62. Vancouver Vice: Crime and Spectacle in the City's West End by Aaron Chapman

My wife picked this one up while we were in Vancouver.  She went to film school with the author who seems to have become a succesful "alternative" journalist, with several books on Vancouver history.  I was about halfway through the 900 page tome on Iranian history and picked this one up at first just to check it out, but it was so readable and interesting that I ended up reading the entire book overnight.

Vancouver Vice is the history of the West End of Vancouver in the late '70s and early '80s, specifically the development of the gay community there and the sex trade that flourished during that time.  We moved to Vancouver Island in 1980 and I didn't really become conscious of Vancouver until a few years later, so I missed the peak of this period, though certainly saw the seediness and crime on Davies and Granville in my teenage years.  My grandfather lived in the West End  and he and his brother who lived with him must have seen all of this.

The book is well-written, very easy and entertaining to read.  It is also thoroughly researched.  Much of the history is now lost, or at least not easily accessible or even part of the common knowledge of the region. Vancouver has a long history of its culture of stiff gentility trying to stifle its pockets of extreme vice.  Today, the really bad neighbourhoods are down on the east side and characterized by homelessness, mental health issues and addiction.  This book captures a time that would probably seem even more shocking to today's younger Vancouverites, where open prostitution of both sexes lined the streets of the West End.  The barriers and blocked streets that make it such a pain in the ass to drive were pu there not to help bikes and make calmer streets for the residences but to make it hard for Johns to drive and solicit sex workers.

Vancouver Vice is framed by a body being found in the trunk of a car left abandoned in Stanley Park.  We then get background on the establishment of the West End as a safe space for gay men, a look into the hot clubs and establishments and interviews with cops and locals as well as some sex workers who were there at the time.  The treatment of the police is quite interesting, they are portrayed in a favourable light and seem like decent guys who had a kind of rock and roll job.  I'm not sure the people they busted for hooking up in the English Bay bathrooms or for buying or selling weed (both activities now legal) felt about them.  Their motivation, they say, was really to go after the abusers and people who preyed on underage kids.

Ultimately, the laws of the time reflected the will of the general public but were also limited by the power elite of the province.  The only name we get is the successful founder of the U-Frame it business, but there is a lot of evidence suggesting many other wealthy and powerful people were participating in sex and drug parties with underage sex workers, who had been exploited by the lower level criminals, particularly the scary Wayne Harris. 

You can buy the book here.