To Serve and Collect

To Serve and Col­lect
By Jeff Lawrence

From Sad Mag issue 7/8.

Ron Dut­ton glides over his bed­room floor 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—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 in 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.