Journal of Historical Sociology Vol. 25 No. 1 March 2012 DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-6443.2011.01411.x Outdoor Brothel Culture: The Un/Making of a Transsexual Stroll in Vancouver’s West End, 1975–1984 johs_1411 126..150 BECKI L. ROSS1 Abstract In the mid-1970s, following a series of police raids on prostitution inside downtown nightclubs, a community of approximately 200 sex workers moved into Vancouver’s West End neighborhood, where a small stroll had operated since the early 1970s. This paper examines the contributions made by three male-to-female (MTF) transsexuals of color to the culture of on-street prostitution in the West End. The trans women’s stories address themes of fashion, working conditions, money, community formation, violence, and resistance to well-organized anti-prostitution forces. These recollections enable me to bridge and enrich trans history and prostitution history – two fields of inquiry that have under-represented the participation of trans women in the sex industry across the urban West. Acutely familiar with the hazards inherent in a criminalized, stigmatized trade, trans sex workers in the West End manufactured efficacious strategies of harm reduction, income generation, safety planning, and community building. Eschewing the label of “victim”, they leveraged their physical size and style, charisma, contempt towards pimps, earning capacity, and seniority as the first workers on the stroll to assume leadership within the broader constituency of “hookers on Davie Street”. I discover that their short-lived outdoor brothel culture offered only a temporary bulwark against the inevitability of eviction via legal injunction in July 1984, and the subsequent rise in lethal violence against all prostitutes in Vancouver, including MTF transsexuals. ***** Introduction Arguably more than most large North American and British cities, prostitution and reactions to it have been key factors in the formation of neighborhoods in Vancouver, British Columbia (Ingram, 1997). In the mid-1970s, street-level prostitution was wellestablished in four primary city-spaces: 1) the business district near Georgia and Hornby streets, and 2) the downtown juncture of Granville and Nelson streets; 3) the skid row area on the city’s east side near Main and Hastings streets, which encompassed Chinatown, and 4); and the West End on and near Davie Street (see Layton, 1975; Forbes, 1977; Finlay, 1972; Lowman, 1984). Following a series of prostitution-related police closures of downtown nightclubs in 1 Becki Ross is the Chair of Women’s and Gender Studies, and Professor of Sociology at the University of British Columbia, 6303 North West Marine Drive, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada; becki.ross@ubc.ca. © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. Outdoor Brothel Culture 127 Figure 1: Map of Vancouver Downtown, and West End, circa 1980. Map designed by Rachael Sullivan, in consultation with John Lowman (1984: 448). 1975–1976, and the loosening of the federal Canadian government’s soliciting law in R. v. Hutt in 1978, the West End’s stroll swelled to approximately 200 on-street sex workers (see Figure 1, Map).1 Once the residential enclave of upper-class Canadian Pacific Railway barons and their families (Gray, Keddie, and Kwan, 1976), by the mid-to-late 1970s the West End was a high-density, mixeduse, and aspiring, middle-class enclave wedged between the downtown business core, the shore of English Bay, and the 1,000-acre Stanley Park. Here, on and near the principal bisector, Davie Street, working “fish” (biological women), male hustlers, and male-tofemale (MTF) transsexuals developed a tight-knit, pimp-free culture with its own language, codes of conduct, and camaraderie in the face of intensifying, well-financed opposition. In what follows, I draw on in-depth interviews and archival materials to explore the stories of three male-to-female (MTF) transsexual prostitutes of colour, who worked on Vancouver’s tranny stroll in the West End from the mid-1970s to 1984.2 Among the only survivors from this era, Jamie Lee, Raigen, and Stacey recollect themes of fashion, working conditions, money, community formation, violence, and resistance to anti-prostitution forces. The collisions that erupted as police officers, politicians, journalists, residents, and the judiciary © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd Journal of Historical Sociology Vol. 25 No. 1 March 2012 128 Becki L. Ross flexed their regulationist muscle reveal inequities structured along lines of gender, class, sexuality, race, and geography. Analytical insights from John Lowman (1984, 2000), Judith Butler (2004a, 2004b), and Jasbir Puar (2007) assist me in uncovering how the West End became imbued with complex spatialities of power, desire, and disgust. By highlighting the uniquely gendered and sexualized choreographies relayed by Vancouver-based transsexual prostitutes, I aim to bridge and enrich trans history and prostitution history – two fields of inquiry that have under-represented the participation of trans women in the sex industry across the urban West.3 Acutely familiar with the hazards inherent in a criminalized, stigmatized trade, trans sex workers in the West End manufactured creative, efficacious strategies of income generation, harm reduction, safety planning, and community building. Eschewing the label of “victim”, they leveraged physical size and style, charisma, contempt towards pimps, earning capacity, and seniority as the first workers on the stroll to assume leadership within the broader constituency of “hookers on Davie Street”. Highly visible on the stroll, trans prostitutes of colour became objects of desire and repulsion in a neighborhood on the cusp of white, gay gentrification, and in a nation bent on “solving the social problem” of prostitution (Lowman 1986; Brock 2009). Socially and medically diagnosed to be ill, abnormal, and out of order, Jamie Lee, Stacey, and Raigen enacted counterstrategies of self-determination. Bankrolling Glamorous Femininity and Working It To attract prospective clients on and near Davie Street in Vancouver’s West End, MTF transsexual sex workers donned apparel and lingerie to create an ultra-feminine appearance. Much like nineteenth-century street-walkers, they embraced nightly parades of showy finery as a tactic to advertise their availability for hire (Valverde, 1989: 178). Reflecting on sartorial choices, Pat Califia (1997a: 180–1) wryly observed that, “Hookers and office workers do not wear the same kind of high heels, stockings, skirts, foundation garments, wigs, or makeup, and these items do not have the same meanings, either . . . By her manner of dress, the hooker marks herself as an outlaw.” For all female sex workers in the late 1970s, the business of sexual allure demanded the multi-seasonal application of make-up, big hair, red lipstick, stiletto-heeled shoes or tall, high-heeled boots, tube-tops stretched out as mini-skirts, perfume, fancy bras, and low-cut blouses. Moreover, the “look” for trannies involved an added combination of hormonal supplements, electrolysis, breast augmentation, and tucking. Raigen (Interview, © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd Journal of Historical Sociology Vol. 25 No. 1 March 2012 Outdoor Brothel Culture 129 2008) explained how her body responded to estrogen: “I was very fortunate because I had breast development very fast. Yes, if you had Native blood in you, your boobs grew.” Also Aboriginal, Jamie Lee purchased breast implants in the early 1980s; to her, they not only heightened her self-esteem as a woman, but increased her earning potential thus enabling her to buy other medical procedures excluded from the provincial health care plan (Padmore, 1980: 13).4 As Jamie Lee (Interview, 2008) commented, “All that you had to pay for. There was no gender clinic. There was no care in the medical profession to assist us with our feminization process.”5 Entering the trade in their late teens, the three transsexual women I interviewed learned the ropes from each other and from older matriarchs in the business such as Mama Karen and Mama Dixie. In effect, their cross-generational networks of kin prefigured the “fashion houses” of African American and Latino queens who “vogued” and made families in New York’s Harlem during the late 1980s (Livingston, 1990). Proud “West Enders”, Jamie Lee, Stacey, and Raigen shared information about outfits, make-up, lovers, hormones and surgeries, housing, working safely, and making money (also see Driscoll, 1971). As Aboriginal women, Jamie Lee and Raigen challenged racist and sexist caricatures of “natives” in Hollywood films, Disney cartoons, and television shows (Barman, 1997/1998; Anderson and Lawrence, 2003). And Stacey, an African Canadian transsexual, was critical of the asexualized stereotypes of black women as “maids and mammies” (Interview 2008; see Collins, 2005: 140). Familiar with how they were luridly fetishized as “she-males” in pornography, scorned in tabloids, and pathologized in medical texts (MacKenzie 1994; Meyerowitz, 2002), all three trans women appropriated signs of heterosexualized femininity for their own purposes. As Jamie Lee noted, they adopted the flamboyant mode of “high fashion showgirls” on city streets. Like postwar burlesque dancers (Shteir 2004; Ross, 2009) and African American blues queens from the 1930s and 1940s (Davis 1998), Jamie Lee, Stacey, and Raigen upended the assumption that overtly embracing feminine style meant sexual objectification and subjugation to men. Raigen recalled: “Remember the old bathing suit I used to wear, the black with the gold lamé up the sides? It just framed me. That and six inch heels. And great, big, long Native hair.” By performing female glamour and enacting a “micro-politics of solicitation” (Whowell, 2010: 132), transsexual women garnered psychological and social validation for their desirability to men who appreciated (and paid for) their beauty, time, and sexual skills. “Going in to work everyday all dolled up,” said Jamie Lee, brought immeasurable “gender affirmation and healing” to those cast aside during © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd Journal of Historical Sociology Vol. 25 No. 1 March 2012 130 Becki L. Ross their youth as “freaks of nature.” Occasionally threatened with arrest for cross-dressing in public, trans prostitutes leveraged their feminine power and sex appeal to achieve economic survival as well as a stake in community belonging and shelter against oppressive forces of sexism, racism, and transphobia (see Califia, 1997b). While working on the West End stroll, the three transsexual women I interviewed elected to keep their penises in order to present clients with “the full-package deal” or “tittie and clittie” (clittie being the MTF term for cock). They disdained the gender essentialism of medicine, which prescribed surgical castration and vaginoplasty to live and pass successfully as women (Benjamin, 1966: 21). Having decided that she was “definitely not giving it away,” Stacey elaborated: “Initially, I thought I’ve got to have surgery. I must have surgery! I’ve got to have that kitty cat! Gotta have it! And then I met someone who taught me that it was okay, and that there was no shame involved in it. And so the surgery part of it went away. He didn’t last, but what I realized was that as a prostitute my cock is a huge asset. How would you make any money without one?” In redefining femaleness on their own terms, Jamie Lee, Stacey, and Raigen confounded the clear-cut categories of pre- and postoperative transsexual that were foundational to the regulatory regime of medicine. They did not name their male genitalia as “disgusting deformities” (MacKinnon 1971: 295). Moreover, they refused psychiatric discourse that classified them as disordered, incoherent, or inauthentic. Defying what Judith Butler has exposed as the common-sense hetero-gendered “grid of intelligibility” (2004a: 35), they reworked and exceeded the feminine norm, showing themselves, each other, observers, and clients a new possibility for womanhood. And possibility, to paraphrase Butler, was not a luxury to them – it was as crucial as bread (Ibid., 29).6 Calling herself “the only pretty black transsexual in Vancouver,” Stacey reflected on her strategy to accommodate a client’s desire for intercourse: “Initially, I confused them. You would have to convince them that you had a vagina between your legs when they were on top. I did so many damn fake lays . . . I always chose this hole, right here [pointing to her anus]. ‘Want to see my pussy? It’s right here’.” For Jamie Lee and many others she knew, intercourse was not a primary focus of activity. She recalled that the preferred menu included oral sex, dirty talk, massage, and butt play “while wearing a finger condom because you didn’t want your nails to hurt them.” When penetration was negotiated, all three women insisted on a client’s condom use; while (unlike biological women) they never feared unplanned pregnancies, they strove to protect themselvesfrom sexually transmitted infections in an era that pre-dated HIV/ AIDS (see Lowman, 1984: 259). © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd Journal of Historical Sociology Vol. 25 No. 1 March 2012 Outdoor Brothel Culture 131 While comfortable with soliciting dates on corners of an established tranny stroll, trans sex workers found themselves managing what Erving Goffman (1963: 42) identified as social information: “To tell or not to tell; to let on or not to let on; to lie or not to lie; and in each case, to whom, how, when, and where.” Jamie Lee noted how she and co-workers became highly attuned to “telling the difference” between a prospective customer and an undercover police officer. The nature of their work demanded, in Goffman’s terms, “a special aliveness to the contingencies of acceptance and disclosure” (Ibid., 111). Conscious of the fact that male customers may have not always known she was transsexual, Stacey proudly insisted that, “Straight men always want a queen. Always want a queen. Don’t you be no fool, they always want a queen.” Preferring “straight dates” over “tranny dates,” Raigen also did fake lays: “In hotels I always kept a tube of KY [lubricant] next to the radiator to keep it warm. So what I would do was I’d always have the KY and a towel beside the bed. And I would go to the client and say, ‘I just had an abortion so I want you to be very sensitive to my needs. I don’t want you to hurt me so I want to put padding between us so you don’t hurt me.’ He’s like, ‘Oh, yes’ – all virile. I squeezed all the KY and I put my hand down there and I’m just like, ‘Oh yes.’ And he’s like, ‘Oh my God you’ve got the strongest pussy I’ve ever had!’ ” Barred from “Gender-Appropriate” Work For transsexual women without high school diplomas, in various stages of gender transition, access to pink collar jobs in sales, service, and clerical sectors was almost unthinkable. Jamie Lee, Raigen, and Stacey noted that, as teenagers in high school, they suffered bullying, ostracism, and loneliness. Authority figures were not always trustworthy, as Jamie Lee explained: “Who was I going to complain to when I got taken down to Stanley Park in a squad car, and there’s a dog barking in the back, and I was forced to perform oral sex on a cop when I’m 18?” Moreover, both formal and informal discrimination against MTF transsexuals in the formal or “square” labour force was rampant then, as it is today (Burnham, 1999; Whittle, 2002; Shelley, 2008). The three transsexual women I interviewed noted that their large hands and feet, protruding Adam’s apple, husky voice, and tall stature disqualified them from work contingent on deferential feminine propriety. In addition, they did not want to list jobs and references on a resumé from a life lived before changing gender; nor did they share the middle-class, Angloethnic privilege and career trajectories of MTFs such as American physician Renée Richards or British journalist Jan Morris. Raigen explained that “educated MTFs were critical of sex workers who were out there whoring and making everybody think that all trans© 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd Journal of Historical Sociology Vol. 25 No. 1 March 2012 132 Becki L. Ross sexuals were whores.”7 Unlike the sixteen MTF transsexuals interviewed in the United States in the early 1980s by Anne Bolin (1988: 143), Raigen, Stacey, and Jamie Lee did not have the luxury of “living on savings” while “gaining experience as full-time women” prior to gender transition. Moreover, they were not drawn to escort agencies or massage parlours where they would have bumped up against strict rules for hetero-feminine dress, physical appearance, and demeanor (see Lowman 1992: 7). While Jamie Lee, Raigen, and Stacey typically solicited clients outdoors, they turned tricks in hotels, cars, and apartments, as well as (though less commonly) in back alleys, underground parkades, outdoor parking lots, and parks. Blurring the line routinely drawn between indoor/private and outdoor/public sex work, they endeavored to duck a new municipal by-law (in place from 1982– 1983) that aggressively targeted street soliciting. Moreover, to supplement their earnings as prostitutes, many transsexual women worked as female impersonators at local gay nightclubs where they advertised their wares to prospective dates by flaunting their sexiness in elaborate costumes, wigs, and make-up on stage. In Vancouver, a host of transsexual women – Jamie Lee/Flo, Sandy St Peters, Tamala Motown, Chrissy Warren, and Daquiri St John – performed at BJs Show Lounge, Numbers, and Champagne Charlie’s (see Figure 2). Similarly, transsexual and transvestite artists Figure 2: Jamie Lee/Flo at BJ’s Show Lounge in Vancouver. Photo by Saralee James, circa 1981, courtesy of Marc, Susie, and Jonathan James. © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd Journal of Historical Sociology Vol. 25 No. 1 March 2012 Outdoor Brothel Culture 133 dazzled fans at the Garden of Allah in Seattle and Finocchio’s in San Francisco, while Coccinelle, Lana St Cyr, Lili St Clair, and Bella Belle were well-known in Montreal’s cabaret culture during the 1960s and 1970s (Paulson and Simpson, 1996; Members of the Gay and Lesbian Historical Society, 1998; Namaste, 2004). While their working conditions worsened dramatically in the mid-1980s (see below), Jamie Lee, Stacey, and Raigen emphasized that the vast majority of customers in the West End – both ablebodied and disabled – were respectful of and grateful for their time and expertise. The services they supplied to male clients ranged from sex surrogacy, fantasy, and companionship to emotional support, instruction, and sex therapy; a successful exchange was constituted through a form of relational inter-dependence (see Brooks-Gordon, 2010: 150). In the relatively rare instance of a trick gone awry, transsexual women used a combination of physical size, strength, and ingenuity to maximum effect. Raigen remembered her adaptive tactics: “Nobody messed with Raigen. I would beat up bad dates. If a date came down and was harassing the girls, I’d drag him out of the car and kick the shit out of him. I’d say ‘Go back to Surrey [a suburb], you fucking punk-ass.’ Us trannies would get really loud . . . I remember this date – he drove me around for awhile. Now, any time with me costs money. I said, ‘OK you owe me time.’ He said, ‘I’m not giving you any money.’ I saw on his finger that he had a wedding band. I was like ‘OK you motherfucker.’ I pulled out my perfume and sprayed his car up and down. I was like, ‘Well that’ll teach you for not paying the hooker. Now deal with your wife tonight’!” Money, Money, Money: Economic and Community Development In her study of brothels in the early twentieth-century boomtown of Rossland, British Columbia, Charlene Smith (2003: 121) notes that, “Prostitution was viewed not only as a ‘necessary evil’, it was seen as beneficial to economic development.” Decades later in Vancouver’s West End, transsexual prostitutes found the business profitable, especially in the early 1980s in spite of an economic recession (Wynn, 1992). In part, their high wages relative to what other women earned in pink-collar sectors reflected unspoken compensation for risks inherent in stigmatized and criminalized work (see McMaster, 2008). Moreover, as part of a small coterie of soughtafter transsexuals who offered a wide range of services in a competitive marketplace, they knew that they could command higher prices than either biological women or male hustlers. Dollars earned (up front) from tourists, conventioneers, sailors in port, and well-heeled regulars in a middle-class neighborhood were in abundant supply, remembered Jamie Lee: “It was like the Q.C., or © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd Journal of Historical Sociology Vol. 25 No. 1 March 2012 134 Becki L. Ross Queen’s Counsel for lawyers – we were the Q.C. of the sex trade – Queen’s Cash.” Unlike the concentration of on-street sex work in areas of socio-economic deprivation (see Hubbard, 1999), Stacey distinguished her West End stroll: “You had a lot of professional clients here in Vancouver. And a lot of tourists. You could charge more in the West End, and it was a lot safer [than on the east side where she had also worked]. I felt more secure. There weren’t a lot of drug addicts or a visible drug trade.” The transsexual women I interviewed found a steady income, flexible hours, and job security via the sex industry, whereas many other MTF transsexuals endured long periods of unemployment or precarious salaried employment during and after their gender transition (see Burnham, 1999; Namaste 2000).8 Jamie Lee, Stacey, and Raigen conveyed strong views of why they rebuffed pimps and pimps’ control of their earnings, working hours, clothing, housing, and relationships. Jamie Lee suspected that pimps feared them because of their “goddess-like stature.” She asked rhetorically, “What would we have needed a stupid pimp for? How would they shine any wonderfulness on our life? We were shining our own wonderfulness on each other. They could not dictate to us.” Similarly Raigen was proud of her pimp-free stroll: “Of course, no pimps would want a trans woman at that time. So they weren’t making any money off me. I didn’t see any fascination with pimping. I found it to be disgusting . . . If the pimps really wanted to make money off prostitution, I told them to put on a fucking dress and go out there and suck some cock!” All West End prostitutes, including transsexual women, spent considerable sums of money within the neighborhood. Beginning in the early 1980s, prior to the advent of cell phones and Internet technologies, Jamie Lee, Stacey and Raigen paid to advertise their “full service” in the West Ender and Star newspapers (though they disliked sitting by the phone). In addition, they chose among four national banks within a four-block radius of Davie Street. As Jamie Lee recalled, “We held accounts at the banks, and we were always exchanging our American money. So the banks were making money off us!” She continued, “It seemed like we were forever shopping, getting our hair or nails done, spending money on ourselves and our friends. We never went hungry or were homeless.” In her view, she and her co-workers fuelled the economic engine of the West End: “We helped the condom companies, the lube companies, the dildo and hosiery companies; we bought edible panties, hot rollers, false eyelashes, hairpieces, and high heels. We bought our favorite toys and books at Little Sister’s bookstore and outfits at Ruby’s boutique. Besides the employees of Saint Paul’s Hospital, our sex worker community had significant economic and community capacity.” © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd Journal of Historical Sociology Vol. 25 No. 1 March 2012 Outdoor Brothel Culture 135 Living in the West End, working girls rented apartments, some of them fancy penthouses. They bought beverages and meals at cafés, bars, and 24-hour restaurants, and spent money at commercial laundries, dry cleaners, hair salons, clothing boutiques, grocery stories, and plastic surgery clinics. They also attracted clients who similarly patronized local establishments. As Stacey put it, “We generated a lot of revenue for a lot of people in that neighbourhood. During the off-season we kept those hotels booked solid . . . In the early 80s, people were in trouble – they were losing their jobs. And we kept the whole area rocking. We saved a lot of businesses.” Yet as Jamie Lee ruefully recalled, “We should have had financial advisors saying, ‘Oh my God, what you’re paying for rent, you could probably have bought two condos by now’.” She dryly added that while the sex workers she knew made good money, they also paid fines and the fees of lawyers who took up their cases when they were charged under the municipal anti-soliciting by-law (noted above). In the early 1980s, to mitigate the perils of law enforcement, Raigen and co-workers invented clever coping strategies: “The cops started charging you for jaywalking, or if you dropped a cigarette on the street you were littering. They would write you up everywhere they could. And then you had to be out there even more to pay the bloody fines . . . We had to learn a new language to avoid getting busted for communicating: ‘Sixty dollars to get me to me to rinse my mouth out with mouthwash, eighty dollars to launder my panties, a hundred dollars for both’.” While developing forms of economic resiliency and shared patterns of consumption, transsexual prostitutes in Vancouver’s West End claimed a “territorial base” as their own (Goffman 1963: 23), sometimes overlapping with gay men, lesbians, drag queens, and cross-dressers. Much like transsexuals and transvestites who worked the Meat District near New York’s Greenwich Village, San Franciso’s tenderloin, and Santa Monica Boulevard in Los Angeles, Jamie Lee, Raigen, and Stacey cultivated a field of spatial, ethical, and emotional enmeshment with others on the Davie Street stroll (Butler 2004a: 25). As they professionalized, they enhanced their ability to choose their clientele, location, and price. On occasion, explained Stacey, female and transsexual sex workers worked in pairs, or “doubles”, to service a male client, with the transsexual doing the blowjob, and the “lady doing the lay.” At the Black Angus Steakhouse, Columbia Inn, White Lunch cafeteria, Parkside Tropicana, and Numbers bar, a community formed of “beautiful hos and hustlers,” to quote Jamie Lee. She elaborated: “This is where we loved, worked, played, contributed to life, and were safe. Call it a family clan. We hung out together for protection, lived together, ate in the same © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd Journal of Historical Sociology Vol. 25 No. 1 March 2012 136 Becki L. Ross restaurants, shopped together, took coffee breaks together on Davie. We often worked in pairs. We had an informal telegraph system: we knew where each other was at any given time. We looked after one another. If you were long from a date we’d say, ‘Has Raigen come back from her date yet?’ What I call the outdoor brothel model provided us safety in numbers and a healthy, humane and respectful way to engage in prostitution while transacting our business.”9 The Lifestyle-Oriented “Gayborhood” While sex workers nurtured their on-street networks, the Vancouver Sun declared that the city’s “gay community” in the West End had come of age in 1979 (Anonymous, 1979: B9).10 Indeed, by the early 1980s, the residential strength, institutional maturity, territorial action, and political power of predominantly white, upwardly mobile gay men in the West End coalesced. In this denselypopulated, mixed-use neighbourhood (see Figure 3), a blend of gay and straight leaders of Concerned Residents of the West End (CROWE) and the vigilante group, Shame the Johns, incited a Foucauldian dissemination and implantation of desire to purge prostitutes from the neighborhood by displaying contempt for those visibly defined by sex (Foucault, 1980: 11).11 Anti-prostitution lobbyists became deft at moral bullying and currying the favor of Figure 3: Vancouver’s West End, circa 1973. City of Vancouver Archives, 4135–132. © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd Journal of Historical Sociology Vol. 25 No. 1 March 2012 Outdoor Brothel Culture 137 journalists and politicians (CROWE, 1982; Ross, 2010).12 On-street sex workers, including MTF transsexuals, quickly learned that Vancouver’s gay district was not a safe haven for all gender and sexual minorities (Hillman, 2011; Ross and Sullivan, forthcoming). Worn down by the harassment instigated by CROWE and the “Shamers,” street-involved sex workers had little educational, economic, or political capital at their disposal, which severely hindered their claim to full, substantive citizenship (Bourdieu, 1984: 114–5). In comparison to gay leaders in the West End, prostitutes lacked an equivalent to the Gay/Police Liaison Committee (formed in 1975); they were not embraced by the “gay voting block,” intent on consolidating a “fixed minority political constituency” (Duggan and Hunter, 1995: 183; Smith 1999). And they had nothing comparable to Angles, the gay-owned newspaper, or the cultural centre, bookstore, retail outlets, and nightclubs so fundamental to gay entrenchment and institutional expansion within the West End (also see Knopp, 1997). MTF sex workers on Davie Street found themselves excluded from a gay liberationist mandate for justice in part because they did not belong in the category either of “homosexual” or of “man”. Indeed, in the 1970s and early 1980s, the meaning and role of “gender identity” within gay, lesbian, and feminist politics stirred much ambiguity and confusion, with trans rights still contested in the present (see Valentine 2007; Elliot, 2010). Moreover, trans sex workers were without a full slate of state-financed medical services, they were vulnerable to sexist and racist harassment, and they endured double-barreled intimidation from police as trannies and prostitutes (see Lowman, 1984: 310; Larsen, 1992: 173, Highcrest, 1997: 43).13 While the definition of homosexuality as pathological was deleted from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) of the American Psychiatric Association in 1973, transsexuality remained in the DSM, encoded as “gender dysphoria”- a mental disorder. And while a homosexual act between consenting adults (21 years of age and older) in “private” was decriminalized in Canada in 1969 (see Kinsman 1996), elements of prostitution (i.e., “communicating” and “living on the avails”) were firmly enshrined in the Canadian Criminal Code, and in municipal by-laws in both Vancouver and Calgary.14 For instance, Jamie Lee was arrested in the West End after Vancouver’s Mayor Mike Harcourt and city councillors introduced what became referred to as the “antihooker” by-law in 1982. She reminisced about an unintended consequence of her incarceration: “I got through that night because other [trans] working girls had also been targeted and we shared cells and stayed up all night at ‘Motel Hell’ sharing our stories. This © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd Journal of Historical Sociology Vol. 25 No. 1 March 2012 138 Becki L. Ross was great since being together provided us some measure of comfort and a setting in which to politically organize. I bet the police and legislators never banked on us mobilizing forces in their dingy jail.” (Interview, 2008) Post-Injunction Dissolution of Community In 1981 in downtown Vancouver, a small group of sex workers formed the Alliance for the Safety of Prostitutes (ASP). At meetings, members plotted consciousness-raising events, sit-ins, a newsletter, The Whorganizer, bad trick sheets, and street demonstrations in the West End, and to City Hall (Arrington, 1987: 104–8). Ironically, noted Jamie Lee, as “activist hos” took risks to establish a vocal presence publicly, a review of 320 newspaper articles on prostitution in the Vancouver Sun (from 1978 to 1983) reveals that journalists rarely sought the expertise of sex workers (see Lowman 1984: 79–84). Moreover, relations between sex workers and logical allies, including feminists, gays, and labour organizers, were often fraught with ambivalence, if not outright antagonism (see Gilmore, 2010). In the late 1970s and early 1980s, circles of white, middle-class women’s liberationists tended to cast female sex workers as degraded victims in need of assistance to exit the trade, rather than as “sisters” in a shared struggle (Barry, 1979; Klein, 1981).15 Moreover, as historians have documented (see Kaplan, 1996; Ross, 1995), many feminist activists were openly suspicious of the identity, intention, and politics of MTF transsexuals. In her incendiary tract, The Transsexual Empire, American feminist Janice Raymond (1994 [1979]: 30, 104) lambasted “male-to constructed female” transsexuals as men responsible for “possessing women,” “penetrating women – women’s mind, women’s space, women’s sexuality,” and “reducing the real female form to an artefact . . . by deception.” When interviewed, Jamie Lee, Raigen, and Stacey told me that they found little to no support as trannies and hookers within the second-wave women’s movement.16 In addition, they resented essentializing feminist rhetoric that reduced female prostitutes (including MTF transsexuals) to their sex acts. Differences of class, race, and gender presentation meant that prostitutes, especially trannies, were rarely integrated into a gay liberationist or feminist political agenda. In effect, the absence of an influential coalition of gender and sexual minorities gravely impeded the interests of sex workers, especially non-white transsexuals, in the street trade (see Highcrest, 1997; Namaste, 2000). In spite of the feisty efforts of “whorganizers,” on July 4, 1984 the Chief Justice of British Columbia’s Supreme Court, Allan McEachern, issued an unprecedented legal injunction that banned © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd Journal of Historical Sociology Vol. 25 No. 1 March 2012 Outdoor Brothel Culture 139 “blatant, aggressive, disorderly prostitutes” from the West End (McEachern, 1985: 110). In this ruling, McEachern reprimanded those who “defiled our city” by “taking over the streets and sidewalks for the purpose of prostitution” (Ibid., 110). In whole-hearted agreement with CROWE, the Mayor, the Chief of Police, and the province’s Attorney General, McEachern choked off all possible alternatives to immediate expulsion. Though many sex workers were residents of the West End, including Jamie Lee, Raigen, and Stacey, they were effectively disqualified from any claim to work in it, or belong to it. For transsexual sex workers, the purge was especially ironic given the history of rebellion led by working-class drag queens and trannies of colour who queered and liberated spaces such as Compton’s cafeteria in San Francisco in 1966, the Stonewall Inn in New York City in 1969, and the White Lunch cafeteria on Granville Street in downtown Vancouver in 1975.17 To Raigen, the Chief Justice’s searing indictment in 1984 destroyed the very fabric of her community: “CROWE and the Judge said that it was okay to violate prostitutes . . . And what happened right after that? More missing women, people dying, people getting stabbed like crazy . . . Today, we need to have a float in the Pride Parade with a whole bunch of coffins on the trailer.” Street-level prostitutes were bombarded by acrimonious blame with no audible overtures of empathy or interest in the social and economic conditions that made street soliciting a rational avenue for survival. Whereas transsexual sex workers were electrically alluring and desirable to some, to many others they were hypervisible objects of fear, disgust, and discrimination. In the end, the political opportunity structures necessary for street-involved sex workers to engineer legal, moral, and social challenges to the Chief Justice’s legal injunction were missing, or insufficiently formed (see Kitschelt, 1986: 61). Constituted as less than human, as “humanly unrecognizable” (Butler 2004b: 98), sex workers were unable to raise the public profile and salience of their rights on their own terms, and in the absence of profound, durable affinities (see Sanchez, 2004). While members of the prostitutes’ rights group, ASP, raised $10,000 for legal advice, the lawyers consulted did not recommend that ASP challenge the provincial injunction on the grounds that it contravened federal jurisprudence. Instead, sex workers were advised to move; McEachern’s ruling was never appealed.18 Forced to work east of Granville Street, members of ASP protested the increased violence spawned by the legal injunction by taking refuge in a West End Anglican church for four days and nights in July 1984 (Cox and Schaefer, 1984: A12). For Aboriginal women intimately familiar with decades of over-policing, incarceration, and colonial tropes of “squalid and © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd Journal of Historical Sociology Vol. 25 No. 1 March 2012 140 Becki L. Ross immoral squaws,” the expulsion was a cruel reminder of their dispossession in a white settler city (see Carter, 1997: 179–82; Mawani, 2009: 80–121). Conclusion While living, working, and playing in Vancouver’s West End, Jamie Lee, Raigen, and Stacey encountered quadruple jeopardy: as working-class, non-white, transsexual prostitutes they became vulnerable to displacement. A century earlier “innocent girls” who were deceived or abducted into the “social evil” became, in the eyes of reformers, objects of pity, rescue, and rehabilitation (Walkowitz, 1980; Rosen, 1982; Valverde, 2008). In the 1980s, while dominant anti-vice discourse no longer pin-pointed the “feeblemindedness” of the “promiscuous lower orders” (see McMaster 2008: 92), West End prostitutes were fingered as scapegoats for renewed cultural indignation and anxiety that centred squarely within a three-pronged master frame articulated by “legitimate” residents: the promotion of urban livability, the defence of property, and entitlement to respectability (see Snow and Benford, 1992). In a rapidly gentrifying gay enclave, in a city poised to host “Expo,” the World’s Fair in 1986, working girls (transsexual and non-transsexual) and male hustlers were painted in bold strokes as a cheeky, devious, public nuisance deserving of rebuke. Raigen explained that gay-bashing in the West End increased after Chief Justice McEachern’s ruling in 1984: “It was the hookers who used to keep the gay guys safe from fuckers touching them, because we’d beat the fucking crap out of them.” The visibility of “unrepentant whores,” to use Jamie Lee’s term, signalled a most unwelcome impediment to those white, statusconscious gay men in the West End who sought belonging under the neo-liberal umbrella of “lifestyle tolerance” (Ley, 1980: 239) and a reprieve from the homophobic clench of medico-moral science (Terry, 1999). Self-righteous denunciation of street-involved sex workers became premised on cleaning up the neighbourhood, which then became whitened and made safe for a new brand of normal that appeared respectably gay, law-abiding, and consumerdriven (see Knopp, 1997; Warner, 1999; Newman, 2002). Antiprostitution activists’ dreams for the West End were contingent on the consignment of “noisy hookers” to their “rightful place” (back) on the city’s racialized, working-class east side. Expulsion from a city-space founded on the colonial dislocation of Musqueam, Squamish, and Burrard First Nations was a doubly painful irony Jamie Lee, Raigen, and other Aboriginal women. © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd Journal of Historical Sociology Vol. 25 No. 1 March 2012 Outdoor Brothel Culture 141 Indeed, the subjection of transsexual prostitutes of color to neocolonial governance echoes the incarceration of Chinese men on D’Arcy Island near Vancouver in the 1920s (Mawani, 2003), the evacuation of Japanese settlers and immigrants from Vancouver in the early 1940s (Miki, 2004), and the seizure and enforced detention of Doukhobor children in the southeastern region of British Columbia in the 1950s (McLaren, 2002), as well as the myriad twentieth-century segregations and dislocations of people worldwide. In the course of Canadian nation building, which included a new Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982, there was no room for “hos and hustlers” in the patriotic march towards imperial progress. By 1985, Vancouver’s gay West End exhibited all of the characteristics of what Gordon Brent Ingram (1997: 109) calls a “queerscape”; however, it had become eerily void of sex workers. Members of the tranny trade – arguably the most rebelliously and flamboyantly queer of all – were perceived as embodiments of illegitimate queerness, as irredeemable outsiders at a time when residents and “city fathers” imagined Vancouver’s future as a “world class” city.19 Jamie Lee, Raigen, and Stacey became collateral damage in the civic war against hookers. The “victory” savoured by antiprostitution crusaders suggests an early sign of what Jasbir Puar (2007: xiii–iv) identifies, decades later, as market accommodation manifest today through multibillion-dollar industries in gay tourism, real estate, weddings, investment opportunities, and retirement. Most chilling, the anti-vice “victory” in 1984 foreshadows what Puar charts as a “rise in the targeting of queerly raced bodies for dying” in the post-9/11 age of securitization, torture, violence, neo-liberalism, the ascendency of whiteness, and citizenship privilege (Ibid., xii-xxvii). The culture of prostitution painstakingly built by trans and nontrans sex workers over a decade provided only a temporary bulwark against the inevitability of eviction. As Jamie Lee, Raigen, and Stacey explained, the residential, occupational, and affective context for their kin-based strategies of care-taking, risk assessment, safety planning, on-street communication, activism, and resource sharing, was in tatters after the injunction. And evidence of escalating violence against on-street sex workers in Vancouver and across Canada piled up after a new, tougher federal law against “communicating” was introduced in 1985 (see Brock, 2009; Lowman, 1996, 2000). When subjected to sexual assault, robbery, extortion, knifings, or beatings, transsexual sex workers, in particular, were loathe to file a formal complaint with unsympathetic authorities, nor did they expect protective custody in the prison system.20 Raigen recounted a painful memory: © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd Journal of Historical Sociology Vol. 25 No. 1 March 2012 142 Becki L. Ross “I was stabbed seventeen times for giving a guy head. This was just after being evicted from the West End when I was working Broadway Street [in Mount Pleasant]. This was the sad thing, because in the West End we’d take license plate numbers for each other, we told each other about bad dates. After the eviction, I had guns to my head. I was incarcerated with men. I was raped in jail and forced to give head to many people in jail.” Forcibly moved east after 1984 to Mount Pleasant, a working-class stroll where prostitutes had worked occasionally since 1980, Raigen, Jamie Lee, and Stacey were incessantly harangued and then chased out by a new cabal of well-resourced residents’ groups. From there, they and others were pushed further and further east to a poorly lit, isolated, industrial zone, which became Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside killing field – the site from which more than sixty-five sex workers – female, trans, and two-thirds Aboriginal – “disappeared” and were murdered (see Cameron, 2007, Matas, 2007).21 Today, all sex workers across Canada labor under the same stigma and criminal sanctions faced by Jamie Lee, Raigen, and Stacey thirty years ago (Davis and Bowen, 2007; Pivot Legal Society, 2004, 2006, Jeffrey and MacDonald, 2006).22 In Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, sex workers continue to disappear from downtown spaces; many are kidnapped and murdered (Wright, 2004). In Sweden and the United Kingdom, a new anti-prostitution punitivism mandates a spate of rehabilitation orders, “reeducation” programs, and stepped-up policing against sex workers and, increasingly, their clients (Scoular, 2004, 2010; Sanders et al., 2009; Brooks-Gordon, 2010). That three self-named tranny hookers are alive today in Vancouver to convey polyvalent memories of tenacity and hardship, ingenuity and violation, and agency and marginalization in the sex industry, is a testament to their courageous struggle against the powers of effacement. Notes I am grateful for research assistance from Jamie Lee Hamilton, Rachael Sullivan, Casson Brown, and Mandy McCrae. The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada supplied invaluable funding. Anonymous reviewers were generous with their feedback and advice. Thank you to all the narrators who have taught us their stories. Our project’s website is: www.westendsexworkhistory.com. Jamie Lee Hamilton invented the provocative concept of “outdoor brothel culture” to characterize her former stroll. 1 In 1978, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled in R v. Hutt that street solicitation must be “pressing and persistent” to constitute a crime. According to John Lowman, the police officers he interviewed in Vancouver in the early 1980s found the law ineffective for controlling on-street sex work. Half of the sample of officers (10/20) he interviewed advocated strengthening criminal law related to prostitution. See Lowman, Vancouver Field Study, 132–134, 146. © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd Journal of Historical Sociology Vol. 25 No. 1 March 2012 Outdoor Brothel Culture 143 2 Jamie Lee, Stacey, and Raigen used interchangeable terms to selfname, including tranny, transsexual, and trans woman, as well as hooker, prostitute, sex worker, working girl, whore, and ho. They often called each other queens; yet unlike most drag queens in gay culture, they did not identify as homosexual. Jamie Lee is a well-known, outspoken trans leader and anti-poverty activist in Vancouver. A non-trans ally since 1982, I have known her as a friend for over fifteen years. For four years, Jamie Lee has worked with me as a research collaborator; for our project, I have interviewed her twice. Together we interviewed Stacey and Raigen, as well as 20 other participants. For more on Jamie Lee’s youth, see Michael Harris, “The Unrepentant Whore,” 40. Today, Jamie Lee and Stacey continue to see clients occasionally; Raigen has retired from the industry. 3 For exceptions, see Pat Califia, Sex Changes, Viviane Namaste, Invisible Lives, and Sex Change, Social Change, and Ronit Leichtentritt and Bilha Davidson-Arad, “Adolescent and Young Adult Male-to-Female Transsexuals”. Namaste argues that Leon Pettiway’s portrayal of five poor, African-American MTF trans prostitutes in his book, Honey, Honey, Miss Thang, is troublingly touristic. See Namaste, Invisible Lives, 29. 4 In 1982, sex reassignment surgeries were not performed in British Columbia; surgeries were done in Toronto or Montreal, or outside of Canada. The costs of some surgeries performed out of province were covered, in principal, by the Medical Services Plan in B.C. by the spring of 1982, though never guaranteed, and only after at extensive testing at the gender clinic at the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry in Toronto, along with evidence of living in the chosen gender role for a minimum of two years. See Paul Watson, “Transsexuals: A Rough Crossing,” C1. 5 In 2009, Dr. Cameron Bowman, a specialist in gender reassignment surgery in Vancouver, was unable to secure publicly funded operating room time for more than a handful of trans clients. See Katherine Dedyna, “Growing Up Different.” 6 Trans female sex workers in the West End were unlike the majority of travesti in Salvador, Brazil, who, for decades, cross-dressed, consumed female hormones and silicone, adopted female names, and worked as prostitutes but did not self-identify as women. See Kulik, Travesti, 5–6. 7 Cut off from knowledge of two-spirits within her Aboriginal community, Raigen spoke of being banned from her reservation in Alberta, and from her grandmother’s grave, unless she “went back to being a genetic man.” On histories of two-spirits within some indigenous communities, see Jessica Hutchings and Clive Aspin, ed. Sexuality and the Stories of Indigenous People, and Will Roscoe, Changing Ones. 8 Julie Serano argues that there is no bigger perceived threat than the existence of trans women, who despite being born male and inheriting male privilege “choose” to be female instead. This, she says, casts a shadow of a doubt over the supposed supremacy of maleness and masculinity. See Serano, Whipping Girl, 15. 9 Many of Jamie Lee’s reflections are shared by Gloria Lockett, an African American sex worker. See Siobhan Brooks, “An Interview with Gloria Lockett,” 138–5. 10 Lesbians (who were not in the sex trade) were more likely to live in the Commercial Drive neighborhood of Vancouver’s east side. See Bouthillette, “Queer and Gendered Housing,” 221–2. © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd Journal of Historical Sociology Vol. 25 No. 1 March 2012 144 Becki L. Ross 11 Hired by criminologist John Lowman in 1984, Maureen St. Louis wrote that, “I overheard one conversation between a transsexual [prostitute] and a homosexual member of Shame the Johns. The hate in the resident’s voice could not be disguised.” Cited in Lowman, Vancouver Field Study, 296. Later in the Study, Lowman writes that “A policeman told four transsexuals in front of one of our research assistants, ‘I wish I could kill you’,” 310. 12 Interviewed in 1984, Gordon Price – the gay leader of CROWE – indicated that gay men made up a significant percentage of the membership of CROWE and Shame the Johns. See Fairclough, “The Gay Community,” 100. 13 Susan Stryker notes that transgender women who were arrested for working the streets of San Francisco in the 1960s were often placed in the men’s jail where they were vulnerable to assault, rape, and murder. See Transgender History, 67. Numerous trans prostitutes of colour have been murdered in the United States, including Venus Xtravaganza in 1988, Marsha P. Johnson in 1992, and Gwen Araujo in 2002. Also, trans sex workers in Tijuana, Mexico and Salvador, Brazil experience constant physical and emotional violence while selling sex in the street. See Infante et al., Sex Work in Mexico and Kulick, Travesti. In Vancouver, trans activism began in 1993 when the High Risk Project developed services for trans street workers in the city’s East End. See barbara findlay [sic], “An Introduction to Transgender Women.” 14 The anti-soliciting by-law was first introduced in Calgary, Alberta, and then in Vancouver, in 1982. The Calgary by-law was ruled to be ultra vires of federal jurisdiction by the Supreme Court of Canada (R v. Westendorp) in 1983; after this ruling, the Vancouver by-law was abandoned. 15 Important Canadian exceptions from the period include the film, Hookers on Davie by Holly Dale and Janis Cole, and Laurie Bell’s anthology, Good Girls/Bad Girls. 16 For thoughtful reflections on trans-inclusive feminism, see Krista Scott-Dixon’s anthology, Trans/Forming Feminisms, and Patricia Elliot’s recent book, Debates in Transgender, Queer, and Feminist Theory. 17 See the documentary by Victor Silverman and Susan Stryker, Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton’s Cafeteria. More research is needed to uncover what Jamie Lee terms the “White Lunch uprising” on Vancouver’s Granville Street. 18 Via personal correspondence, 19 May 2011, John Lowman told me that he believes that ASP would have defeated the Chief Justice’s injunction had they been advised to use previously successful arguments against municipal by-laws as ultra vires of federal jurisdiction. He explained that the legal advice given to ASP was “awful.” 19 The transsexual sex workers I interviewed understood their queerness as linked to their gender-transgressive personae as trans hookers and professional drag performers. 20 Viviane Namaste argues that, “For every Brandon Teena, there are a thousand TS/TV prostitutes who were raped, stabbed, shot, strangled, beaten to death, burned alive, without ever having a single book, documentary, or fiction film produced about them.” See Namaste, Sex Change, Social Change, 93. 21 In 2007, Robert (Willie) Pickton, a farmer from Coquitlam, British Columbia, was convicted of murdering six women (of the twenty-six women he was charged with murdering). © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd Journal of Historical Sociology Vol. 25 No. 1 March 2012 Outdoor Brothel Culture 145 22 Widely viewed as a major victory by all advocates of decriminalization, Ontario Superior Justice Susan Himel ruled on September 28, 2010, that three laws concerning prostitution in Canada’s Criminal Code were unconstitutional. 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