Jamie Lee Hamilton – Larger than Life

With Jamie Lee there was no grey area when it came to social justice — or injustice

Jamie Lee Hamilton passed away Dec. 23, 2019 after a battle with cancer. Hamilton dedicated a good part of her life to righting what is wrong and fighting injustice and prejudice. Jamie Lee, a transgender activist of Metis and Cree heritage, was 64.

Jamie Lee created Grandma’s House on Pandora Street, a safe haven for sex-trade workers in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, which was closed by police in 2000. Jamie Lee had been charged with running a common bawdy house – a charge that was later stayed. “That wasn’t the sole purpose of the house,” Jamie Lee told The Vancouver Sun. She explained 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.”

The house kept sex-trade workers safe at a time when she was convinced there was a serial killer stalking women in the Downtown Eastside — and she was right.

In 2002, pig farmer Robert “Willy” Pickton was arrested and charged with two counts of first-degree murder. In 2005, Pickton was charged with the first-degree murder of 27 women and, in 2007, was convicted of six counts of second-degree murder.

But that all happened after Jamie Lee had been hollering from the rooftops that something was wrong, that marginalized women were disappearing in alarming numbers, and that the mayor and council of the day were more concerned about an arsonist setting fire to garages on the city’s West Side than the almost 70 women who had vanished into thin air.

Out of frustration on a rainy day in 1998, Jamie Lee dragged four garbage bags up the steps of city hall, before she emptied the contents out in front of waiting media. There, scattered across the steps, were 67 stiletto heels, one for each woman from the Downtown Eastside Hamilton believed to be missing.

But it wasn’t just sex-trade workers who Jamie Lee championed. Her activism was far reaching and included the fight for Trans rights, Indigenous peoples, the homeless and those living in poverty in the Downtown Eastside. She also turned her ire to what she called the “poverty pimps” running non-profit agencies and politicians at all three levels of government she thought needed to be held accountable.

It was that passion that pushed her to run for office and Jamie Lee became the first transgender person to seek public office in Canada. Jamie Lee also later ran for school board and park board, which is when she took on the moniker of “Queen of the Parks.”

Jamie Lee was also a great source of juicy news tips and gossip, particularly any bureaucratic scandals she perceived taking place in the Downtown Eastside, an area of the city she loved and called home. An obituary in the Vancouver Courier detailed some of Jamie Lee’s fights for justice.

After collaborating many years with Becki Ross, a professor at UBC’s Department of Sociology and Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice, in 2019 the two became the first co-winners of the Angus Reid Practitioners/Applied Sociology Award by the Canadian Sociological Association, an award which recognized their work in memorializing sex workers expelled from the city’s West End neighbourhood during the 1980s, including Jamie Lee.

Ross described her late friend in a phone interview with the Georgia Straight as  a “fierce advocate for impoverished people, for Indigenous people, for trans people, and for sex workers.”

In 2008, Jamie Lee and Ross formed the West End Sex Workers Memorial Committee and in 2016 they  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 were violently expelled from the area.

For decades, Jamie Lee fought tirelessly to decriminalize sex work. She was a guest lecturer at UBC, the University of Victoria, Simon Fraser University, Capilano University and Douglas College. The two also led walking tours to recall the once vibrant sex workers community in the West End. Ross said her friend began to transition in 1969 so that she could live in the world as a woman, and she started to work in the sex industry as a teenager.

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 lamppost 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 were 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.

At her memorial, friends described Jamie Lee Hamilton as innovative, generous, funny, fierce and opinionated. She was larger than life; she had spirit and moxie. And her death represents a great loss for Vancouver.