Image Credit: How I got My Queer Back

Heritage as a concept has been increasingly questioned in recent years as we have become more aware of who has historically been given the right to claim “heritage” and the imbalance in who has power to advocate for the form of heritage important to them. Only recently have government institutions such as Parks Canada, guided by the mandate to “protect and present nationally significant examples of Canada’s natural and cultural heritage,” begun foregrounding discussions on recognizing the ways in which certain histories, places, and peoples have been marginalized, rendered invisible, or forgotten.

When asked to share what queer identity looks like in (Metro) Vancouver, many participants commiserated upon shared stories of the people around them having viscerally negative reactions to queerness, especially coming from their own parents responding with disappointment, sadness, or anger. Indeed, queerness has often been conceptualized as not only a mental illness, but a physical one: some sort of infectious disease to be quarantined and evacuated from: “The gay is catching.” In fact earlier on during the HIV/AIDS epidemic, because these infections seemed to target gay men, the illness was originally given the official name “Gay Related Immune Deficiency (GRID),” further reinforcing and institutionalizing this pernicious misconception. The disease was only renamed in 1982 by the American Center for Disease Control as “Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS)”.

In 1998, Vancouver had the largest HIV outbreak in North America. Throughout the 80s and 90s, Vancouver saw two large increases in the prevalence of HIV. In the 1980s, when the AIDS epidemic first hit North America, HIV was most prevalent among men who have sex with men. In the 1990s, the virus spiked again among people who use injection drugs and sex workers on the Downtown East Side. Vancouver’s AIDS epidemic victimized these two populations. During the epidemic in the 1980s and 90s, B.C. had the highest rate of HIV infection in Canada for its population size. In the early 2000s, HIV rates were six times more prevalent in Vancouver than they were in the rest of Canada.

For older participants, particularly those who lived through the HIV/AIDS epidemic as adults and the decades of discrimination both preceding and succeeding, highlighted the ability to connect over the “shitty, awful experiences” and developing community that way as a key part of what defines queer heritage. One participant, when thinking back to the film and how it was made in 2001/2002, and the two and a half decades since, reflects on how they are surprised they are still alive and were able to “figure everything out for [themselves]”–from finding community to dating. The most important part of “queer heritage,” many participants agreed, has been empathy: nurturing it within ourselves and others. 

Queer history–as an accumulation of voices, perspectives, and experiences often oppressed by Canada’s ongoing “legacies of colonialism, patriarchy, and racism” (Parks Canada)–is now often represented by what JP Catungal named during the panel event, moments of the “spectacular.” What is usually represented in popular culture or mainstream media are the big protests, marches, memorials–often stitched together as a linear narrative of progress. However, participants all generally agreed that there seems to be a shift in the current cultural moment towards more conservative policymaking and sentiment, particularly against queer and trans rights. 

It is in the everyday that we can perceive most clearly that there has never been a straightforward, linear progress towards more open-minded, progressive ideas around gender and sexuality. JP further shared that it is also in the everyday “smaller, tender moments” where queer heritage is constantly made, shaped, and practiced. 

Image Credit: How I got My Queer Back

So, where are the spaces in which these smaller, tender moments are made possible? Rather than being relegated solely into the hidden, clandestine, or private, participants emphasized a need for queer, accessible spaces. Perhaps even more pressing than defining “queer heritage,” is a need to sustain it.  

Especially for a city such as Vancouver, infamous for its high cost of living and housing crisis, has forced a migration out of historically queer communities in the West End, as spaces of gathering, living, and thriving have been destroyed and gentrified. Participants spoke fondly of old bars like the Odyssey Nightclub and Dufferin Hotel, that were critical in holding, cultivating, and celebrating those otherwise clandestine moments of queer intimacies and joy – that now only exist in memory. While there are indications that Vancouver seems to be working towards being more inclusive of its 2SLBTQIA+ community through both symbolic gestures of representation (e.g., rainbow sidewalks, flying rainbow flags at City Hall) and movement towards more meaningful changes (e.g., creating consultation groups such as the Trans and Gender-Variant Inclusion Working Group in 2013 and the extant 2SLGBTQ+ Advisory Committee)–how can people continue to live and survive in cities as it becomes increasingly made unaffordable? What kinds of infrastructure is needed to maintain and sustain queer spaces? How can we nurture a sense of empathy within the spaces we occupy? 

Image Credit: Thomas Williams

Urban spaces have often been shaped through resilience and resistance, into safe havens for queer folks to commune and support one another. Thinking about the role Little Sister’s played and continues to play in the community, participants also reflected on the importance of physical spaces. One participant shared that they didn’t have any prior knowledge about queer culture in Vancouver before hearing about Little Sister’s, learning of its role as a bookstore and hub for the LGBTQIA+ community, and the changing forms of queer gathering both online and offline: “You are not going to hear about Vancouver queer history when you are online … the communities [online] are mostly global.” Discussions unfolded around what places are seen as deserving of a plaque, what history has been erased, and what still remains visible despite development and gentrification–in physical markers like rainbow flags that look like they have stood the test of time, or stories shared by those who continue to carry important cultural memory of past spaces, intimate and everywhere. 

Image Credit: Robert Clark

In our discussion groups, there was a mix of newcomers to Canada, transplants from other cities, visitors, folks who grew up in Vancouver, or have lived here for a long time. As participants traded stories, one noted how it was interesting to reflect on physical location and local history, and the city, for example: the West End Sex Workers Memorial, the AIDS ward in St. Paul’s hospital, the former bath house on Second Beach that used to be open in the 80s, Joe’s Cafe on the Drive. While these places may no longer exist, “There are places all over. The more I know about the history of queerness in the city, the more I see it.” 

Other participants shared their perspectives as immigrants and experiences of tensions between queer identity and immigrant identity. One participant shared: “I feel [as] an immigrant family, we should be open to cultural exchange, but what I see my parents are being fed is dislike for other immigrant communities.” The circulation of misinformation and language barriers can often feed into a fear. Together, folks talked through how a lot of contemporary North American politics seems to be driven by moral panic, fearmongering, and “truth decay,” especially targeting trans people (sometimes even within the queer community). 

Another participant shared the unconscious bias they sometimes carry against their diasporic community, having experienced homophobia and transphobia within their previous cultural context. They reflected on both the emotional labor required of needing to be the one to extend an invitation to communicate and understand one another, as well as the empathy that invitation can generate. On the other hand, they also came to realize that despite Canada’s overall reputation as being more progressive in some ways than a lot of other places, there are still many other histories and forms of discrimination that need to be brought to light and redressed. We can think of Canada’s very recent history of residential schools, rising xenophobia, Islamophobia, amongst countless other issues. They expressed how, “When I first came to Canada, I felt that everything is accepted and supported, but when I lived longer here, I realized that it was bad in a different way.” 

Within these stories, participants discussed how queerness, being open to other cultures, housing affordability, and environmentalism–all these topics are intimately related. As anti-LGBTQIA+ violence seems to be rising in Canada and worldwide and life feels increasingly precarious in Vancouver, the desire and need to “make history” through creating new spaces to hold one another, make memories together, and learn from each other becomes more and more potent.

For many living in Vancouver in the 1980s and 90s, Little Sister’s played that role. Through the materials curated by Jim Deva, Bruce Smyth, Don Wilson, and others, community members were exposed to everyday objects, ideas, and vocabularies of “queerness.” And even from just the diversity of the people involved in the making of “How I Got My Queer Back,” we can see how Little Sister’s became a place where folks from all different perspectives and backgrounds gathered. Within the bookstore, the embodied experience of being queer was encouraged and celebrated–and the event space itself turned into an extension of this energy. As one of the people featured in the short film noted during the panel: “We are not a phenomenon… We are history, we are making history just by sitting here today. It is such a bigger project.”

How can we continue to preserve, commemorate, and pass on this heritage?

Learn more

• “Queer-What-You-Can: Queer community organizing in a gentrifying East Vancouver” (Alexandra Toland, MA Thesis, SFU Urban Studies).
• “Routes to Roots: Building a community in Vancouver with LGBTQ newcomers and refugees” (Program led by Danny Ramadan with Qmunity, drop-ins for LGBTQ newcomers and refugees)
• “‘Undone: A Newcomer’s Story’ Had a Tragic End. We Asked How Things Could Have Been Different” (Katie Hyslop, 2 August 2019, The Tyee)
• “Gender is not an ideology – but conservative groups know learning about it empowers people to think for themselves” (Victoria Pitts-Taylor and Elizabeth Anne Wood, 21 October 2025, The Conversation)
• “The collective trauma of HIV/AIDS and contemporary constructions of health: Older gay men’s perspectives” (Ingrid Handlovsky, et. al.; 2024, SSM – Qualitative Research in Health)
• “GL vs. BT: The Archaeology of Biphobia and Transphobia Within the U.S. Gay and Lesbian Community” (Jillian Todd Weiss in Bisexuality and Transgenderism, 2004)