Archive for the 'Issue 7/8: Autumn 2011' Category

Dis­patches
By Matt Roy

From Sad Mag issue 7/8.

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 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.

Illus­tra­tion: Parker McLean.

Gay in the Sub­urbs
By Adam Cristo­bal

This arti­cle appears in full in Sad Mag issue 7/8.

Every­one 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 high-school 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 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.…

Con­tinue read­ing in Sad Mag issue 7/8.

Photo: Laura Nguyen.

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.

Denis, Every­one
By Dave Deveau

From Sad Mag issue 7/8.

The first time I met 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. Denis, a renowned per­former, hosted the show for the bulk of my child­hood. That hip­sters wear shirts depict­ing a char­ac­ter from a show he hosted shows the sig­nif­i­cance Denis had 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. From the babyfag see­ing his first instance of cross-dressing in an early Christ­mas pan­tomime to the the­atre vet­eran telling a joke that makes the tallest man in the room throw his head back and guf­faw, Denis is remem­bered by many 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.

This Mag­i­cal Place
As told to Jeff Lawrence.

From Sad Mag issue 7/8.

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.

Photo: Daphne Chan.

Mega­phone, Van­cou­ver’ street paper, has repub­lished an arti­cle from Sad Mag’s Queer His­tory Issue. The arti­cle, Tough in Tran­sit by Daniel Zom­par­elli, fol­lows Char­l­ize Gor­don and Suzanne Kil­roy as they nav­i­gate gen­der and sex­u­al­ity in one of Vancouver’s tough­est neighbourhoods.

Sean Con­don, Mega­phone’s Exec­u­tive Direc­tor, had this to say on the magazine’s website:

The Down­town East­side may be home to our city’s most mar­gin­al­ized res­i­dents, but that doesn’t mean it’s always accept­ing of peo­ple who live on the fringes. Just ask Char­l­ize Gor­don and Suzanne Kilroy.

Char­l­ize, a recently-transgendered woman, and Suzanne, who’s two-spirited, have bravely faced down myr­iad chal­lenges rang­ing from sim­ple homo­pho­bia to phys­i­cal abuse while find­ing their places as proud mem­bers of the DTES’s LGBTQ com­mu­nity. The diverse social makeup of today’s DTES owes much to the strug­gles and tri­umphs of peo­ple like Char­l­ize and Suzanne, as uncov­ered in this story from Sad Mag’s Queer His­tory issue.

You can buy the issue now from one of Mega­phone’s ven­dors for a sug­gested dona­tion of $2.

Rain­bow Reels
By Esther Tung

From Sad Mag issue 7/8.

Just before the rise of AIDS, Canada’s—and pos­si­bly the world’s—first gay and les­bian cable-access show, Gay­ble­vi­sion, thrived on West End Cable 10. Any­one with enthu­si­asm and an idea could cre­ate or con­tribute to the hour-long show, which aired weekly from 1980 to 1986. The pro­duc­tion team was will­ing to train and develop new, inex­pe­ri­enced tal­ent, and there’s no doubt that the show’s acces­si­bil­ity con­tributed to its longevity.

One of the co-founders of Gay­ble­vi­sion, Mary Anne McEwen, was a UBC alum­nus who was booted from her soror­ity in 1965 for being a les­bian. When Gay­ble­vi­sion was first estab­lished, McE­wan, who had a half-decade stint as Cre­ative Direc­tor of Cre­ative House, was the only staff mem­ber who had any expe­ri­ence work­ing in media. McEwen passed away ear­lier this year, but she spoke about putting together Gay­ble­vi­sion at the 2010 Van­cou­ver Queer Film Fes­ti­val, where select episodes of the ground­break­ing pro­gram were screened.

The first episode of Gay­ble­vi­sion cap­tured 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 is still open today. Other notable seg­ments include an inter­view with out-of-the-closet Amer­i­can play­wright Ten­nessee Williams, as well as a doc­u­men­tary on another pop­u­lar gay venue of the time, a shady bar called Vanport.

Gay­ble­vi­sion once held a dear place in the heart of the ’80s queer com­mu­nity, and it is one of many gen­e­sis sto­ries of Vancouver’s queer culture.

Illus­tra­tion: Monika Koch.

Editor’s note:  Gay­ble­vi­sion is archived at VIVO Media Arts. Thank you to the help­ful staff for their assis­tance with this article.

A Long Walk
Vancouver’s First Pride Parade
By Derek Bedry

From Sad Mag issue 7/8.

Vancouver’s pride parade today 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 population.

“[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.”

Image: Cour­tesy the B.C. Gay and Les­bian Archives.

Give the gift of Sad Mag for just $12, and remind your friends and fam­ily of your good taste the whole year through. Or maybe it is time to “treat yo self.”

Order before Decem­ber 17, and a hol­i­day card will be sent to the recip­i­ent that noti­fies them of their new sub­scrip­tion, in time for Christ­mas. Mean­while, gen­er­ous Van­cou­verites that place an order before Decem­ber 17 will also earn an entry into a draw for a $100 gift cer­tifi­cate to Burcu’s Angels vin­tage cloth­ing store. Visions of vin­tage furs and sequins dance in our heads!

Photo by Jonathan Spooner

Sad Mag: Who are you?

Monika Koch: I’m a puppy tamer and a scor­pion fighter.

SM: What do you do?

MK: I make things. I make things look nice. I ride my bike, usu­ally fast. I sleep when I have no other choice.

SM: How did you become a designer?

MK: I was one of those kids who was con­stantly com­mis­sioned by peers to draw car­toon char­ac­ters in return for snacks in ele­men­tary school. Thank­fully, I am no longer paid in snacks, because the lightning-quick metab­o­lism is gone and I can’t pay rent in snacks. My pur­suit of design as a grownup must have been ignited with my deci­sion not to go to art school.

After about a year of uni­ver­sity, the need to cre­ate became unbear­able. Sadly for my GPA, from then on I com­mit­ted myself to nur­tur­ing my skill in every way I saw fit. Design came as a nat­ural out­let– my dad taught indus­trial design, and I grew up fid­dling with Adobe soft­ware. I free­lanced and stayed sharp with illus­tra­tion and per­sonal projects. Some­how I man­aged to grad­u­ate, and kept at the free­lance thing. My best friend, also a free­lanc­ing designer at the time, saw me through that period and I couldn’t ever thank him enough for his sup­port and the inspi­ra­tion to just do what I love.

SM: Where do you live?

MK: Mount Pleas­ant.

SM: What’s your Hal­loween costume?

MK: I’m not telling. Not because I’m wait­ing for my bril­liance to save me at the last minute.

SM: Favourite mag­a­zines?

MK: ACNE Paper, Cir­cus, S, and Interview.

SM: What are you excited about for fall?

MK: As a New Eng­lan­der, I am excited for colder tem­per­a­tures and any­thing that resem­bles that kind of autumn, even for a day or two. This year’s has been beau­ti­ful, though. Mostly I just want to wear more cloth­ing, look like I dropped out of Sar­to­ri­al­ist and feel cold air on my cheeks.

Sad Mag presents: The Queer Cul­tural Awards and Show

The Cobalt (917 Main St)

8:00PM-1:00AM

Advance tick­ets $6, at the door $8

Full details on Face­book.