- Banner, Richard
- Brooke, Cynthia
- Cecill, Bet
- Craik, Paul
- Guinan, Dan
- Hamilton, Jamie Lee
- Kaleta, Janis
- Kozachenko, John
Richard Banner
Around AIDS, I think I can remember that we wrote some letters to the Social Credit government at the time, in our name. Not because we actually expected a response, but just because we wanted to have it on record and see if they actually said anything, what it would be. They didn’t, but we organized a community meeting. I think it was to take sort of a model around solidarity with Palestinians, actually I think is where the idea came from, saying that we stand side-by-side with these oppressed people. And as a community we wanted to say that people with AIDS are part of our community. We’re standing with them. Probably it was a response to the quarantine legislation, or to talk about it. And I think it was a well-attended community meeting. Several hundred people came. I don’t remember this concretely, if there was anything coming out of it. I think there were follow up meetings and activities. One of the most important things that we got out of it, I think, was just making contact with other people in the community around the AIDS issues and sort of knowing who was who and where they stood, so that when the first meetings of the Coalition for Responsible Health Legislation [CRHL] were called we had some idea of who people were and how to make contact with them.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-TL0YKd-_Q?rel=0]
Cynthia Brooke
There was also, besides leather line stuff that was coming up, the other thing that came up is also about the politics of inclusion. And I think that that’s really important to talk about. ACT UP and Queer Nation by nature were inclusive. The people who were political got involved. What that looked for me at that time was a broad section of people. So, there were people of colour. We were mostly all working class. A lot of different political ideologies. At the beginning of both of those movements, because they were so closely interrelated and in the same time zone, there was room for that, there was inclusion of that. Then as things started moving on and Queer Nation became more organized. Of course, when that happens, when you put on something like an AIDS conference, the first one was really great. There was a lot of room. There was a huge amount of inclusion. There was inclusion at that conference of voices from sex trade workers, voices from people of colour, lesser so from IV drug users, but there certainly was room for that. And, then, it started shifting, right? It started getting legitimized. As soon as that started happening, the face of who was welcome at the table started changing. The same thing was happening at the Vancouver Lesbian Connection. A lot of the attacks against the Vancouver Lesbian Connection were about who’s sitting at the table. Some of that stuff was really unfounded, because the Lesbian Connection had always been everybody was not just included at the table, but there was a lot of “step back and move up” to make sure that that was happening. Nonetheless, those discussions were happening. They were happening globally in the lesbian community, in the gay men’s community, and the ally bridging communities. They were discussions that needed to be happening. I don’t think any of us handled them particularly well. And we imploded.
[youtube https://youtu.be/DoWUoMOtb3A]
Bet Cecill
You mean, “As a lesbian, why would I be doing that?” Is that the question? Well, I’m one of those weird lesbians that thinks that we’re all people, too. I’m working personally, my push is to work for a world that we all get to be in. That’s not always made me popular. So, it totally made sense to me. My organization was in this weird no-man’s-land, or no-woman’s-land, or no-person’s-land, or whatever you want to say, because there were a lot of feminists that were not too thrilled with who we are. We were women, but we were also very much queer, too, so we were in this sort of funny place. There were members who didn’t want to work with men, and that’s all right. That’s fine, you don’t want to do it, there are people who will do it. But they supported us. Our basis of unity said, “We will work with men and personal preferences will be taken into account.” We had a very broad vision of the kind of world we were trying to create. So, it totally made sense. Plus, the fact that many of us knew gay men, and many of us knew gay men who had been sick, and got sick.
[youtube https://youtu.be/_dTkwQxE8wk]
Paul Craik
Let’s see, there was the provincial government under Bill Vander Zalm, the Social Credit government. They were consistently hostile to gay rights. They consistently refused to deal with the AIDS crisis. One of the cabinet ministers would say, “What we said in the army was if you shot yourself, it was a self-inflicted wound” and that’s what their attitude was with AIDS. And then there was talk of quarantining, I think Bill Vander Zalm himself actually came out in favour of quarantining. And they brought in a law, and we discussed this in the Front for Active Gay Socialism in one of our meetings, it was the Health Statutes Amendment Act – Bill 34. And basically what it did was it dusted off provisions for quarantining people with any kind of infectious, communicable disease. But there were already provisions in the law for that. They didn’t really need to bring that up legally, because that was already in place. So, the real reason I think they brought that up was as a propaganda ploy to stir up homophobia and get support from their social conservative base. But I also think that there was a real danger of quarantine, because I think there was enough homophobia. Gay bashings were on the rise. We were beginning to see as the decade wore on bomb threats and bombings of Little Sisters bookstore several times, bomb threats. I remember walking down the street one time and Numbers was emptying out because there had been a bomb threat.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8_3HED6zLg?rel=0]
Dan Guinan
So, the Front for Active Gay Socialism – all of this stuff was happening and, I guess, it was sort of like a radical gay group and it was activism. It was also very social, but also kind of like a learning group – like, we’re learning and we’re discovering things and we’re taking about things. And so we’re dealing with issues like racism and, you know, we’re just educating ourselves and sometimes educating others. And so it was odd because we had the Angles collective, we’ve got the Front for Active Gay Socialism [FAGS], and we’ve got the AIDS organizations sort of forming. So, we were kind of a nucleus for starting different things and then people would get mad at us because we were so radical and [go] off and do something else.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPIrWiWtr60?rel=0]
Jamie Lee Hamilton
You know, a very religious man had been elected leader of the Social Credit Party, the right-wing government, Bill Vander Zalm. And he brought into the position, as the Premier, a very religious, fundamental religious doctrine. And so, based out of ignorance, or hatred they, you know, “These people are immoral. They’re spreading this disease around,” instead of treating the issue as a health issue. And so, that’s when the talk of the quarantine – of quarantining the gay men – came into play in the 80s there. It was frightening because, you know, we knew government can just create policies. They did it with the judge to mass evict us. So, we knew that was a very real threat. And so we needed to do work and be quite vigilant about that. That was slightly before ACT UP [AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power] started. It was great when ACT UP started because that took off. I think some of the actions that ACT UP engaged in were great. In my opinion, The Coalition for Responsible Health Legislation, we accomplished our goal of ensuring no quarantine. Some of our members got involved with ACT UP, and I was still involved with my trans organizing and my sex work organizing. So it was, I think, a good little group. It lasted for the period in time it needed to last for, to accomplish the goal of stopping the quarantining.
[youtube https://youtu.be/-YsX3wRJp7U]
Janis Kaleta
Right. So, my understanding was that the PWA Society and the other big AIDS organization, AIDS Vancouver, were doing tremendous work in terms of supporting people who were HIV positive and people with AIDS in advocating for them, in researching the treatment options, but they were also getting government funding to do so. There was a conscious decision that they could not engage in political activism or advocacy, and there were people within who wanted to have that avenue and who knew of ACT UP organizations in the States. And so it was those people who came out of People With AIDS Society. I was not at the first meeting, but I understand that most of the people there were from PWA. So, it seems like there was a good handful of people, like 30-something, who wanted to have an activist organization. The next meeting they had done some work in terms of reaching out to the community and saying, “Let’s start an ACT UP group.” And that’s when different groups in the community – different people from different groups – came together. I think it was in a church basement, but I’m not sure. There was, I think, at least 60 people that came out, and very diverse. There were of course people, like Kevin Robb, from the PWA Society, but there were also a lot of women – young women, young dykes – involved in the prison justice movement, radical dykes who immediately would see the appeal of something like this. There were Downtown Eastside people, I say in the sense of you know non-middle class, white gay men living with AIDS; some of them were HIV positive who came. And I think probably that connection would’ve been around Socialist Challenge’s work in those areas. Also, there were straight people, young straight people, artistic types but political – political artists. I’m not sure particularly about lesbians and dykes at the time.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bC1AklTjU0?rel=0]
John Kozachenko
Well, now we’re getting into ACT UP. We met in David Lewis’ backyard in Kitsilano, for the first meeting of ACT UP. That would’ve been in ’89. It was advertised as a public meeting as part of how to respond to the provincial government and about two hundred people showed up in his backyard and that formed the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power. The first event that we had was at Robson Square and it was a public display of art – three bodies (mummies) being wrapped in linen and being hung upside down. That was a public event; it wasn’t a protest actually. The next protest was July 24 of the Social Credit fundraiser of Les Misérables at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre. And there were lots of elements from other members in the community – not just HIV. It wasn’t just an ACT UP protest. There were First Nations people, there were anarchists, there were some Left people, and there was a little ruckus. I did a die-in right in front of the door and while Vander Zalm walked over me, I grabbed his legs with my legs and Lillian tripped over me. Five of us were arrested, included Janis Kaleta, and Ivan Coyote.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSU64M8cWqo?rel=0]