ne day in the deep end of winter, 1998, it rained on Vancouver’s City Hall. It rained on the 6.9 Mercedes that pulled up to the entrance a little before noon. It rained on Jamie Lee Hamilton’s good swing coat as she emerged from the car and lugged out four bulging garbage bags. It rained on the fourteen media crews that watched her carry the bags up the steps, hair plastered to her face. It rained on all of them as she dumped sixty-seven pairs of stilettos at the city’s feet — one for every woman who she believed had gone missing from the Downtown Eastside.

Nobody knew that this was the start of the largest serial killer case in Canada’s history; nor that Robert Pickton was still, then, taking women back to his pig farm on the outskirts of the city to mutilate and murder them; nor that, more than a decade later, in 2009, a constitutional appeal would argue that our country had systematically imperilled the lives of these women with brutal laws that forced them to work in untenable conditions. All Hamilton knew was that women — sex workers — were disappearing and nothing was being done.

If missing women are silenced women, Hamilton has made it her mission to be fully present and accounted for. An aboriginal, transsexual sex worker from one of the country’s poorest neighbourhoods, she’s a kind of activist polyglot, able to speak with whatever voice best suits the situation. She presents as insistently at ease, adding “dear” and “honey” to her sentences like dollops of crème fraîche. Still, mention her name, and journalists, politicos, and armchair commentators turtle in their heads with alternating fear and exasperation: she’s infamous for her public and embarrassing arguments with anyone who crosses her. (Even one of her fiercest supporters told me, “You’d be safer writing a profile of a Mafia don.”)

Perhaps that’s why her letters requesting a meeting with the mayor had been ignored, leaving her no choice but to show up at City Hall in person — and her person can be as intimidating as her reputation. Her face is hearty and galvanized with energy, the strength of her shoulders set off against plunging necklines. When Mayor Philip Owen emerged, she picked up a red sequined stiletto to present to him, thinking she could ask for a meeting in front of rolling cameras. Owen bolted.

Following this initial embarrassment, she pitched a tent on the lawn of City Hall and slept there until, a few days later, it went missing. When she reported the theft from a phone inside the building, the police asked, “Do you have any suspects?” Yes, she said in her gravelly voice: Mayor Philip Owen. City Hall gave her back the tent. But still no meeting.

Her final stand was soon afterward, on February 3, when she walked into a council meeting (having neglected to proceed through the required channels) and demanded an audience. The room emptied. But she stood at the mike for hours, anyway, waiting for a response. Once the media caught a whiff of “Crazy Shoe Lady, Part Three,” city manager Ken Dobell delivered the news: “Okay, you’ve got your meeting.”

“You’re just the top city bureaucrat,” returned Hamilton. “You get the mayor in his seat, on-camera, telling me I’ve got a meeting.” So Owen did, and the struggle of sexual outliers had a new poster child.

n 1969, while a team of drag queens and friends rioted against police at New York’s Stonewall Inn, sparking the North American gay rights movement, Jimmy Hamilton was a confused thirteen-year-old living in a Downtown Eastside housing project. His father — a union man who had worked at a foundry until silicosis of the lungs forced him into part-time work as a janitor at a burger joint — was furious that his son had turned out to be a “sissy.” His mother, the revered aboriginal rights activist Alice Hamilton, took him to the REACH Community Health Centre, where a doctor asked Jimmy, “Do you think you’re homosexual?” 

Blink. “What do you mean?”

“Well,” he said, searching for some delicate definition, “do you feel like a girl?”

“Oh, yes,” Jimmy said, and was sent out. His mother was called in. Fifteen minutes later, when the boy poked his head around the door again, he found her in tears.

It could have been worse. Homosexuality was legalized in Canada that year, so instead of undergoing therapeutic “cures” (the sexual equivalent of an exorcism, and about as useful) Jimmy rode the bus from his housing project out to the University of British Columbia, where his counselling sessions were videotaped for research purposes by Dr. William Maurice in a room next to a daycare for psychiatric patients. Looking around, Jimmy asked his doctor, “Am I crazy?”

“No,” said Maurice, “and don’t let anyone tell you it’s wrong.”

Jimmy became the first boy in Canada to be medically sanctioned with a female identity — not that it made any difference at school. He was called “fag,” “fairy,” and “freak” by his schoolmates; phys ed classes, where he was forced to shower with boys, were particularly painful and alien. Jimmy’s solution was simply to stop going. He had heard there was a burgeoning gay scene on the Granville strip, in particular at the White Lunch cafeteria (supposedly thus named to assure customers they didn’t use Chinese cooks). There, he met five co-conspirators, all about fifteen years old.

One of his new friends told him about turning tricks beneath the stately Birks clock at Granville and Georgia. When Jimmy hit the hot spot, a pleasant man in his fifties rolled up and offered to pay for a blow job. They did the deed in the nearby Drake Steam Baths. “Easiest money I had ever made,” Hamilton says, and growing up in the projects, easy was something money had never been before. He started hustling regularly: he could score forty bucks for oral or a hand job dressed as a boy, and double that if he was dressed as a girl.

The six friends would pool their resources and rent a room at the Palms Hotel, where they could practise applying makeup and walking in high heels; then they’d head over to the White Lunch to flirt and pick up men. Because transexual sex workers are rare, they become a coveted, precious commodity. They become, often for the first time in their lives, beloved for who they are. The manager of the White Lunch, Molly, was not such an admirer. “You girls are dressing far too slutty,” she finally spat. “You can’t come in here till you learn how to dress like proper ladies.”

The kids bridled at being ousted from the tiny space they’d carved out for themselves. They retreated to the Palms to plot their revenge. Ambushing the White Lunch dressed in even sluttier clothes — fishnet stockings, micro-miniskirts, loudest possible makeup — they lined up at the counter, reached their hands past the sneeze guard like a team of ballerinas at rehearsal, and stuck their fingers into a corresponding line of pies.

ehind any individual life looms a whorl of politics. In 1972, the vagrancy law, outlawing pretty much all street life, was deemed a relic of ancient morality and replaced with what’s called the soliciting law, which meant sex-oriented vagrants could still be shuffled along. Hunky-dory, said the police. Fine, said the residents of aspirational neighbourhoods. Then, in 1978, the Supreme Court redefined soliciting as pressing or persistent behaviour; simply saying, “Want a date?” didn’t qualify.

This proved problematic, since the murder of a twelve-year-old shoeshine boy in an apartment above a Yonge Street body rub parlour the year before had prompted raids of massage parlours in Toronto. (There had been similar campaigns in Vancouver even earlier.) Masses of sex workers were pushed onto the street. Needing a legal mechanism to shoo them, the government passed the communication law in 1985, which criminalized any communication for the purposes of prostitution in a public place (including cars).

It was the end of what Hamilton calls “the golden age of prostitution.” By night, she would dress up as Cher and perform “Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves” for audiences at a downtown Vancouver gay bar called BJs. By late night, she would join hundreds of other sex workers strolling the West End, a pimp-free “drive-in brothel” where transexuals, boys, and “fish” (biological women) could look out for one another and openly ply their trade.

Gordon Price, the director of the City Program at Simon Fraser University, was then leading CROWE (Concerned Residents of the West End) in the push to remove sex workers, and he remembers things differently. There were pimps, he says, dangerous ones, and everyone from schoolchildren to grandmothers was being solicited. Price becomes highly excitable when he discusses the past. “A new status quo, with sex workers working happily among residents, simply was not an option,” he says. “It was us or them.”

On the right side of Price’s line in the sand: the West End’s thriving gay community, which had moved with breathtaking speed toward empowerment since 1969. Fourteen years later, the gay bookstore Little Sister’s and AIDS Vancouver, two totems of political will, came to life; by 1985, the city even had a gay newspaper. Homosexuals were real citizens, and capable of pushing other minorities around. Hamilton, who’d started on hormone therapy in 1977, thereby slowly and permanently distinguishing herself from the drag queens, remembers being barred from performing at one gay bar. Sex workers, meanwhile, were seen as “vermin that had to be exterminated,” says Becki Ross, chair of the Women’s and Gender Studies Department at ubc. “They had to be removed to give people a sense they were living in a ‘contamination-free zone.’”

The pressure from residents grew to such a fever pitch that it finally resulted in a 1984 injunction by BC Supreme Court chief justice Allan McEachern; hundreds of sex workers were pushed out of the West End and, pursued by the communication law, into increasingly desolate spaces, until they were finally allowed to rest in the industrial no man’s land of the Downtown Eastside. Since it had last been Hamilton’s regular haunt, the city’s central library, an Eaton’s, and several offices had closed up shop, leaving a hole filled by deinstitutionalized psychiatric patients, whose presence encouraged a street-based drug trade, which in turn promoted theft and violent crime.