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.