Vancouver Vice: Crime and Spectacle in the City’s West End by Aaron Chapman

Author:Aaron Chapman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press
Published: 2021-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

GATE (Gay Alliance Toward Equality) protesters take over the stage behind police at the West End Community Centre.

c/o Don Hann

Two members of GATE felt the leaflets weren’t enough. Don Hann and Rob Joyce marched to the stage with a banner to stand behind seated police officials. “We didn’t plan in advance to take the stage,” recalls Hann, who still lives in Vancouver. “Police weren’t prepared for the avalanche of questions being thrown at them and didn’t expect that militancy. But it was really because of the way the police responded to the questions that it felt like symbolically taking the stage meant we were saying to police, ‘What we’re hearing from you is unconvincing.’”

Staff Sergeant Glenn MacDonald gave a brief talk concerning police activities against sex work, but he was cut short by a gay man who protested that he had been arrested at English Bay for “doing something which if it had been a member of the opposite sex would have been totally overlooked.” Other gay men took the microphone and shared anecdotes of police harassment, like when, just days earlier, the police had raided several gay nightclubs and made more than thirty arrests for drugs like amyl nitrate and marijuana (both still regarded at the time as contraband by the drug squad).

When MacDonald insisted that the vice squad didn’t target gay men, he was rigorously jeered at by the crowd. To a degree, MacDonald was correct—the VPD had no standing orders to target the gay community. But to those present, MacDonald was ignoring the wealth of anecdotal evidence of individual officers who were harassing gay men or making prejudicial comments about them during police stops.

“Individual officers can be the ones culpable at the end of the day,” Don Hann says. “But GATE wrote a letter to the chief of police asking that a directive be issued forbidding individual officers from expressing negative views about gays in the course of duty. The chief refused.”

As the evening wore on, the meeting dissolved into chaos. One audience member repeatedly stated he hadn’t come to the meeting to listen to “a bunch of creampuffs,” and another, annoyed by the GATE banner at the front of the room, called for the activists to be “kicked off” the stage. People began to shout insults and threats at one another. A shoving match broke out at the back of the hall and participants had to be separated. Inspector Westover apologized to those in attendance who came to discuss noise problems, noting, ironically, “Unfortunately, you’ve been drowned out by others who came here to use this meeting for their own purposes.”

“The whole thing started out well intentioned enough,” Robson recalls. “People were civil and passing around the mic saying that as residents they couldn’t sleep with all the noise of the johns coming and going, screaming in the alleyways, used condoms being left everywhere, but the whole thing descended into disorder when the guys with the banner got up behind Westover. From then on, every single group and subgroup was just concerned with making their own point.

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