs, supported by community members organizing email campaigns and writing letters to MPs, was successful after ten months. During that time, one of the men waiting for treatment died. In January of 2006, Kerr and the other three surviving men were finally granted access to the treatments. The drugs, then called TMC114 and TMC125, now known as Prezista and Etravirine, had an immediate effect. “Within five days my viral load dropped 90 per cent.” A month later, his viral load was undetectable—a sign that the virus, while not gone from his body, was suppressed by a restored immune system. He remains healthy today.

“I feel 25 again. It’s remarkable. I’ve been really working hard ever since then, and using my work as a method of social change. I’m really getting active in community involvement, and through that whole process, I’m happy to say, people are kind of listening to my point of view. It’s a real privilege to use my work and my life experience to do things for people who don’t have that voice.”

Now, he gives back to the community that rallied behind him as he fought for the right to life-saving treatment. A long-time resident of the West End, he is an outspoken advocate against development without community consultation, and is currently working on a series of paintings that demonstrate the effects of densification.

When I ask him if it’s painful to be asked about his years of struggling with medications, illnesses and access to treatment, surprisingly, he says no. “I don’t regret a single thing at all. The drugs have passed licensing now, lots of people are getting them, and it’s saving people’s lives. I had a little bit to do with that, I’m really grateful.

“I can only describe my own experience. But I think that experience is definitely shared—working hard, fighting for your life, and coming out on the other side no matter what. And not to be deterred, and not to just settle for what the government is going to feed you, but just really taking control of your destiny. I think that’s a common theme for anyone trying to survive anything.”

Despite the progress in treatments and acceptance of people living with HIV, Kerr maintains there’s more work to be done in education and advocacy with regard to around HIV. While doctors and researchers pave the way with new therapies and insights into the virus, there is a place for artists like Kerr to change minds and beliefs.

“Art has a power that words don’t have. I’ve always maintained that art has no enemies. There’s always a split second when a viewer looks at a work of art when he’s completely open and his defences are down. And at that moment you can penetrate your message in a very powerful and emotional way.

“I think that’s why when there are revolutions and political take-overs, artists are the first to be hauled away.

We have this incredible power of hitting people in a subconscious, very subtle way. There’s a lot that needs to be changed. If I can use art practice to do that, that’s just great.” S

seven/eight

a tough pill: the art of general idea

of gigantic fiberglass pills line either side of a clinically white hallway. Five even larger pills rest on the hallway floor. The medicinal motif represents a sterilized version of reality for some victims of the 1980s AIDS crisis: five pills of azidothymidine a day, and 1825 pills a year. Azidothymidine, otherwise known as AZT, is an antiretroviral drug used for the treatment of AIDS. “One Year of AZT and One Day of AZT” (1991) is a watershed installation by General Idea, a Toronto-based multidisciplinary collaboration between artists Felix Partz, and Jorge Zontal, and Vancouver-born A. A. Bronson. The piece, originally showcased at a Museum of Modern Art exhibition, is now part of the National Gallery of Canada’s permanent collection.

General Idea was established in 1969. The subject matter of the group’s art has varied over the years, but from 1987-1994 the focus was on the AIDS crisis. During that time, the influential trio was famed for their installations, which used gigantic pills as an aesthetic language. These works were made all the more poignant by the AIDS-related deaths of Partz and Zontal in 1994, and were recently featured in a retrospective of the group’s work at the Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris.

“In Paris, there were a huge number of people under the age of 35 coming to see the exhibition—it was really dominated by young people. That was delightful for me to see,” Bronson told Canadian Art magazine. “I’m thrilled that the work still looks fresh.” General Idea’s pill-mosaicked world extends outside the LGBT experience and renders it into something anyone can walk through. S adam cristobal

Pills. seemingly endless walls

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legit evolves canada’s immigration laws

Borderline Riot deanne beattie photography by sarah race

J

an Altshool vividly remembers a life-changing call she received from Deb LeRose in 1993. She peels back the memory, first recounting the bright blue paint on the walls, then the tiny, stuffy closet that served as a makeshift phone booth. She was in a YWCA in Manhattan where she was visiting for a school reunion. At the other end of the line, Deb explained that there had been changes made to Canada’s immigration law.

“There might be hope,” she said.

Hope at that time was more than a political slogan—it was a much more precious and rare asset for Deb, a Canadian, and Jan, an American, who met at a time when rights for gay and lesbian couples were simply non-existent.

When asked if they thought they would see the legalization of same-sex marriage in their lifetimes, both wom-

en shake their heads vigorously. There were no rights for same-sex couples in Canada, and there were certainly no rights for couples attempting to bridge international borders. Marriage? There were still too many barriers, especially for two people who tried desperately for years to just stay in the same country.

What they couldn’t know in those early days was the changes they would spark in Canada’s immigration law for same-sex couples were part of an impending wildfire of change, both in law and culture, that culminated in the legalization of gay and lesbian marriage in 2005. When the couple did get married this past summer at West Point Grey’s University Golf Club, surrounded by family and friends, the event was as much a promise for the future as it was a celebration of everything the couple had survived in their 25 years together.

For any couple to last 25 years seems like a miracle in an age characterized by deep cynicism about love and its longevity. These generations were raised in the swell of social change charged by rising education levels, working mothers, ‘no fault’ divorce and unprecedented individualism; they know that, in contrast to the promises of ‘60sseven/eight 43

era slogans, love is not all you need, and it’s not enough to make any 21st century relationship last.

To do that, you’ve got to have faith.

Deb and Jan were part of an unseen cohort of gay and lesbian couples in Canada who experienced the cultural equivalent of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. Until the ’90s, the country’s most progressive stance on the topic of homosexuality could be best described as minimal-effort tolerance. In 1968, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau supported the decriminalization of homosexual acts in Canada, simply explaining, “there’s no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation.” But this was to say nothing about the rights of gay and lesbian people in school, at work, or in public.

The nation’s blind eye to same-sex couples reached far into immigration law, which prescribed that only legally married, common law or conjugal opposite-sex couples could sponsor their partners to become permanent residents of Canada. For Jan, who moved to Vancouver in 1986, this meant that the only way for her to stay in Canada was for her to secure a student visa. Over seven years, she completed numerous degrees and certificates at four different institutions in the area, and hurtled toward burnout.

“By the end of my last semester at SFU, people would come up to me and ask, ‘how’s school going?’ and I would burst into tears,” says Jan. Without legal status as a couple, Deb and Jan felt invisible.

“For us, in those days, it was hard to be out, and hard to fit into any communities,” says Deb. “It was hard to be out in the straight community, and hard to be out in the gay community about immigration. Nobody got it.”

“Nobody got it,” echoes Jan. “For years, we thought we were the only people in the entire planet who had this problem,” says Deb. The couple also lived in the ever-present moment, constantly fearful that what they had today would be taken away tomorrow with the flick of an official’s pen. They feared that Jan would be deported, or that her student visa wouldn’t be renewed. They feared crossing the border into the United States, or attempting to return to Canada after time abroad. Without an end in sight and their options narrowing, the couple felt their hope dim.

Everything changed for Deb and Jan when they met Chris Morrissey and Bridget Coll, two Vancouver women who 44 sad magazine

were in the same situation: out of immigration options, and running out of time. Chris met Bridget in 1978 when they worked as Catholic nuns in Chile. They were working in the western zone of Santiago during Augusto Pinochet’s regime, an infamously brutal period in Chile’s history when thousands of people were tortured and killed.

Chris says the experience helped her to understand the personal oppression she experienced as a closeted lesbian, which led her to leave the Catholic Church and return to Canada with Bridget in 1989.

What should have been the start of a peaceful new life quickly became heart wrenching when they learned that Bridget, an Irish-American, wouldn’t qualify for Canadian immigration. In December of 1991, the couple rallied together with ten other couples from Vancouver who faced similar immigration challenges, and LEGIT, the Lesbian and Gay Immigration Task Force, was born. With the support of this new group, Chris and Bridget filed a court challenge to the Department of Immigration that invoked the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in January.

The formation of LEGIT in Vancouver was monumental: it was the first group to form in Canada with the purpose of changing immigration law to include same-sex couples. Other groups in Canada had formed to legalize same-sex marriage, but this wouldn’t help gay and lesbian couples in the case of immigration. Canada’s laws specified that only opposite-sex couples qualified for family sponsorship.

For Deb and Jan and the other member couples of the group, LEGIT’s formation meant much more, because at last they didn’t feel so alone.

“Walking into that first meeting and seeing a room full of people—” says Deb, pausing as she searches for the right words. “It was just amazing. It was absolutely incredible to me that there were other people who had the same experience.”

To maintain her student visa, Jan continued to attend evening classes and was forced to miss the early LEGIT meetings. She remembers catching her first glimpse of Chris getting out of her car on Commercial Drive when she on was the bus. Jan leapt to her feet and waved wildly from the back window, swinging her arms overhead as if she had just spotted the only other person on a deserted island.

“Finally, I was able to put a face to another person, anybody, going through the same thing,” says Jan. The couples in LEGIT drew on their collective strength in October that year. Bridget was unexpectedly granted residency as an individual applicant, thereby nullifying their challenge to the Department of Immigration.

While great news for Chris and Bridget, LEGIT interpreted the move as the federal government ‘buying out’ their court challenge. With still ten other couples without immigration rights in the group, LEGIT would not be dissuaded. They continued to lobby the government and filed complaints with the Human Rights Commission in hopes that someone would hear them.

And then someone did.

Canada passed Bill C86 in 1993, a small part of which gave authority to program managers at Canadian consulates to grant residency on humanitarian and compassionate grounds. LEGIT learned that Donald Cameron, a program manager at a consulate in Seattle, was willing to consider same-sex couples under this jurisdiction. Deb called Jan as soon as she could. This could be their shot.

Deb and Jan made an appointment with the Seattle consulate and began preparing an application that they filled with years of evidence of a shared life together. They pointed to their apartment, a circle of friends who could vouch for them, and letters addressed to both of them.

They even included a copy of the store warranty for a sofa and loveseat, on which the store clerk had recorded both names.

When their interview day arrived, they had accumulated more than 180 pages of documentation, but remained extremely cautious. If this didn’t work, they weren’t sure they would have another chance.

“I wore polyester dress pants,” says Jan, remembering that autumn day in Seattle.

“She never dresses up,” says Deb. “We were so nervous,” says Jan. The couple went into an interview with a bureaucrat named Norman Barnes. Jan was reassured by the sight of a bicycle vest hanging on the back of his door, which she interpreted as evidence that the clerk harboured the kind of west coast, liberal values they could identify with.

“He was as nice as can be,” she says. “He asked me questions like, ‘You’re not a member of the NRA or something crazy like that, are you?’”

“We spent most of the time talking about life in Canada,” continues Deb. “We talked about what we had to do, and how to get Jan’s Social Insurance Number, and we just looked at each other, wide-eyed, like, ‘does that mean you’re in?’”

The relief was overwhelming.

“We were staying at a hotel really close by in Seattle,” says Deb, “and after the interview we went back and sat in the lounge, and both of us—we just started crying, and

crying, and crying.”

Jan received her landing papers in December of that year, a few days before Christmas. In January, the couple drove down to the border and parked on the Canadian side. A border guard stopped traffic allowing Jan to walk into the U.S.A., walk around to the Canadian booth, and hand her landing papers over to be stamped.

Deb and Jan remain involved with LEGIT, working with the group to help Canadians with same-sex partners around the world to come to Canada. In 2002, a new Immigration Act was enacted which recognized same-sex partners, due in large part to the sustained effort of LEGIT’s members.

Deb and Jan’s story has a happy ending, in stark contrast to the experience of couples like San Francisco’s Bradford Wells and Anthony John Makk. The California couple made international headlines this summer during their fight for same-sex marriage and immigration rights in the United States. Bradford, an American who suffers from severe health complications due to AIDS, may lose his life partner and primary care giver, Australian citizen Anthony John, due to the American government’s staunch Defense of Marriage Act which bars same-sex couples from claiming the same rights as opposite-sex couples. There are an estimated 36,000 binational samesex couples living without legal status in the United States alone.

What seems at first to be a daunting challenge is now supported by contemporary histories of marriage. These histories conclude that governments and religions have always strived to define the legal and moral parameters of intimate relationships precisely because these relationships are so powerful. Even in an age of divorce and the seeming disassembling of the marriage tradition, people around the world continue to fall in love at all costs; they face ex-communication, exile and even death to be with they ones they love.

To remain relevant, governments and religions are forced to evolve. In the context of increasing social and political conservatism in Canada as well as landmark political events south of the border—New York legalizing same-sex marriage, California repealing it—it’s comforting to know that the power rests with ordinary people, and that there is always hope. We create it. S

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this magical place At 21, Ghassan Shanti left behind a life of fear in Jordan because of his sexuality and claimed refugee status in Canada to begin a promising career as a makeup artist.

My parents are Palestinian, but I was born in Jordan. So I guess I’m from Jordan, but I spent a big

chunk of my childhood in southern California in a small town called Torrance.

We moved there when I was five, in 1990, and we lived in California until I was 14. In 1999, we moved back to Jordan.

It was the most horrendous, traumatic experience of my life, probably. I spent the next seven years there until I turned 21.

High school is difficult enough in any part of the world, let alone being a little Americanized, angsty teen in the Middle East.

For the first couple years of high school I always thought that I would just somehow move back to the States—I didn’t know how. Then 9/11 happened and it became virtually impossible for an Arab to travel between the Middle East and the U.S. It was just incredibly difficult, and I figured that it would be years before the anti-Arab climate would cool down.

I wanted to go to Canada because I figured it would be a better option than the U.S. I chose Vancouver because it was the least cold part of Canada. I guess I was right. The summer that I moved here was perfect: July 2006. It was magic, the best summer the city has had in ages.

I don’t know that I would be alive today if I were living in Jordan. It’s a Muslim country. But I honestly don’t think that Islam is any more anti-gay than any of the other major religions, specifically Christianity. I think that they both manage to be as spiteful in their vitriol against homosexuals. But there’s no legislation in Jordan protecting me, and anti-homophobia legislation in Canada is super extensive. Unlike Jordan, where being gay is a criminal act, virtually any discrimination against gays is a criminal act here. I feel safe. S as told to jeff laurence sad magazine

PHOTOGRAPH daphne chan

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transgender, two spirit, and the downtown east side

Tough in Transit daniel zomparelli photography by brandon gaukel

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Suzanne Kilroy

W

hen people drive by the Downtown Eastside (DTES) of Vancouver, they fixate a blank stare.

They lock their car doors or they blatantly observe at a drug deal in action. You have to be tough to live there.

The more fringed you are, the tougher you have to be. It is hard enough to deal with poverty, but when you deal with gender identity, it’s a whole new world of tough.

Charlize Gordon is a recently transgendered woman who moved to the DTES a few years ago. Suzanne Kilroy is a two-spirited resident of the DTES. Both have backbones of steel—and they must.

Charlize only had her surgery just four years ago. Before living in the DTES, she lived as Charlie at Unity Housing, a social housing project located in East Vancouver). She spoke to her doctor about how she felt about her gender identity, and attended several meetings

at Three Bridges, a local community health-care centre.

Charlie then finally made a leap of faith: For her whole life, she had waited for this change. After her surgery, she made a quick transition from Charlie to Charlize. “It was something that I wanted for a very, very long time in my life,” she says.

Since Charlize is new to the DTES, she’s still adjusting to life in the area. “There are different communities here. I don’t do drugs and a lot of the women here don’t do the full [transition] because they’re not ready yet.”

Many Canadians cite the DTES as the poorest postal code in the country, to the point that this factoid has become a trite phrase for this community. But the DTES is undergoing economic changes that, in actuality, make the community far more complex and confusing than this cliché. In the same neighbourhood as InSite, the safe inseven/eight 49

Charlize Gordon

jection site for drug users, there are several sophisticated cafés, social housing, and high-end stores. The mix of residents from very different income groups creates a tension between classes, between consumerism and poverty.

While this neighbourhood is dealing with gentrification, displacement, addiction, homelessness, and mental health issues, it also maintains a strong LGBT community. The queer community in the DTES has its roots in 50 sad magazine

Expo ’86, when many downtown residents joined forces in order to uproot transgendered prostitutes of Davie Street and move them out of the downtown core. This was part of an effort to establish Vancouver as a “world class city” and consequentially moved many of the transgendered sex-trade workers to the Downtown Eastside, where they still live. The more recent shame and contempt that surrounded the Downtown Eastside leading up to the 2010 Winter Olympics parallels the anxieties of Expo ’86.

But despite the 2010 Olympics “clean-up” and the persistence of homophobia in the DTES, people like Charlize exemplify a strong culture of survival and resilience.

When Charlie became Charlize she was met with abuse, both verbal and physical, and was kicked out of her home in East Vancouver. She went from place to place to find a safe and affordable home, but wasn’t able to find it until she moved into the Downtown Eastside. Charlize now earns her living by selling calendars, books, and the street paper Megaphone, as well as working for Hope In Shadows, a charitable organization that educates and empowers low-income people.

Charlize’s job is very much ingrained in how she interacts with the world around her, and her pay depends entirely on how hard she works. If you pass Cambie and Hastings, you can find her at the new Woodwards building, belting out an impromptu song and beaming with pride. More and more, she has focused on her writing, and her poems have regularly appeared in Megaphone.

She now spends her time turning her poetry into music.

“I like to write poetry, and I like to play my guitar, and I love turning my poetry into music, […] It’s good to empower oneself by playing music.”

She still has to deal with the phobia of the streets, but has a positive light on Vancouver and feels it is a much safer city to live in than others in Canada. “Back home in New Brunswick, this man came out and said he wanted to be a she, and was blacklisted from her family. It’s very progressive here in the Lower Mainland,” she says.

Charlize has slowly joined a community that has taken decades to build, one that Suzanne Kilroy has been a part of for more than 14 years. When you first meet Suzanne, she immediately points to the ground and states, “Oops, you dropped your pocket.” But once you look back to find nothing on the ground, she immediately bursts into laughter. She is a two-spirited woman and mother of two, currently attempting to exit the sex trade. Suzanne moved to the DTES from English Bay for the same reason most of us trade spaces in Vancouver: cheaper rent.

Being two-spirited, she has been treated differently her whole life, and not necessarily through discrimination. “I used to live in a redneck town,” she says, “and every gay

or transsexual got beat up all the time. Some died, some killed themselves, and some just ran away and were never heard of again. I always wondered why I never was bothered, and wondered by the elders were always teaching me their ways.” Suzanne noted that her status as two-spirited put her in a special light in the Native community. “They did that because in the Native culture two-spirited people were the medicine people.”

Over the course of two decades in the DTES, she met a lot of obstacles. She began using drugs, and had trouble finding safe spaces. “Transgendered [people] wouldn’t be allowed in certain places. You couldn’t go to a men’s shelter, and you couldn’t go to a woman’s shelter. You had to be on your own,” she says. Shelters are a space to find warm food and social assistance, which can be life saving in the DTES. Around ten years ago, after many battles and fights, the area became a safer place: WISH, a dropin centre for women in the sex trade, and the Women’s Centre opened up their spaces to transgendered women.

Suzanne is always talking about the great things for which she is thankful, including the resources available in her neighbourhood. “People are resilient, and if they believe in themselves, they can get a university or college education if they want down here [in the DTES].”

Her optimism flies in the face of the many challenges she and her community confront, but there is one thing to know about this LGBT community of the DTES: It knows how to survive. Its members are tough as nails.

“We had to walk when we had broken toes,” Suzanne says, “We had to smile when we couldn’t smile. And not only that, we had to stay happy.”

“Everywhere you go, you can always see a big group of us always laughing. Everyone’s laughing, ’cause everyone needs to have fun. Ask the queens.” S

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PHOTOGRAPH brandon gaukel

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free spirit

the transformation of jaylene tyme

Jaylene is a living canvas. The former drag Empress of Vancouver, she integrates avant-garde makeup and outfits

into drag performances and brings a regal stillness to the stage, challenging assumptions about the art form. Beyond her public persona, Jaylene is a rich and complex woman who identifies as two-spirit, a First Nations concept for masculine and feminine spirits housed within one body. She is a part of, and speaks for, trans, two-spirit and First Nations communities.

Jaylene came to Vancouver from Calgary in the early ’90s for a visit with friends and never left. Her arrival in Vancouver was part of a dark and transitory period of her life that she describes as her climb “up through the wreckage to the beautiful ocean air.” Those early struggles with drug and alcohol addiction guide her generosity of spirit today. “I shouldn’t be alive, but I am. How I communicate and involve myself today is steeped in richness and gratitude. In the back of my head, I know there’s one person in that room who needs to see me.” That person brings her onstage for each performance. Her role in the queer community, as she sees it, is to enable other people to fully be themselves, and help guide them through that process.

Jaylene’s drag roots can be traced back to Calgary. There, she first discovered drag performance and its possibilities for her. After she saw a performance by Justine Tyme, a prominent Calgary-based drag queen who would later become her drag mother, Jaylene understood the draw: “She was evoking a spirit of drama. It was emotion.”

The Empress didn’t quite see herself as a performer then, but she was and is still an artist through-and-through. The precision of facial contours, the textiles, and the lights that catch angles on the face attracted her. It’s no surprise that she is a professional make-up artist today.

As a transgendered woman and part of the two-spirit community, Jaylene is an anomaly. Transgendered people often do not engage in the drag scene and vice versa, but the queer and drag communities were the first groups to welcome her in Vancouver. Jaylene says, “The drag community has made me who I am today.”

Who she is today is a drag queen, teacher, make-up artist, performer, community leader, and First Nations two-spirit woman. Jaylene is not easy to define, and she likes it that way. It’s how she’s able to persevere.

“I’m very adaptable.” S dAVE DEVEAU seven/eight 53

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building the suburban gaybourhood

Gay in the Suburbs adam cristobal photography by laura nguyen

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E

veryone knows a Kurt Hummel story, a heart-felt or humorous story akin to that of Glee’s coiffed countertenor. The suburban adolescent gay male is now cliché, and his tale a quintessential part of highschool chronicles. Such a tale’s tropes have been well established. It is usually told as a tragic portrait of an outcast protagonist, brought to a dramatic climax of homophobic conflict, and peppered with awkward quips about some locker-room misunderstanding between said protagonist and some sultry classmate manifest from hormonally charged pubescent dreams. You know that story, or at least a variant of it.

But this—this is not that story. It is one thing for queer youth to grow up in the suburbs, but it is entirely another thing when LGBT families settle in the suburbs. Downtown Vancouver and San Francisco form two ends of one big West Coast rainbow, but Vancouver’s vibrant LGBT community is virtually nonexistent in our city’s suburbs.

Can LGBT families settle outside the downtown core, in

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areas where the density of queer individuals ebbs with the density of other human beings? Is the rainbow-coloured picket fence possible, and if it is, what are its implications for the LGBT community at large?

Three years ago, Nathan Pachal and Robert Bittner tied the knot in Langley and have lived there ever since. Both husbands are in their late twenties, but neither has lived in Vancouver proper. Nathan works as a broadcast technician; Robert is a Masters candidate at the UBC Department of English. The latter commutes to campus to study queer young-adult literature. “Langley doesn’t really have a distinct LGBT community,” he tells me.

“I saw two teenage males making out at the back of the 502, the bus that goes from Surrey to Langley,” Nathan adds. Hot. Chilliwack is a different story. In 2005, Nicole and Sian Hurley moved there from their former residence

on Thurlow and Burnaby in downtown Vancouver. Both moms are 29, and live in Chilliwack with their toddler, Roan. Nicole is a store manager at Starbucks, and Sian is a semi-retired chef and stay-at-home mom. “There seems to be an interesting mix,” Sian says describing the LGBT demographic in her city. “Forty-something lesbian moms,” she laughs, as if they all get together for knitting and quilting every Sunday, “and lesbians our age that intermingle and date, who we don’t really know. There are also some older gay men and queer youth.”

Both Nicole and Sian were raised in Chilliwack, but why would they return after life in the Davie Street comfort zone? “We have a very large family, and when we started coming around for birthdays, our nieces and nephews didn’t recognize us as much and they didn’t want to hug us,” Sian explains.

Despite their restored proximity to family, the Hurleys’ move was not easy. LGBT family life in the suburbs can be considered the societal equivalent of dropping Mentos

into a two-litre bottle of Diet Coke. Not dangerous per se, but certainly messy and potentially disastrous. “I was working at Starbucks on Davie street, and the shift for me was huge when we moved back to the Valley,” Nicole comments. “I’m working in a store that is predominantly straight, working in an area that—I think—is predominantly straight and very, very right wing.” Sian, who attended culinary school just before the move, also experienced an unsettling change in her work environment.

“As soon as I came here and apprenticed, my identity was almost erased,” she says.

Both Nathan and Robert express anxieties similar to that of the Hurleys. “The old people, certainly, have a stigma,” says Nathan.

“I definitely am more comfortable when I go into Vancouver, just being able to be myself,” Robert adds. But he also admits there is power in numbers in Vancouver’s population density. He hasn’t had too much trouble out in Langley, but it’s not the same as being in the city centre. seven/eight 57

“There are certain pockets in Langley where you feel fine. Like, Starbucks, for example,” he continues. “But we have, in the odd moment, been called out while walking down the sidewalk together—” “But that’s also happened to me on Broadway in Vancouver,” adds Nathan.

To deem any neighborhood “safe,” be it suburban or urban, would be naive. While a big, pink map marking reported queerbash incidents in the Lower Mainland would be somewhat informative, it would also be impossible to create with a reasonable degree of accuracy.

Discrimination cannot be geographically mapped, and a greater distance from Davie Street doesn’t directly correlate with an increase of homophobia. Bashings pockmark the entire Lower Mainland—often with a higher degree of intensity in the West End. The line between the alleged less gay-friendly sensibilities of Langley and the supposed freedom of Vancouver proper cannot be drawn easily, or really be drawn at all. Yet despite this blur, suburbia is still socially uncharted territory for LGBT families. Without the comfy refuge of institutionalized support like Qmunity, these families are wont of social resources and certainly are right to approach suburban life with a degree of trepidation.

It’s an awkward position to be gay in the suburbs.

Starbucks customers in Chilliwack often get to know Nicole as their favorite coffee girl, but soon discover that she and Sian do not exactly conform to their expectations of a lumberjill lesbian couple. “Everybody has this idea that there’s gotta be a butch and there’s gotta be a femme, but Sian and I are very much our own people,” Nicole says.

“I guess you could call us femme, if you wanted to put us in a little box—” “But please don’t,” laughs Sian.

“I think that we open up a lot of people’s eyes to what real gay people look like—which is everybody,” Nicole says.

Are LGBT families in the Lower Mainland’s suburbs the new pioneers of LGBT integration in Vancouver?

Probably. Albeit over 70 per cent of North America’s population—in whole—is urban and is no longer built upon vast plains of ’50s suburbia, family life in the suburbs still holds a real sense of societal validation and integration, not to mention, the properties and rental rates are more affordable. If this statistic were to be isolated to Greater Vancouver, however, most residents live in suburban communities that are peripheral to Vancouver proper.

The City of Vancouver—comprised of Downtown, the 58 sad magazine

West End, East Vancouver, Kitsilano, South Vancouver, and Point Grey—holds only a quarter of Greater Vancouver’s total population. Perhaps it is time for another rally chant, complete with a minivan float. We’re here, we’re queer, and we’re going to mow our lawns.

Older members of the LGBT community lived in socalled gay ghettos for support and solidarity in earlier and rougher years. Yet younger LGBT generations often consider this way of life to be a dubious, counterintuitive, and antiquated model. “There’s a lot of older gays that seem to still have this sense of wanting to be segregated and have their own special community and area,” says Nathan. “A lot of the younger people—such as myself—rather just integrate into society and be accepted.”

Indeed, the innate solitude of any cultural, sexual, or religious ghetto can be a catalyst for exclusion. When the Hurleys lived in the West End, they discovered that at some nebulous point, community can become exclusion, and exclusion can operate under the guise of community.

“We were so engrossed in our neighborhood,” Sian says.

“We never went to Chinatown, we never went to Gastown, and we never went to all of the places that make that city so great because we were stuck in this one-street town.”

“We don’t need to be ghettoized into Davie Street,” says Nathan. “Why would we be doing that in this day and age?

Why would we exclude ourselves?”

Easier said than done. Clearly defined LGBT communities are often the sole impetus and financial driver for LGBT support centres, and these centres can often be a necessary umbilical cord of resources. “It was definitely interesting being a pregnant lesbian in the Valley,” Nicole tells me. “The vibe that I got was that people would rather that I had been a single mother—pregnant by some man whom I didn’t know via one night stand—than going to an actual clinic, getting inseminated, and having a baby with another woman.”

“In the [Chilliwack], there are not a lot of resources for couples—lesbian or gay—having children, at all,” she says.

I ask about the older lesbian moms Sian mentioned.

Could they not have provided some sort of support? “It was an entirely different situation for them,” she replies.

They are of a different generation than the Hurleys. Many of these women have had relationships with men and have children from previous heterosexual marriages. “They’re quite old. To them, what we were doing was so trailblazing and trendsetting—” “—which, in reality, it’s not at all,” added Sian.

“We’re blowing their minds, everyday,” Nicole laughs.

Despite the Hurleys’ remarks, there is a pioneering quality to raising a LGBT family in the suburbs. So much so that pop culture is mining comedy out of it. The critically lauded sitcom Modern Family features a suburban double-dad family comprised of Costco addict Mitchell Pritchett, his bear of a partner Cameron Tucker, and their adopted Vietnamese baby daughter, Lily. The novelty of the Pritchett-Tuckers primarily lies in their fish-out-ofwater narrative. Mitchell and Cameron make their home in a setting normally known to have negative attitudes toward the LGBT community, but are living the urban lifestyle stereotypically associated with the gay community.

“Urban design or urban settings attract a creative class and professional-type folks,” Nathan argues. “If you look at people who have the time to be creative, it seems to be gay people as well.” That’s not to say anyone who’s queer categorically identifies with East Vancouver bohemia or West End yuppiedom. The association between the urbanite creative class and the LGBT community may have arisen simply because in the past, LGBT individuals needed the relative safety the city usually provides.

Regardless, the clubs, social vibrancy, and overall comfort of the Davie Street community continue to attract the younger set. “All the queer youth [raised in the suburbs] leave as soon as they can,” Sian says. And that’s understandable. Not everyone can emerge from the closet safely, and if suburbia isn’t quite calibrated for LGBT adolescents, why should queer youth stay there after or even during high school?

“I would like to say that they should all stick together and have a great time out here [in Chilliwack], but that’s not the truth,” Sian continues. “If they’re going to have any sort of life, or if they’re going to see anything, they need to leave this area. There’s nothing out here for them, and the things that they do have disappear.” When the Hurleys first moved to Chilliwack, there was a queer youth support program. But before the couple could get involve, the program was discontinued.

Glee’s Kurt Hummel is certainly not the average gay teen, but his disposition and desires are real and familiar.

The chance for LGBT youth to interact with others like themselves on a scale far greater than what’s possible in the suburbs is not only attractive, but also necessary for their overall wellbeing.

Yet LGBT youth who move from the suburbs perpetuate the hardships of living anywhere but a city. “In some ways, it’s a bit of a feedback loop,” says Robert. “You get

the young people going downtown to experience the ‘gay scene,’ and they just get so into it that they don’t really feel the need to go back and create a safe space for themselves within their communities at home.” With all of their older peers moving to the city, how are suburban queer youth to survive? The continuing exodus could make Robert and Nathan, the Hurleys, and even Modern Family’s PritchettTuckers historical anomalies, rather than groundbreakers.

Indeed, without resources and support in Chilliwack, the Hurleys have decided to return to Vancouver. “In a perfect world, it’d be great to stay,” Sian says. “But it’s not going to be possible to raise our son here.”

Vancouver is a tiny pair of peninsulas cradled in a wide stretch of suburbia, from North Vancouver’s maze of mountain chalets to White Rock’s far reaches. It’s all one sprawling but loosely populated zone that may never become a megalopolis. Suburbia has always been the frontier of the Lower Mainland, and the LGBT community will never be truly integrated into Vancouver society unless it is able to find a residential balance between the queer concentration on Davie Street and outback outliers of Langley and Chilliwack.

So maybe this really is about Kurt Hummel. Or rather, people like him in the Lower Mainland. Many future suburban queer youth, like most young people, will wistfully look to downtown Vancouver’s awkward but identifiable skyline in hopes of a queer-friendly life. But hopefully they will fly from their respective nests and into the city’s embrace for future opportunities, rather than leave the ‘burbs just to escape the pressures of alienation.

If more LGBT families settle in the suburbs, perhaps suburban life—the life led by most people in the Lower Mainland—will not be so tough for LGBT individuals in the future. It’s worth a shot.

“I know a lot people say a lot of things about us, because it’s a small town, but we’re incredibly oblivious,” Sian says. “We’re living a great life.” S

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illustration lon garrick

denis, everyone.

The first time I met renowned performer Denis Simpson,

I happened to be wearing an ironic T-shirt that read “Raised on Canadian TV” and was emblazoned with a picture of Polkaroo from the famed Canadian children’s series Polka Dot Door. Simpson, a renowned performer, hosted the show for the bulk of my childhood. That hipsters wear shirts depicting a character from a show he hosted demonstrates the significance Denis held within the arts community. As a performer, he inhabited multiple, often contradictory worlds: children’s entertainment as the host of Polka Dot Door; adult contemporary music as the original bass singer in The Nylons; theatre, in which he produced overtly queer and sexy work (his solo show Denis, Anyone? had tremendous success at Arts Club); musicals aplenty; and even news programming (who can forget his stint as the Live Eye Guy on CityTV?) Call it coincidence that when I first had the chance to pick the brain of this legendary Canadian entertainer, I was sporting the iconic image he was so closely associated with. But as we continued working together, I wore it to every one of our coffee dates and meetings to see if he’d notice. I spent my youth watching his smiling face, and wanted to acknowledge the effect he’d had on who I became. But how do you actually say that without becoming a bumbling fanatic?

Denis was a very public presence whose contributions to charitable organizations entrenched him as one of Canada’s queer crown jewels. His work as a community member continues to inspire queers and artists alike. Despite the numerous trials he faced in life, Denis was the utmost believer in gratitude. Ever gracious and graceful, Denis took many a wayward theatre fag under his wing and gave his time generously, relaying stories about a gay Vancouver that had changed drastically since his first West Coast foray in the ’80s. Despite being a big name, especially in the local theatre scene, Denis always made time for anyone and everyone who needed it.

Though his passing last year left an open wound in both the queer and arts communities, Denis leaves behind his perseverance, dedication and open-heartedness. Denis is remembered as someone who knew how to create community. He was community. And the countless stories he told over coffee, under the polite supervision of Polkaroo on my T-shirt, will not soon be forgotten. S dave deveau seven/eight 61

to serve and collect

and slides open a wood panel with the elegant precision of Vanna White revealing a vowel on Wheel Of Fortune. Light floods the shelves to illuminate the most comprehensive library of Vancouver queer history available in the city, contained within his home on Harwood Street in the West End. An alphabetized, time-sorted collection of books, magazines, videotapes, oversize posters, and photographs—all chronicling this city’s LGBT history from the mid-century onward—lead me to believe Dutton is much more of an Alex Trebek.

Within seconds he pulls up a file on Vancouver’s gay clubs, then flips through some photographs of The Castle pub from the ’70s, the decade in which the archives were born. As a young gay man in a time of great political transformation, Dutton found his calling.

“It was a very interesting time in that the civil rights movement in the States had been going on for 30 years, the women’s movement for 20 years, and there was this huge sense that the world was in transition,” he says. “Everybody was protesting, taking up activist roles. They were busily doing the work of transforming society and there was nobody who was documenting this, and of course as an archivist and a librarian, it’s my trade.”

Since then, he’s stashed away everything LGBT-related he can get his hands on, from the first half of the century when even a sliver of information about gays was extremely hard to come by, up to today.

“My job has been twofold: to document that social change as it occurs, and secondly, to recover the history of gays and lesbians going back to the beginning of this province,” he says.

That history, when compared to other parts of Canada, is as different as the geography across this country.

“Historically, Vancouver has been much more laissez-faire in terms of marginalized people than has been the case in say, Toronto, where to this very day the relationship between the gay community and the police has been poisonous,” he says.

That wasn’t the case here, Dutton explains. Once a frontier, wooden-shack town with brothels on every block, “There was a tacit agreement between the city’s fathers, the police department, and the gay community that if people don’t get too outrageous and don’t rock the boat, everyone will prosper from this.

“We were pretty oppressed, but less so. That really goes back to the founding of Vancouver.”

According to Dutton, documenting social change is important ammunition against the possible recurrence of past injustices and violence. “We have gained a measure of freedom, but we have to guard against it being taken away from us through our own inattention or our own complacency,” Dutton cautions. “There isn’t the level of activism there was in the 1970s.

However, many of the rights have been gained and it’s a mop-up operation now.”

The archives, he hopes, will remind people today and future generations about what has been achieved, and where we’ve come from. Despite the freedoms we enjoy today, Ron Dutton and his archives are a reminder of why LGBT activism remains more important than ever. S jeff lawrence Ron Dutton glides over his bedroom floor

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PHOTOGRAPH brandon gaukel

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Drag King What I love best about what I do in my heart, I’m a performer. Being on stage is probably my favourite part, but that might be tied with the true joy that I get when I see other performers break out of their comfort zones. No, I take it back. That’s number one.

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Hair stylists/Salon owners What it’s like to work together Jim: “We’ve been together for 14 years.”

Anthony: “We have a little saying that I’m the sparkly part of the fishing tackle and he’s the hook.”

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Burlesque Artist What I love about my art form Burlesque is so inclusive. It’s not for fat strippers, it’s for all people. Guys too.

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actor What it means to me to be a member of an acting troupe Coming out for me has always been a process of progress—of owning it and coming to accept it. I am constantly facing the challenge of whether or not to come out to a particular group of people. This group [The Bob Loblaw Queer Arts Society] has really helped me in my journey, in terms of accepting myself and who I am, and having that family of acceptance saying, yes, in this group, we are queer.

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writer/performance artist Why I wanted to be a performer I love when I’m performing something, and the audience has joined me there. There’s a kind of moment in a room when the collective presence of the people therein is all focused on one thing together. What they’re focused on is not me, but the story; the place in time; the snapshot that I’m holding out.

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Dancer Why I do what I do I can‘t help myself. This is what I was designed to do.

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Director/ Drag Queen What I think about the role of art in social justice It’s crucial that you keep those struggles in the forefront. Art has many responsibilities.

Entertainment is a small part of that, and education and forward-movement in social struggles is another part—a huge part.

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Writer What I think about the role of art in social justice If you get to a point in your artistic career and you don’t care about social justice, you’re losing a really huge opportunity. It’s been a big part of my writing, ever since the beginning. It’s one of the things I love about storytelling, and art in general.

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Writer/Comedian What I love about writing I love nothing about writing. No, that’s not true. I love having written something.

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Dancer What my mentor, Jojo Zolina, means to me He’s had a huge impact on me— introducing me to people, having me transition comfortably into the gay community. Before, it was on the down low, nobody knew [I was gay]. I just wanted to dance, but I thought, if I dance, this is going to be such a giveaway.

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Isolde N. Barron and Sad Mag’s Jeff Lawrence goof off on set Photo Brandon Gaukel

Grant Harder teaching sad’s ‘Documenting your Life’ Workshop at the Waldorf Hotel

Photo Rachel Rilkoff

A collection of Kinesis magazines Photo Monika Koch

back story

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Vancouver Fabulous since 1969

Gay love has been legal in Canada since 1969, protected by the Constitution since 1992 and celebrated with marriage since 2005.

www.twitter.com/HIMtweets www.checkhimout.ca/facebook

HIM is dedicated to strengthening the health and well-being of gay men.

Today, Vancouver’s queer community is at the foreground: from the West End to East Vancouver, it is a visible

and intrinsic thread of the city’s cultural fabric. The city’s queers are here, and for most Vancouverites, this is to state the obvious. But this was not always the case. It was not easy for Vancouver’s queer community to arrive where it is today, and its journey from a quiet subculture to a prominent voice in the city was not always a joyride. Historically, the LGBT people were often marginalized from the foreground altogether.

Why, then, has the community’s history remained hidden as its people once were? The city’s queer culture is evident, but its past less so. This past, a dense, complex, multi-part, and multi-voiced history, has remained a quiet outlier of Vancouver’s chronicles. Perhaps this is because the city is still young and has precious little history of its own, or perhaps because we take the LGBT community’s development for granted due to its continued growth and presence.

Sad Mag has always featured queer content, but until now it’s something that we didn’t make a big deal about. For us, queer content was and is an important part of our mandate: the queer community contributes to our city’s arts and cultural development. This issue, though, we mean it more than ever. We track the workings of the Dogwood Monarchist Society in the ‘60s, and we piece together sequins of Vancouver’s queer disco scene in the ‘70s. We speak to a queer artist that fought a political battle for the treatment of AIDS victims in the ‘90s, and we try to figure out what it means to be gay in the 21st-century suburb.

It’s a bit of a stretch, but boy do we have some new old stories for you. S editorial team seven/eight 13

sAD MAGAZINE IS deanne beattie editor in chief brandon gaukel creative director jeff lawrence & adam cristobal managing editors monika koch lead designer megan lau copy editor

Contributing Writers Deanne Beattie Derek Bedry Tony Correia Adam Cristobal Dave Deveau Steph Hallett Jeff Lawrence Tyler Morgenstern Leanne Perry Michelle Reid Benjamin Riley Matt Roy Esther Tung Daniel Zomparelli

Contributing Artists Mischa Bartkow Daphne Chan Lon Garrick Brandon Gaukel Grant Harder Brennan Kelly monika koch Parker McLean Laura Nguyen Sarah Race Monique Wells

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featured contributors 1. mischa bartkow is a Vancouver-born photographer who loves blurring the line between ugly and beautiful. An image he captured of lightbulbs against a stark background in Hong Kong was selected as a design for a Scotties tissue box, which you can see in stores now.

2. tony correia has worked as a columnist and contributor for Xtra since 2005. Tony’s essays and articles have appeared in The Globe & Mail, The Vancouver Province, San Francisco Courier, SubTerrain, and Vancouver Review, as well as the anthologies, Second Person Queer and I Like it Like that.

3. dave deveau is an awardwinning playwright who explores queer work for a broad audience. He also makes fun queer parties happen in East Van including the weekly drag show Apocalypstick, Queer Bash, and the hip-hop night Hustla where you can find his drag alter ego Peach Cobblah.

Sad Mag would like to thank: The City of Vancouver B.C. Gay and Lesbian Archives Jan Altshool Robert Bittner Guy Babineau Nicole Hurley Sian Hurley Deb LeRose Ted Northe Nathan Pachal michelle reid rebecca slaven pinq.ca gayvancouver.net Vancouver Queer Film Festival East Van studios The Cobalt Katie Stewart Sad Mag is published four times per year by the Sad Magazine Publishing Society, Suite 534, 2818 Main St., Vancouver, B.C., V5T 0C1. Email: hello@sadmag.ca.

Contents Š Sad Mag 2011 All rights reserved. www.sadmag.ca www.facebook.com/sadmag www.twitter.com/sadmag

4 dispatches 6 a long walk 8 dressed to empress 16 wide-eyed adrenaline

vancouver’s first pride parade ted northe gussied up for change

24

the glitzy dancefloors of ‘70s lgbt nightlife

queens of the castle history of the landmark beer parlour

28 designing davie 31 speaking volumes 35 rainbow reels 36 the quiet fighter

urban planner alan herbert nancy pollak tells queer stories

put on your gablevision glasses

40

tiko kerr on finding his voice in the battle against hiv/aids

a tough pill: the art of general idea canada’s art stars instruct a new generation

43 borderline riot 46 this magical place 48 tough in transit 53 free spirit 52 gay in the suburbs 61 denis, everyone.

62 to serve and collect 64 photo essay:

legit evolves canada’s immigration laws leaving behind a life of fear in jordan

a culture of strength in the dtes

jaylene’s transformation new frontier of lgbt integration

remembering denis simpson ron dutton’s lgbt archives

photo printed with permission from the B.C. Gay & lesbian archives.

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ILLUSTRATIONS BY PARKER MCLEAN

MATT ROY TORONTO Toronto is so big, who knew? When I moved here from Vancouver I instantly found myself a small town boy with a West Coast drawl and not the city man I claimed to be, slowly but surely mapping out the “New York of Canada,” a navigation that included sussing out the gays. “Turn left on Church Street,” says my iPhone.

Ten times bigger than Vancouver in practically every way, Toronto has shown me a new version of queer, of community, of responsibility. And I’m learning a lot. For instance, it is not cool to make trans jokes because you have no inkling of who may be trans— especially the hot bear you’ve been chatting with at the bar. My ‘Couve apathy will be the death of me yet.

People take their politics seriously here. With Mayor Rob Ford planning to cut AIDS funding off at the 4 sad magazine

knees, among nearly every other essential social service, queers and generally all compassionate liberal (human) souls are assembling, and I’ve been swept out to sea (or into lake I suppose). Whether I’m marching in Slut Walk, or discussing my role as queer on a rooftop deck, partially (fully) inebriated, there’s no escaping the fact that I’m now a participant and not the voyeur I once was. S

STEPH HALLETT LOS ANGELES In 2008, Larry King was an eighth grade student at E.O. Green Junior High in Oxnard, California.

By most accounts, he was bubbly, gentle, and liked to dress up his otherwise-blah school uniform with high-heeled boots, jewelry and makeup. He was also openly gay from the age of 10.

Three years ago, King’s life was taken by a fellow student.

Brandon McInerney, now 17, shot him twice in the back of the head. Being re-tried as an adultafter and initial mistrial, McInerney faces 53 years to life in prison on pre-meditated murder and other charges. McInerney’s lawyers argue the boy was pushed to a breaking point when King called out to him, “I love you, baby!” after a science class on Feb. 11. He brought a gun to school the next day.

Would teaching the stories of queer American heroes like Harvey Milk have kept King safe?

Advocates of a new California law, which mandates the inclusion of important queer Americans in social science curricula, say yes. They argue that teaching gay history will engender a climate of tolerance, keeping students like King safe.

Anti-gay activists have vowed to see the new law reversed. But with horrific stories like King’s cropping up across the country, compassion may be their foe. S

BENJAMIN RILEY MELBOURNE A while back I wrote some promotional material for the biggest Bear Pride in the Southern Hemisphere, held annually in Melbourne.

During the week-long event, hairy and chunky gay men from all over the region descend upon Melbourne to drink, hang out and touch each other. I’m gangly, six-and-a-half feet tall, with limited body or facial hair. No one would ever call me a bear.

But while I’ve never been into the mainstream Melbourne Pride, the guys in the Bear Pride

promo shots were pretty damn sexy. It was the kind of pride I could get behind.

And so, after much thought, I began to wonder if deep down I was a bear.

Signing up to a local bear organization gave me legitimacy, a membership key ring, and a newfound and burning sense of pride. Any comments disparaging the bear community in my presence were met with an almost religious fury. “Don’t discriminate against my people!” I shouted at a stranger who mentioned he wasn’t into hairy guys.

I even decided I’d participate in all the Bear Pride events. I’d be the model bear community member.

When Bear Pride Week finally arrived, I walked into the opening night party and my heart sank. A sea of burly, furry bodies buffeted my lanky, hairless frame and I realized the truth: I was a pretender. I shuffled out of the bar.

When I got home I pulled out my house key and stared at my bear membership key ring. At once a feeling of immense pride surged through me. It didn’t matter how I looked, I felt like a bear.

I turned around and hailed a taxi. S

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a long walk

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Images from Vancouver’s first Pride. Printed with permission from The B.C. Gay & Lesbian Archives.

is a dazzling, splashy spectacle of throbbing bass, rainbow glitter, topless lesbians roaring down Robson on muscular motorbikes, and shirtless studs lobbing Mardi Gras beads into a crowd of more than 500,000 giddy spectators. Along with the visibility of queer people in this city, the parade has certainly grown from humble beginnings.

Vancouver’s first officially sanctioned gay pride parade took place on August 1, 1981. The route began in Nelson Park and proceeded to Alexandra Park via Thurlow, then Beach and Pacific—and instead of completely occupying these streets, the parade was given one side of each, while traffic proceeded otherwise uninterrupted. An estimate by the Vancouver Sun puts roughly 1,500 participants at the parade.

Bill Siksay, former Burnaby-Douglas MP and the organizing committee’s UBC representative in ‘81, says it was more of a demonstrative march: “It was about claiming our place in the streets of Vancouver for the first time. The spirit of it was we’re here, we’re your neighbours, we’re part of the community and we’re not going away.”

In years prior, proposals to establish official pride celebrations were deftly struck down by councillors’ votes. In 1981, Mayor Mike Harcourt signed a proclamation naming the week of August 1-7 Gay Unity Week, fulfilling an election promise.

Siksay says the ability for queer people to announce themselves in broad daylight was a major step forward for Vancouver’s LGBT people. “[Before 1981] you often felt isolated, like it was a long slog to do the work you wanted, have the relationships you wanted, to be the person that you were. You felt like every place you turned there was a challenge, and I think having that moment of pride really made a lot of other things possible for folks,” he says.

The marching queers were not entirely embraced by onlookers. Siksay recalls some strange looks and comments from vehicles driving by, and one group of young men in particular who shouted at Siksay, his partner Brian, and their great Dane.

“They said, ‘Is the dog gay too?’ And I think it was the only time in my life I’ve ever had a retort for something like that.

I said, ‘Why, no. She’s a lesbian.’”

However, Siksay says more people were supportive or curious than hostile. The celebrants were so happy, nothing was going to dampen their spirits on the sunny day they marched for diversity on the streets of Vancouver.

“That work isn’t done yet,” says Siksay. “I think Pride is still about claiming our place in the life of the city, the culture of Vancouver. [Today’s Pride parade is] broader, much broader than it was back then, but the root of it remains the same. I think everybody who goes to Pride today has that kind of feeling.” S derek bedry Vancouver’s pride parade today

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TED NORTHE GUSSIED UP FOR CHANGE

Dressed to Empress DEANNE BEATTY ILLUSTRATIONS BY MONIQUE WELLS

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previous pages, accompanying photo: the lady herself, ted northe. image from coronation program. printed with permission from the b.c. gay & lesbian archives.

T

he movie trailer for Auntie Mame, the 1958 film starring Rosalind Russell, starts with the frame tight on a hand in a red silk glove tapping seductively on a bejeweled cigarette holder, then motioning to the camera come hither. It’s a flirty gesture that gives off the sort of sparkly aplomb one would expect to inspire a young ted northe (who does not capitalize his name).

The 73-year-old drag dynamo and founder of the Dogwood Monarchist Society, the longest-running LGBT organization in Canada, wasn’t so much inspired by the film as he was by the drag queen of the same name who came roaring into a San Francisco costume ball in the early '60s. An argument had broken out at the gathering when Portland’s Auntie Mame, the drag persona of David Hamilton, stood up in her full show make up and dress. Oh, shit, she screamed, now just listen to me for a minute—none of you are making any sense!

“Every man in that room and every woman in that

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room stopped,” laughs northe. “We said, ‘Who is she?

The bitch!’ So, I thought, I’m going to check up on this—I want to meet her.”

Northe recognized Mame’s socially strategic advantage as a drag queen. “Nobody wants to see a man getting up there and giving a lecture,” he says. “Women don’t like it especially. And gay men don’t like it, because it’s too much of the stereotype telling them what to do.” Northe admired Mame’s ability to speak and hold the attention of others, and saw drag as a way to do that.

Northe strode up to Mame and introduced himself, professing he wouldn’t have the courage to do what she had done that night. She responded, “Ted, it’s the easiest thing in the world to do. Once you get the make up on, the rest is easy. You’ve got a mouth!”

Mame whisked him back to her hotel and dressed him up in her wigs and make up. “We went out that night in San Francisco, and I had such a hoot!” northe recalls of

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left: 1980S Emperor and Empress nomination flyers. above: A shot from a Coronation Ball 1979, from the Seattle Gay News.

Printed with permission from The B.C. Gay & Lesbian Archives.

his first night in drag. Realizing the effectiveness of drag for meeting and connecting with people, he decided to bring the act home with him.

Vancouver was a sleepy, coastal town before the '60s when a generation of drop-outs, naturalists, gay people and hippies discovered the city’s spectacular beauty and laid-back charm. Vancouver’s burgeoning gay community connected with more established scenes in Portland and San Francisco, and it was common for the cities to take turns hosting costume balls for the West Coast gay community to reunite.

Histories of the gay rights movement in North America typically begin with the Stonewall riots in New York City in 1969. However, Vancouver, Portland and San Francisco established strong gay communities years before the riots began, and were met with relative acceptance. In contrast 12 sad magazine

to the homophobia and police violence experienced on the East Coast, the West Coast community opened gay bars, hosted gay parties and started fighting for equal rights much earlier with comparative ease.

It was in this context in 1964 that northe established the Imperial Empire of Canada. The society was based on his concept for a coronation ball where ‘monarchs’ known as empresses were to be elected. The event was intended to celebrate the accomplishments of people in the gay community who worked hard to be the voice of Vancouver’s queer population and to make the city a better, safer place for gay people to live.

“You don’t want to spend your life fighting with people,” says northe. “After a while, it becomes a real chore.

When you’re fighting you’ve got to have good things happen to you once in a while.

“That’s why I thought the coronation ball could be a big celebration—we’d put on a big ball and say thank you to the emperor and empress for doing hard work that year, and then we’d all have a big party.”

The Imperial Empire of Canada was re-established as the Dogwood Monarchist Society in 1971, and celebrated its 40th anniversary this year. The organization still operates in much the same way it did at its start. The elected empress and emperor for the year represent the organi-

zation at community events and raise money for various causes. The Dogwood Monarchist Society has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for local HIV/AIDS and LGBT charities.

The Dogwood Monarchist Society also helped northe and countless others to find their voice among the clamour. Like Auntie Mame did in the '60s, the society used fun, glamour and humour to de-stigmatize gay issues in Vancouver.

“Some of my biggest adversaries would come to our parties,” explains northe. “They found out that we weren’t a bunch of sex-hungry people, that we’re all just great people out and having fun. They’d see the appreciation people in the community had for one another when they saw someone getting an award—the thunderous applause, and people hugging and kissing them because they were so happy for that person, and because they worked hard for it.”

Even after many years of service, northe regularly plans and attends charity events around North America and shows no signs of slowing down. He exhibits the same unstoppable confidence and wit that made him an unforgettable Vancouver role model.

“Everything I wanted to do was in my head,” he says, “so I just put the crown on, and made it happen.” S

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GLITZY, RISKY AND GAY: THE DANCEFLOORS OF '70S DISCO NIGHTLIFE

Wide-Eyed Adrenaline JEFF LAWRENCE PHOTOGRAPHY BY GRANT HARDER

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disco can be found just about everywhere; from beer parlours in suburbia, to the meat markets on Hornby Street, people are flocking in unbelievable numbers with a common goal—dancing, which has replaced LSD as the number one form of mind expansion.

Charles Lyall, “Disco Nooz,” Bi-Line Oct. 1978

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A coupon flyer from the Odyssey. Printed with permission from The B.C. Gay & Lesbian Archives.

A

s protest groups stormed their way through the 1960s into the early '70s, the radical new left movement brought a massive change. For gays, this meant for the first time being out and open with their sexuality. The Stonewall riots and inaugural pride parades told the public, “We’re not going away.”

If the '60s were about pride, then the '70s were about celebration. The freedom gays desperately fought for was suddenly attainable and gave way to a hedonistic tidal wave. Gays suddenly found themselves riding the crest of a subculture that defined an entire decade: and that was disco.

A $4-billion industry in the U.S.A. at one point, disco music was the soundtrack to the '70s for gays and straights

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alike, says Vancouver journalist and fashion intructor Guy Babineau. He fondly remembers when disco was emerging from the funk and soul sound filling America. The Staple Singers, Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson, Sly and the Family Stone: they paved the way for artists like Gloria Gaynor and Donna Summer to break out in the mid to early '70s.

“Disco was an underground phenomenon, a hybrid of gay and black culture,” Babineau says. “White guys took it from black clubs, and that served as the transfer point to the mainstream community. Before Saturday Night Fever in 1977, disco was actually kind of cool.”

In that time, Babineau grew up in a progressive, accepting family in Vancouver’s Dunbar area that never

considered his homosexuality a problem. “I came out in the summer of 1973, the summer I turned 15,” he says, asserting how extremely rare it was for a young man to be out in school. A child of the liberal '60s, Babineau rarely had a problem expressing himself to the other kids.

He still endured the same old attitudes of discrimination from kids who didn’t understand his flamboyance and fuck-you mindset, though. “One morning I woke up to discover that a bunch of guys from school had glued homo-milk cartons to the front door of our house,” he says, chuckling. “But because I came out blazing down the hallway in my platform shoes and eyeshadow, there was nothing anyone could really do about it,” he says.

“My feeling was that I wasn’t even thinking politically.

When you’re a teenager, you’re not political in that way.”

And that, Babineau says, was the overwhelming feeling surrounding the disco years. In a 1979 Village Voice piece, “The Dialect of Disco: Gay Music Goes Straight,” Andrew Kopkind writes, “Disco in the '70s is in revolt against rock in the '60s. It is the antithesis of the ‘natural’ look, the real feelings, the seriousness, the confessions, the struggles, the sincerity, pretensions and pain of the last generation … All the sparkle, speed, cynicism, and jaded irony associated with metropolitan life is attached to disco. It is far from wholesome.”

And in the metropolis of Vancouver, there were many people just like Babineau who craved the dimly lit, smokefilled dance floor of the disco club. The disco club was a place they could get together to be themselves, no matter how cynical and jaded they were, sans judgment.

“In the group of gays I was hanging out with—I was usually the youngest one—they were runaways or hus-

tlers and here I was, this straight-A student from Dunbar,” he recalls.

“There was this house on 4th Ave, it was in Kitsilano, which, back then, was still hippy-dippy. We nicknamed it ‘Mondo Homo’ and it would always be guys in their 20s, 30s; rock ’n’ roll guys, hustlers and drag queens hanging around there. It was a way station for people who had nowhere else to go.”

On any given Friday night in 1975, Babineau and his friends would have a few beers, share a joint (cocaine and poppers, popular in large cities such as New York, were not as rampant in Vancouver, though certainly present) and then head across the bridge downtown to 795 Seymour Street, the epicentre of Vancouver’s disco movement, a club called Faces.

“It is definitely, without a question, the iconic club of Vancouver that we associate with the birth of the gay movement,” he says. “It was the favourite club, the focal point, it was the one place where everyone wanted to go.

This was the cool one, this was where everyone went to be seen, where people put on rhinestones and sequins wanting to be David Bowie and Lou Reed.”

It was an unassuming and small club. In those days, when liquor licensing was harder to get, you would bring your own bottles of booze and give them to the bartender, who would then re-serve the alcohol back to you upon request. “It was really small but always packed with fabulous people,” Babineau remembers. “There was a little mix of everybody and people were really friendly then.”

Once you were in, you might stay all night, listening to the man behind the turntables play nonstop singles. This was the advent of the DJ as we know it.

“The developed their own media form, the 12” single,” says Darryl Cressman, a PhD candidate at SFU studying musical culture. “The reason for this is the gay community at the underground clubs at this particular time, they liked the ideas of records being played together. That sort of epic, six hour set.

“At a purely aesthetic level, disco transformed music as we know it, man.”

While the music started the movement, everyone was fascinated with clubs as a status symbol. “It wasn’t the music that was underground, it was the clubs,” explains Cressman. “That’s where it was at. That’s why rock hated disco. Disco was like, ‘No, let’s go to New York City and find the hippest clubs that only 50 people know about.’”

In Vancouver there was no shortage of cool clubs. Faces was “it,” but there was also Luv-A-Fair, a sleek, lavish club at 1275 Seymour that was initially a gay-frequented disco club, but became best-known as the city’s premiere seven/eight 17

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previous: 1251 Howe St, the old home of the Odyssey. these pages: A selection of club flyers, Printed with permission from The B.C. Gay & Lesbian Archives.

new wave club in the '80s. The Playpen Center at 856 Seymour and the Shaggy Horse at 818 Richards were also popular destinations, and the Gandy Dancer was also one of the first bigger gay disco clubs where the music of Sylvester and Divine would whip the floor into frenzy.

“There were actually more clubs than there are now,” says Babineau. “They were more like American pubs and bars, but there must have been a dozen of them. I think we have about four or five now.”

The reality is that the number of clubs belonging to the LGBT community is in decline. Some time between the heyday of gay nightlife in the ’70s and now, Vancouver became a nightclub morgue. The most recent obituary belongs to The Odyssey, the community’s beloved-yet20 sad magazine

derided, seven-nights-a-week destination for drag shows, strippers and general debauchery. The Odyssey was the Faces of my generation, and Lick was its lesbian counterpart. The destruction of both venues signifies a greater change in queer club culture altogether.

Disco music has morphed over the years from one genre to the next. From house music to techno, to rap and indie rock, its far-reaching influence has been felt everywhere. Yet it has returned to simply be called ‘disco’.

Meanwhile, the clubs are changing. We don’t require spaces for meeting each other to identify who is gay, who is on our side and who is against us, as much as we did then. We now have the Internet for that. We still dance in the name of having a good time, but the necessity of

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socializing in a safe space has been removed. Want to meet somebody? Go on the Internet. Want to sleep with someone? Download Grindr. Do we have less fun in our chosen queer spaces because of it? Babineau thinks so.

“People were happier then,” he says. “It was a lot of fun, a lot of excitement, and a lot of adventure.

“What has happened with the change in gay society, is we’re now all about status and the care of superficiality,” he says. “That’s not what we were coming out for.

We just wanted to make the choices we wanted to make without being judged. This word ‘community,’ what does it mean? It needs to be discussed, we need to revise it, because there is a disconnect between the generations which 22 sad magazine

didn’t exist when I was coming out.” Today, he asserts, inter-generational mingling at a club is a rare event.

In the '70s, swarming the dark dance floor of a packed club equated with refreshing your Facebook feed every five seconds or publishing your every passing thought via status update. “It was all about dancing and it was all about being with people, it was not about being isolated,” Babineau says.

“It was so innocent, we were wide-eyed. It was new, exciting. I never got addicted to anything at that point, we weren’t going to the gym every day. We were really just kids discovering who we were.” S

The old home of 616 Club (left), 495 seymour street, the former site of faces (right).

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queens of the castle A historic day for the landmark beer parlour tony correia illustration brennan kelly Little is written of The Castle Pub at 750

Granville Street. Fraser Biggs, founder of the West End Softball Association, and Bobby Fraser, (a.k.a. Buffalo Babs) a bartender there, share their memories about the landmark beer parlour and that day in the spring of 1990.

Bobby Fraser

I got a job on Canadian Pacific Railway working on the dining car. There were 12 of us; ten of us were gay.

Someone suggested we go to The Castle Hotel, it was right downtown. That was '72, '73. After I started working there in 1980 I ran into a couple of tourists who were at The Castle in 1930. They told me, “We remembered that this is where men go to meet men.”

Fraser Biggs

When I first started going there in 1966, it was split in two; “Ladies and Escorts” and “Men’s Only.” Women weren’t allowed in “Men’s Only” and they were only allowed in “Ladies and Escorts” if a man accompanied them. When they got rid of “Ladies and Escorts” they made it into one big round main section with an upper section.

BF

They had names for the different sections because they were all blocked off. The entrance was Welfare Flats.

There was Gay Heights.

FB

The main section had a fireplace that looked like a spaceship.

BF

They had this massive fireplace surrounded with chairs and big beams supporting it. It was the perfect place for meeting people.

FB

The Castle was the home pub for all the drag queens.

That was where they felt the most comfortable entertaining and got the best reception. And it was called The Castle. The Queen’s portrait hung there for years. seven/eight 25

It always had a spot of prominence. It didn’t matter where you sat in the bar, you could see this picture of Queen Elizabeth II.

Softball Association], he was our first sponsor. You couldn’t serve drinks on Sundays. That’s one of the reasons we started gay sports: to get together and drink beer.

FB

BF

Then, in the mid-seventies, the owners wanted to get rid of the gay people.

BF

Terry Wallace and The Castle were fundamental for raising money when the AIDS epidemic came. And we weren’t shy about it. We raised thousands and thousands of dollars.

If you were gay or were known to associate with gays they wouldn’t serve you.

FB

FB

The owners sold the property and it was going to be redeveloped, so they gave notice that they had to close.

BF

So we made a pact—everybody knew each other—we’d all meet on Friday night, order a drink and then get up and walk out of the place en masse—which we did—and we walked across the street to The York, which is now Sears. A week-and-a-half later the management asked us to come back.

BF

The owner was getting older, his kids were growing up and none of the kids wanted to take over the business. It was a full-time job because you had the hotel, the restaurant and the pub. They just weren’t interested.

BF

FB

This went on for about six to eight months and their business went down. Finally, they came to the conclusion business is business, and then they went back to the way it used to be.

A few of us were really sentimental and wanted to stay with Terry to the very end. When the moment came we decided maybe we should take the Queen with us.

Terry was pretty emotional and he said, “Great idea.

Let’s do it.”

FB

It became the gay community centre and kept going from there. It never slowed down.

BF

In 1975 or 1976 they hired a bar manager named Terry Wallace. That’s when it really became the center for everything that was gay in the city.

FB

He looked like a troll from under a bridge, but he had a heart of gold.

BF

The Castle had a very small bar area—four or five seats to the right of the cash register, and certain people sat there every day for years. One of them was a chap named Ray; he was always known as Ray-chel.

FB

We all finished our drinks and we took the Queen off the wall and I carried it very high—it was pretty big but somehow I managed.

BF

BF

Terry was a very serious man. He could never do enough to promote the gay community in Vancouver. He was very fashionable. Loved suede jackets. Always wore a tie.

They decided to make it official. The Queen was leaving The Castle and moving to a new castle: The Royal Hotel. They took her portrait off the wall, and Ray-chel, leading this group on an April Fool’s Day at 1 p.m., marched down Granville street holding the picture of the Queen.

FB

He was one of the first to step up to the plate and support the first gay bowling league at the Commodore Lanes. When I helped found WESA [the West End 26 sad magazine

FB

There were about 12 of us. We marched down the west side of Granville Mall with the queen held really high.

Left: The closing night of the Castle Pub. Right: Kitty Litter performing the same night. Printed with permission from The B.C. Gay & Lesbian Archives

A few gay people joined. It was an incredible feeling.

The Royal Hotel was packed. The place went absolutely crazy. They didn’t stop cheering, hollering, and crying for almost ten minutes, which is pretty long for any gay person not to stop and at least have a beer. They kept that energy going for at least two or three hours. Everybody was on this super high. The Castle was closed, but a bit of it moved to The Royal.

BF

Without the spirit that that hotel and its clientele developed, I don’t think gay people would be as far as we are today in Vancouver. S seven/eight 27

designing davie for AIDS Vancouver?” The loaded question met Alan Herbert after the first tumultuous and emotionally charged meeting of AIDS Vancouver, the first organization that addressed HIV/AIDS in Canada. In the early '80s, HIV and AIDS were still largely misunderstood. Alan Herbert’s answer was a decades-long career as a gay rights and AIDS activist in Vancouver, helping shape the culture and city as we know it, and earning him Xtra!

West’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2004.

Herbert served on the board of many pivotal organizations, including the Vancouver Pride Society, often as the chair. He founded McLaren House, the first housing for people living with HIV and AIDS, and Hominum, a support group for gay men married to women.

In 1996, Herbert ran and was elected for city council. During his first and only term as city councillor, he fulfilled his campaign promise and obtained licensing for The Fountainhead Pub—a victory that led to no endorsement for a second run. As a city planner, Herbert understood the importance of civic design and how The Fountainhead could change the character of the street and dynamic of the neighbourhood by providing a legitimate, safe space for the gay and lesbian community in Vancouver. It was from this beginning that the Davie Street Village was born.

Now, Herbert hopes the younger community will remember the history. Remember the struggle, the fight. Remember everything that has been accomplished, and hold it dear, so nothing gets lost. S LEANNE PERRY

“so, what are you going to do

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PHOTOGRAPH daphne chen

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NANCY POLLAK ON THE PRINTED WORD, VOICE, AND GETTING OUT OF ONE’S OWN ASS

Speaking Volumes TYLER MORGENSTERN PHOTOGRAPHY BY BRANDON GAUKEL

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“There’s a lot more cock than cunt. You know? ‘There’s a lot more cock than cunt’ would be a way of putting it.”

T

hat, in a nutshell, is what Nancy Pollak makes of the state of queer media in Vancouver today. I laugh, maybe a bit uncomfortably, probably giving myself away as green. There’s a pause. Pollak, who sits across the table from me at Commercial Drive’s Prado Café, cracks a smile and laughs along with me. The moment passes and we settle back into easy conversation over the sound of spoons knocking against porcelain.

We’ve spent the morning together, wandering around and through the history of local LGBT publishing, unpacking the question of how we tell, create, and circulate stories that chart the queer experience; how the printed word, hung in constellation with passionate communities and political bravery, might change the voices we hear and how we hear them.

A long-time member of Vancouver’s feminist and lesbian publishing community, and now an instructor of Wom-

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en’s Studies at Langara College, Pollak knows all too well that certain narratives, particularly those of women, are often left out of textbook queer histories. That’s why she’s spent most of her professional life trying to write them back into visibility.

Almost immediately after moving to Vancouver from Ontario in 1978 (she claims she stayed for the salmon), Pollak began working with Press Gang Printers and Publishers, a radical feminist print shop that operated out of a “cavernous, productive, creative, wonderful” warehouse space on Powell Street.

From its founding in the early '70s until its dissolution in 2002, Press Gang was the heartbeat of queer women’s publishing in Vancouver. An explicitly anti-sexist, antiracist, and always eclectic organization, it found stories worth telling in places that most people wouldn’t even bother to look. Press Gang gave voice, through prose, poetry and narrative, to the experiences of women, lesbians and feminists at the leading edge of the liberation years.

Counted among the collective’s collaborators are artists and writers the likes of Daphne Marlatt, Ivan E. Coyote, and Persimmon Blackbridge, many of who remain active in the community today.

Pollak worked at the Powell Street space full time for five years, taking home a meagre $85 dollars a week in wages (the collective had talked her up from her original offer of $65). For young writers in Vancouver today, such pay is the stuff of rent-due nightmares, but Pollak is quick to reassure me that, at the time, it was plenty livable. “I don’t remember thinking, ‘Oh god, cat food for dinner again.’ It was fine. You could live on nothing—many of us did, and cultivated ourselves as activists, as artists, as cultural workers.”

After leaving her post at Press Gang, Pollak, quite by accident, found work in 1987 with Kinesis, Vancouver’s feminist, lesbian, anti-colonialist, anti-sexist newspaper, published by Vancouver Status of Women. She recalls walking into the office to submit an ad to the paper’s events section, and being invited to join in on a retreat to Saturna Island. “I was in the market for new friends, so I went on that retreat. And I got the newspaper bug.”

Kinesis, like Press Gang, had emerged in the early 1970s, when newspapers were, in Pollak’s words, “bursting up like mushrooms among all of those liberation movements, whether it was gay liberation, women’s liberation, civil rights, aboriginal people; it would be a newspaper in no time at all. ” This is especially true of Vancouver’s queer activism scene. Nineteen sixty-four had seen the founding of Canada’s first homophile organization, the Association for

Social Knowledge, and it’s associated paper, the aptly-named ASK Newsletter. Nine years later, the Vancouver chapter of the Saskatoon-based Gay Alliance Toward Equity began publishing Gay Tide, a magazine that soon earned a reputation for its radical queer and anti-capitalist politics. By 1985, the newsletter of the Vancouver Gay Community Center (now Qmunity) had become structurally independent and established itself as Angles. A critical, politically engaged, and often-controversial paper, Angles more-or-less steadily remained in print until 1998, when the editorial collective, faced with a number of commercial pressures and new competitors, disbanded.

All the while, Vancouverites had access to a number of magazines and papers published well beyond city limits, including long-running activist magazine The Body Politic, based in Toronto. Eventually, Vancouver’s current gay and lesbian biweekly, Xtra!, joined the mix. Xtra! had spun out of the original Body Politic editorial collective when it was incorporated in 1975 under the non-profit enterprise, Pink Triangle Press. By the mid-1990s, the paper had established itself on the west coast under the Xtra! West banner.

As a women’s paper, though, Kinesis was different. It opened up questions of queer sexuality and identity from a feminist perspective at a time when female and lesbian voices were often marginalized in the city’s gay community. Beyond

this, it had what Pollak calls “a particular history, a real journalistic sensibility” that other liberation papers tended to lack.

“People had things to say! A lot of [what other papers printed] was opinion, and there’s no problem with that.

It wasn’t really news focused, and didn’t really get what journalism was about.” As she puts it, Kinesis printed stories that would “inflame because they were informing, not inflaming because you were inflamed.” It was a paper for news and features, rather than opinion and commentary.

It embodied, in every sense, its ambition to track down news about women that’s not in the dailies.

Pollak pulls out an old, yellowed, slightly curled-atthe-edges copy of Kinesis and takes me through it, story by story: “An issue about violence against women, an issue about midwifery, news stories, an obituary about an amazing woman, news about a health center, pay equity in the Hospital Employees’ Union, another story about violence against women, a story about prisons—the penitentiary for women in Kingston, which was constantly scandalous, awful, awful. A coalition about AIDS and disabilities, then a whole feature section on unlearning racism.”

It’s extensive coverage, to be sure; the kind of coverage we can mostly only wish for from most of today’s papers.

There’s international news, arts and culture, debates about seven/eight 32

the constitution and the Meech Lake Accord. This isn’t just what was happening around town. This is news— hard-hitting news—for women, lesbians, and queers, by women, lesbians, and queers; reports from the front lines.

When I ask if Kinesis ever took flak for this dense and sometimes-controversial content, Pollak reaffirms the spirit of the paper. “Why would we get in trouble for doing that? It was totally in the air. Indeed, people cancelled their subscriptions, but we never talked about at Kinesis whether we would do it or not. It was a no-brainer that we would publish it.”

Even AIDS, painted in broad strokes by the mainstream press as an exclusively gay male story, was taken up early by Kinesis and explored as an issue that weighed heavily on the community, writ large.

Kinesis, like Press Gang, operated on collective grounds, and was supported almost entirely by enthusiastic volunteer workers. Philosophically, it was a structure underpinned by a real belief in participatory democracy, committed to opening new lateral and horizontal spaces of hearing, learning, and voice.

Of course, Pollak is well aware that even in the best meaning of collectives, privilege will always rear its head, a reality to which Kinesis was never immune. “The collective was predominantly white,” she says. “People who are used to speaking, speak. People who are used to being heard get heard.”

Even so, the practice of collective publishing, for Pollak, allows us to think larger and imagine beyond ourselves. “Embodying things, by that I mean, being with other people in rooms or in streets” carries with it “that difficult magic that happens when you’re in a room with people and you don’t know what’s happening.” Love for the written and printed word notwithstanding, “We shouldn’t ask our disembodied media to do the work of our bodies.”

The intimate negotiation between author and text, while invigorating, is no substitute for those shaky spaces of tension and opportunity that emerge when we experience one another as more than the sum of our words.

The long and short of it? “Make sure you don’t spend all your time up your own asshole. There is a big difference between journaling and talking to yourself, and publishing and talking to a wider world.”

Even though I still bristle at the thought of braving Vancouver on $85 per week, as we talk I flirt with a strange prosthetic nostalgia. I’m wading happily through fond memories of a history that I never experienced.

In an amazing feat of chronological acrobatics, I find myself looking from an adopted past into my native fu34 sad magazine

ture, and I’m a bit dismayed at what I see; perhaps more importantly, at what I don’t. Rest assured, this isn’t meant to be another woeful declaration on the death of ‘real’ journalism.

Instead, maybe it’s a plea for a type of storytelling my generation lacks, for the embodied, fragile work that happens between people before it happens between the writer and the page; that uncertain process of always making, unmaking, and remaking in the hopes of finding a fuller sense of meaning.

For those out to tell queer stories, in particular, this seems to me of paramount importance.

Pollak mentions that in publishing, there’s a lot of “delayed gratification. It’s very intangible for a long time, and then suddenly there’s a product, right? And then it’s obsolete. And then you start working in the virtual realm of creating once again.” This is a relatively nuts-and-bolts statement, an accurate reflection of the delightful frustration that is part and parcel of working with text. But there’s a bigger message to be mined here.

In early June, The Grid TO published an essay by Paul Aguierre-Livingston entitled “Dawn of a New Gay.” The argument is rife with troubling denials of privilege, but the take away message is as follows: “My parents have never actually heard me say the words “I am gay” because I don’t need to and it really doesn’t matter because they love me all the same … I’m not fighting the good fight.

It was never mine to fight.” In essence: the queer story is over because my queer story is over.

The fight to find and share queer voices has always been one of delayed gratification, marked as much by moral shaming and silence as by tremendous victory and celebration. It parallels the kinetics of the liberation movement: decades of intangible organizing, discussing, and collaborating, punctuated by fleeting moments of elation that seem obsolete as quickly as they flare up. In Aguierre-Livingston’s world, the point at which we see that flare is the point at which the story ends.

Pollak, though, knows that this simply isn’t how storytelling—good storytelling—goes. Once that moment fades, you “start working in the virtual realm of creating once again.” The moment the story comes off the press, new searches begin, new narratives emerge, new questions demand answers, and new struggles begin fighting for visibility. In that instant, just when the case seems closed, you start all over, “talking to people who scare you, talking to people you don’t like. You stretch.” S

rainbow reels

was Canada’s — and possibly the world’s — first gay and lesbian cable access show that thrived on Vancouver’s West End Cable 10 between 1980-1986. Anyone with enthusiasm and an idea could create or contribute to the show. The directorial team was willing to train and develop new, inexperienced talent, and there’s no doubt that the show’s accessibility was necessary for its longevity.

One of the co-founders of Gayblevision, Mary Anne McEwen was a UBC alumnus who was kicked out of her sorority in 1965 for being a lesbian. When Gablevision was first established, she was the only staff member who had any media background, with a half-decade stint as Creative Director of Creative House. McEwen passed away earlier this year, but was present at a screening of select episodes at last year’s Vancouver Queer Film Festival for a post-show discussion of gay news and culture of the era and putting together Gayblevision.

The program aired weekly, with hour-long episodes that mixed short and long segments. The first episode of Gayblevision chronicled the opening of the infamous Hamburger Mary, a gay-friendly burger joint that was one of the first establishments to open along Davie Street in 1979 and still exists today.

Other notable segments included an interview with out-of-the-closet American playwright Tennessee Williams of A Streetcar Named Desire fame, as well as a documentary on another popular gay venue of the time: a shady bar by the name of Vanport.

Gayblevision once held a dear place in the heart of the '80s queer community, and it remains one of many genesis stories of Vancouver’s history of queer culture. S esther tung

gayblevision

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TIKO KERR,

ARTIST AND COMMUNITY ACTIVIST, REFLECTS ON THE WORK AND COMMUNITY THAT KEPT HIM ALIVE.

The Quiet Fighter MICHELLE REID PHOTOGRAPHY BY SARAH RACE

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or his first show after getting healthy, Vancouver artist Tiko Kerr created self-portraits using the medical debris of a life-altering illness. Syringes, boxes and pill bottles were all transformed into art.

“The series goes from my very worst, with my face sunken in and my eyes yellow from jaundice, and up to today where my health has been completely restored,” he says. “One of my main missions is to really be sustainable with my art making, so that all this stuff that’s leftover: the brushes, the empty tubes, the pills I’m on. Everything that is my by-product I’m trying to incorporate into my work, so that there will be none of that left by the time I’m dead, and all of it will be art.”

He speaks of death with ease, a far cry from how he first felt on that day in 1985 when a doctor uttered the words that would forever change his life.

“Go home and get your affairs in order.”

This was how Kerr received his HIV diagnosis. In those days, no drug therapies were available. “The news was delivered in a very brutal way, because there was no medication in those days,” recalls Kerr. “People were dropping like flies.”

Today, Vancouver might be known best among tourists for hockey riots, Olympics, and unseasonably grey summers. But in the medical world, it is known for some of the most significant breakthroughs in HIV/AIDS

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research and treatment: the city hosted the 1996 World AIDS Conference. But in the 1980s, Vancouver’s medical community struggled to respond to the emergence of the disease, and many artists such as Kerr found themselves facing an unknown future with a fatal disease that doctors could newly diagnose but not yet treat.

At the time of his diagnosis, Kerr was 30 and living in Australia. After coming home to be with his family, he focused his dwindling energy on producing as much work as he could. “A big motivation for me was just to finish another painting. I’d come into the studio every day and just get something done.” For many years, Kerr did not publicly disclose his status as HIV-positive. “I didn’t want to play the victim or anything, so certainly family and friends knew what my status was, but I didn’t want it to be a public issue. I’d actually seen how other artists were using that, either for making the public to feel sorry for them, or to say, ‘Maybe the work is a good investment because I won’t be here in a while.’ That really revolted me.” Kerr continued to live and work in the West End as his health declined, and regularly donated art pieces to community events and fundraisers for HIV/AIDS. The first antiretroviral treatments for HIV were approved in 1987, and after an early diagnosis, Kerr was put on new medications as they were released, developing resistances to them as fast as they were created.

“In 2005, I reached a point where none of the medications were working anymore. They were throwing everything at me and nothing was helping.” Kerr and five other men, 20-year survivors of a disease that was expected to kill them long ago, found themselves out of options.

Dr. Julio Montaner, one of the world’s leading researchers in the field and the Director of the British Columbia Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS, applied for access to drugs that had shown promising results in European

trials but were not yet approved in Canada. The Special Access Program is an exception in the Canadian Food and Drug Act that allows physicians to request experimental treatments in situations like Kerr’s wherein all other treatments had failed.

The request was denied. They reapplied, with the same results. Kerr suspected that there was a bias against Montaner. “He is quite vocal, he’s ruffled a lot of feathers,” says Kerr, “but he’s the best advocate we could possibly imagine. Finally he called me into his office and he said, ‘You know, the politics of this are against me. And I’ve come to realize that I can’t do anything more. So it’s up to you to get the drugs.’”

“I had no idea how to do that. But I spoke to a friend at the Vancouver Sun who I knew for many years. He said, ‘Leave it to me.’”

The story was an overnight sensation. Kerr, who had been private about his status for two decades, suddenly found himself as the face of a political battle over the rights of HIV-positive individuals.

“Within two days it was a national news story. So basically I had to spearhead this very public campaign on behalf of the men who really needed the drugs,” he says.

“Just by luck the government decided to call an election, and it became an election issue. It was in all the newspapers, it was on television, it was everywhere. And what was great was I had been participating so much in the community and donating art for various causes that people were telling the local media, ‘This guy has helped us out in the past, and its time for you to help him.’ There was a huge groundswell of support.”

The campaign for the drugs, supported by community members organizing email campaigns and writing letters to MPs, was successful after ten months. During that time, one of the men waiting for treatment died. In January of 2006, Kerr and the other three surviving men were finally granted access to the treatments. The drugs, then called TMC114 and TMC125, now known as Prezista and Etravirine, had an immediate effect. “Within five days my viral load dropped 90 per cent.” A month later, his viral load was undetectable—a sign that the virus, while not gone from his body, was suppressed by a restored immune system. He remains healthy today.

“I feel 25 again. It’s remarkable. I’ve been really working hard ever since then, and using my work as a method of social change. I’m really getting active in community involvement, and through that whole process, I’m happy to say, people are kind of listening to my point of view. It’s a real privilege to use my work and my life experience to do things for people who don’t have that voice.”

Now, he gives back to the community that rallied behind him as he fought for the right to life-saving treatment. A long-time resident of the West End, he is an outspoken advocate against development without community consultation, and is currently working on a series of paintings that demonstrate the effects of densification.

When I ask him if it’s painful to be asked about his years of struggling with medications, illnesses and access to treatment, surprisingly, he says no. “I don’t regret a single thing at all. The drugs have passed licensing now, lots of people are getting them, and it’s saving people’s lives. I had a little bit to do with that, I’m really grateful.

“I can only describe my own experience. But I think that experience is definitely shared—working hard, fighting for your life, and coming out on the other side no matter what. And not to be deterred, and not to just settle for what the government is going to feed you, but just really taking control of your destiny. I think that’s a common theme for anyone trying to survive anything.”

Despite the progress in treatments and acceptance of people living with HIV, Kerr maintains there’s more work to be done in education and advocacy with regard to around HIV. While doctors and researchers pave the way with new therapies and insights into the virus, there is a place for artists like Kerr to change minds and beliefs.

“Art has a power that words don’t have. I’ve always maintained that art has no enemies. There’s always a split second when a viewer looks at a work of art when he’s completely open and his defences are down. And at that moment you can penetrate your message in a very powerful and emotional way.

“I think that’s why when there are revolutions and political take-overs, artists are the first to be hauled away.

We have this incredible power of hitting people in a subconscious, very subtle way. There’s a lot that needs to be changed. If I can use art practice to do that, that’s just great.” S

seven/eight

a tough pill: the art of general idea

of gigantic fiberglass pills line either side of a clinically white hallway. Five even larger pills rest on the hallway floor. The medicinal motif represents a sterilized version of reality for some victims of the 1980s AIDS crisis: five pills of azidothymidine a day, and 1825 pills a year. Azidothymidine, otherwise known as AZT, is an antiretroviral drug used for the treatment of AIDS. “One Year of AZT and One Day of AZT” (1991) is a watershed installation by General Idea, a Toronto-based multidisciplinary collaboration between artists Felix Partz, and Jorge Zontal, and Vancouver-born A. A. Bronson. The piece, originally showcased at a Museum of Modern Art exhibition, is now part of the National Gallery of Canada’s permanent collection.

General Idea was established in 1969. The subject matter of the group’s art has varied over the years, but from 1987-1994 the focus was on the AIDS crisis. During that time, the influential trio was famed for their installations, which used gigantic pills as an aesthetic language. These works were made all the more poignant by the AIDS-related deaths of Partz and Zontal in 1994, and were recently featured in a retrospective of the group’s work at the Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris.

“In Paris, there were a huge number of people under the age of 35 coming to see the exhibition—it was really dominated by young people. That was delightful for me to see,” Bronson told Canadian Art magazine. “I’m thrilled that the work still looks fresh.” General Idea’s pill-mosaicked world extends outside the LGBT experience and renders it into something anyone can walk through. S adam cristobal

Pills. seemingly endless walls

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LEGIT EVOLVES CANADA’S IMMIGRATION LAWS

Borderline Riot deanne beattie photography by sarah race

J

an Altshool vividly remembers a life-changing call she received from Deb LeRose in 1993. She peels back the memory, first recounting the bright blue paint on the walls, then the tiny, stuffy closet that served as a makeshift phone booth. She was in a YWCA in Manhattan where she was visiting for a school reunion. At the other end of the line, Deb explained that there had been changes made to Canada’s immigration law.

“There might be hope,” she said.

Hope at that time was more than a political slogan—it was a much more precious and rare asset for Deb, a Canadian, and Jan, an American, who met at a time when rights for gay and lesbian couples were simply non-existent.

When asked if they thought they would see the legalization of same-sex marriage in their lifetimes, both wom-

en shake their heads vigorously. There were no rights for same-sex couples in Canada, and there were certainly no rights for couples attempting to bridge international borders. Marriage? There were still too many barriers, especially for two people who tried desperately for years to just stay in the same country.

What they couldn’t know in those early days was the changes they would spark in Canada’s immigration law for same-sex couples were part of an impending wildfire of change, both in law and culture, that culminated in the legalization of gay and lesbian marriage in 2005. When the couple did get married this past summer at West Point Grey’s University Golf Club, surrounded by family and friends, the event was as much a promise for the future as it was a celebration of everything the couple had survived in their 25 years together.

For any couple to last 25 years seems like a miracle in an age characterized by deep cynicism about love and its longevity. These generations were raised in the swell of social change charged by rising education levels, working mothers, ‘no fault’ divorce and unprecedented individualism; they know that, in contrast to the promises of ‘60sseven/eight 43

era slogans, love is not all you need, and it’s not enough to make any 21st century relationship last.

To do that, you’ve got to have faith.

Deb and Jan were part of an unseen cohort of gay and lesbian couples in Canada who experienced the cultural equivalent of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. Until the ’90s, the country’s most progressive stance on the topic of homosexuality could be best described as minimal-effort tolerance. In 1968, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau supported the decriminalization of homosexual acts in Canada, simply explaining, “there’s no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation.” But this was to say nothing about the rights of gay and lesbian people in school, at work, or in public.

The nation’s blind eye to same-sex couples reached far into immigration law, which prescribed that only legally married, common law or conjugal opposite-sex couples could sponsor their partners to become permanent residents of Canada. For Jan, who moved to Vancouver in 1986, this meant that the only way for her to stay in Canada was for her to secure a student visa. Over seven years, she completed numerous degrees and certificates at four different institutions in the area, and hurtled toward burnout.

“By the end of my last semester at SFU, people would come up to me and ask, ‘how’s school going?’ and I would burst into tears,” says Jan. Without legal status as a couple, Deb and Jan felt invisible.

“For us, in those days, it was hard to be out, and hard to fit into any communities,” says Deb. “It was hard to be out in the straight community, and hard to be out in the gay community about immigration. Nobody got it.”

“Nobody got it,” echoes Jan. “For years, we thought we were the only people in the entire planet who had this problem,” says Deb. The couple also lived in the ever-present moment, constantly fearful that what they had today would be taken away tomorrow with the flick of an official’s pen. They feared that Jan would be deported, or that her student visa wouldn’t be renewed. They feared crossing the border into the United States, or attempting to return to Canada after time abroad. Without an end in sight and their options narrowing, the couple felt their hope dim.

Everything changed for Deb and Jan when they met Chris Morrissey and Bridget Coll, two Vancouver women who 44 sad magazine

were in the same situation: out of immigration options, and running out of time. Chris met Bridget in 1978 when they worked as Catholic nuns in Chile. They were working in the western zone of Santiago during Augusto Pinochet’s regime, an infamously brutal period in Chile’s history when thousands of people were tortured and killed.

Chris says the experience helped her to understand the personal oppression she experienced as a closeted lesbian, which led her to leave the Catholic Church and return to Canada with Bridget in 1989.

What should have been the start of a peaceful new life quickly became heart wrenching when they learned that Bridget, an Irish-American, wouldn’t qualify for Canadian immigration. In December of 1991, the couple rallied together with ten other couples from Vancouver who faced similar immigration challenges, and LEGIT, the Lesbian and Gay Immigration Task Force, was born. With the support of this new group, Chris and Bridget filed a court challenge to the Department of Immigration that invoked the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in January.

The formation of LEGIT in Vancouver was monumental: it was the first group to form in Canada with the purpose of changing immigration law to include same-sex couples. Other groups in Canada had formed to legalize same-sex marriage, but this wouldn’t help gay and lesbian couples in the case of immigration. Canada’s laws specified that only opposite-sex couples qualified for family sponsorship.

For Deb and Jan and the other member couples of the group, LEGIT’s formation meant much more, because at last they didn’t feel so alone.

“Walking into that first meeting and seeing a room full of people—” says Deb, pausing as she searches for the right words. “It was just amazing. It was absolutely incredible to me that there were other people who had the same experience.”

To maintain her student visa, Jan continued to attend evening classes and was forced to miss the early LEGIT meetings. She remembers catching her first glimpse of Chris getting out of her car on Commercial Drive when she on was the bus. Jan leapt to her feet and waved wildly from the back window, swinging her arms overhead as if she had just spotted the only other person on a deserted island.

“Finally, I was able to put a face to another person, anybody, going through the same thing,” says Jan. The couples in LEGIT drew on their collective strength in October that year. Bridget was unexpectedly granted residency as an individual applicant, thereby nullifying their challenge to the Department of Immigration.

While great news for Chris and Bridget, LEGIT interpreted the move as the federal government ‘buying out’ their court challenge. With still ten other couples without immigration rights in the group, LEGIT would not be dissuaded. They continued to lobby the government and filed complaints with the Human Rights Commission in hopes that someone would hear them.

And then someone did.

Canada passed Bill C86 in 1993, a small part of which gave authority to program managers at Canadian consulates to grant residency on humanitarian and compassionate grounds. LEGIT learned that Donald Cameron, a program manager at a consulate in Seattle, was willing to consider same-sex couples under this jurisdiction. Deb called Jan as soon as she could. This could be their shot.

Deb and Jan made an appointment with the Seattle consulate and began preparing an application that they filled with years of evidence of a shared life together. They pointed to their apartment, a circle of friends who could vouch for them, and letters addressed to both of them.

They even included a copy of the store warranty for a sofa and loveseat, on which the store clerk had recorded both names.

When their interview day arrived, they had accumulated more than 180 pages of documentation, but remained extremely cautious. If this didn’t work, they weren’t sure they would have another chance.

“I wore polyester dress pants,” says Jan, remembering that autumn day in Seattle.

“She never dresses up,” says Deb. “We were so nervous,” says Jan. The couple went into an interview with a bureaucrat named Norman Barnes. Jan was reassured by the sight of a bicycle vest hanging on the back of his door, which she interpreted as evidence that the clerk harboured the kind of west coast, liberal values they could identify with.

“He was as nice as can be,” she says. “He asked me questions like, ‘You’re not a member of the NRA or something crazy like that, are you?’”

“We spent most of the time talking about life in Canada,” continues Deb. “We talked about what we had to do, and how to get Jan’s Social Insurance Number, and we just looked at each other, wide-eyed, like, ‘does that mean you’re in?’”

The relief was overwhelming.

“We were staying at a hotel really close by in Seattle,” says Deb, “and after the interview we went back and sat in the lounge, and both of us—we just started crying, and

crying, and crying.”

Jan received her landing papers in December of that year, a few days before Christmas. In January, the couple drove down to the border and parked on the Canadian side. A border guard stopped traffic allowing Jan to walk into the U.S.A., walk around to the Canadian booth, and hand her landing papers over to be stamped.

Deb and Jan remain involved with LEGIT, working with the group to help Canadians with same-sex partners around the world to come to Canada. In 2002, a new Immigration Act was enacted which recognized same-sex partners, due in large part to the sustained effort of LEGIT’s members.

Deb and Jan’s story has a happy ending, in stark contrast to the experience of couples like San Francisco’s Bradford Wells and Anthony John Makk. The California couple made international headlines this summer during their fight for same-sex marriage and immigration rights in the United States. Bradford, an American who suffers from severe health complications due to AIDS, may lose his life partner and primary care giver, Australian citizen Anthony John, due to the American government’s staunch Defense of Marriage Act which bars same-sex couples from claiming the same rights as opposite-sex couples. There are an estimated 36,000 binational samesex couples living without legal status in the United States alone.

What seems at first to be a daunting challenge is now supported by contemporary histories of marriage. These histories conclude that governments and religions have always strived to define the legal and moral parameters of intimate relationships precisely because these relationships are so powerful. Even in an age of divorce and the seeming disassembling of the marriage tradition, people around the world continue to fall in love at all costs; they face ex-communication, exile and even death to be with they ones they love.

To remain relevant, governments and religions are forced to evolve. In the context of increasing social and political conservatism in Canada as well as landmark political events south of the border—New York legalizing same-sex marriage, California repealing it—it’s comforting to know that the power rests with ordinary people, and that there is always hope. We create it. S

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this magical place At 21, Ghassan Shanti left behind a life of fear in Jordan because of his sexuality and claimed refugee status in Canada to begin a promising career as a makeup artist.

My parents are Palestinian, but I was born in Jordan. So I guess I’m from Jordan, but I spent a big

chunk of my childhood in southern California in a small town called Torrance.

We moved there when I was five, in 1990, and we lived in California until I was 14. In 1999, we moved back to Jordan.

It was the most horrendous, traumatic experience of my life, probably. I spent the next seven years there until I turned 21.

High school is difficult enough in any part of the world, let alone being a little Americanized, angsty teen in the Middle East.

For the first couple years of high school I always thought that I would just somehow move back to the States—I didn’t know how. Then 9/11 happened and it became virtually impossible for an Arab to travel between the Middle East and the U.S. It was just incredibly difficult, and I figured that it would be years before the anti-Arab climate would cool down.

I wanted to go to Canada because I figured it would be a better option than the U.S. I chose Vancouver because it was the least cold part of Canada. I guess I was right. The summer that I moved here was perfect: July 2006. It was magic, the best summer the city has had in ages.

I don’t know that I would be alive today if I were living in Jordan. It’s a Muslim country. But I honestly don’t think that Islam is any more anti-gay than any of the other major religions, specifically Christianity. I think that they both manage to be as spiteful in their vitriol against homosexuals. But there’s no legislation in Jordan protecting me, and anti-homophobia legislation in Canada is super extensive. Unlike Jordan, where being gay is a criminal act, virtually any discrimination against gays is a criminal act here. I feel safe. S as told to jeff laurence sad magazine

PHOTOGRAPH daphne chan

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TRANSGENDER, TWO SPIRIT, AND THE DOWNTOWN EAST SIDE

Tough in Transit daniel zomparelli photography by brandon gaukel

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Suzanne Kilroy

W

hen people drive by the Downtown Eastside (DTES) of Vancouver, they fixate a blank stare.

They lock their car doors or they blatantly observe at a drug deal in action. You have to be tough to live there.

The more fringed you are, the tougher you have to be. It is hard enough to deal with poverty, but when you deal with gender identity, it’s a whole new world of tough.

Charlize Gordon is a recently transgendered woman who moved to the DTES a few years ago. Suzanne Kilroy is a two-spirited resident of the DTES. Both have backbones of steel—and they must.

Charlize only had her surgery just four years ago. Before living in the DTES, she lived as Charlie at Unity Housing, a social housing project located in East Vancouver). She spoke to her doctor about how she felt about her gender identity, and attended several meetings

at Three Bridges, a local community health-care centre.

Charlie then finally made a leap of faith: For her whole life, she had waited for this change. After her surgery, she made a quick transition from Charlie to Charlize. “It was something that I wanted for a very, very long time in my life,” she says.

Since Charlize is new to the DTES, she’s still adjusting to life in the area. “There are different communities here. I don’t do drugs and a lot of the women here don’t do the full [transition] because they’re not ready yet.”

Many Canadians cite the DTES as the poorest postal code in the country, to the point that this factoid has become a trite phrase for this community. But the DTES is undergoing economic changes that, in actuality, make the community far more complex and confusing than this cliché. In the same neighbourhood as InSite, the safe inseven/eight 49

Charlize Gordon

jection site for drug users, there are several sophisticated cafés, social housing, and high-end stores. The mix of residents from very different income groups creates a tension between classes, between consumerism and poverty.

While this neighbourhood is dealing with gentrification, displacement, addiction, homelessness, and mental health issues, it also maintains a strong LGBT community. The queer community in the DTES has its roots in 50 sad magazine

Expo ’86, when many downtown residents joined forces in order to uproot transgendered prostitutes of Davie Street and move them out of the downtown core. This was part of an effort to establish Vancouver as a “world class city” and consequentially moved many of the transgendered sex-trade workers to the Downtown Eastside, where they still live. The more recent shame and contempt that surrounded the Downtown Eastside leading up to the 2010 Winter Olympics parallels the anxieties of Expo ’86.

But despite the 2010 Olympics “clean-up” and the persistence of homophobia in the DTES, people like Charlize exemplify a strong culture of survival and resilience.

When Charlie became Charlize she was met with abuse, both verbal and physical, and was kicked out of her home in East Vancouver. She went from place to place to find a safe and affordable home, but wasn’t able to find it until she moved into the Downtown Eastside. Charlize now earns her living by selling calendars, books, and the street paper Megaphone, as well as working for Hope In Shadows, a charitable organization that educates and empowers low-income people.

Charlize’s job is very much ingrained in how she interacts with the world around her, and her pay depends entirely on how hard she works. If you pass Cambie and Hastings, you can find her at the new Woodwards building, belting out an impromptu song and beaming with pride. More and more, she has focused on her writing, and her poems have regularly appeared in Megaphone.

She now spends her time turning her poetry into music.

“I like to write poetry, and I like to play my guitar, and I love turning my poetry into music, […] It’s good to empower oneself by playing music.”

She still has to deal with the phobia of the streets, but has a positive light on Vancouver and feels it is a much safer city to live in than others in Canada. “Back home in New Brunswick, this man came out and said he wanted to be a she, and was blacklisted from her family. It’s very progressive here in the Lower Mainland,” she says.

Charlize has slowly joined a community that has taken decades to build, one that Suzanne Kilroy has been a part of for more than 14 years. When you first meet Suzanne, she immediately points to the ground and states, “Oops, you dropped your pocket.” But once you look back to find nothing on the ground, she immediately bursts into laughter. She is a two-spirited woman and mother of two, currently attempting to exit the sex trade. Suzanne moved to the DTES from English Bay for the same reason most of us trade spaces in Vancouver: cheaper rent.

Being two-spirited, she has been treated differently her whole life, and not necessarily through discrimination. “I used to live in a redneck town,” she says, “and every gay

or transsexual got beat up all the time. Some died, some killed themselves, and some just ran away and were never heard of again. I always wondered why I never was bothered, and wondered by the elders were always teaching me their ways.” Suzanne noted that her status as two-spirited put her in a special light in the Native community. “They did that because in the Native culture two-spirited people were the medicine people.”

Over the course of two decades in the DTES, she met a lot of obstacles. She began using drugs, and had trouble finding safe spaces. “Transgendered [people] wouldn’t be allowed in certain places. You couldn’t go to a men’s shelter, and you couldn’t go to a woman’s shelter. You had to be on your own,” she says. Shelters are a space to find warm food and social assistance, which can be life saving in the DTES. Around ten years ago, after many battles and fights, the area became a safer place: WISH, a dropin centre for women in the sex trade, and the Women’s Centre opened up their spaces to transgendered women.

Suzanne is always talking about the great things for which she is thankful, including the resources available in her neighbourhood. “People are resilient, and if they believe in themselves, they can get a university or college education if they want down here [in the DTES].”

Her optimism flies in the face of the many challenges she and her community confront, but there is one thing to know about this LGBT community of the DTES: It knows how to survive. Its members are tough as nails.

“We had to walk when we had broken toes,” Suzanne says, “We had to smile when we couldn’t smile. And not only that, we had to stay happy.”

“Everywhere you go, you can always see a big group of us always laughing. Everyone’s laughing, ’cause everyone needs to have fun. Ask the queens.” S

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PHOTOGRAPH brandon gaukel

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free spirit

the transformation of jaylene tyme

Jaylene is a living canvas. The former drag Empress of Vancouver, she integrates avant-garde makeup and outfits

into drag performances and brings a regal stillness to the stage, challenging assumptions about the art form. Beyond her public persona, Jaylene is a rich and complex woman who identifies as two-spirit, a First Nations concept for masculine and feminine spirits housed within one body. She is a part of, and speaks for, trans, two-spirit and First Nations communities.

Jaylene came to Vancouver from Calgary in the early ’90s for a visit with friends and never left. Her arrival in Vancouver was part of a dark and transitory period of her life that she describes as her climb “up through the wreckage to the beautiful ocean air.” Those early struggles with drug and alcohol addiction guide her generosity of spirit today. “I shouldn’t be alive, but I am. How I communicate and involve myself today is steeped in richness and gratitude. In the back of my head, I know there’s one person in that room who needs to see me.” That person brings her onstage for each performance. Her role in the queer community, as she sees it, is to enable other people to fully be themselves, and help guide them through that process.

Jaylene’s drag roots can be traced back to Calgary. There, she first discovered drag performance and its possibilities for her. After she saw a performance by Justine Tyme, a prominent Calgary-based drag queen who would later become her drag mother, Jaylene understood the draw: “She was evoking a spirit of drama. It was emotion.”

The Empress didn’t quite see herself as a performer then, but she was and is still an artist through-and-through. The precision of facial contours, the textiles, and the lights that catch angles on the face attracted her. It’s no surprise that she is a professional make-up artist today.

As a transgendered woman and part of the two-spirit community, Jaylene is an anomaly. Transgendered people often do not engage in the drag scene and vice versa, but the queer and drag communities were the first groups to welcome her in Vancouver. Jaylene says, “The drag community has made me who I am today.”

Who she is today is a drag queen, teacher, make-up artist, performer, community leader, and First Nations two-spirit woman. Jaylene is not easy to define, and she likes it that way. It’s how she’s able to persevere.

“I’m very adaptable.” S dAVE DEVEAU seven/eight 53

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BUILDING THE SUBURBAN GAYBOURHOOD

Gay in the Suburbs adam cristobal photography by laura nguyen

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E

veryone knows a Kurt Hummel story, a heart-felt or humorous story akin to that of Glee’s coiffed countertenor. The suburban adolescent gay male is now cliché, and his tale a quintessential part of highschool chronicles. Such a tale’s tropes have been well established. It is usually told as a tragic portrait of an outcast protagonist, brought to a dramatic climax of homophobic conflict, and peppered with awkward quips about some locker-room misunderstanding between said protagonist and some sultry classmate manifest from hormonally charged pubescent dreams. You know that story, or at least a variant of it.

But this—this is not that story. It is one thing for queer youth to grow up in the suburbs, but it is entirely another thing when LGBT families settle in the suburbs. Downtown Vancouver and San Francisco form two ends of one big West Coast rainbow, but Vancouver’s vibrant LGBT community is virtually nonexistent in our city’s suburbs.

Can LGBT families settle outside the downtown core, in

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areas where the density of queer individuals ebbs with the density of other human beings? Is the rainbow-coloured picket fence possible, and if it is, what are its implications for the LGBT community at large?

Three years ago, Nathan Pachal and Robert Bittner tied the knot in Langley and have lived there ever since. Both husbands are in their late twenties, but neither has lived in Vancouver proper. Nathan works as a broadcast technician; Robert is a Masters candidate at the UBC Department of English. The latter commutes to campus to study queer young-adult literature. “Langley doesn’t really have a distinct LGBT community,” he tells me.

“I saw two teenage males making out at the back of the 502, the bus that goes from Surrey to Langley,” Nathan adds. Hot. Chilliwack is a different story. In 2005, Nicole and Sian Hurley moved there from their former residence

on Thurlow and Burnaby in downtown Vancouver. Both moms are 29, and live in Chilliwack with their toddler, Roan. Nicole is a store manager at Starbucks, and Sian is a semi-retired chef and stay-at-home mom. “There seems to be an interesting mix,” Sian says describing the LGBT demographic in her city. “Forty-something lesbian moms,” she laughs, as if they all get together for knitting and quilting every Sunday, “and lesbians our age that intermingle and date, who we don’t really know. There are also some older gay men and queer youth.”

Both Nicole and Sian were raised in Chilliwack, but why would they return after life in the Davie Street comfort zone? “We have a very large family, and when we started coming around for birthdays, our nieces and nephews didn’t recognize us as much and they didn’t want to hug us,” Sian explains.

Despite their restored proximity to family, the Hurleys’ move was not easy. LGBT family life in the suburbs can be considered the societal equivalent of dropping Mentos

into a two-litre bottle of Diet Coke. Not dangerous per se, but certainly messy and potentially disastrous. “I was working at Starbucks on Davie street, and the shift for me was huge when we moved back to the Valley,” Nicole comments. “I’m working in a store that is predominantly straight, working in an area that—I think—is predominantly straight and very, very right wing.” Sian, who attended culinary school just before the move, also experienced an unsettling change in her work environment.

“As soon as I came here and apprenticed, my identity was almost erased,” she says.

Both Nathan and Robert express anxieties similar to that of the Hurleys. “The old people, certainly, have a stigma,” says Nathan.

“I definitely am more comfortable when I go into Vancouver, just being able to be myself,” Robert adds. But he also admits there is power in numbers in Vancouver’s population density. He hasn’t had too much trouble out in Langley, but it’s not the same as being in the city centre. seven/eight 57

“There are certain pockets in Langley where you feel fine. Like, Starbucks, for example,” he continues. “But we have, in the odd moment, been called out while walking down the sidewalk together—” “But that’s also happened to me on Broadway in Vancouver,” adds Nathan.

To deem any neighborhood “safe,” be it suburban or urban, would be naive. While a big, pink map marking reported queerbash incidents in the Lower Mainland would be somewhat informative, it would also be impossible to create with a reasonable degree of accuracy.

Discrimination cannot be geographically mapped, and a greater distance from Davie Street doesn’t directly correlate with an increase of homophobia. Bashings pockmark the entire Lower Mainland—often with a higher degree of intensity in the West End. The line between the alleged less gay-friendly sensibilities of Langley and the supposed freedom of Vancouver proper cannot be drawn easily, or really be drawn at all. Yet despite this blur, suburbia is still socially uncharted territory for LGBT families. Without the comfy refuge of institutionalized support like Qmunity, these families are wont of social resources and certainly are right to approach suburban life with a degree of trepidation.

It’s an awkward position to be gay in the suburbs.

Starbucks customers in Chilliwack often get to know Nicole as their favorite coffee girl, but soon discover that she and Sian do not exactly conform to their expectations of a lumberjill lesbian couple. “Everybody has this idea that there’s gotta be a butch and there’s gotta be a femme, but Sian and I are very much our own people,” Nicole says.

“I guess you could call us femme, if you wanted to put us in a little box—” “But please don’t,” laughs Sian.

“I think that we open up a lot of people’s eyes to what real gay people look like—which is everybody,” Nicole says.

Are LGBT families in the Lower Mainland’s suburbs the new pioneers of LGBT integration in Vancouver?

Probably. Albeit over 70 per cent of North America’s population—in whole—is urban and is no longer built upon vast plains of ’50s suburbia, family life in the suburbs still holds a real sense of societal validation and integration, not to mention, the properties and rental rates are more affordable. If this statistic were to be isolated to Greater Vancouver, however, most residents live in suburban communities that are peripheral to Vancouver proper.

The City of Vancouver—comprised of Downtown, the 58 sad magazine

West End, East Vancouver, Kitsilano, South Vancouver, and Point Grey—holds only a quarter of Greater Vancouver’s total population. Perhaps it is time for another rally chant, complete with a minivan float. We’re here, we’re queer, and we’re going to mow our lawns.

Older members of the LGBT community lived in socalled gay ghettos for support and solidarity in earlier and rougher years. Yet younger LGBT generations often consider this way of life to be a dubious, counterintuitive, and antiquated model. “There’s a lot of older gays that seem to still have this sense of wanting to be segregated and have their own special community and area,” says Nathan. “A lot of the younger people—such as myself—rather just integrate into society and be accepted.”

Indeed, the innate solitude of any cultural, sexual, or religious ghetto can be a catalyst for exclusion. When the Hurleys lived in the West End, they discovered that at some nebulous point, community can become exclusion, and exclusion can operate under the guise of community.

“We were so engrossed in our neighborhood,” Sian says.

“We never went to Chinatown, we never went to Gastown, and we never went to all of the places that make that city so great because we were stuck in this one-street town.”

“We don’t need to be ghettoized into Davie Street,” says Nathan. “Why would we be doing that in this day and age?

Why would we exclude ourselves?”

Easier said than done. Clearly defined LGBT communities are often the sole impetus and financial driver for LGBT support centres, and these centres can often be a necessary umbilical cord of resources. “It was definitely interesting being a pregnant lesbian in the Valley,” Nicole tells me. “The vibe that I got was that people would rather that I had been a single mother—pregnant by some man whom I didn’t know via one night stand—than going to an actual clinic, getting inseminated, and having a baby with another woman.”

“In the [Chilliwack], there are not a lot of resources for couples—lesbian or gay—having children, at all,” she says.

I ask about the older lesbian moms Sian mentioned.

Could they not have provided some sort of support? “It was an entirely different situation for them,” she replies.

They are of a different generation than the Hurleys. Many of these women have had relationships with men and have children from previous heterosexual marriages. “They’re quite old. To them, what we were doing was so trailblazing and trendsetting—” “—which, in reality, it’s not at all,” added Sian.

“We’re blowing their minds, everyday,” Nicole laughs.

Despite the Hurleys’ remarks, there is a pioneering quality to raising a LGBT family in the suburbs. So much so that pop culture is mining comedy out of it. The critically lauded sitcom Modern Family features a suburban double-dad family comprised of Costco addict Mitchell Pritchett, his bear of a partner Cameron Tucker, and their adopted Vietnamese baby daughter, Lily. The novelty of the Pritchett-Tuckers primarily lies in their fish-out-ofwater narrative. Mitchell and Cameron make their home in a setting normally known to have negative attitudes toward the LGBT community, but are living the urban lifestyle stereotypically associated with the gay community.

“Urban design or urban settings attract a creative class and professional-type folks,” Nathan argues. “If you look at people who have the time to be creative, it seems to be gay people as well.” That’s not to say anyone who’s queer categorically identifies with East Vancouver bohemia or West End yuppiedom. The association between the urbanite creative class and the LGBT community may have arisen simply because in the past, LGBT individuals needed the relative safety the city usually provides.

Regardless, the clubs, social vibrancy, and overall comfort of the Davie Street community continue to attract the younger set. “All the queer youth [raised in the suburbs] leave as soon as they can,” Sian says. And that’s understandable. Not everyone can emerge from the closet safely, and if suburbia isn’t quite calibrated for LGBT adolescents, why should queer youth stay there after or even during high school?

“I would like to say that they should all stick together and have a great time out here [in Chilliwack], but that’s not the truth,” Sian continues. “If they’re going to have any sort of life, or if they’re going to see anything, they need to leave this area. There’s nothing out here for them, and the things that they do have disappear.” When the Hurleys first moved to Chilliwack, there was a queer youth support program. But before the couple could get involve, the program was discontinued.

Glee’s Kurt Hummel is certainly not the average gay teen, but his disposition and desires are real and familiar.

The chance for LGBT youth to interact with others like themselves on a scale far greater than what’s possible in the suburbs is not only attractive, but also necessary for their overall wellbeing.

Yet LGBT youth who move from the suburbs perpetuate the hardships of living anywhere but a city. “In some ways, it’s a bit of a feedback loop,” says Robert. “You get

the young people going downtown to experience the ‘gay scene,’ and they just get so into it that they don’t really feel the need to go back and create a safe space for themselves within their communities at home.” With all of their older peers moving to the city, how are suburban queer youth to survive? The continuing exodus could make Robert and Nathan, the Hurleys, and even Modern Family’s PritchettTuckers historical anomalies, rather than groundbreakers.

Indeed, without resources and support in Chilliwack, the Hurleys have decided to return to Vancouver. “In a perfect world, it’d be great to stay,” Sian says. “But it’s not going to be possible to raise our son here.”

Vancouver is a tiny pair of peninsulas cradled in a wide stretch of suburbia, from North Vancouver’s maze of mountain chalets to White Rock’s far reaches. It’s all one sprawling but loosely populated zone that may never become a megalopolis. Suburbia has always been the frontier of the Lower Mainland, and the LGBT community will never be truly integrated into Vancouver society unless it is able to find a residential balance between the queer concentration on Davie Street and outback outliers of Langley and Chilliwack.

So maybe this really is about Kurt Hummel. Or rather, people like him in the Lower Mainland. Many future suburban queer youth, like most young people, will wistfully look to downtown Vancouver’s awkward but identifiable skyline in hopes of a queer-friendly life. But hopefully they will fly from their respective nests and into the city’s embrace for future opportunities, rather than leave the ‘burbs just to escape the pressures of alienation.

If more LGBT families settle in the suburbs, perhaps suburban life—the life led by most people in the Lower Mainland—will not be so tough for LGBT individuals in the future. It’s worth a shot.

“I know a lot people say a lot of things about us, because it’s a small town, but we’re incredibly oblivious,” Sian says. “We’re living a great life.” S

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illustration lon garrick

denis, everyone.

The first time I met renowned performer Denis Simpson,

I happened to be wearing an ironic T-shirt that read “Raised on Canadian TV” and was emblazoned with a picture of Polkaroo from the famed Canadian children’s series Polka Dot Door. Simpson, a renowned performer, hosted the show for the bulk of my childhood. That hipsters wear shirts depicting a character from a show he hosted demonstrates the significance Denis held within the arts community. As a performer, he inhabited multiple, often contradictory worlds: children’s entertainment as the host of Polka Dot Door; adult contemporary music as the original bass singer in The Nylons; theatre, in which he produced overtly queer and sexy work (his solo show Denis, Anyone? had tremendous success at Arts Club); musicals aplenty; and even news programming (who can forget his stint as the Live Eye Guy on CityTV?) Call it coincidence that when I first had the chance to pick the brain of this legendary Canadian entertainer, I was sporting the iconic image he was so closely associated with. But as we continued working together, I wore it to every one of our coffee dates and meetings to see if he’d notice. I spent my youth watching his smiling face, and wanted to acknowledge the effect he’d had on who I became. But how do you actually say that without becoming a bumbling fanatic?

Denis was a very public presence whose contributions to charitable organizations entrenched him as one of Canada’s queer crown jewels. His work as a community member continues to inspire queers and artists alike. Despite the numerous trials he faced in life, Denis was the utmost believer in gratitude. Ever gracious and graceful, Denis took many a wayward theatre fag under his wing and gave his time generously, relaying stories about a gay Vancouver that had changed drastically since his first West Coast foray in the ’80s. Despite being a big name, especially in the local theatre scene, Denis always made time for anyone and everyone who needed it.

Though his passing last year left an open wound in both the queer and arts communities, Denis leaves behind his perseverance, dedication and open-heartedness. Denis is remembered as someone who knew how to create community. He was community. And the countless stories he told over coffee, under the polite supervision of Polkaroo on my T-shirt, will not soon be forgotten. S dave deveau seven/eight 61

to serve and collect

and slides open a wood panel with the elegant precision of Vanna White revealing a vowel on Wheel Of Fortune. Light floods the shelves to illuminate the most comprehensive library of Vancouver queer history available in the city, contained within his home on Harwood Street in the West End. An alphabetized, time-sorted collection of books, magazines, videotapes, oversize posters, and photographs—all chronicling this city’s LGBT history from the mid-century onward—lead me to believe Dutton is much more of an Alex Trebek.

Within seconds he pulls up a file on Vancouver’s gay clubs, then flips through some photographs of The Castle pub from the ’70s, the decade in which the archives were born. As a young gay man in a time of great political transformation, Dutton found his calling.

“It was a very interesting time in that the civil rights movement in the States had been going on for 30 years, the women’s movement for 20 years, and there was this huge sense that the world was in transition,” he says. “Everybody was protesting, taking up activist roles. They were busily doing the work of transforming society and there was nobody who was documenting this, and of course as an archivist and a librarian, it’s my trade.”

Since then, he’s stashed away everything LGBT-related he can get his hands on, from the first half of the century when even a sliver of information about gays was extremely hard to come by, up to today.

“My job has been twofold: to document that social change as it occurs, and secondly, to recover the history of gays and lesbians going back to the beginning of this province,” he says.

That history, when compared to other parts of Canada, is as different as the geography across this country.

“Historically, Vancouver has been much more laissez-faire in terms of marginalized people than has been the case in say, Toronto, where to this very day the relationship between the gay community and the police has been poisonous,” he says.

That wasn’t the case here, Dutton explains. Once a frontier, wooden-shack town with brothels on every block, “There was a tacit agreement between the city’s fathers, the police department, and the gay community that if people don’t get too outrageous and don’t rock the boat, everyone will prosper from this.

“We were pretty oppressed, but less so. That really goes back to the founding of Vancouver.”

According to Dutton, documenting social change is important ammunition against the possible recurrence of past injustices and violence. “We have gained a measure of freedom, but we have to guard against it being taken away from us through our own inattention or our own complacency,” Dutton cautions. “There isn’t the level of activism there was in the 1970s.

However, many of the rights have been gained and it’s a mop-up operation now.”

The archives, he hopes, will remind people today and future generations about what has been achieved, and where we’ve come from. Despite the freedoms we enjoy today, Ron Dutton and his archives are a reminder of why LGBT activism remains more important than ever. S jeff lawrence Ron Dutton glides over his bedroom floor

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PHOTOGRAPH brandon gaukel

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Drag King What I love best about what I do in my heart, I’m a performer. Being on stage is probably my favourite part, but that might be tied with the true joy that I get when I see other performers break out of their comfort zones. No, I take it back. That’s number one.

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Hair stylists/Salon owners What it’s like to work together Jim: “We’ve been together for 14 years.”

Anthony: “We have a little saying that I’m the sparkly part of the fishing tackle and he’s the hook.”

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Burlesque Artist What I love about my art form Burlesque is so inclusive. It’s not for fat strippers, it’s for all people. Guys too.

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actor What it means to me to be a member of an acting troupe Coming out for me has always been a process of progress—of owning it and coming to accept it. I am constantly facing the challenge of whether or not to come out to a particular group of people. This group [The Bob Loblaw Queer Arts Society] has really helped me in my journey, in terms of accepting myself and who I am, and having that family of acceptance saying, yes, in this group, we are queer.

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writer/performance artist Why I wanted to be a performer I love when I’m performing something, and the audience has joined me there. There’s a kind of moment in a room when the collective presence of the people therein is all focused on one thing together. What they’re focused on is not me, but the story; the place in time; the snapshot that I’m holding out.

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Dancer Why I do what I do I can‘t help myself. This is what I was designed to do.

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Director/ Drag Queen What I think about the role of art in social justice It’s crucial that you keep those struggles in the forefront. Art has many responsibilities.

Entertainment is a small part of that, and education and forward-movement in social struggles is another part—a huge part.

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Writer What I think about the role of art in social justice If you get to a point in your artistic career and you don’t care about social justice, you’re losing a really huge opportunity. It’s been a big part of my writing, ever since the beginning. It’s one of the things I love about storytelling, and art in general.

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Writer/Comedian What I love about writing I love nothing about writing. No, that’s not true. I love having written something.

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Dancer What my mentor, Jojo Zolina, means to me He’s had a huge impact on me— introducing me to people, having me transition comfortably into the gay community. Before, it was on the down low, nobody knew [I was gay]. I just wanted to dance, but I thought, if I dance, this is going to be such a giveaway.

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Isolde N. Barron and Sad Mag’s Jeff Lawrence goof off on set Photo Brandon Gaukel

Grant Harder teaching sad’s ‘Documenting your Life’ Workshop at the Waldorf Hotel

Photo Rachel Rilkoff

A collection of Kinesis magazines Photo Monika Koch

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