Harrison Mooney

Red Umbrella March celebrates history of Vancouver sex workers

Vancouver sex workers and activists gathered Saturday afternoon at Victory Square for the sixth Red Umbrella March, a show of defiance against what protesters deemed Canada's "unfair" and "unconstitutional" prostitution laws.

Under parasols and dressed in red boas, scarves, T-shirts and bustiers, approximately 100 people walked the route, which followed Cambie Street down into Gastown for a demonstration at the steam clock before marching up Abbott Street to Hastings Street, then proceeding to Main Street before coming to an end at the waterfront in Crab Park.

It was a markedly different route from last year's Red Umbrella March, which began at the Vancouver Art Gallery before colliding with a vegan march on Granville Street.

But the confusion over last year's route had little do with the decision to march through Gastown this time around, explained activist Andrew Sorfleet, president of the group behind the march, the Triple-X Workers' Solidarity Association of B.C.

While the local march is only in its sixth year, the event's history actually extends much further into the past — 130 years — and it began on the very route walked Saturday.

"This year we decided to celebrate by doing something a little bit different," Sorfleet said before the march began. "What we're gonna do is a historical tour of the old brothel areas of Vancouver, circa 1890 to 1910."

The Red Umbrella march draws its inspiration from what sex workers in steam-era Vancouver, around 1900, called the "court parade" — the days when sex workers marched defiantly from the red-light district, a two-block stretch of what became Pender Street, between Main and Carrall, to City Hall, then located on Main just south of the Carnegie Library, to pay their $20 fines for prostitution. "(The city) knew there was a way to fill the city coffers by fining the ladies occasionally," said Sorfleet. "And so the ladies all knew they would just plead guilty, and they would pay their fines, and so they turned it into a bit of a court parade, that's what they used to call it, and they would all get dressed up, and they would march down and defiantly pay their fines."

According to legend, Sorfleet added, the women were often able to recoup their losses in short order by picking up new clientele among the men who gathered to watch the parade.

Red Umbrella marchers believe this is a history worth celebrating, and on Saturday they continued a tradition over a century in the making, even handing out pamphlets citing the arrest records of a diverse array of "court parade" participants between 1899 and 1905.

Sorfleet explained that, while a lot has changed for sex workers in Vancouver, the fight for sex worker rights remains the same battle it was 130 years ago. The pioneers who marched to city hall at the turn of the century were laying the groundwork for the march that happened Saturday.

"Those moral reform movements are still alive in different ways today," he said. "We would like to draw a little line in history from that place to this place, and also celebrate some of the names of some of the women from a long time ago who did resist. They made it into something.

"They were compliant, but they were defiantly compliant."