Jordan Smith had never held hands with a man in public before. But late one September night in 2008, the 27-year-old airline pilot impulsively intertwined fingers with his boyfriend, as they walked home through the city’s well-known gay neighbourhood.
Their affection lasted all of five minutes. A group of young men accosted the couple with a series of gay slurs. One of them then struck Mr. Smith from behind, sending him unconscious to the sidewalk, a hard tumble that broke his jaw.
“That night, we just threw caution to the winds,” Mr. Smith recalled this week. “You see what happened.”
His assailant, Michael Kandola, was eventually sentenced to 17 months in prison, after a B.C. Supreme Court judge ruled the attack a hate crime.
The incident was far from isolated that year. Over all in 2008, Metro Vancouver police forces reported 34 hate-crime cases motivated by sexual orientation, the highest per-capita frequency of such attacks in the country.
They contributed to a disturbing trend across Canada that saw hate crimes against gays and lesbians more than double, from 71 in 2007 to 159 a year later. The numbers, reported last month by Statistics Canada, have prompted some to label Vancouver “the gay-bashing capital of Canada.”
While figures may reflect more reporting of anti-gay crimes than an actual new wave of assaults, Vancouver Councillor Tim Stevenson, a United Church minister who has been “out” for 30 years, doesn’t shy from the tag.
“Unfortunately, we are the gay-bashing capital,” Mr. Stevenson said. “While I don’t think there’s been a huge spike, it’s on the increase. Gay-bashing is not going down, that’s for sure. The question is: ‘Why not?’ ”
On the eve of the city’s enormously popular pride parade, an annual event that attracts more than half a million spectators, with politicians, police and community leaders marching together among raucous, celebratory gays, lesbians and transgendered, the troubling persistence of gay-bashing continues to cast a pall over the party.
“There’s still a lot of societal liberation that needs to take place,” said Vancouver Pride Society president Ken Coolen, attesting to ongoing instances of hate crimes and well-publicized gay-bashings.
Just this month, four men were arrested in connection with two separate attacks on Vancouver gay men. Both incidents are being investigated as possible hate crimes.
And on Aug. 10, a verdict is expected in a high-profile assault at the Fountainhead Pub that left Ritch Dowrey with permanent brain damage. The incident brought more than a thousand community members into the streets, demanding an end to anti-gay violence.
“In spite of all the advances that have been made, people are still coming down to our ’hood, screaming and yelling and calling us names and occasionally bashing,” said Ron Stipp of West Enders Against Violence Everywhere. “That has to stop.”
Yet, for all that, reasons for the Statscan findings are not clear-cut.
There is consensus among activists, police and statisticians alike that the rise in reported hate-crime cases is as much due to a new comfort level between gays and police than to any new wave of gay-bashing.
“The more trust there is, the more likely victims are to come forward and report what happened to them,” said Warren Silver of the Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics, which compiles the data for Statscan.
Vancouver Police Department Inspector Mario Giardini is more blunt. “In the immortal words of Scotty Bowman, statistics are for losers,” said Insp. Giardini, head of the VPD’s Diversity and Aboriginal Policing section.
He pointed out that 2008 was the same year police held a series of forums in the gay community, urging victims to report crimes to police, assuring them all would be “as fully investigated as possible.”
But Doug Janoff, author of a book on homophobic violence in Canada, speculated that the higher prevalence of reported attacks in Vancouver is not merely because more gays are coming forward.
