Tracing lines of horizontal hostility: How sex workers and gay activists battled for space,voice,and belonging in Vancouver,1975–1985

Introduction

Throughout the 20th century in the port city of Vancouver, British Columbia – the ‘prostitution capital of Canada’ – commercial sex flourished, though periodically targeted by moral campaigners determined to eradicate the ‘social evil’ (Freund, 2002; Nilsen, 1980). By the early 1970s, outdoor sex workers had moved into the city’s West End – a densely populated, largely white, middle-class, and mixed-use neighbourhood (Anonymous, 1972; Layton 1975). This stroll expanded and a smaller stroll formed at the Georgia-Hornby intersection after indoor sex workers were pushed out of Vancouver’s downtown cabarets and hotels following a series of prostitution-related police raids in 1975–1976 (see Lowman, 1984, 1986). On and near Davie Street – the central bisector of the West End – a diversely gendered and racialized culture of approximately 200 female, male, and male-to-female (MTF) transsexual prostitutes endeavoured to live, work, and foster a pimp-free community within a 25-block zone (see map, Figure 1). Other sexual and gender minorities – gay male activists and second-wave feminists, who were sex workers’ logical allies in liberation struggles – grappled with ambivalence toward, if not outright opposition to, the exchange of sexual services for money as they strove to sort out a range of moral, economic, and legal positions and practices, much as they had a century earlier (see McMaster, 2008; Rosen, 1982; Walkowitz, 1980). Though some grassroots activists supported the decriminalization of prostitution as a necessary first step toward sex workers’ improved safety and security, few were prepared to identify prostitutes’ rights as a key plank in a broad, social justice-oriented platform for action. In the early 1980s, a consensus united residents’ groups, business owners, realtors, police, and city councillors: outdoor sexual commerce had no place in the city beyond the historic red-light district in and around Chinatown on Vancouver’s working-class Eastside (see map, Figure 1; Anderson, 1991). OPEN IN VIEWER

Drawing from archived documents, mainstream and counter-cultural newspapers, and in-depth interviews with former stake-holders, we examine the goals and strategies enacted by Vancouver-based sex workers and gay men on the ‘prostitution question’ in Vancouver’s West End. ¹ Amidst a climate of disagreement, indifference, and confusion within progressive circles, single-minded opponents of prostitution opportunistically organized a crusade against ‘hookers on Davie’. Our objective in this article is to map the alignments and fractures within and across social groups in advance of an unprecedented legal injunction by the Chief Justice of British Columbia’s Supreme Court to ban prostitution from the city’s West End in July, 1984. Our case study interrogates the class-bound, gendered, racialized, and spatialized cleavages that placed on-street sex workers at risk of forced dislocation. Enacting features of what Lisa Duggan (2002: 179–180) has termed the new homonormativity, white, upwardly mobile gay West Enders sought respectability through access to privatized domesticity and consumption, and the simultaneous expansion of gay public culture through institution building and residential stability in a gentrifying neighbourhood. Concomitantly, on-street sex workers who called the West End home, and who shared gay men’s desire for community development, belonging, and freedom from police prosecution and state interference, became caricatured as noisy, truculent, and dirty violators of community values. Vilified by well-organized members of residents’ groups and political elites, including gay male leaders, and without strong alliances forged with gay activists and women’s liberationists, ² sex workers in the West End commanded inadequate moral, political, and legal capital to thwart anti-vice campaigning. Analysis of conflicts about public sex and sexual shame in the gay West End reveals early signs of white, conservative, assimilationist gay politics played out on the backs of an even more vulnerable, stigmatized, and racialized sexual minority of on-street prostitutes (Califia, 2000; Warner, 1999). While some gay men consolidated their residential mooring, as well as their institutional and political gains as bona fide sexual citizens in Vancouver, sex workers learned their ‘proper place’ at the bottom of hierarchies of propriety and property.

An emergent gayborhood

In the 1970s and early 1980s, the issue of prostitution moved in and out of the field of political vision for gay men, including members of gay liberationist organizations. In Vancouver, as activists in the Gay Alliance Towards Equality (GATE) agitated for civil liberties and legal reforms, hustling – with its long history within gay culture – was only periodically addressed as a sideline concern, eclipsed by campaigns to gain social, moral, and legal approval for homosexuality through education, lobbying, and meetings with police, journalists, physicians, psychiatrists, clergy, and city officials. During a key decade, from 1975 to 1985, three factors combined to consolidate Vancouver’s West End as an identifiably gay locale. The first, in 1975, was the formation of the Gay/Police Liaison Committee with a mandate to mediate disputes between the gay community and the Vancouver Police Department (Fairclough, 1985). In the wake of decades of strained, sometimes violent altercations between police officers and gay men, the Liaison Committee symbolized a new commitment to strengthen relations of trust and respect across historically embattled constituencies; an annual softball game was instituted to enhance the spirit of reconciliation. In a column on ‘Gays and the Police,’ it was reported that gay representatives at the Liaison Committee meetings decided that ‘cruising and public sex had to be toned down’ (EA, 1982: 18) which further signalled a new mood of compromise. Second, in response to pressure from gay individuals and groups who had organized a gay pride week since 1972, Vancouver’s mayor, Mike Harcourt, officially proclaimed ‘Gay Unity Week’ in August 1981. This event, held in the West End, emblemized the state-sanctioned growth and development of the community, including its evolution as a gay voting block. Third, 1983 marked the year that the gay bookstore, Little Sister’s, opened on Thurlow Street near Davie Street, and Angles, the gay newspaper, was launched from an office on Davie Street. Both of these forays into the highly charged field of cultural representation enabled politically oriented gay men to challenge and subvert homophobic imagery and language on their own terms. As such, they added to an increasingly diverse matrix of gay male institutions in the West End, which included bars, sports and fitness clubs, bathhouses, travel agencies, restaurants, political groups, a phone-line, a television show (Gablevision), a radio show (Coming Out), and a community centre (Fairclough, 1985).

By the early 1980s, predominantly white gay men in the West End had achieved a measure of cultural and political respectability, as well as economic stability in ways that engendered early signs of brand identification and loyalty. The trend towards gay community development was aided, albeit unintentionally, by the massive residential redevelopment of the West End (spurred by new zoning regulations in the mid-1950s), which attracted thousands of gay men to the vast number of inexpensive one-bedroom apartments, as well as a smaller supply of privately-owned cooperatives, leaseholds, and condominiums (Bouthillette, 1997: 213–215; Ingram, 1997). The substantial in-migration of gay professionals and service workers to an enclave on the border of the downtown business core prepared the ground for the maturation of gay residential, political, cultural, and commercial interests and investments. In fact, these traits were characteristic of gay neighbourhoods across the West, including Church Street in Toronto, the Village in Montreal, the Castro in San Francisco, Boys Town in Chicago, West Hollywood in Los Angeles, Capital Hill in Seattle, Marigny in New Orleans, Soho in London, Canal Street in Manchester, and Hillbrow in Johannesburg (see Castells, 1983; Conway, 2009; Knopp, 2008; Ryan and Fitzpatrick, 1996; Self, 2008; Whowell, 2010).

Anti-prostitution rhetoric and action

As we have already noted, street-involved sex workers also lived and worked in the West End; the population swelled to approximately 200 in the aftermath of police closures of the Penthouse and Zanzibar cabarets on charges of ‘corrupting public morals’ and ‘living on the avails’ of prostitution in December 1975 (Lowman, 1986: 6–8; Ross, 2009: 79–81). While many sex workers patronized gay establishments (e.g. bars, cafes, bookshops, clothing stores), and strove to build up their own community’s capacity, they were neither integrated nor supported as partners or leaders in consolidating a neighbourhood of sexual minorities with political, commercial, and residential heft and scope. Rather, the female, male, and MTF transsexual on-street sex workers – a sizeable number of whom were Aboriginal, Filipina, and African Canadian – confronted intensifying opposition to their visible presence on the Davie Street stroll. To Jamie Lee, an Aboriginal MTF transsexual sex worker who once lived and worked in the West End:

We had a cultural community where we shopped together, we helped each other with outfits, hair and make up, we supported one another emotionally, in some cases we lived together. And on the street we took down license plate numbers for each other, and shared tips about bad dates. Often, we often worked in pairs, doing a double bubble [double blow job]. We had a culture of prostitution, with safety planning … and we worked pimp-free. The business provided us with job security. (Jamie Lee, 2009)

In 1980, a group of high-profile, white, upwardly-mobile men and women, led by a gay man, Gordon Price, formed Concerned Residents of the West End (CROWE) to purge prostitutes from the neighbourhood. ³ Emotionally emboldened by the single-issue campaign, CROWE and its vigilante posse, Shame the Johns, vigorously lobbied politicians at all levels of government for stepped-up regulation and tougher penalties for offenders (Leiren-Young 1984; Ross, 2010). In October 1983, mayor Mike Harcourt approved the hiring of Price as the West End Community Coordinator on a six-month contract paid for by the city’s Social Planning Department. Though his appointment was criticized as ‘one-sided’ by several groups, including the Vancouver Multicultural Women’s Association, Price was paid $15,000 to advance CROWE’s agenda to abolish street prostitution from the West End (see Manager’s Report, 1984: 1). Harcourt also engineered a municipal ‘anti-hooker’ by-law in 1982 that licensed police to harass, arrest, and fine on-street prostitutes in the West End (Barrett, 1983). Criminologist John Lowman (1985: 5) discovered that in the first six months of enforcement, over 500 charges were laid, with fines ranging from $350 to $2000.

CROWE sought additional advocates in high places. From the moment of her election in 1980, Pat Carney, the conservative Member of Parliament (MP) for Vancouver Centre, became a supporter of CROWE; in 1981 in the House of Commons she likened prostitution in the West End to ‘an infestation of a quiet and beautiful neighbourhood’ (cited in Lamb, 1981: A4). Two years later, insisting on stiffer penalties for street soliciting, Carney crowed that, ‘The well-being of our neighbourhoods and families needs some protection’ (cited in O’Farrell, 1983: 7). Again, CROWE struck gold while prospecting among the province’s political elite: in 1983, British Columbia’s Attorney General Brian Smith thundered, ‘We are going to declare war on these people and drive them from the streets’ (cited in Anonymous, 1983: 1). Here, the violent imagery of a battle against street-based sex workers concretized a strategy of governance reliant on the threat of brute force against an internal enemy.

CROWE’s anti-prostitution agenda had traction: it was entered into textually mediated relations of ruling that coordinated, or knit together, differently located moral elites, including residents, the mayor and politicians from municipal, provincial, and federal parties, urban planners, journalists, and the police. Extending the insights of sociologist Dorothy E Smith, the mandate to ‘declare war’ in the West End – accomplished through mainstream media frames, residents’ reports, planning documents, and legal measures – not only worked to articulate courses of action among powerful players at the local level, but it influenced extra-local media reportage and policing of an increasingly ‘national social problem,’ with similar ‘clean ups’ undertaken in Calgary, Toronto, Halifax, Ottawa, and Niagara Falls (Brock, 2009; DE Smith, 2005: 165–180). Central to the organizational logic of these coordinated social relations was the taken-for-granted subordination of low-income, diversely gendered, and racialized street-based sex workers as unknowable outcasts (see Butler, 2004).

Coalitional politics? Possibilities and constraints

A small number of vocal gay men hesitated to endorse the anti-hooker consensus that took hold in Vancouver’s West End. Several feature stories in the gay monthly, Angles, included interviews with hustlers working in the West End on Davie Street and the surrounding area. In December 1983, gay activists Fred Gilbertson and Richard Banner wrote that ‘We recognize that hustlers together with their customers are members of the gay community… The morality of buying or selling sexual favours must be determined on an individual basis in the same way that other activities and relationships are judged’ (Gilbertson and Banner, 1983: 16). Several other contributors to Angles argued that young men and women worked the streets because they had been banished from their homes upon ‘coming out’ as homosexual. Hoddy Allen was so upset about Shame the Johns that he wrote a letter to Angles asking ‘Shamers’ to re-examine their position: ‘This letter is addressed to those gay men who feel compelled, by understandable frustration, to parade about the West End “shaming the johns.” This campaign distresses me greatly because many of the participants appear to be gay men’ (Allen, 1984: 4). Here, Allen questioned the desire of gay abolitionists to scapegoat prostitutes and clients, some of whom, he argued, were themselves gay. David Myers, a co-host of Vancouver’s Coming Out show on Co-op Radio in 1978, remembered conservative elements within gay organizing: ‘At meetings, people were saying, “We need to court straight support to get laws changed, and we need to tone down our impressions to convince straight people that we’re just like them. And that we don’t want to embrace transsexuals, transvestites, prostitutes, or leather culture’” (Myers, 2008).

In 1969, homosexuals in Canada registered a significant legal victory: homosexual conduct in ‘private’ between consenting adults aged 21 and older was decriminalized via Bill C-150, an amendment to the federal Criminal Code. By contrast, public acts of prostitution remained illegal in all but name which effectively kept sex workers vulnerable at all times to socio-legal discipline and punishment. Similarly, when some middle-class gay rights activists pushed for same-sex spousal benefits and workplace equality under the banner of legal protection for sexual orientation and domestic partnerships, the live-in lovers and friends of sex workers were prosecuted as pimps who lived illicitly on the avails of prostitution. Moreover, in 1977, following several years of pressure by gay rights activists across Canada, federal immigration law was changed to permit entry to lesbians and gay immigrants and visitors; at the same time, the century-old immigration ban on prostitutes remained (Anonymous, 1975). Gay activist Bill Houghton painted a picture of disconnection rooted in what Judith Butler (2004: 38) might term an ‘uneasy proximity with unfamiliar others’:

It’s like prostitutes were in their own world, and we were going along in ours, and it’s like they might bump into each other, but you had your own focus about being a gay man in your life, and trying to figure out what your lifestyle was, your night-life, and stuff like that. You’d see prostitution going on in certain parts of the city but you were just looking at it in the same way as a straight person was – it was just there, you knew it was there, you never really got into much contact with it. (Houghton, 2008)

By the early 1980s, some vocal, white guppies and yuppies (gay/young urban professionals) had a stake in openly refusing a ‘de facto red light district’ in the West End in part because they feared a plunge in property values (CROWE, 1982). We also suspect that the brash, hyper-visible femininity of biologically female and MTF transsexual sex workers on the Davie Street stroll catalyzed misogynist and racist reactions in those gay men who trumpeted the white, butch masculinity of the San Franciscan ‘Castro clone’ and who disavowed the feminized ‘sissy’ so fundamental to the medico-moral classification of homosexuality as arrested development (see Ross, 2012; Taywaditep, 2001). Moreover, the opportunity for gay men to share anti-hooker indignation with ‘normal’ non-gay residents seems to have weakened the negative stereotypes associated with homosexuality. In part, the campaign for gay respectability involved repudiating public sex – both commercial and recreational – in order to redeem and ‘responsibilize’ homosexual identity in the eyes of West End residents, police, and politicians (see N Rose, 1999: 88). The drive to expel prostitutes from the imagined gay community became part of the bargain made by (some) predominantly white gay men to enhance their transition from lowly criminals and deviants to enterprising, morally-upright citizens and community leaders. Their aim: to loosen the grip of aberrance long enough to escape from the ‘numberless family of perverts’ administered by agents of the medico-sexual regime (see Foucault, 1980: 40). In effect, the bargain would herald a gay ‘makeover’ in the very terms of citizenship, implicating a process not only of becoming but also of unbecoming citizens (see Cossman, 2007: 2–3). Fraser, a white, Irish Canadian gay man who turned tricks in the West End in the early 1980s, remembered, angrily, the hypocrisy of some gay lobbyists in his neighbourhood:

They wanted street workers out of the West End. It was basically, ‘You are not the fabric we’re looking for, and people aren’t going to be moving down here because it’s a deranged area.’ But I had these people who were like me. They weren’t freaks of nature, they weren’t deviants, they were people who were doing a service and getting paid for it. I had a community, and it was destroyed. It was a class war. It was capitalism. It was assimilation. It was, ‘Be like me or be out of my fucking sight.’ It was like you had your gay supporters kicking you in the teeth and saying ‘I love you’ at the same time. It felt like treason. (Fraser, 2009)

Tom, a heterosexual member of Shame the Johns, recalled how his group ‘coalesced the West End neighbourhood’ through twice-weekly street patrols, billboard campaigns, planning meetings, identification of johns (through license plates and photographs), and pickets outside johns’ homes. A mandate centred on rituals of public humiliation ‘allowed us’, said Tom

to meet our neighbours, many of whom were, and are, of different sexual orientations … Before then, I certainly didn’t know any gay men outside my [apartment] building. I thought, ‘Wow, this is grass roots.’ Rightly or wrongly, I was amazed that we effected social change. (Tom, 2009)

George, another heterosexual resident of the West End and co-founder of CROWE, met openly gay men for the first time who became his friends and fellow lobbyists. In an interview, George stressed that,

We had invested emotional currency in friendships, in networks, in patterns of behaviour and relationships with neighbours … I didn’t have a relationship with transsexuals on the stroll, so [who they were] didn’t matter to me … I came to see all prostitution as intrinsically wrong … These people were involved in all sorts of illicit activities. It was a wild west show. (George, 2009)

To George and other members of the Shamers and CROWE, the ‘source of aggravation’, was not gay men (this time): it was on-street prostitutes who were perceived as homeless and responsible for the ‘erosion of societal values’ in the West End (George, 2009). George recalled explaining to a co-worker that, ‘The gays aren’t the problem here, it’s the hookers and the johns and the thugs and everything that goes along with it. That’s the problem. The gays are fine. The gays are great’. To advance an anti-hooker agenda, straight men and women forged allegiance with vocal gay West Enders, and not with prostitutes who George claimed were ‘people who lived outside of what are reasonable, acceptable norms of society’ (2009). When asked about Shamers’ vigilante tactics, Fraser turned the abolitionists’ logic upside down:

Shame the Johns weren’t shaming the johns, they were shaming the prostitutes. But they couldn’t say, ‘We’re going to shame these street individuals because it wouldn’t be morally correct. So they had to come up with a clever way of saying, ‘We’re not against you, we’re for you. But we don’t want these predators coming into our neighbourhood.’ What predators? The johns were my bread and butter. I didn’t have any stigma about saying, ‘Hey, I was a hooker.’ I learned a lot about how to deal with some people … We were proud of who we were. If someone screamed out of their car window, ‘Fucking faggot’, you’d turn around and say, ‘Fuck you. You’re in our neighbourhood.’ (George, 2009)

Cast as threatening folk devils (Cohen, 1972) who conjured feelings of disgust and fear, ‘hookers on Davie’ became the brunt of sensationalist news stories that worked to inflame residents’ anxiety and anger. Mainstream news exposés in the early 1980s warned readers of the ‘social decay’, ‘rot’, ‘disintegration,’ and ‘deterioration of our beloved West End’ (see Anonymous 1978; Budgen 1984; C Rose, 1984; Jensen, 1981). Resident Eleanor Hadley explained that, ‘Our beautiful jewel of the West End is going to become a cesspool of degradation if [street] prostitution isn’t stopped’ (cited in McMartin, 1984: 5). In concert with the burgeoning social consensus, Vancouver Sun columnist Denny Boyd (1984: A3) vowed that the majority population of ‘36,000 permanent, law-abiding West End citizens’ should not have to accept, accommodate, or tolerate a minority group consisting of ‘a loose population of 150 socially unacceptable transients’. An official spokesman of CROWE, George remembered pride in his ability to influence debate within mainstream media outlets:

The best sales job I have ever done was selling the idea of street prostitution as a real and pressing problem in Canada. I was interviewed on TV by Laurier LaPierre, and by Ann Medina on The Journal [Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Television]. I was interviewed, quoted, and photographed in Maclean’s magazine. I was on As It Happens [Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Radio], and my name was mentioned in Parliament … [To the press] we were defending our investment in the community. We had a great community and it was just being ravaged by excessive and constant erosion of the peace and quiet of the neighbourhood … The prostitutes’ behaviour wasn’t enhancing the community. Their behaviour was destroying the community. (George, 2009)

Legal annihilation

In July 1984, after years of pressure from residents, political authorities, police, and journalists, Chief Justice of the British Columbia Supreme Court, Allan McEachern (1985: 110) banned ‘blatant, aggressive, disorderly prostitutes’ from the West End. In response to the ruling, Tom, an ex-member of Shame the Johns recalled that, ‘We were elated’ (Tom, 2009). Former sex workers Jamie Lee (2008), Stacey (2008), and Raigen (2008) told us that they were crushed by the ruling. Neither members of Vancouver’s small but plucky activist organization, the Alliance for the Safety of Prostitutes (ASP), nor supporters were able to amass sufficient interest or money to mount a legal appeal. ⁴ As a result, Chief Justice McEachern’s unprecedented legal injunction was never reviewed by a higher judicial authority.

‘In times of stress,’ argues Pat Califia (1997: 185) ‘some gay community leaders and members attempt to purge fringe elements or at least to disassociate their own groups from those who are more stigmatized – all in an attempt to keep and increase their improved, and often precarious, status in the city’. Califia terms this phenomenon horizontal hostility (1997: 187). To be sure, Vancouver’s gentrifying West End was not a safe oasis for all sexual minorities. Denied access to the very resources amassed by gays to forge entitlement to privacy, safety, security, and liberty, prostitutes were reminded, once again, of their disposability (see Lowman, 2000). With little to no purchase on the terms ‘community’ or ‘citizen’, sex workers were muzzled by anti-vice crusaders who sought, vigorously, to defend a middle-class, prostitution-free zone. Whereas gay men mobilized the right to privacy as a civil liberty to defend their affective and sexual bonds against police charges (in bars, parks, alleys, and bathhouses), sex workers were denied this discursive strategy. Indeed, in 1985, the federal Conservative government amended the Criminal Code via Bill C-49 to strengthen the most punitive elements of anti-prostitution law, with a focus on penalizing street solicitation (with new fines and extended jail time), as well as expanding conceptions of public space to include the interior of a motor vehicle (Brock, 2009). In effect, at the same time that gay rights were increasingly entrenched in new laws and policies country-wide, Canadian politicians elected to reinvigorate the moral and legal regulation of market-mediated sex presumed to corrupt intimacy, romance, and the ‘natural’ (hetero)sexual act.

A public forum was held in late September 1984 at the West End Community Centre to resolve some of the resentments that had built up between residents and street-based sex workers. Members of the audience expressed interest in imagining a new plan that would offer alternatives to those making a living on the streets. However, not only was the meeting orchestrated and led by non-sex workers, but the initiative sounded a hollow note. Offered too little, too late, the once vibrant, pimp-free community in Vancouver’s gay West End disappeared after the Chief Justice’s forced legal evacuation. Though residents of the West End themselves, prostitutes were officially legally prohibited from working west of Granville Street. Expansion of symbolic and real urban space by and for gay men was achieved – whitened and masculinized – at the same time that space for on-street prostitutes shrank, and then vanished. Accommodated within this regulatory framework, however paradoxically, were the up-scale, indoor, and licensed escort agencies and massage parlours that dodged state control, prospered, and multiplied in the neighbourhood. In the end, the political opportunity structures necessary for on-street sex workers to mount a legal challenge, or to overturn the punishing West End injunction, were missing (Kitschelt, 1986; Meyer and Staggenborg, 1996). Popularly disparaged across the political spectrum as unruly and dangerous outlaws, sex workers lacked the political, cultural, and legal capital to unhinge or scramble CROWE’s elitist logic, or to mount an effective counter-campaign (see Bourdieu 1984: 114–115).

Speaking on behalf of purged sex workers, Jamie Lee concluded,

We were no force against the ballooning, white middle-class and their friends in high places, in political power … It was a social massacre. The injunction disenfranchised us, and split us from one another. It was like residential schools for First Nations was a social massacre: ‘Kill the Indian in the child.’ This was ‘Kill the sex worker in the West End’. (Jamie Lee, 2009)

Fraser (2009) recalled how ‘the profile people literally went through every street, harassing us, standing in front of us, physically pushing us past Burrard and then past Granville Street’. Expelled from their homes and workplaces, with their kinship practices and safety-planning in tatters, on-street prostitutes were funnelled out of sight, much as Scottish and Irish prostitutes a century earlier were corralled into reformatories and penitentiaries to ‘repent of their sins’ and to prepare for work as domestic servants (Mahood, 1990). That on-street prostitutes were engaged in consensual sexual transactions did not seem to matter. As legal scholar Brenda Cossman explains (2007: 197), consent does not operate as an automatic citizenship sanction when commercial sex work is at stake.

While there is some evidence that male hustlers ‘blended in’ ambiguously and discreetly as sex workers inside gay villages (Whowell, 2010: 140–143), in Vancouver’s West End, hustlers, ‘fish’ (the street term for biological women), and MTF transsexuals were vigorously deemed out of place in the late 1970s and early 1980s. That white, professional, and politically ambitious gay men led the charge against prostitutes in the West End offers an unsettling twist to stories that reveal the power of binaries such as clean/dirty, civilized/uncivilized, wealthy/poor, private/public, and legal/illicit to co-construct regulatory discourses of ‘self’ and ‘other’ with often lethal effects (see Mawani, 2003: 13). Similarly, in the gay district of Hillbrow, Johannesburg in 1987, gay white voters who feared an influx of non-white minorities, ‘criminal elements’, and a decline in property values elected a white ‘gay rights’ candidate in a whites-only election, thus contributing to the ruling National Party’s justification for the racist repression of apartheid (Conway, 2009: 859).

Once tolerated as occasional entertainers in gay clubs, paying customers in local gay shops, suppliers of sexual services, and fund-raisers through the gay/trans Dogwood Monarchy Society, sex workers in Vancouver’s West End learned not only the limits of tolerance, but the impossibility of full, substantive citizenship in the city. As legal scholar Patricia Williams notes, ‘For the historically disempowered, the conferring of rights is symbolic of all the denied aspects of their humanity’ (1991: 153). For on-street prostitutes, the disavowal of rights both symbolically and materially confirmed their dehumanization. Explicit references in official texts to prostitutes as racialized others in Vancouver’s West End are rare. And yet recurring terms such as freak, jungle, circus, zoo animal, and carnival curiosity, alongside imperatives that prostitutes be relocated or, to adapt Sara Ahmed (2006: 113), ‘re-orientated’ east to Chinatown’s racialized red-light zone, suggest the workings of neo-colonial cleansing and sanitizing, as do the first-person stories of racism narrated by former sex workers. From the 1870s forward, Aboriginal female bodies were defined by colonizers as inherently licentious, immoral, and promiscuous (see Carter, 2008; Mawani, 2009). A century later, Aboriginal and other non-white bodies remained vulnerable to racist and sexist marginalization.

The politics of shame and non-belonging

Belt-tightening at municipal and provincial levels in the early 1980s resulted in cuts to government funding and bureaucratic barriers that affected the ability and desire of gay (and feminist) groups to look beyond what they defined as the urgent needs of their own constituencies. While a small number of gay liberationists and feminists in Vancouver sympathized with the call by the Alliance for the Safety of Prostitutes to decriminalize sex work (Chan, 1983), white, upwardly-mobile gay men and allies in CROWE and Shame the Johns savoured their victory over sex workers in July 1984. By the mid-1980s, the majority of gay activists had become increasingly preoccupied with an equality-seeking agenda, emboldened by a new Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982 that did not include the rights of sex workers (see Kinsman, 1996; M Smith 1999). In part, anti-prostitution forces in the gay West End triumphed by enlisting state regulators and the media in what Michael Warner (1999: 13–14) terms ‘the politics of shame’, with shame vis-à-vis paid sexual services leveraged as political capital. Gay leaders’ conciliatory pledge to ‘tone down’ public expressions of sexuality became palatable to those whose class-bound, white privilege afforded them the luxury of (shameful) discretion, and irreconcilable to sex workers – both white and of colour – whose dependence on commercial, street-level sexual exchange guaranteed their status as inassimilable. Adapting Ann Cvetkovich (2003: 46), we see the move towards the normalization of privatized gay sex and identity as a form of insidious trauma, born out of queer histories of rejection and humiliation. Substantive victories by and for gay activists seemed to signal that long-denied acceptance of homosexual difference was within their collective grasp. At the same time, we see how the thwarting of sex workers’ rights foreclosed knowledge of their traumas as well as and feelings in the context of oftentimes hazardous, public sexual commerce.

A final irony: in the mid-to-late 1980s, gay men learned, as many lay dying of HIV/AIDS (first named Gay-Related Immune Deficiency), that respectability and belonging were statuses both provisional and fragile (see Bersani, 1987; Spence, 1985). Once again, and alongside prostitutes, gay men were publicly vilified as dirty, immoral, and threatening – deserving of their grisly fate. The boundary that respect-hungry gays had drawn between themselves and ‘noisy hookers’ seemed to dissolve (at least temporarily) in the wake of a new moral panic and its corollaries: neo-colonial and neo-liberal fear and the exclusion of sexually spoiled, fatally promiscuous ‘others’ (see Goffman, 1963: 71). The threat of a plague, historically associated with disease-carrying prostitutes, assumed a new guise in the ravaged faces and wasted bodies of men struck down by an initially mysterious and lethal illness.

Conclusion

In sum, while very small groups of gay men (and second-wave feminists) aligned themselves with activist sex workers in the late 1970s and early 1980s in Vancouver, the majority steered clear of a concerted commitment to prostitutes’ rights, and to a broad campaign for sexual liberation. Few activists of any political stripe, including labour organizers and unionists, had much to offer sex workers in need of support. As a result, the harassment and, sometimes violent, assaults of outdoor prostitutes by police, clients, journalists, politicians, and residents not only continued but intensified. After the Chief Justice’s legal injunction in 1984, on-street prostitutes were forcibly relocated from the West End, first to the working-class enclave of Mount Pleasant, and then further east to isolated, bleak, and industrial spaces where they began to go ‘missing’ in catastrophic numbers, and where ‘violence had no witness’ (Sanchez, 1998: 551). Today, the impoverished Downtown Eastside of Vancouver has been shattered by the murders of 65 women and trans people since the early 1980s, mostly Aboriginal survival sex workers and drug-users (Cameron, 2007; Jiwani and Young, 2006). Meanwhile, the city’s West End – its gay village – remains a largely white, masculinist, cleaned-up, post-HIV/AIDS node on the global circuitry of gay tourism (Bell and Binnie, 2004; Puar, 2008), though, again ironically, not free of gay-bashing or residual modes of sexual shame. Beyond Canadian borders, we see how the wholesale purge from Vancouver’s West End foreshadowed the contemporary and ongoing displacement of street-level prostitutes into spaces of exclusion beyond the bounds of visible respectability in the UK, the Netherlands, and Sweden (see Hubbard et al, 2008; Kantola and Squires, 2004; Sanders et al., 2009).

Thinking through the deaths of Iraqi citizens by American soldiers in the Gulf War, Judith Butler tells us ‘how certain forms of grief become nationally recognized and amplified, whereas other losses become unthinkable and ungrievable’ (2004: xiv). In 2012, there is no permanent marker in Vancouver’s West End to help us think through, grieve about, and commemorate the losses – of community, home, and life itself – born by the brave sex workers who once worked and lived on the Davie Street stroll. Its absence invites reflection on the perils of collective forgetting, the institutional implantation of the whore stigma, and the myopia of liberationist social movements.