More vice than virtue: A Q-and-A with historian, Vancouver Vice author Aaron Chapman
Posted November 28, 2021 10:33 am.
Last Updated November 28, 2021 10:35 am.
He has taken us behind the scenes at Vancouver’s Penthouse Nightclub and the fabulous Commodore Ballroom. He has revealed the secrets of the city’s nightlife in Vancouver After Dark and chronicled the rise and fall of the Clark Park Gang in The Last Gang in Town. Now, in his fifth book, author and historian Aaron Chapman zeroes in on one era in one neighbourhood with Vancouver Vice: Crime and Spectacle in the City’s West End.
John Ackermann: First off, of all the books you could write, why this one? What made you take on this era of Vancouver?
Aaron Chapman: I started to realize that that period of the history of the city, particularly in the West End, if you’ve been living in Vancouver the last 20 years or even 30 years, you might have no memory or have no idea that the West End got that turbulent in that many years. It’s kind of something that has been forgotten. If you walk around the West End today, there’s no hint that that era ever happened aside from some of the old streets that were there barricaded or have little curbs that you can’t get around that are left over from when the city tried to prevent people cruising streets or the West End Sex Workers Memorial. But there’s no hint that the neighbourhood was affected with that kind of turbulence at the time. It was a really significant thing in the city, as I remember. I was a kid when it happened. But it was interesting to look back many years later and interview some of the people that maybe haven’t been interviewed so often or are part of the story of that time.
He's taken us behind the scenes at Vancouver's Penthouse Nightclub and Commodore Ballroom, and chronicled the rise and fall of the Clark Park Gang.
This week on CityNews' Bookshelf with @jackermann, historian Aaron Chapman zeroes-in on one era of the city's West End pic.twitter.com/GPsWYntz9r— CityNews Vancouver (@CityNewsVAN) November 28, 2021
Ackermann: The subject matter ties-in quite nicely with number of your earlier books. It’s fair to say that there are pieces of almost all your earlier works in Vancouver Vice.
Chapman: A little bit. I guess maybe that’s what happens when you start to build a body of work. But, yeah, the Penthouse shows up and some nightclubs show up so perhaps that’s my own interest in some of the city’s history in those areas that worked their way in. But they all are sort of valid. It’s an interesting time with the rise of some of the gay nightclubs in town that are happening in the 1970s. It’s an interesting period where police are being tasked with this sort of work to deal with some of the street prostitution issues in the neighbourhood in a different way and in a bigger way. It’s interesting to look back at the period of this book covers because there was a Trudeau in office, Vancouverites had begun to complain that police and the city had lost control of its neighbourhoods. There was a new virus that was emerging that people maybe didn’t know everything about. It’s a bit reductive, of course, to compare AIDS to COVID, but at the same time, we talk about downtown today, some of the issues of violence or nighttime crime that’s happening, particularly in the West End. It’s more of these things, the more they change, the more they stay the same.
Ackermann: There is a great line of yours in the book that sums-up the era quite nicely. “It was as if Vancouver had decided to sow its wild oats as fast as it could — exorcise all its urban demons — before the city got together for the family photo of Expo 86.” That really seems to be the dividing line for the old, gritty frontier town Vancouver and then the shiny city of glass Vancouver that we’re more familiar with today.
Chapman: Oh, that’s very true. I think you hit it right on the head. You know, when you look back at those years, there’s a certain fondness people have for, “Oh, Vancouver was better back in the day.” I think this book (and maybe some of my other ones as well) underscore that not everything was as great back then as we’d like to think. For some, it depended on who you were or where you were living. And it’s funny when you look at some of the photos of the city, pre-Expo. As much as we have a fondness for that smaller town that we had some areas of Vancouver that looked pretty beat up. It wasn’t all that pleasant. Maybe gentrification occasionally does bring some nice things in that regard. But that whole period is some of the wildest years in Vancouver, as I suggest in the book. Not only do you have some of the issues in the West End that are happening and crime problems. For instance, in 1982, there were more homicides in the West End than there were on the Downtown Eastside. In ’81, we have the Clifford Olson murders and we have the Squamish Five shortly after that. So, these are stories that all happened within a few years. And it’s amazing that we don’t look back more and say, “Wow, what a crazy few years we had in Vancouver.”
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Ackermann: Now, the West End of 40 years ago, as you point out, is a very different place than the one we know today. There was street prostitution, both female and male, but also different attitudes about sex, drugs, and pornography than we have today. Were you struck by the difference in writing this book?
Chapman: Oh, very much so. You know, when you look back and you realize some of the things that were going on or some of the things that police were tasked to patrol or were a care of the city, you’d be hard-pressed [today] to find the issue of pornography in bookstores being an issue that the mayor would want to charge down Granville Street and lead a purge to control. We don’t even talk about that anymore. But, older residents or Vancouverites of a certain vintage will remember people like Bernice Gerard, a Pentecostal minister who was on city council. We don’t have that same sort of piety in Vancouver anymore that shakes its finger at certain things. And there were certain people, obviously, that sometimes considered those people a little bit on the outside, even a little bit of a joke. But there are a lot of Vancouverites who sided with them and believed them. So, it’s an interesting time. It’s an interesting period, as I say, to look back on and, in particular, the investigation that the police undertake, that ends up being almost a murder mystery at one point. One of the threads that I wanted to use and use the lens of how police in particular saw things, but also people in the emerging gay community as that developed, and also the nadir of the relationship between those two that was pretty tough during those years, as a way to look at not only what the city was like then but how it’s changed today.
Ackermann: As you mentioned earlier, one thing that is still in the West End from that era are the barriers and one-way streets. How did prostitution contribute to these, what we now call in urban planning language, traffic-calming measures?
Chapman: Right. It’s interesting that, this is the 40th anniversary this month, of those barricades going up. For anybody that lives in West End today, you probably don’t even notice them. They’ve turned into little parklets or sometimes little curbs that a bike can go around but a car can’t. It’s probably more frustrating for a driver or a new driver to the West End who thinks, “How come I can’t turn around some of these corners?” or “What are these things for?” When they came in in November 1981, there was a huge cry from even some of the neighbours who said, “Why do we have these barricades?” [But] if you were to suggest today to take them away, those same neighbours would complain because they’ve grown to love them in that regard. But they were ostensibly put in as traffic calming measures before, but they were announced in November 1981 to help curb the street prostitution issues, to prevent cars from going down certain corners and being able to cruise some of the clientele that were down there. If anything, it was just another thing that failed because all it did was slow traffic down for some of the street sex workers to be able to talk to their clients for a longer period of time. It’s interesting, everything we tried to do to fight street sex work in those years failed. One after another, the measures didn’t work until finally an injunction in 1984 pushed them out. And many people suggest today that injunction forced sex work only further into the shadows and victimized some of those people. It’s a circuitous route how it happened, but it’s interesting to see the flow and how things changed in those years.
Ackermann: That kind of leads me to my next question. You have the West End now on the national radar for the sex trade, you have neighbors waging these “Shame the Johns” campaigns to move it out of the neighbourhood, and then you mentioned that court injunction. Was that really the tipping point, the end of the era, right there?
Chapman: It certainly was, at least within the West End. There a lot of people who talk about [how] the day after that injunction was carried forward, you could shoot a cannon down Davie Street, there was just no traffic there. After that, it really, overnight, changed things. Now some people, depending on what side of the issue you’re on, some would say not for the better or some people would say it was finally a victory for some of the neighborhood groups that were dealing with it. Anybody that has any memory of downtown will remember some of that sex trade work went up to even up to Mount Pleasant for a while, up by Main Street there, and then it kind of came back down to Seymour Street. And then, finally, I think with the rise of condos in Yaletown and whatnot, those pushed them out. So, you know, you can fight the police, you can fight your neighborhood groups, but you can’t fight your strata. Those condos finally pushed everybody out in that regard. Nobody could fight them in the end.
Ackermann: You really can’t fight your strata, it’s true. So, what do you want people to take away from Vancouver Vice then? To me, it’s really is a place and a time that’s so foreign from the city as we know it today and yet it wasn’t all that long ago.
Chapman: That’s exactly it. You know, it’s interesting time to look back this many years later. It’s a good distance of 40 years, but it’s also not a great period of time as well. If you’re living in Vancouver or you’re living in the West End or anywhere in the city, you wouldn’t have a memory, unless you had grown up here or were living then. If you moved here 20 years ago, you would have no idea some of this happened within Vancouver and I think it’s important. It’s a part of the city’s DNA in that regard, that this is how we got here. And I get into a little bit of the history of the West End, going back to its foundation, just to see how the neighborhood changed. And very much into the late 1960s, it was this neighborhood of promise an attractive neighborhood. And within 10 years that changed a bit and then it changed again. But I think it’s interesting to look back. It’s also interesting to look back at that era of policing. Some of the things that they did, now they could not get away with, certainly not in terms of some of the surveillance. Some of the things they did was just stuff that was done and many situations some police are left to their own devices to discover that. Within that world, there were some enterprising men and women that would find a way to solve something and whatnot. But, it’s an interesting look back on so many different topics, whether it’s some of the sex work of that era, whether it’s the rise of the gay neighborhood, some of the gay clubs that were beginning to form, some of the things that were affecting Vancouver Police at the time, and everything in between. I hope readers will be entertained.
Vancouver Vice: Crime and Spectacle in the City’s West End is available from Arsenal Pulp Press. A book launch is being held on Thurs. Dec. 9 at the Penthouse Nightclub in Vancouver.
