Jamie Lee Hamilton had spirit and moxie. She was innovative,
generous, funny, fierce and opinionated, and her death represents a
great loss for Vancouver.
Those were among the words friends had
for Hamilton, a longtime advocate for transgender and sex workers who
died Monday at age 64.
David C. Jones, a Vancouver entertainer and
writer, last saw Hamilton on Saturday, when she was baptized. He and a
group of Hamilton’s other friends had filled her room at the Cottage
Hospice, where she had been receiving care since Dec. 9, to sing Amazing
Grace.
Hamilton was very weak that day and she could only speak
in single words at a time rather than full sentences. What Jones told
her then serves as a last goodbye between the two friends.
“I said you are an amazing person and you have done so much for the city and for me, and you’re a great friend and I love you.”
Contrast that with their first interaction, when Hamilton publicly
criticized Jones over a stance he held on an issue. Hamilton held strong
opinions, but she also had the ability to separate people from actions
with which she disagreed. The two eventually became close friends, so
close even that she allowed him to buy a trio of her outfits for use in a
panto of Rumpelstiltskin.
Hamilton began to transition in 1969 so
that she could live in the world as a woman, as friend Becki Ross put
it, and she started to work in the sex industry as a teenager.
Ross, a sociology professor at the University of B.C., has known and
worked with Hamilton since the mid-1990s, when she ran for Vancouver
city council. It was the first of several political campaigns for
Hamilton, who also ran for Vancouver park board and school board.
Hamilton
was among the first to sound the alarm that a serial killer was preying
on sex workers in Vancouver. She protested police inaction in 1998 when
she dumped 67 pairs of stilettos on the steps of Vancouver City Hall to
raise awareness about missing women.
“There were some individual
police officers who were sympathetic,” Hamilton said of that period.
“But the political opinion of the police department was obscene: That
[the missing women] may have moved away and there was no proof of a
serial killer.”
Hamilton established and operated Grandma’s House
on Pandora Street as a safe haven in the Downtown Eastside for sex
workers. But it was closed as a “common bawdy house” by police in 2000.
“That
wasn’t the sole purpose of the house,” Hamilton told The Vancouver Sun
that year, adding that it was also a refuge where prostitutes could get a
meal, clothing and access to street nurses. “Obviously, the police have
a different take on that.”
Robert Pickton was arrested two years
later and charged with 27 counts of first-degree murder of women who had
disappeared from the Downtown Eastside. He
ultimately confided that he had killed 49 and he was convicted in 2007 of six counts of murder.
In 2016, Hamilton and Ross co-founded Canada’s first sex work
memorial outside St. Paul’s Anglican Church, at the West End
intersection of Jervis and Pendrell streets. The memorial, a retro
lamp-post with a red bulb, honours sex workers in the neighbourhood who
were forced out by city hall, police and the provincial government in
the 1980s. Hamilton was among those who had been violently expelled from
the area, Ross said.
Hamilton fought every day for decades for
the decriminalization of sex work, and she spoke as a guest lecturer at
UBC, the University of Victoria, Simon Fraser University, Capilano
University and Douglas College, Ross said.
Hamilton returned earlier this year to the West End to live before she entered the hospice in early December.
Ross last saw her friend on Dec. 12, when she was still in high spirits.
“I
just did not know, and I don’t think anyone did, how compromised her
body was, and how she just wouldn’t survive this, because she’d survived
everything else,” Ross said through tears.
“To me, she was just
always so fierce and undaunted and unflagging in her drive to live and
to snatch every bit of meaning and pleasure and everything worthwhile
out of life that she could.”
mrobinson@postmedia.com
sbrown@postmedia.com
(c) 2019 Vancouver Sun
Postscript: Jamie Lee was a fierce defender of the independence of the Park Board and an advocate for neighbourhood services. She ran many times for Park Board Commissioner and will always be remembered as 'Queen of the Parks'. My condolences to JLHs family of friends. She will be missed and remembered. Stuart Mackinnon
