Pride’s history in Vancouver’s West End

The Vancouver Pride Parade will take place on Sunday with a longer, more accessible route that spreads across multiple neighbourhoods.

It will mark the first time the parade will venture outside the city’s West End, which has long been a haven for the 2SLGBTQIA+ community dating back decades.

But what made the area within Burrard, Robson, Davie, and Denman streets become that safe space?

Read More: Vancouver kicks off Pride Week

Vancouver historian Michael Kluckner draws it back to the 1950s and 60s, when more single working women began populating newly built high-rise apartment buildings in the neighbourhood.

“Put all these things together and then along comes a different group of people … single gay men who were moving in there and it was tailor-made for them,” he told CityNews.

One of those men was Gordon Price, who moved to the West End from Victoria in the late 1970s. Before he was elected as a Vancouver city councillor in 1986, he took part in some of the earliest Pride demonstrations.

“It was a small, not so much a protest, but a statement,” he told CityNews. “I think it was initially treated with some amusement. But then people said, ‘Hey, this is fun.'”

The former politician says the timing of the neighbourhood’s revitalization through new apartment builds coincided with the Baby Boomer generation populating the city as young adults.

Former Vancouver city councillor, Gordon Price in a headshot from 2000. (City of Vancouver Archives)

“There were a lot of guys like me and when we kind of all showed up here, it felt liberating to just be walking down the street,” Price explained.

“You didn’t feel like it was a neighbourhood of anybody else’s, and it could be yours.”

Price points out the West End had a lot in common with other notable “gaybourhoods” in North America at the time.

“It’s close to the downtown core, lots of service jobs. It had, at that time, affordable one- and two-bedroom apartments,” he noted.

Price says when he was visiting the West End before moving there, he witnessed a softball game being played between a group of gay men and police officers.

“I thought, ‘Wow, where would that happen? Except maybe in a place like Vancouver. I like this town.’ And a few years later, I moved about a block away,” he recalled.

In the 1980s, while Gordon Campbell was mayor of Vancouver, Price became the first openly gay councillor in the city’s history — also one of the first elected officials in Canada to be publicly out.

“The first question that was asked is, ‘Do you think it’s going to be an issue?’ And I said I thought not and that was it. That question, no other, we moved on, it never really came up,” he said. “It was never really a controversial issue.”

The Yaletown Roundhouse Community Centre, where there will be Pride festivities set up along the parade route this year. (Greg Bowman, CityNews)

With this year’s Vancouver Pride Parade route taking the event into different neighbourhoods, Price says he welcomes the change.

“I think this is a great thing. It’s no longer just going to be Denman and Beach,” he said. “It will be able to set up and involve more people, do more things, and have more of a presence.”

The parade will take place on Aug. 6 at 12 p.m., beginning in English Bay and ending at Concord Community Park.