Becki L. Ross

Sex and (evacuation from) the city: the moral and legal regulation of sex workers in Vancouver’s West End, 1975—1985

For more than a century, prostitution in Vancouver, British Columbia has been at the centre of legal and political debate, policing, media coverage, and policy-making. From 1975 to 1985, a heterogeneous, pimp-free community of sex workers lived and worked on and around Davie Street in the city’s emerging ‘gay’ West End. Their presence sparked a vigorous backlash, including vigilante action, from multiple stake-holders intent on transforming the port town into a ‘world class city’ and venerable host of the World’s Fair, ‘Expo 1986’. In this article, drawing from interviews and archival material, I examine the abolitionist strategies adopted by Vancouver’s residents’ groups, business owners, politicians, and police to criminalize street solicitation and evacuate prostitutes who, in small numbers, ‘whorganized’ to fight back. The collective disavowal of sex workers as citizens was premised on the ‘cleansing’ of the zone under siege, which became whitened and made safe for bourgeois (queer) capitalism, with lethal consequences for outdoor sex workers in the city.

Tracing lines of horizontal hostility: How sex workers and gay activists battled for space, voice, and belonging in Vancouver, 1975–1985

In the mid-1970s, indoor sex workers were pushed outdoors onto the streets of Vancouver’s emergent gay West End, where a small stroll had operated for several years. While some gay activists contemplated solidarity with diversely gendered and racialized sex workers, others galvanized a campaign, alongside business owners, realtors, police, city councillors, and politicians to expel prostitution from their largely white, middle-class enclave. Sex workers commanded inadequate capital to thwart the anti-vice, neo-liberal lobby. Instead, an assimilationist, homonormative gay politics played out on the backs of an even more vulnerable and stigmatized sexual minority – the majority of whom were low-income, street-involved women, men, and male-to-female (MTF) transsexuals of colour.