Tracing lines of horizontal hostility: How sex workers and gay activists battled for space, voice, and belonging in Vancouver, 1975–1985

Abstract

In the mid-1970s, indoor sex workers were pushed outdoors onto the streets of Vancouver’s emergent gay West End, where a small stroll had operated for several years. While some gay activists contemplated solidarity with diversely gendered and racialized sex workers, others galvanized a campaign, alongside business owners, realtors, police, city councillors, and politicians to expel prostitution from their largely white, middle-class enclave. Sex workers commanded inadequate capital to thwart the anti-vice, neo-liberal lobby. Instead, an assimilationist, homonormative gay politics played out on the backs of an even more vulnerable and stigmatized sexual minority – the majority of whom were low-income, street-involved women, men, and male-to-female (MTF) transsexuals of colour.