Issue 7/8
About issue 7/8…
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 queer community is 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 queer community was often marginalized from the foreground altogether.
Why, then, has the community’s history remained hidden as the community itself once was? The city’s queer culture is evident, but its past less so. This past is a dense, complex, multi-part, and multi-voiced history that 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 it for granted due to the community’s vibrant and growing 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.
Thank you to Vancouver 125, the City of Vancouver’s 125th Anniversary Grants Program.