Our Pride Parade, then and now
Vancouver celebrates its LGBTQ+ community as it goes through ‘a Renaissance right now’
When the 2018 Vancouver Pride Parade kicks off on Sunday at 11 a.m., many parties that started long before will still be going strong.
Pride week packs in a plethora of varied entertainment designed to celebrate the LGBTQ+ community style. Events take place all over town, but the focus remains on the area of the West End known as the Davie Village.
A fixture on the scene there is Celebrities Nightclub at 1022 Davie.
Almost like a lighthouse to guide revellers into the ’hood, the cavernous club has played a pivotal role in Pride celebrations and as a year-round hub. For Pride 2018, the venue is presenting the biggest lineup in its history with luminaries ranging from Chicago DJ Felix Da Housecat to Grease, the Musical Drag Show Remix curated by Alma Bitches (Aug. 3) and more.
“There’s no sleep before Pride and no sleep during,
especially at Celebrities,” says marketing director Jason Sulyma. “This space has been the Retinal Circus, where the Velvet Underground and others played, and then it was the Capital Ballroom and it reopened in the early ’80s as a gay event space and it’s become more of an ally/mixed space now.”
The debate about venues shifting their focus is one that goes on, but talking to Sulyma and others about the changing face of the gay club scene is, in many ways, discussing the changes to the entire downtown entertainment scene. In the past, there were far more venues with quite distinct focus spread all across the downtown core. These days, it’s largely limited to a few blocks of the Davie Village and the Granville strip, with closures more common than openings. Two of the gay scene’s most storied spaces — 23 West and the Odyssey — closed before this year’s Pride.
DeDe Drew was an active drag performer in the ’80s who went on to big time work in Atlantic City and elsewhere. He says the shrinking and centralization is the product of a pretty obvious reality in Vancouver.
“What happened was land value, most of the clubs that were around are now condos,” said Drew. “Everything was quite spread out back in the day and we were always cabbing around to Yaletown, Pender street or Richards and those buildings have all been torn down. We all tend to romanticize those times, because a community that struggles tends to come together very tightly out of necessity and, perhaps, there is far less need for that now.”
The difference in the landscape in terms of acceptance and safety for members of the LGBTQ+ community today versus the busy ’80s is something all persons interviewed for this story commented on. Simply put, there is less need to have specific spaces when you can be yourself in almost all spaces. That doesn’t take away from the reasons for Pride.
“Pride is one part celebration, one part protest and a lot of performing, it’s easily the busiest time of the year for a drag artist like me,” said Alma Bitches. “I’ve got something like 12 shows, with multiple gigs on top of my regular ones such as Sunday night at 1181 Lounge. I’ve been out for 15 years of my life, and that was a time where we had Pumpjacks, the Dufferin, the Junction and the Cobalt, but I hear stories about 20 years ago when there would be ten drag shows going on the same night and you would be on the move all the time.”
What happens when that movement becomes more centralized is evident in Celebrities programming for Pride. You get more variety in one space, with its multiple spaces and an early/late/later split for show times.
“We’ve made sure that each day is curated and gone for some early entertainment that’s not typically in the city, as well as keeping our dancing loft lively with legends into the late night,” said Sulyma. “We have things like Asian-American comedian, Joel Kim Booster (Aug. 2), who has been on Conan a few times, and it’s unique to bring in out of town entertainers. We also work with the great local community promoters like Ruff Black, who does weekly events, who is putting on our bear party with two buzz-worthy DJs, including Seattle’s King of Pants, who are cultural artists you may not know the name of but should.”
New content is always a draw, but the classics are blowing up like never before too.
The success of programs such as RuPaul’s Drag Race has elevated what was already a mainstay entertainment into one that you can catch almost every night of the week. It’s keeping performers like Alma Bitches busy.
“I don’t want to call it the Golden Age of drag, but Vancouver is having a Renaissance right now, with shows going each night of the week and some days more than one,” said Bitches.
“It’s a small, young city, but we have had an active drag community going for a really long time. I’m part of the 47th reign of the Dogwood Monarchist Society which is a local registered non-profit that has been raising money for charities for 47 years, which means we had an active scene before that.”
One that everyone should take pride in all year long.