I first came across the poster for Lesberado Productions’ lesbian erotic show in Vancouver 1987 while searching the ArQuives collection. I was taken immediately by the woman in the illustration; her hair wild, the shades, leather bodice unzipped. However, my research to find more archival material regarding the show was a short-lived venture: I found only two brief reviews from Angles, a Vancouver-based gay and lesbian magazine.
I almost abandoned this research, thinking that I was analyzing an event that was too small to be significant. After all, it was not a protest, police raid, or any form of violent suppression against queer life. Rather, it seemed like a fun night, the type to elicit pleasure and joy. Is this why I did not see it as important? Was I giving into the idea that grief is “the proper ticket into historical consciousness” (Freeman 59)? How deeply have I held the belief that the work of pleasure was secondary to the work of grief? Audre Lorde would argue for the erotic as an “open and fearless underlining of [one’s] capacity for joy” (89). Doesn’t queer joy deserve a podium in queer history?
When considered against such a vast landscape of pain, what is one night of queer pleasure?
I assert: It’s everything.
Vancouver’s First Ever Lesbian Erotica Show
Lesberado Productions was a Seattle-based group that came to perform in Vancouver on November 14, 1987. The event was marketed as Vancouver’s first ever Lesbian Erotica Show, with Lesberado Productions performing for two sold-out crowds at the Heritage House Hotel on 455 Abbott Street. Hosting a second show that same night was an unexpected decision “made quickly in response to the sell-out of the first show in half an hour,” says the event’s promotor Jan Brown, in her post-event “Letters” entry in Angles magazine.
While the 1987 event claims to be the first instance of public, sexually explicit lesbian representation in Vancouver, I am critical of the ways in which this claim of preeminence buries the possibilities for earlier unrecorded erotic lesbian representation. Would a lesbian erotica event organized by and for Black and racialized lesbians have made it into archival history? Whose labour is erased by such a claim?
In a remarkable example of organizing, the event was run almost entirely by the Vancouver lesbian community, as Brown points out in her list of acknowledgements to the lesbians “who did security, lighting, tickets, bar, backstage, etc.” The Lesbian Erotica Show speaks to an even larger community of West Coast lesbians, the women from Seattle coming together with the Vancouver women to form a new space, even just for a night, where lesbians might gather and celebrate pleasure and eroticism.
Representation Hotly Desired
This event being the first lesbian erotic show in Vancouver is a point of interest to me. Sandra Robinson’s review of the event attends both to the productivity and limitations of the Lesbian Erotica Show in the context of representation. Based on the two reviews I found in the archive, the reaction of the crowd was mixed. There was a tension between finally receiving such hotly-desired representation, and finding that it didn’t speak to everyone’s vision of the truth.
As Robinson points out, the Lesbian Erotica Show mainly represented “those into leather, domination and heavy butch/femme fantasies.” Robinson, despite expressing some displeasure around the leather-centrism of the content, still saw the event as generative: “If dykes want to see other performances reflecting different sexual ideals, perhaps this will provide the motivation necessary to organize an alternative show.”
The Lesbian Erotica Show occurred during a time when tensions between anti-pornography feminism and sex radicalism were particularly volatile. Many who aligned with the former camp considered sexual representation as a form of violence that re-inscribed the harm of patriarchal domination, and further exploited women. Refusing this view, sex radicalism saw the potential for empowerment and resistance within sexual representation. In the 1980s, lesbians began inciting conversations about the position of lesbian eroticism within the anti-porn debates (Kiss and Tell Collective 10). Surely, a Lesbian Erotica Show’s situation among these politics was precarious. In the absence of other archived reviews from the show, I can only extrapolate that such a space enlivened the Vancouver lesbian community, galvanizing conversations about representation, the politics of lesbian sex, and the diversity of the culture.
Vancouver’s Queer Geographies: 455 Abbott Street
When Lesberado Productions came around in 1987, the Heritage House Hotel on 455 Abbott Street was already a hub for gay and lesbian events. I found several posters from the City of Vancouver Archives promoting various queer events throughout the 1980s. The chronology of 455 Abbott Street is a difficult thing to map. In both the year 1913 and the year 2020, 455 Abbott Street is home to the Lotus Hotel. At some point between that vast amount of time, the space became and ceased to be the Heritage House Hotel: a space where Vancouver queer communities gathered, danced, and fundraised for various organizing efforts. Today, the Lotus Hotel promotes itself as a place for “Vancouverites who want to live in the city’s trendiest neighbourhoods…ideally suited for anyone who wants to live the “18-hour” lifestyle of the modern urban townscape” (“About Us”). 455 Abbott Street’s role in Vancouver’s queer history has become mostly invisible, the gentrification of Vancouver’s downtown east side likely playing a large role in such a seamless erasure of history.
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Works Cited
“About Us.” The Lotus Hotel, www.lotussuites.ca/about-us/.
Freeman, Elizabeth. “Time Binds, or, Erotohistoriography.” Social Text, vol. 84-85, no. 34, 2005, pp. 57–68.
Kiss and Tell Collective. “Porn Wars and Other Hysteries.” Her Tongue on my Theory: Images, Essays and Fantasies. Vancouver, BC: Press Gang Publishers, 1994, pp. 5-26.
Lorde, Audre. Uses of the Erotic: the Erotic as Power. Kore Press, 2000.