CLUB OPERATOR SENDS PRIVATE EYE TO SPY ON SEX PARTY HELD BY RIVAL
• The manager of a prominent Vancouver gay nightclub admits he hired private investigators to infiltrate a crowded sex party organized by a rival and leaked their findings — including shadowy images of participants — to a local newspaper, in an attempt to publicize what he says is an “inconsistent enforcement of liquor regulations and capacity laws in the city.”
Bijan Ahmadian runs the Odyssey nightclub, which is bankrolled by media-shy entrepreneur Peter Allard, son of the late, legendary media magnate Charles “Doc” Allard. The pair reopened the Odyssey this year, after the club’s original premises were torn down.
Business at their new location was good, until the Vancouver Arts and Leisure Society (VAL) began hosting “no-holes-barred” sex parties at informal venues, under the auspices of a new city of Vancouver “arts events licence” program.
The initiative is supposed to help artists in Vancouver “host ‘pop up’ performances in industrial and retail spaces,” according to city staff.
But the program does not require licence holders to showcase any art. In fact, there is no mention of “art” in any of the city’s new program requirements.
Club operators, including Ahmadian, claim VAL is ignoring the program’s intended — if vaguely worded — purpose. It eschews art for wild, booze-fuelled events, where paying customers are encouraged to have sex with each other. VAL has hosted 42 events since 2014, the city says, and obtains temporary liquor licences from the province.
This year, city and provincial liquor inspectors met Matt Troy, VAL’s executive director, after concerns were raised about one of the parties. Troy said afterward an inspector claimed to have seen “a female being tied up and receiving digital penetration from a male.”
A recent VAL event, called SPANK, was billed as a “scissor bang-of-aparty combining the best of both worlds for a no-holes-barred gay, straight, kinky mess of fun, pleasure and pain,” with “fetish-attire-only sex positive inner sanctum” spaces provided.
Ahmadian, a young lawyer, took his concerns to the city, arguing the “arts events licence” program was being exploited and as a result, legitimate, fully licensed gay nightclubs were losing business.
The arguments failed to sway city authorities, so he hired private sleuths to infiltrate a VAL party held on Oct. 30. Three weeks later, images the investigators recorded at the event were published in The Province newspaper, under the headline “Did Party Go Too Far?”
The private investigators claimed they “observed smoking, drug use, a variety of sexual acts and alcoholic drinks being over-served,” according to the newspaper, which agreed not to identify the person who hired the investigators.
Ahmadian acknowledges it was him, and he shared the investigation results with the press.
In an email exchange this week with the National Post, he wrote the “private investigation was commissioned and paid for by the Odyssey ... I am solely responsible and in control of all of the company’s decisions.
“My intent was to illustrate how liquor regulations are inconsistently enforced and therefore discriminatory against businesses that play by the rules,” he continued.
“I hoped that exposing the overcrowding in the warehouse could bring attention to BC’s archaic capacity laws, which need to be reviewed and overhauled ... I apologize for any negative impact to my staff, our artists, and the LGBTQ+ community.”
Troy declined to be interviewed. But VAL published a lengthy riposte in the gay news website Xtra, claiming “the current media firestorm” ignited by Ahmadian “is an attack on alternative, artist-run event spaces (and) on the morality of gay men, gay culture and queer events.”
“That’s B.S.,” says one veteran of Vancouver’s gay nightclub scene, who, fearing reprisal, asked to remain anonymous. The issue is not about attacks on gays or artists. It’s about rivalries and competition between club owners and people using loopholes to hold giant parties, where booze is sold and sex is encouraged. It’s a fight “that was festering way before that (newspaper) story,” he adds.
He paid $40 to attend VAL’s Oct. 30 party, and says the account published by The Province is accurate. The place was packed with about 300 people, well above the stated capacity. Booze flowed, drugs were consumed and people had sex in designated areas.
Lineups for washrooms were so long and slow he was forced to urinate in a cup, which he left near the dance floor. As for art, he says, there wasn’t any, unless the giant papiermâché penises mounted on walls were considered art.
None of it really surprised him. These days, he says, almost anything goes, with city officials looking the other way unless things really get out of hand.
“Everyone is trying to ride the edge, to see what they can get away with,” he says. “And that edge is getting sharper.”