Davie Street is known as Vancouver’s Queer hub — where pride is celebrated every day, all year round. The street runs through a portion of downtown Vancouver known as Davie Village, populated by small businesses, venues and services that have been creating a safe and comfortable space for Queerness for decades.
Davie Street’s Queer history dates back to the 1940s when young working-class gay men came to the area after the West End’s mansions were replaced by affordable housing. Queer people built a safe community together under the radar until the decriminalization of homosexuality in 1969.
Historian Ron Dutton lived through the advent of Vancouver’s Queer village, frequenting bars, businesses and nightclubs that offered a safe haven under Canada’s Criminal Code that considered non-heteronormative sexualities criminal. Dutton also founded the BC Gay and Lesbian Archives in 1976, storing valuable documents and artifacts that might have otherwise been lost in his own home.
“The rationale, by the 1950s, for living in the West End was, you’re close to all the shopping, the downtown theatres, Stanley Park and the beaches,” said Dutton. “And, above all, you could live a life of anonymity in the West End.”
Such anonymity — facilitated by low-income, single-occupant rooms subdivided from West End townhouses left vacant as wealthy owners fled to the suburbs — was attractive to Queer Vancouverites. During the mid-20th century, Queer people would have experienced discrimination and violence if they displayed their identities publicly.
“The [Queer] bar scene began to develop ... along Davie, Granville and Yaletown,” said Dutton. “Yaletown at the time was not high-rise luxury condos. It was one-storey, two-storey high warehousing.”
“Bars and baths began to develop [there] because you could go down there at night and never meet your employer or your preacher.”
Dutton sees the sexually liberated ‘free love’ era of the 1960s as a definitive moment in the formation of Davie Street’s Queer identity. Under the threat of criminalization, the neighbourhood offered Queer Vancouverites not only a place to let their hair down in relative safety, but also a haven for health and lifestyle services often denied to them in other areas.
According to Dutton, with 1969’s decriminalization of homosexuality came an expansion of these services.
“Gay travel agents, gay hairdressers, restaurants, nightclubs, gift-shops ... bookstores [in the West End allowed you] to be close to your public.”
But with decriminalization came dilution. Queer people in Vancouver began to frequent clubs and businesses outside of the Davie core as the decades passed and the violence of enforced heteronormativity slowly waned. The mutual support and protection offered by Davie Village became less and less essential.
In conjunction with this, swiftly rising housing prices in the downtown core soon made the prospect of a bachelor/ette pad on Davie or Granville significantly less accessible.
“Of equal or more importance is the advent of social media,” said Dutton. “Look, when you were a young man like myself ... [in the ‘70s], you want[ed] to hit the bars, right? Disco era, rock and roll everywhere. The one place to go to meet other people [was] the bar scene.”
But as social media developed, the opportunity to meet people through means other than drinking and drugs became available.
“Over time [on social media],” said Dutton, “you get gay nudists and gay Bhuddists ... gay antique car enthusiasts — an organization or three for absolutely every imaginable interest.”
This diversification of community facilitated by social media has meant Davie Street is no longer the only place where Queer love and friendship can be found in Vancouver.
But Davie Village is still here and Dutton said that students, particularly those who are newly immigrated and studying English at one of many language schools downtown, make up a distinct part of the neighbourhood’s modern identity.
“[These students] are often living downtown and ... just as if you had come from a small town to the big city, if you’ve come from a fairly conservative country, there is a period in which you want to be expressive of your identity and where you’re still kind of tentative about that.”
For students like this, and other Queer people who might not be ready to fully share their identity in their family lives, Davie Street offers supportive anonymity.
Today, the neighbourhood provides comfort to students and other young people in a Vancouver area that fosters Queer community all year rather than just every June when the sudden appreciation of Queerness by corporations makes other parts of Vancouver less welcoming to Queer people.
“I think a big thing, especially now, within the Queer community is kind of this rainbow washing across a bunch of corporations,” said Keira Lumley, a UBC student who frequents Davie Street. “It’s the authenticity that I think I really appreciate having, a Queer-centred space in the city.”
N, another UBC student who frequents Davie Street and whose name has been withheld for safety concerns, emphasized the community aspect of the area that supports expressions of self by cultivating a comfortable space.
“There [are] definitely levels to the comfort I feel based on my intersectional identities,” said N. “Relative to the rest of [Vancouver], I felt a lot safer and more comfortable [on Davie Street], especially in the spaces where drinking and just general going out, precautions need to be taken into consideration.”
Davie Street has built a space where Queer people can feel seen at all times of the year while providing a space to be yourself.
“I think that there’s a comfort in the area itself,” said Natasha Elek, a UBC student who conducted research on the area.
“Being able to express yourself just walking down the street, being able to exist in a space that Queer people have made their own.”
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