Gay Guide to Vancouver
Little Sister's opened on Davie Street in 1983 and then spent fifteen years fighting Canada Customs, which kept seizing its shipments at the border while waving the same titles through to mainstream bookshops. In 2000 the Supreme Court of Canada ruled for the store, finding that Customs had violated its rights to free expression and equality. The shop is still open, still selling books, and the plaza a few doors up is named for its founder, Jim Deva.
Davie Village, in the West End, is one of the more legible gay districts anywhere: it runs along Davie Street between Burrard and Jervis and you can see the whole thing from either end. The Pumpjack, Fountainhead, Numbers, Celebrities, Junction and 1181 are strung along it. In July 2013 the city painted permanent rainbow crosswalks at Davie and Bute, the first permanent ones anywhere.
Steamworks and F212 cover the saunas, and Wreck Beach, out past the university, is the clothing-optional beach: enormous, genuinely beautiful, and reached by several hundred steps down a cliff that are considerably harder on the way back up.
Vancouver Pride takes the start of August, with the parade winding through the West End to a festival by the beach. Out on Screen programs the queer film festival, and Qmunity, Trans Care BC and the Catherine White Holman Wellness Centre handle the community and health side.
The West End is dense, walkable and wedged between downtown, Stanley Park and English Bay, which means you can leave a bar and be on the sand in four minutes. The mountains are visible from most of it, which never stops being slightly absurd.