When We Were Young

A photographer’s journey into Vancouver’s excellent ’80s club scene.

we made many incredible discoveries searching through 50 years of Vancouver magazine’s archives, and one such delight was artist Oraf’s photographs of an early ’90s Graceland, the epic nightclub that’s synonymous with peak Vancouver for many club kids. In fact, Oraf spent the ’80s and early ’90s archiving Vancouver’s social life, including spending all of one year—1981—with the larger-than-life Oliv, in the gay bars of the city. “There were 12 gay bars in the West End in 1980,” he says. “It was the gay ghetto.”

He considers himself an artist first, photographer second. “I still don’t know what kind of camera Ihave,” he says. “I never look through it when I’m taking the shot.”

Most of the photos here were taken during that year with Oliv, in her run-up to being named Empress of Vancouver at the annual Coronation Ball—a tradition that still exists some 36 years later. As Oraf shares, it’s a glimpse into a time before the party ended: when the AIDS crisis was still arumour, and optimism reigned.

First Pride Parade, 1981, Nelson Park “We’d started to hear that people were dying in San Francisco from something called GRID, and you got it by inhaling the fog machine on the dance floor. This was the last party. Truly. There was real optimism then.”

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The artist Oraf in 1981.