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.

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.