PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

This article was downloaded by: [Canadian Research Knowledge Network]
On: 5 March 2010
Access details: Access Details: [subscription number 783016864]
Publisher Routledge
Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-
41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Social & Cultural Geography
Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information:
http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t713708888

Governing sexuality and park space: acts of regulation in Vancouver, BC
John Paul Catungal a; Eugene J. McCann b
a Department of Geography and Program in Planning, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario,
Canada b Department of Geography, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada

Online publication date: 13 January 2010

To cite this Article Catungal, John Paul and McCann, Eugene J.(2010) 'Governing sexuality and park space: acts of
regulation in Vancouver, BC', Social & Cultural Geography, 11: 1, 75 — 94
To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/14649360903414569
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14649360903414569

Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.informaworld.com/terms-and-conditions-of-access.pdf

This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or
systematic reproduction, re-distribution, re-selling, loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or
distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden.

The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents
will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae and drug doses
should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss,
actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly
or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.

http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t713708888
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14649360903414569
http://www.informaworld.com/terms-and-conditions-of-access.pdf


Governing sexuality and park space: acts of regulation
in Vancouver, BC

John Paul Catungal1 & Eugene J. McCann2
1Department of Geography and Program in Planning, University of Toronto, 100 St. George

Street, Room 5047, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M5S 3G3, catungalj@geog.utoronto.ca;
2Department of Geography, Simon Fraser University, 8888 University Drive, Burnaby,

British Columbia, Canada, V5A 1S6, emccann@sfu.ca

This paper suggests that the coding and ordering of sexuality and space through
definitions of which sexual practices and which representations of sexuality are morally
appropriate in public space can be usefully understood as a problem of governance.
We argue that attempts to hide or make visible specific sexualities in public space are
complicated and politically charged because, while written regulations are relatively cut-
and-dried, their implementation, by planners, judges, et al., involves significant discretion
and leads to contingent, contestable outcomes. Furthermore, the politics of governing
sexual morality and public space is made more problematic when the place where a
hegemonic norm of behaviour or morality is publically challenged is an iconic park that
attracts intense media attention. The paper elaborates these arguments through two
interrelated case studies: a debate over the appropriate location of an AIDS memorial in
Stanley Park, Vancouver and the reaction to the killing of a gay man who cruised the
park for sex. We conclude by linking our argument to recent statements about the
future of geographies of sexuality, arguing for analyses that acknowledge both the
contingences and potentialities of categories like ‘the state,’ ‘governance,’ and ‘public
space’ and also their structural tendencies and their ongoing association with sexual
repression.

Key words: public space, sexuality, the state, governance.

Introduction

Contemporary scholarship in social and

cultural geography elucidates how urban

public space is produced through interrelated

spatial codings, regulations, and represen-

tations. The relationship between sexuality

and space has been one strong theme in this

literature (Bell and Valentine 1995; Brown

2000; Hubbard 2004, 2008; Knopp 1995;

Miller 2005). This paper draws upon and

extends this theme by addressing how certain

expressions of sexuality become problems of

governance and objects of political contest in

and through one specific form of public space:

the urban public park. The uses, coding, and

Social & Cultural Geography, Vol. 11, No. 1, February 2010

ISSN 1464-9365 print/ISSN 1470-1197 online/10/010075-20 q 2010 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/14649360903414569

D
o
w
n
l
o
a
d
e
d
 
B
y
:
 
[
C
a
n
a
d
i
a
n
 
R
e
s
e
a
r
c
h
 
K
n
o
w
l
e
d
g
e
 
N
e
t
w
o
r
k
]
 
A
t
:
 
0
5
:
5
0
 
5
 
M
a
r
c
h
 
2
0
1
0



regulation of parks are frequently represented

by the state and the media as of general public

concern, since parks are intended for general

use and are, in many cases, seen to be icons of

their cities. Our purpose is to link analyses of

the spatial codings of sexuality and public

space to literatures on the politics of park

space, morality, and spatial exclusion through

a detailed account of two related cases—

debates over the location of an AIDS memorial

in Stanley Park, Vancouver and reactions to

the killing of Aaron Webster, a gay man who

used the park’s trails for sex. They show how

sexual codings and transgressions of public

space and hegemonic morality are addressed

by the state, the media, and the public as

problems of governance.

We build upon analyses of how the state and

the media govern homosexuality through

regulatory and representational practices that

seek to hide transgressive forms of sexuality

from the public gaze. These analyses focus, for

example, on how urban planning seeks to

order and purify space and address fears that

sexual activities ‘“pollute”, “taint” or “con-

taminate” other land uses’ (Prior 2008: 342;

also Kerkin 2004). They also examine how

governance strategies are often entwined with

popular media discourses ‘to reassert and

reinforce traditional understandings of “men”

and “women”, and hetero- and homosexual’

(Bain and Nash 2007: 19). Through these and

other forms of socio-spatial ordering and

exclusion, ‘the organization of space in

Western cities . . . keeps sexual Otherness

“out of sight” . . . [by regulating] disorderly

sexuality in the midst of a heterosexually

ordered city, segregating it from “respectable”

populations while making it accessible to

those who wish to indulge’ (Hubbard 2002:

357 – 358).

We suggest that attempts to code, order, and

hide sexual difference are complicated and

often made more politically charged because:

(1) while regulatory policy is relatively cut-

and-dried in its written form, the governance

of public space is conditioned by the relative

discretion of those bureaucrats and judges

who adjudicate on specific cases and who thus

produce an uneven and contestable terrain of

regulation (Lipsky 1980; Proudfoot and

McCann 2008); and (2) the politics of

governing sexual morality and public space is

made more problematic when the site of

transgression—the place where a hegemonic

norm of behaviour or morality is publically

challenged—is an iconic park that attracts

intense debate and contestation in the public

sphere.

Ideally, iconic parks are understood to

represent their community’s core moral values

and to be open to all who are ‘respectable,’

who act respectably, or who aspire to

respectability. Furthermore, they are places

built for visibility: offering opportunities for

seeing and being seen while being carefully

constructed to offer impressive and pleasing

vistas to the recreating public. Parks are

usually also the sites of monuments that

honour behaviours that are deemed laudable,

such as sacrificing one’s life for the nation, or

that commemorate events and people who are

officially considered worthy of tribute. These

monuments are themselves designed to be

impressive sights/sites and are often associated

with regular rituals where people use the

surrounding parks to perform certain acts of

memory, politics, and community. Different

readings or appropriations of existing monu-

ments (Till 2005) or the introduction of new

monuments in iconic spaces frequently lead to

political controversy since alternative prac-

tices of memorialisation can, as Brown (1997:

168) argues in his discussion of an AIDS quilt,

undermine attempts to hide and exclude

homosexuality from urban space while,

76 John Paul Catungal & Eugene J. McCann

D
o
w
n
l
o
a
d
e
d
 
B
y
:
 
[
C
a
n
a
d
i
a
n
 
R
e
s
e
a
r
c
h
 
K
n
o
w
l
e
d
g
e
 
N
e
t
w
o
r
k
]
 
A
t
:
 
0
5
:
5
0
 
5
 
M
a
r
c
h
 
2
0
1
0



‘extend[ing] gay visibility . . . [and extending]

safe public space for gays and lesbians.’

Transgression, sexual or otherwise, in iconic

places of ‘propriety’ and visibility is a

particular problem for governance, we

suggest, because it frequently prompts par-

ticularly vociferous and sometimes violent

reactions, since it is regarded by some to be an

affront to ‘common values.’ Visible transgres-

sion, such as the occurrence or representation

of Other sexual practices and identities,

destabilizes hegemonic norms while state

reactions to those disruptions—efforts to

actively shore up or adjudicate the space’s

‘natural’ order—reveal that order as social,

power-laden, and uneven.

An important element of this governance

involves ‘moral coding’ (Domosh 2001: 576),

whereby hegemonic definitions of good and

bad, appropriate and inappropriate behaviour

reflect and shape social interaction and space.

The debates over the AIDS memorial and

Webster’s killing invite a focus on the spatial

politics of sexual morality and its associated

geographies since they shed light on the

practices through which various actors govern

contemporary urban parks. The literature on

urban parks addresses how meanings and uses

are coded onto these public spaces. Parks are

frequently barriers that reinforce spatial

divisions between socio-economically distinct

neighbourhoods (Gobster 1998; Solecki and

Welch 1995) while unequal access to parks

conditions and is conditioned by race,

ethnicity, class, and gender (Loukaitu-Sideris

1995; Whitzman 2002). These concerns are

also evident in analyses of the historical

development of urban parks in which the

creation of proper, moral citizens is shown to

be a key purpose behind their design and

governance (Mawani 2005; Rosenzweig

1983).

After drawing upon conceptualizations of

exclusion, morality, and visibility and inte-

grating them in a discussion of the governance

of sexuality and park space, the paper presents

the two case studies from Stanley Park. These

accounts are linked, conceptually and empiri-

cally, by how they illuminate the problematics

of governing and representing Other sexual

practices and identities in iconic park space.

We conclude by linking our argument to recent

statements about the future of geographies of

sexuality, arguing for analyses that acknowl-

edge contingences and potentialities of cat-

egories like ‘the state,’ ‘governance,’ and

‘public space’ as well as their structural

tendencies and their ongoing association with

sexual repression.

Morality and visibility in the governance
of sexuality and park space

Our analysis of struggles over what is

appropriately seen/hidden in urban public

space operates at the intersection of literatures

on sexuality and space, moral geographies

(Lee and Smith 2004; Matless 2000; Setten

2004; Smith 1998, 2000), and urban govern-

ance (Brown 1997, 1999; MacLeod 2002;

Proudfoot and McCann 2008). The more

specific literature on the social geographies of

park space (Ingram 2000; Mawani 2005;

Mitchell 2003; Rosenzweig 1983; Schultz

1998; Solecki and Welch 1995; Whitzman

2002) speaks to and can also be enhanced by

this analysis since it contains insights into how

the creation and management of apparently

pure and natural space in cities contribute to

hegemonic definitions of ‘wholesome’ and

‘moral’ publics, illustrations of the conse-

quences of cultural attempts to maintain social

boundaries through the invocation of taboos

(Douglas 1966; Sibley 1995), and examples

Governing sexuality and park space 77

D
o
w
n
l
o
a
d
e
d
 
B
y
:
 
[
C
a
n
a
d
i
a
n
 
R
e
s
e
a
r
c
h
 
K
n
o
w
l
e
d
g
e
 
N
e
t
w
o
r
k
]
 
A
t
:
 
0
5
:
5
0
 
5
 
M
a
r
c
h
 
2
0
1
0



of the strategies used by urban planners and

other state agents to govern society through

spatial practices like segregation and exclusion

(Corburn 2007; Kerkin 2004; MacLeod 2002;

Prior 2008).

For example, Mawani’s (2005) account of

the development of iconic park space in

Vancouver discusses how, in nineteenth-cen-

tury Canadian settler society, proponents of

urban greenery argued that parks contributed

to the formation of moral British subjects. As

in many other contexts, the production of

landscape involved a process of racialization

whereby moral Britishness, represented and

bolstered by parks, was achieved through the

denigration of alternative understandings and

uses of space and the attendant eviction of

indigenous and immigrant people of colour.

Similarly, Rosenzweig (1983) shows how

urban green spaces have historically been

implicated in the socio-spatial governance of

working-class people who are framed as in

need of wholesome park spaces if they are to

learn middle-class values. Parks are similarly

implicated in repressive governance of sexu-

ality in which the regulation of the space is

entwined with attempts to foster and guard

specific forms of sexual citizenship. In his

study of criminological responses to public sex

in Seattle parks, Schultz (1998) notes that

public calls for increased policing of gay public

sex are often accompanied by the invocation

of the middle-class heterosexual family as the

appropriate user of local greenspace.

The governance of social difference in

and through urban parks resonates with

geographical approaches to morality, more

generally. As Lee and Smith (2004: 2) put it,

‘[m]orality refers to what people believe and

what they do in pursuit of, or merely as a

reflection of, their own conceptions of

the right and the good.’ ‘Moralities,’ they

continue,

are profoundly geographical products of the uneven

development of social relations among people and

between people and nature . . . Moralities are, in

short, constructed through geographically

articulated social interaction. (2004: 7)

The spatial practices that produce and reflect

moralities entail hegemonic definitions of

what/who is in/out of place (Cresswell 1996).

In scenic recreational parks, moral judgements

are imbricated with how the landscape is seen

and who/what is allowed to be seen in it. The

aestheticization in these spaces ‘provides an

[illusory] image of enjoyable leisure and end-

less present’ (Mitchell 2000: 446). Such

‘sanitized images of a mythical urban environ-

ment’ (2000: 446) seek to silence sedimented

histories of and contested claims to a given

place by favouring certain identities and certain

social relations over others. The moral judge-

ments explicit in these processes of silencing

and hiding are folded into the production of

hegemonic moral geographies by a wide range

of actors from state agents to hate mongers.

In her study of anti-gay and lesbian hate

crime, for example, Sumartojo (2004: 105)

argues that these crimes ‘are exclusionary acts

motivated in part by offenders’ desires to

assert power over a given space . . . to send a

“message.”’ Violence is one end of a range of

actions intended to maintain the existing

socio-spatial order in the face of difference in

public space. Other actors maintain the

boundaries of place and morality through

state institutions and mainstream media

(Heibel 2004; Hubbard 2002; Setten 2004;

Valentine 2004; Whitehead 2004). Yet, while

many forces seek to maintain the status quo,

hegemonies can always be overtly contested or

subtly negotiated and undermined and the

state is frequently called on to regulate and

adjudicate these struggles.

78 John Paul Catungal & Eugene J. McCann

D
o
w
n
l
o
a
d
e
d
 
B
y
:
 
[
C
a
n
a
d
i
a
n
 
R
e
s
e
a
r
c
h
 
K
n
o
w
l
e
d
g
e
 
N
e
t
w
o
r
k
]
 
A
t
:
 
0
5
:
5
0
 
5
 
M
a
r
c
h
 
2
0
1
0



Exclusionary acts are frequently confronted

by activists’ attempts to enact ‘the develop-

ment—or often the radical claiming—of a space

for representation, a place in which groups and

individuals can make themselves visible’ to

claim their right to space (Mitchell 2003: 33,

original emphasis). While visibility can chal-

lenge hegemony as part of overt politics, others

note that a strategic retreat from visibility in a

public space can support a more subtle

negotiation and disruption of hegemonic

norms. Ingram (2000), for example, explores

how the environment of a forested urban park

and its adjacent beach enables the formation of

spaces of anonymous sexual encounter because

its landscape offers numerous concealed spaces

for those ‘in-the-know.’ State attempts to

control sexuality in the park have never been

successful in part because of its configuration.

Thus, Ingram argues, the space is somewhat

liberatory and autonomous (Bell and Binnie

2000; Brown 2004).

The political and strategic deployment of

visibility in public spaces also characterizes

how the state adjudicates appropriate uses of

public space. Bain and Nash argue that the

legal system and other state actors frequently

seek to keep homosexuality invisible and

repressed even in cases where legal decisions

appear to promote tolerance:

[L]egislative and policy initiatives concerning gays

and lesbians [in Canada] . . . often [mean] a de-

sexualization and a privatization of gay and lesbian

lives which can push alternative sexual practices

and identities into the private (and invisible) sphere,

causing a division between ‘good gays’ and

(disreputable) ‘bad queers.’ (2007: 21)

The socio-spatial governance of sexual mor-

ality thus involves the ongoing management of

what is visible and of the tensions that are

produced by governance strategies themselves

(Sharp 2005). As Hubbard (2002: 359) argues,

‘the geography of sexuality is shaped by a

complex aesthetics of desire and disgust,

bequeathing a sexual city that discloses some

sights/sites but represses others.’

This focus on strategies of exclusion and

visibility in the moral politics of sex frames our

discussion of the AIDS memorial debate and

the Webster killing in Vancouver’s Stanley

Park. Following Lipsky’s (1980: xii) conten-

tion that ‘public policy is not best understood

as made in legislatures or top-floor suites of

high-ranking administrators . . . [but] in the

crowded offices and daily encounters’ of

bureaucrats, we argue that the analysis of

how sexuality in public space is governed

through strategies of hiding is complicated by

the acknowledgement that neither the state

nor the media are monolithic but that, instead,

they are comprised of various agents with

relative discretion who produce, through their

adjudication of specific cases and other

mundane practices, uneven regulation which

invites further struggle (Proudfoot and

McCann 2008). Furthermore, when the public

space involved is a particularly iconic, visible

one, governance becomes more problematic as

media attention ratchets up debates about

appropriate behaviour. Efforts to govern

sexuality and space by settling disputes about

which elements of the former should be seen in

the latter lead, paradoxically, to ongoing

critique.

Stanley Park: recreation, exclusion, and
order

Near the entrance to Stanley Park, the 1,000

acre heavily forested peninsula on the edge of

Vancouver’s downtown (Figure 1), a statue

depicts Lord Stanley, a nineteenth-century

Governor General of Canada, with his arms

Governing sexuality and park space 79

D
o
w
n
l
o
a
d
e
d
 
B
y
:
 
[
C
a
n
a
d
i
a
n
 
R
e
s
e
a
r
c
h
 
K
n
o
w
l
e
d
g
e
 
N
e
t
w
o
r
k
]
 
A
t
:
 
0
5
:
5
0
 
5
 
M
a
r
c
h
 
2
0
1
0



Figure 1 Stanley Park, Davie Village, and the proposed and final locations of the AIDS memorial.

Note: We choose not to identify exactly where Webster’s body was found since it is near the ‘strolls.’

80 John Paul Catungal & Eugene J. McCann

D
o
w
n
l
o
a
d
e
d
 
B
y
:
 
[
C
a
n
a
d
i
a
n
 
R
e
s
e
a
r
c
h
 
K
n
o
w
l
e
d
g
e
 
N
e
t
w
o
r
k
]
 
A
t
:
 
0
5
:
5
0
 
5
 
M
a
r
c
h
 
2
0
1
0



outstretched in welcome. On the statue’s

plinth are his words of dedication: ‘To the

use and enjoyment of people of all colours,

creeds and customs for all time—I name thee

Stanley Park.’ His welcoming sentiment is

echoed and extended by britishcolumbia.com

(n.d.), a privately owned tourist website which

emphasizes the contemporary ideal of the park

as a beloved place, open to a vast array of

people and activities: ‘So firmly is love for

Stanley Park rooted in the citizenry’s soul that

in an annual survey carried out by the Georgia

Straight, a free weekly paper, readers repeat-

edly choose the park as the best place in town

to take a romantic stroll, watch the rain fall,

experience bliss, have sex, break up, make up,

and take visitors.’ Indeed, the park—which is

now commonly referred to as an ‘oasis’ in

the city—attracts twenty million visitors

(residents and tourists) annually (Steele 1988,

1993).

Yet its history, like other parts of Vancouver,

is characterized by processes of moral ordering

and socio-spatial exclusion (Anderson 1991).

Soon after the city’s incorporation in 1886, the

city council employed a discourse of morality

to promote the establishment of an urban

park, specifically arguing that recreational

landscapes create moral and healthy citizens

and curb deviance and violence (Steele 1993).

Mawani shows that the park was to be an

‘imperial icon’ to ‘promote and develop the

British-ness of British Columbia’ (2005:

325 – 326, original emphasis). Soon after its

establishment, it ‘was hailed as an important

site of moral, physical and imperial advance-

ment’ (Mawani 2005: 326).

This colonial project focused specifically on

excluding Chinese and Native populations

who were resident in the park (Barman 2005).

The justification for their removal was framed

in terms of health and the inappropriateness of

permanent settlement in a space newly

designated as suitable only for brief rec-

reational visits. The Chinese were the first to

be uprooted as their homes were officially

defined as ‘threats to public health’ and were

burned without warning by local health

officials (Mather 1998: 80). Discourses of

abjection and threat forced removals, and

targeted by-law enforcement accompanied

other legal strategies as the state re-ordered

the new park space, creating a moral

geography of appropriate and inappropriate

presence. For example, with its designation as

a park, the peninsula became legal property of

the City. First Nations and mixed-race

residents, whose tenure predated the dedica-

tion of the park, were thus prevented from

launching their own claims to the land

(Blomley 2004; Mawani 2005).

These practices are not only things of the

past, however. The work of governing the

park’s moral geography is ongoing and its

socio-spatial order requires constant tending.

In turn, it provokes periodic struggles invol-

ving, among others, state agencies like the

Vancouver Park Board, park users, and, given

the park’s iconic status, the general population

of Greater Vancouver. The two cases we

highlight involve negotiations of Stanley

Park’s meanings where different moral under-

standings of the landscape collide, leading to

significant legal and policy decisions and

political struggles, all of which continue to

shape and reshape perceptions and uses of the

park. In 1996, a memorial to Vancouverites

who have died from AIDS was proposed for

the park, setting off a protracted debate over

appropriate land use. The beating to death of

Aaron Webster while cruising (looking for

what are often anonymous sexual encounters)

in the park in 2001 produced a debate over

appropriate behaviour. Both cases highlight

actual or potential transgressions of hegemo-

nic definitions of what monuments and

Governing sexuality and park space 81

D
o
w
n
l
o
a
d
e
d
 
B
y
:
 
[
C
a
n
a
d
i
a
n
 
R
e
s
e
a
r
c
h
 
K
n
o
w
l
e
d
g
e
 
N
e
t
w
o
r
k
]
 
A
t
:
 
0
5
:
5
0
 
5
 
M
a
r
c
h
 
2
0
1
0



activities belonged in the park and, thus,

revealed a spatial politics of sexual morality in

its coding and ordering.

The discussion is based on a document-

based study of government and media sources

related to the two cases. This approach was

chosen first because the research was con-

ducted after the cases occurred, thus barring

ethnographic approaches and, second, the

research addressed how the debates developed

in the public sphere—in the media and other

public forums. An online archive of national,

provincial and local newspapers provided

ninety-six articles—forty-five on the AIDS

memorial (August 1995 to July 2004) and

fifty-one on the Webster case (November 2001

to March 2005). A survey of key policy and

court documents included plans, minutes,

court decisions, and tourism marketing

materials for the park. A discourse analysis

identified instances where reporters, intervie-

wees and other actors spoke of: (1) what they

understood Stanley Park to be and/or (2) why

the AIDS memorial and public gay sex were

considered appropriate or inappropriate there.

‘A place to go and feel good’? The AIDS
memorial debate

In 1995, AIDS Vancouver, a non-profit

AIDS-related social service organization, soli-

cited support for a public memorial to those

who had died from, or had been affected by

the disease. They believed in part that a

Stanley Park location offered the memorial not

only a local but also a national and global

audience (Griffin 1995). Inspired by ‘amazing

community response,’ the organization peti-

tioned the Vancouver Park Board (VPB) to

allocate space in Stanley Park for the

memorial, which was designed as a series of

copper sheets with the names of people who

died of AIDS perforating them. The board

approved the project overwhelmingly in

November 1996 with only one park commis-

sioner questioning the proposal and arguing

that approval would ‘set a precedent for

other groups to demand Stanley Park space’

(Fong 1996a). Later, another commissioner

qualified the decision by describing the

monument as an exception: ‘we routinely

turn [requests] down . . . we have to make sure

that only the best of the best is approved’

(Fong 1996a). Two days later, BCTV, a local

television station, conducted a phone-in poll

on the memorial and its proposed location: 96

per cent of the almost 14,000 respondents

opposed the project (Gram 1996). Two days

later still, the VPB rescinded its approval,

citing massive public opposition, although the

Board insisted that its decision was not based

solely on the results of the television poll

(Gram 1996). The debate that ensued, one

largely carried out in the mainstream media,

was based squarely on discourses of morality

and place, sexuality and memorialization.

A pristine park?

Normative visions of the park informed both

sides of the debate. Echoing another park

commissioner’s assertion that Stanley Park is a

place that has ‘spiritual resonance with Van-

couver,’ a group called Friends of Stanley Park

argued that it should be preserved in its current

condition with no built additions (Fong 1996b).

‘With green space being more difficult to obtain,

why should we be putting more memorials in?’ it

asked, while calling instead for ‘organic’

memorials, such as a grove of trees (Fong 1998).

Proponents of the memorial, on the other

hand, pointed to the myth of parks in general as

natural, pristine spaces. Beyond the exercise of

power needed to create Stanley Park, this myth

82 John Paul Catungal & Eugene J. McCann

D
o
w
n
l
o
a
d
e
d
 
B
y
:
 
[
C
a
n
a
d
i
a
n
 
R
e
s
e
a
r
c
h
 
K
n
o
w
l
e
d
g
e
 
N
e
t
w
o
r
k
]
 
A
t
:
 
0
5
:
5
0
 
5
 
M
a
r
c
h
 
2
0
1
0



is further undermined by a partial listing of some

of the more prominent artificial elements of the

contemporary park: an extensive system of

roadways, including a major commuter route,

numerous restaurants, snack bars, a souvenir

stand, a major outdoor swimming pool,

Vancouver Aquarium, a children’s petting zoo

and miniature train, a carefully tended rose

garden, and an outdoor amphitheatre. Further-

more, Table 1 lists twenty-one monuments and

sculptures, defined by the VPB as ‘major’

elements of the park, that were extant when

the AIDS memorial was proposed. Neither was

the proposed site pristine, proponents argued,

since that part of the park was primarily ‘a place

[people] take their dogs to do their business’

(Haysom 1996b; Yeager 1996). Stanley Park’s

character as a recreational space also framed

debate. According to a letter to the editor,

‘Stanley Park is for recreation purposes, not a

place for AIDS memorials, or any other type

of memorial’ (Thompson 1996) and a radio

caller argued that ‘Stanley Park is a place to go

and feel good . . . [n]ot a place to get depressed’

(in Haysom 1996a).

A peopled, political park

The presence of the politically and aestheti-

cally displeasing in public space has tradition-

ally stirred reaction (Sibley 1995). In this case,

notions of place—and out-of-placeness—fig-

ured in the debate. Opponents deemed the

memorial to be out of place because it visibly

identified the presence of the diseased sex-

ualized Other, the immoral, and the anti-social

in a space they saw in terms of wholesomeness.

Therefore, the proposed memorial was a

political transgression, revealing and disrupt-

ing unquestioned hegemonic assumptions

regarding the park. Some opponents argued

that memorials should be reserved for heroic

acts and argued that people who have died of

AIDS were not heroes. When a VPB commis-

sioner likened the memorial to Vancouver’s

cenotaph at a public hearing, numerous people

walked out, shouting, ‘[t]hey [the war dead]

died for you!’ (McCune 1998). Continuing

this theme, a local physician, writing to

The Vancouver Sun, argued that,

‘The majority of [people with AIDS] are

individuals who contracted the virus through

sexual contact. . . . A memorial wall pays

tribute to a country’s heroes who died for a

cause they believed to be noble. What cause

have the AIDS victims died for? In what way

are they heroes?’ Opponents also argued that

the memorial was out of place since people

with AIDS, as ‘figures of contamination’

(Sturken 1997: 148), should be in medicalized,

private spaces.

For other opponents, the issue was about the

place of grieving. To one public hearing

participant, ‘[t]here are special places for things

like these . . . They’re called cemeteries’

(McCune 1998). This comment makes clear

that the realm of the emotional is deemed by

this speaker to be private, invisible, and out of

place in recreational public space (Burk 2003).

Proponents of the memorial challenged these

discourses by charging that AIDS was a

battle—for survival (Bailey 2001; Dixon

1996; Gerlach 1998)—that visible grief is

appropriate in public space, and asked rhetori-

cally, ‘[are we] seeing an AIDS phobia in this

city . . . [a] fear of the disease which has been

unspoken until now?’ (Haysom 1996a). This

reaction echoes Brown’s (1997) reflection on

the Canadian AIDS Quilt display in Vancouver

that had occurred two years before the

memorial application. For him, such memor-

ials, ‘make the AIDS crisis visible, . . . [creat-

ing] a space of grief for family and friends, a

place for them to remember their dead

publically . . . despite society’s traditional

Governing sexuality and park space 83

D
o
w
n
l
o
a
d
e
d
 
B
y
:
 
[
C
a
n
a
d
i
a
n
 
R
e
s
e
a
r
c
h
 
K
n
o
w
l
e
d
g
e
 
N
e
t
w
o
r
k
]
 
A
t
:
 
0
5
:
5
0
 
5
 
M
a
r
c
h
 
2
0
1
0



placement of grief and personal loss in the

private sphere’ (Brown 1997: 155 – 156;

Till 2005).

Sexuality, morality, and public visibility

were also clear foci of early media coverage,

which concentrated on links between AIDS

and the gay community, even though AIDS

Vancouver representatives argued that

‘the memorial is for everyone affected by the

syndrome’ (Griffin 1995). Even some of those

in favour of the memorial equated AIDS with

homosexuality in uncritical ways (The Pro-

vince 1996). Certain opponents ‘did not shrink

from saying that the [AIDS] epidemic . . .

[affected] the sodomites’ (Dixon 1996).

In addition, a common qualifier to those

surveyed by radio and TV stations and other

mainstream media outlets was ‘I’m not

homophobic, but . . . ’ (Haysom 1996a).

The VPB was aware that many opponents of

the memorial were homophobic (Fong 1996a;

Gram 1996) and, as a result, one commis-

sioner contradicted his own ecological philos-

ophy by voting for the memorial because ‘[I]

will not vote in a manner that may see a

victory in this city for bigotry’ (Fong 1998).

This reaction was, perhaps, a small victory

for proponents of the memorial since they

intended it to be a counter-hegemonic memor-

ial, a space deliberately focusing on proble-

matic social relations which would provoke

thought and change opinion. Dixon (1996)

underlined this intention by rhetorically

asking if ‘contemplative activity [is] an

enemy of the recreation of a complete human

being?’ Eventually, the VPB’s answer was

contained in a revised policy, which empha-

sizes, ‘beauty, not controversy, when it comes

Table 1 Major monuments and sculptures in Stanley Park (as defined by the Vancouver Park Board) prior to the proposal

for the AIDS memorial

Monument Vancouver Park Board’s description

9 O’Clock Gun Cast in England in 1816, brought here in 1894, was used by mariners to set their

chronometers and also to warn fishers of closings.

Chehalis Monument Marks lost lives when two ships collided nearby.

David Oppenheimer 1911 bust commemorating Vancouver’s Mayor, 1888 – 1891.
Edward Stamp Commemorates where lumber operations first started in the park in 1865.

Garden of Remembrance Air Force Memorial plaques.

Girl in a Wet Suit Sculpture by Elek Imredy placed on 9 June 1972.

Hallelujah Point A former site for Salvation Army prayer meetings.
Harding Memorial Commemorating the first visit of a US president.

Harry Jerome Famed Vancouver runner.

HMS Egeria Marks survey point used by Royal Navy ship in 1898.

Japanese Monument Memorial to Vancouver’s Japanese soldiers serving in World War I.
Lord Stanley Governor General of Canada (Queen’s representative) in 1888.

Lumbermen’s Arch Erected in 1952 to honour BC’s lumber industry and replacing the original Bowie

Arch built in 1912 and dismantled in 1947.
Pauline Johnson 1913 cairn to famous Vancouver poet.

Port of Vancouver Explains Port of Vancouver landmarks.

Queen Victoria Built to commemorate her death.

Robert Burns Famed Scottish poet.
Shakespeare Garden Trees planted that were mentioned in the Bard’s works.

SS Beaver Cairn Ship wrecked on the rocks below Prospect Point in 1888.

SS Empress of Japan Replica of ship’s figurehead that sailed to the Orient from 1891 to 1922.

Stanley Park Centennial 1988 plaque marks the spot where park was originally declared open.

Source: Vancouver Park Board (n.d.).

84 John Paul Catungal & Eugene J. McCann

D
o
w
n
l
o
a
d
e
d
 
B
y
:
 
[
C
a
n
a
d
i
a
n
 
R
e
s
e
a
r
c
h
 
K
n
o
w
l
e
d
g
e
 
N
e
t
w
o
r
k
]
 
A
t
:
 
0
5
:
5
0
 
5
 
M
a
r
c
h
 
2
0
1
0



to approving new monuments’ (Todd 1998a).

‘[N]ew monuments,’ they continued, ‘must

enhance the design of parks’ (Todd 1998b).

Visually pleasing design was to be the future

watchword of park governance.

Working under its new policy in 1998, the

VPB approved the location of the AIDS

memorial for Sunset Beach park (Todd

1998a), located immediately south of Davie

Village, Vancouver’s gay neighbourhood, and

outside the boundary of Stanley Park (Figure 1

and 2). It was officially opened to the public in

November 2004, with the following dedica-

tion carved into its walkway: ‘this Memorial is

located in this park as a place of healing and

education within an understanding and com-

passionate city’ (AIDS Memorial Society of

Vancouver 1998). The park at Sunset Beach

does not have the status of Stanley Park and

the location of the memorial there may be

regarded as a ‘ghettoization’ of the AIDS issue

which negates the opportunity for the memor-

ial to be located in one of Vancouver’s iconic

places of memory and thus lessens the

opportunity for it to be viewed by a wider

population or to elicit complex and contra-

dictory emotions about the past and future of

AIDS among the general population.

The new policy’s focus on the design and

moral neutrality of public space certainly lends

credence to worries about the state-sanctioned

narrowing of what activities are deemed

appropriate in public space (MacLeod 2002;

Mitchell 2003), but the details of the case also

underscore the constant ideological work

necessary to maintain hegemonic codings and

emphasizes that state governance is not

monolithic, nor a ‘black box.’ Rather, it is

contingent on specific situations and the

discretion of state agents, like a particular set

of Park Board members experiencing certain

political pressures. Clearly, the VPB’s final

decision meant that memorialization of people

with AIDS is not visible and therefore not

officially sanctioned in Stanley Park and,

through this action, a problem of governance

was solved and a hegemonic moral order was

settled once more in favour of ‘taken-for-

granted’ notions of appropriateness (Matless

2000). Yet, the ability of opposition forces to

get the original decision to locate the memorial

inside Stanley Park changed highlights the

potential (but by no means certainty) for

governance decisions to be influenced in more

progressive directions in other contexts.

Public sex, violence, and moral geography
in the Aaron Webster case

Such struggles over what should be visible in

Stanley Park have not been limited to the AIDS

memorial. Certain spaces in the park consti-

tute sites for anonymous gay public sex and,

simultaneously, strategic sites for community-

building and networking (Ingram 1997).

These spaces often become the site for and

stake in struggles over ‘appropriate’ presence

and behaviour in public space, particularly

when they are made visible to the general

public through media coverage of violence.

These cruising grounds, like spaces of memory,

become problems of governance that are dealt

with using state power that is deployed at the

discretion of specific state agents and in a

context of often intense political contestation.

On 17 November 2001, Aaron Webster’s

body was discovered, battered and naked, by a

friend taking a late-night stroll in Stanley Park.

Subsequent police investigations and media

reports implicated four young men in Web-

ster’s beating death. Robertson (2005: 485)

notes that these men travelled to Stanley Park

from their suburban homes, armed with ‘an

assortment of golf irons, a pool cue and,

possibly, baseball bats,’ specifically to look for

Governing sexuality and park space 85

D
o
w
n
l
o
a
d
e
d
 
B
y
:
 
[
C
a
n
a
d
i
a
n
 
R
e
s
e
a
r
c
h
 
K
n
o
w
l
e
d
g
e
 
N
e
t
w
o
r
k
]
 
A
t
:
 
0
5
:
5
0
 
5
 
M
a
r
c
h
 
2
0
1
0



‘peeping toms.’ The logic behind this ‘mis-

sion,’ it was later revealed in the testimony of

the accused, was revenge: one of the accused

had once been disturbed by a ‘peeping tom’ in

Stanley Park as he and his girlfriend were in his

parked car. It was also revealed that the

group had gone on several similar forays to

the park in the past. That particular evening,

the group came upon Aaron Webster, dressed

only in socks and boots, smoking near a gay

cruising stroll. The group chased him down,

repeatedly hitting him with their weapons

until he fell to the ground. Webster was

pronounced dead by the police and emergency

medical personnel who arrived shortly

thereafter.

The four men—two youths (identified as

A.C. and J.S.) and two adults (Ryan Cran and

Danny Rao)—were eventually charged with

manslaughter. Faced with the prospect of the

charges being made more serious, with an

associated higher sentence, the defendants

argued that the act should not be defined a

hate crime because they had been looking for

‘peeping toms,’ not gay men. This argument

was partially successful. A.C. and J.S. were

tried in youth court (in exchange for testifying

against the adults); both were found guilty and

sentenced to three years detention. Only in

J.S.’s trial was hate crime legislation explicitly

invoked to affect the sentencing, however.

In delivering his sentence, Youth Court Judge

Valmond Romilly utilized the hate crime

statute by pointing out that the law protected

‘peeping toms,’ as they constitute ‘groups

similar to those defined by sexual orientation

in that both represent a sexual lifestyle which

some consider deviant and, therefore, these

groups would suffer discrimination in a

similar manner to gay people’ (Robertson

2005: 486). He also added that, ‘a gay person

was “bashed” by the accused and his friends in

an area frequented by gays, and in that regard,

Figure 2 The AIDS memorial at Sunset Beach park. Source: J. P. Catungal.

86 John Paul Catungal & Eugene J. McCann

D
o
w
n
l
o
a
d
e
d
 
B
y
:
 
[
C
a
n
a
d
i
a
n
 
R
e
s
e
a
r
c
h
 
K
n
o
w
l
e
d
g
e
 
N
e
t
w
o
r
k
]
 
A
t
:
 
0
5
:
5
0
 
5
 
M
a
r
c
h
 
2
0
1
0



I fail to see why it cannot be regarded as a “gay

bashing”’ (Robertson 2005: 487).

The trial for the adult suspects had a

different tenor. Judge Mary Humphries

acquitted Danny Rao, citing insufficient

evidence linking him to the incident and

sentenced Ryan Cran to the minimum number

of years (six) sought by Crown prosecutors.

In Cran’s sentencing, hate crime legislation was

explicitly avoided because the judge felt that

there was no proof that the suspect’s motive

was hate against gay people (Robertson 2005:

488). Media accounts of the killing and

subsequent legal case produced an extended

public debate around homophobia, morality

and violence in public space and helped spur

activists’ attempts to reorder and recode the

spaces of the park and the city more generally.

Protecting the park from sexual ‘deviance’

Sumartojo notes that through decisions on

how to frame and focus the news, the media

are able ‘to reflect and influence opinions not

only about hate-crime in general, but also

about the groups that hate crime laws are

designed to protect’ (2004: 93). In covering

the killing, reporters repeated that Webster

was not only in Stanley Park but, ‘in an area of

Stanley Park that is cut with trails known as

strolls, where some in the gay community seek

anonymous sex’ (Bailey 2001). This focus was

accompanied by frequent descriptions of his

body as naked, except for hiking boots.

In reaction to the media’s narrow focus on

Webster’s sexuality, friends and family sought

to portray Webster as a complete person, who

‘loved photography and was very good at it,

who had a great sense of humour and who was

“quite a spiritual person”’ (Skelton and

Zacharias 2001). It is unsurprising, however,

that gay cruising sites continued to figure

prominently in the mainstream media cover-

age. The performance of sex—defined as a

private act—in public space ruptures the

liberal private – public dichotomy that defines

appropriateness. Implicitly, much of the

coverage and opinion seemed to ask whether

the public visibility of ‘inappropriate’ acts in

gay cruising sites provokes violence.

Homophobic commentary on Webster’s

public performance of gay sexuality formed a

significant portion of reactions in the media.

For instance, Webster’s killing elicited calls to

‘ensure that a park [does not] become an

outdoor sex shop that turns off legitimate park

users’ (North Shore News 2001). One letter to

the editor argued that acts in the place the

author called ‘The Fruit Loop’ were a

necessary ingredient in a killing which could

have been avoided had Webster ‘engaged in

whatever type of sex he desired in the privacy

of his own home’ (Knight 2001). Another

letter-writer blamed Webster for his fate

because he ‘[sought] out deserted and poten-

tially dangerous areas in order to have

anonymous sex’ (Peace River Block Daily

News 2001). Quoting a police detective, the

letter argued that ‘people who go [to Stanley

Park to seek sex] “create a perfect circum-

stance to become victims of crime”’

(Peace River Block Daily News 2001).

These harsh, blame-the-victim reactions

sought to defend the ‘wholesome’ iconic park

from deviance. In doing so, they asserted the

normalcy of heterosexuality and coded the

park space in terms of specific orders of sexual

morality. As Brown (2000) notes, such codings

serve to ‘closet’ actions deemed out of place.

The invisibility and attendant vulnerability

entailed in this closeting was highlighted in the

wake of Webster’s killing when investigators

found it difficult to gather testimony from

witnesses who were, in some cases, afraid to

reveal their sexuality by admitting their

Governing sexuality and park space 87

D
o
w
n
l
o
a
d
e
d
 
B
y
:
 
[
C
a
n
a
d
i
a
n
 
R
e
s
e
a
r
c
h
 
K
n
o
w
l
e
d
g
e
 
N
e
t
w
o
r
k
]
 
A
t
:
 
0
5
:
5
0
 
5
 
M
a
r
c
h
 
2
0
1
0



presence in the location of the crime (Todd

2003a). In light of both the violence and the

harsh judgements of Webster in the media,

invisibility became the watchword and pro-

tective strategy for many of the cruising

ground’s regulars just as prosecutors and

community activists sought to shed light on

the issue of hate crime.

The efforts to bring the killers to account

and to make spaces of homophobic violence

visible to the state were also confounded by

Canadian law’s tendency to assign homosexu-

ality to the private, invisible sphere (Bain and

Nash 2007) and by its inability to consistently

incorporate spatiality into decisions over

violent acts. This further element of the

socio-spatial production of sexual morality

as a problem of governance was epitomized by

Judge Humphries’ decision to not define

Webster’s killing as a hate crime. Her decision

therefore closed off acknowledgement of

the spatiality of hate crime (Bellett 2005;

Theodore 2005). As Robertson puts it in his

critique of the decision, however,

Webster performed a gay identity, or space of

difference, that was readable as such through

action, bodily comportment and time, even to the

ilk of the accuseds, and this made him a target, even

in the absence of the accuseds’ familiarity with [that

area of the park] as a gay space or what a gay man

looks like . . . By applying a geographical

understanding of the identity of the body and

space, it may be asserted that the intersection of the

naked body of Aaron Webster and the space of a

dark park generally associated with sexual goings-

on should have led a reasonable person to conclude

that to attack Webster would be an affront if not to

the gay community, then to a class of persons who

have a sexuality dissimilar from that of the

majority. (2005: 499)

In her sentencing, Humphries failed to take

into account ‘constellations of public – private,

action, time and comportment’ (Robertson

2005: 500) in identifying a hateful motivation.

Yet, for Robertson, Webster’s presence was

certainly ‘queer (or different)’ (2005: 500), if

not gay, and it was particularly so, we would

suggest, since it involved a taking of space, of

being visible in an iconic space where visibility

is encouraged but only in strictly constrained

forms (Mitchell 2003). His presence disrupted

taken-for-granted moral codings. ‘By smoking

in place, perhaps even languorously,’

Robertson (2005: 500) continues,

Webster expressed the fact that he was

appropriating this corner of the park—he was not

transiting through with a pet. Through an

audacious docility and being outside (as opposed

to inside an automobile), as an object, and as a body

available to make new acquaintances in the dark he

blurred the distinction between the public and

private: he drew out the latter to form an ob-scene.

(Robertson 2005: 499)

So, while Bain and Nash are right to argue that

the state’s erasure of a range of sexualities

from the public gaze means that the achieve-

ment of ‘robust sexual citizenship . . . is often

highly problematic, particularly for those

whose everyday practices seek to incorporate

radical sexual alternatives’ (2007: 31), we

would add that through decisions like

Humphries’ which ignore context and thus

severely narrow definitions of hate crime, state

agents also hide and therefore legally

‘bracket,’ certain forms of hate. Yet, it is also

important to note that ‘the state,’ in the

abstract, does not do anything but that it is

specific agents of the state (judges, for

example) who hold a certain degree of

discretion to make judgements and enforce

88 John Paul Catungal & Eugene J. McCann

D
o
w
n
l
o
a
d
e
d
 
B
y
:
 
[
C
a
n
a
d
i
a
n
 
R
e
s
e
a
r
c
h
 
K
n
o
w
l
e
d
g
e
 
N
e
t
w
o
r
k
]
 
A
t
:
 
0
5
:
5
0
 
5
 
M
a
r
c
h
 
2
0
1
0



regulations. The contrast between Judge

Humphries’ understanding of hate crime and

that of her youth court counterpart is a case in

point, since the same statute was applied in

one case but not the other. The ordering of

morality, sexuality, and public space—even an

iconic public space in which the political

stakes are raised by its symbolic importance—

becomes, from this perspective, a varied and

unpredictable terrain upon which struggle

plays out.

Beyond Stanley Park: activists’ efforts to
recode the city in terms of hate crime

While the eventual judgements in the Webster

case were largely disappointing to those

activists and prosecutors involved, the varied

terrain of activism offered other opportunities

to work with state agents against endemic

homophobic violence. As the investigation

into Webster’s death proceeded, activists in the

gay community sought to utilize the heigh-

tened visibility of parks as cruising sites

and their attendant threat of violence to

also highlight other sites in Vancouver where

homophobic violence takes place. They

problematized the narrow spatial bounded-

ness of many discussions of Webster’s killing.

For example, one argued that homophobia

and violence were more rampant in the city

than reported and that attacks happened ‘not

just in areas where people would frequent for

casual sexual encounters’ (in Bailey 2001).

Thus, while proponents of the AIDS memorial

could be seen to have been thwarted to some

extent by its eventual location outside Stanley

Park, activists who reacted to Webster’s killing

took the opportunity to widen the discussion

of the locations of hate crime beyond the park

in order to advocate for better protection

across the city.

Their argument was echoed by a police

officer involved in the Webster case who

suggested that the suspects were most likely

‘serial gay bashers’ and that they ‘may have

cruised down Davie Street or in other areas

where there is a highly concentrated gay

population’ (in Bolan 2001). Indeed, the

argument that cruising sites in parks invite

violence fails to explain this broader geogra-

phy of homophobic hate crime. After all,

parks are not separate from society or the city

more widely; they form a part of a much

broader social ecology of queer urban spaces.

Davie Street is at the heart of the Davie Village

neighbourhood, close to the final location of

the AIDS memorial, and is generally con-

sidered to be a relatively safe and tolerant

space in which Other sexual identities are

visible (Miller 2005). By highlighting the

widespread threat of violence in the city,

even in ‘safe’ spaces, activists decided

‘that [it is] not appropriate anymore to just

scurry off and not deal with it,’ and so

resistance strategies—including some violent

retaliation and the involvement of the police—

became more common (Carrigg 2003).

Activists sought to overcome the ‘[commu-

nity’s] historically . . . adversarial relationship

with police’ (Morton 2003) and promote a

form of community – police collaboration that

would not entail simply increased patrols in

Stanley Park. They called for more liaisons

between gay organizations and the police

during hate crime investigations in order to

encourage victims to report attacks. In an

early attempt to bring GLBT activists into

the city’s governance networks, Prideline, a

peer-support helpline for victims of gay

violence, was launched in collaboration with

the Vancouver police in 2003 (Morton 2003).

In addition, police visibility in public and

institutional spaces, such as their participation

in pride parades and the enrolment of gay and

Governing sexuality and park space 89

D
o
w
n
l
o
a
d
e
d
 
B
y
:
 
[
C
a
n
a
d
i
a
n
 
R
e
s
e
a
r
c
h
 
K
n
o
w
l
e
d
g
e
 
N
e
t
w
o
r
k
]
 
A
t
:
 
0
5
:
5
0
 
5
 
M
a
r
c
h
 
2
0
1
0



lesbian officers, were seen as necessary steps

(Bolan 2001). And on the seventh anniversary

of Webster’s death, in November 2008, a series

of ‘Aaron Webster Community Forums’ were

launched by a Vancouver LGBTQ community

centre in partnership with the police depart-

ment. With the tagline ‘Stop the Violence!’

these five events were held throughout the city,

not just in Davie Village, and indicated the

continued resonance of the Webster case for

activists, their continued attempts to expand

the spatial scope of their concerns, their

ongoing good relationship with the police,

but also the ongoing cases of anti-GLBT

violence (Rolfsen 2008) that underscore the

problems of governing sexual morality and

public space in Vancouver.

Conclusion

In this paper, we have highlighted coding and

ordering practices employed by state actors,

the media, and community activists, by violent

‘bashers’ and by ordinary people like Webster

as they seek to govern, define, and contest

hegemonic definitions of appropriate presence

and behaviour in an iconic park. Through

accounts of a dispute over the location of an

AIDS memorial in Stanley Park and of the

killing of a gay man in the park, we analyse the

relationship between sexuality and public

space as a problem of governance continually

in the process of being regulated and

represented within the public sphere.

Recent evaluations of the literatures on

geographies of sexuality conclude that

scholarship has been somewhat narrow in

both its focus on certain types of places

where sexualities can be studied and in its

deployment of certain standard, relatively

under-problematized analytical and political

categories. Brown, for example, calls for

studies of ‘sexualities as they are lived across

the whole city, not just the inner-city leisure

zones and gentrified neighbourhoods . . . and

[for] research beyond the metropolitan

centres of the Global North’ (2008: 1216).

Hubbard (2008: 641), for his part, notes that

‘geographies of sexuality overwhelmingly

focus on the way that spaces are produced as

either heterosexual or homosexual, and con-

sequently fail to acknowledge the diverse

sexualities that may exist within these broad

categories.’

How, then, might our study be positioned in

terms of these programmatic statements?

Clearly, we do not venture beyond a well-

studied city in our analysis. What we do offer

is an argument for understanding specific

public spaces and their relationship to sexu-

ality, even those spaces in well-studied cities,

in their own terms rather than as monoliths.

Thus, we argue that our two related cases

highlight the specific role of iconic public

parks in the spatial governance of sexuality.

There is something about Stanley Park and

places like it that ratchet up media attention

and political stakes in debates over regulation.

Similarly, we point to a need for the ongoing

conceptualization of the governance of public

space and sexuality beyond ‘black box’

categories like ‘the state’ (cf. Hubbard 2008:

645 on the ‘“black box” of heterosexuality’).

This is not to dismiss, but to build upon, the

important and varied work on the

relationship between state actors, space, and

sexuality. Work on sexuality and public space

as problems of governance can continue to

explore how the structural characteristics of

the state reproduce inequalities and repress-

sion but might also conceptualize the state in a

similarly open and potentially empowering

way as Brown (2008: 1228) hopes sexuality

will be understood: ‘as frequently being

inconsistent, beyond easy classification, and

90 John Paul Catungal & Eugene J. McCann

D
o
w
n
l
o
a
d
e
d
 
B
y
:
 
[
C
a
n
a
d
i
a
n
 
R
e
s
e
a
r
c
h
 
K
n
o
w
l
e
d
g
e
 
N
e
t
w
o
r
k
]
 
A
t
:
 
0
5
:
5
0
 
5
 
M
a
r
c
h
 
2
0
1
0



as being immanent and “defined” at the

moment of the sex act, flirtation or encounter.’

Acknowledgements

This paper has benefited greatly from com-

ments by Phil Hubbard, Sean Robertson,

Marit Rosol, and two anonymous reviewers.

Thanks also to John Ng (SFU Cartography

Lab) for producing the map. The usual

disclaimers apply.

References

AIDS Memorial Society of Vancouver (1998) Vancouver

AIDS memorial dedication, ,http://www.aidsmemorial.

ca/The-Memorial/Dedication.htm. (accessed 7 September

2008).

Anderson, K. (1991) Vancouver’s Chinatown: Racial

Discourse in Canada, 1875 – 1980. Montreal and

Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press.

Bailey, P. (2001) Police believe witnesses saw Stanley Park

killing, The Vancouver Sun, 14 Dec.: B.3.

Bain, A. and Nash, C.J. (2007) The Toronto women’s

bathhouse raid: querying queer identities in the court-

room, Antipode 39: 17 – 34.

Barman, J. (2005) Stanley Park’s Secret: The Forgotten

Families of Whoi Whoi, Kanaka Ranch, and Brockton

Point. Vancouver: Harbour Publishing.

Bell, D. and Binnie, J. (2000) The Sexual Citizen: Queer

Politics and Beyond. Cambridge: Polity.

Bell, D. and Valentine, G. (1995) Mapping Desire:

Geographies of Sexualities. London: Routledge.

Bellett, G. (2005) Fatal beating not a hate crime, National

Post, 9 Feb.: A.4.

Blomley, N. (2004) Unsettling the City: Urban Land and

the Politics of Property. New York: Routledge.

Bolan, K. (2001) Killers ‘likely serial gay bashers’,

The Vancouver Sun, 1 Nov.: B.1.

Britishcolumbia.com (n.d.) BC parks—Stanley Park,

Downtown Vancouver, ,http://www.britishcolumbia.

com/parksandtrails/parks/details/?ID¼481. (accessed

7 September 2008).

Brown, G. (2004) Sites of public (homo)sex and the

carnivalesque spaces of Reclaim the Streets, in Lees, L.

(ed.) The Emancipatory City? Paradoxes and Possibi-

lities. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, pp. 91 – 107.

Brown, G. (2008) Urban (homo)sexualities: ordinary cities

and ordinary sexualities, Geography Compass 2:

1215 – 1231.

Brown, M. (1997) RePlacing Citizenship: AIDS Activism

and Radical Democracy. New York: Guilford.

Brown, M. (1999) Reconceptualizing public and private in

urban regime theory: governance in AIDS politics,

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research

23: 70 – 87.

Brown, M. (2000) Closet Space: Geographies of Metaphor

from the Body to the Globe. London: Routledge.

Burk, A.L. (2003) Private griefs, public places, Political

Geography 22: 317 – 333.

Carrigg, D. (2003) Gays fighting mad about harassment:

police won’t condone retaliation, Vancouver Courier

19 Jan.: 17.

Corburn, J. (2007) Reconnecting with the roots: a critical

history of American planning and public health for the

twenty-first century, Urban Affairs Review 42:

688 – 713.

Cresswell, T. (1996) In Place/Out of Place: Geography,

Ideology and Transgression. Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press.

Dixon, J. (1996) Stanley Park seems so right as a place

to contemplate the catastrophe, The Vancouver Sun,

16: Nov.: A. 19.

Domosh, M. (2001) The ‘Women of New York’: a

fashionable moral geography, Environment and Plan-

ning D: Society and Space 19: 573 – 592.

Douglas, M. (1966) Purity & Danger: An Analysis of

Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. New York: Praeger.

Fong, P. (1996a) Stanley Park AIDS memorial to bear

2,000 names, The Vancouver Sun, 6 Nov.: B.3.

Fong, P. (1996b) Memorial’s location up to public,

The Vancouver Sun, 12 Nov.: B.3.

Fong, P. (1998) AIDS memorial approved for Sunset

Beach, The Vancouver Sun, 23 Nov.: A.1.

Gerlach, K. (1998) Beat AIDS, then build shrine,

The Province, 4 Aug.: A.15.

Gobster, P.H. (1998) Urban parks as green walls or green

magnets? Interracial relations in neighborhood bound-

ary parks, Landscape and Urban Planning 41: 43 – 55.

Gram, K. (1996) Parks board sets aside approval for AIDS

project, The Vancouver Sun, 9 Nov.: A.1.

Griffin, K. (1995) AIDS memorial in planning stage,

The Vancouver Sun, 3 Nov.: B.3.

Haysom, I. (1996a) Opposition delays AIDS monument,

The Windsor Star, 14 Nov.: B.8.

Haysom, I. (1996b) AIDS memorial for park delayed by

public outcry, The Ottawa Citizen, 14 Nov.: A.4.

Governing sexuality and park space 91

D
o
w
n
l
o
a
d
e
d
 
B
y
:
 
[
C
a
n
a
d
i
a
n
 
R
e
s
e
a
r
c
h
 
K
n
o
w
l
e
d
g
e
 
N
e
t
w
o
r
k
]
 
A
t
:
 
0
5
:
5
0
 
5
 
M
a
r
c
h
 
2
0
1
0



Heibel, T. (2004) Blame it on casa nova?: ‘good scenery and

sodomy’ in rural southwestern Pennsylvania, in Flint, C.

(ed.) Spaces of Hate: Geographies of Discrimination

and Intolerance in the U.S.A. New York: Routledge,

pp. 109 – 136.

Hubbard, P. (2002) Maintaining family values? Cleansing

the streets of sex advertising, Area 34: 353 – 360.

Hubbard, P. (2004) Cleansing the metropolis: sex work

and the politics of zero tolerance, Urban Studies 41:

1687 – 1702.

Hubbard, P. (2008) Here, there, everywhere: the

ubiquitous geographies of heteronormativity, Geogra-

phy Compass 2: 640 – 658.

Ingram, G.B. (2000) Contests over social memory in

waterfront Vancouver: historical editing & obfuscation

through public art, ,http://www.ub.es/escult/Water/

tress/gordon.htm. (accessed 10 September 2008).

Ingram, G.B., Bouthillette, A.M. and Retter, Y. (eds)

(1997) Queers in Space: Communities/Public Places/

Sites of Resistance. Seattle, WA: Bay Press.

Kerkin, K. (2004) Discourse, representation and urban

planning: how a critical approach to discourse helps

reveal the spatial re-ordering of street sex work,

Australian Geographer 35: 185 – 192.

Knight, L. (2001) The ‘Fruit Loop’ can be a dangerous

place, North Shore News, 28 Nov.: 7.

Knopp, L. (1995) Sexuality and urban space: a framework

for analysis, in Bell, D. and Valentine, G. (eds)

Mapping Desire. New York: Routledge, pp. 149 – 161.

Lee, R. and Smith, D.M. (eds) (2004) Geographies and

Moralities: International Perspectives on Development,

Justice, and Place. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Lipsky, M. (1980) Street-level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas

of the Individual in Public Services. New York:

Russell Sage Foundation.

Loukaitou-Sideris, A. (1995) Urban form and social

context: cultural differentiation in the uses of urban

parks, Journal of Planning Education and Research 14:

89 – 102.

MacLeod, G. (2002) From urban entrepreneurialism to a

‘revanchist city’? On the spatial injustices of Glasgow’s

renaissance, Antipode 34: 602 – 624.

Mather, S. (1998) One of many homes: stories of

dispossession from ‘Stanley Park’, MA thesis, Simon

Fraser University.

Matless, D. (2000) Moral geographies, in Johnston, R.,

Gregory, D., Pratt, G. and Watts, M. (eds) Dictionary

of Human Geography. Malden, MA: Blackwell,

pp. 522 – 524.

Mawani, R. (2005) Genealogies of the land: aboriginality,

law, and territory in Vancouver’s Stanley Park,

Social and Legal Studies 14: 315 – 339.

McCune, S. (1998) AIDS wall, cenotaph analogy panned,

The Province, 16 Jun.: A.4.

Miller, V. (2005) Intertextuality, the referential illusion

and the production of a gay ghetto, Social & Cultural

Geography 6: 61 – 80.

Mitchell, D. (2003) The Right to the City: Social Justice

and the Fight for Public Space. New York: Guilford.

Mitchell, K. (2000) The culture of urban space,

Urban Geography 21: 443 – 449.

Morton, B. (2003) Murder victim’s mother pleads for

information, The Vancouver Sun, 15 Feb.: B.12.

North Shore News (2001) Police park, 23 Nov.: 6.

Peace River Block Daily News (2001) Government not at

fault, 22 Nov.: 4.

Prior, J. (2008) Planning for sex in the city: urban

governance, planning and the placement of sex industry

premises in inner Sydney, Australian Geographer 39:

339 – 352.

Proudfoot, J. and McCann, E.J. (2008) At street-level:

bureaucratic practice in the management of urban

neighborhood change, Urban Geography 29: 348 – 370.

Robertson, S. (2005) Spaces of exception in Canadian hate

crimes legislation: accounting for the effects of

sexuality-based aggravation in R.v. Cran, Criminal

Law Quarterly 50: 482 – 507.

Rolfsen, C. (2008) Vancouver police seek hate charge: gay

man’s jaw broken in viscious attack in Davie Village, The

Vancouver Sun, 28 Sep., ,http://www.canada.com/vanco

uversun/story.html?id¼c8585fc3-b8af-4d0a-8280-

e80bff7d48da. (accessed 21 November 2008).

Rosenzweig, R. (1983) Eight Hours for What We Will:

Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870 – 1920.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Schultz, M.T. (1998) Policing public space: community

response to park cruising and sexual activity, MA thesis,

Department of Landscape Architecture, University of

Washington, Seattle.

Setten, G. (2004) The habitus, the rule and the moral

landscape, Cultural Geographies 11: 389 – 415.

Sharp, E. (2005) Morality Politics in American Cities.

Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.

Sibley, D. (1995) Geographies of Exclusion: Society and

Difference in the West. New York: Routledge.

Skelton, C. and Zacharias, Y. (2001) Police on park murder:

‘It’s a hate crime’, The Vancouver Sun, 19 Nov.: A.1.

Smith, D.M. (1998) Geography and moral philosophy,

Ethics, Place and Environment 1: 7 – 34.

92 John Paul Catungal & Eugene J. McCann

D
o
w
n
l
o
a
d
e
d
 
B
y
:
 
[
C
a
n
a
d
i
a
n
 
R
e
s
e
a
r
c
h
 
K
n
o
w
l
e
d
g
e
 
N
e
t
w
o
r
k
]
 
A
t
:
 
0
5
:
5
0
 
5
 
M
a
r
c
h
 
2
0
1
0



Smith, D.M. (2000) Moral Geographies: Ethics in a World

of Difference. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Solecki, W.D. and Welch, J.M. (1995) Urban parks: green

spaces or green walls, Landscape and Urban Planning

32: 93 – 106.

Steele, M. (1988) The First 100 Years: An Illustrated

Celebration. Vancouver: Vancouver Board of Parks and

Recreation.

Steele, M. (1993) Stanley Park. Surrey, BC: Heritage

House.

Sturken, M. (1997) Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War,

the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering.

Berkeley: University of California Press.

Sumartojo, R. (2004) Contesting place: anti-gay and lesbian

hate crime in Columbus, Ohio, in Flint, C. (ed.) Spaces of

Hate: Geographies of Discrimination and Intolerance in

the U.S.A. New York: Routledge, pp. 87– 107.

The Province (1996) We asked, 10 Nov.: A.8.

Theodore, T. (2005) Six-year term in brutal slaying

angers B.C. gay community, Kingston Whig-Standard 9

Feb.: 11.

Thompson, H.H. (1996) Keep park for recreation,

The Vancouver Sun, 9 Nov.: A.22.

Till, K.E. (2005) The New Berlin: Memory, Poltics, Place.

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Todd, D. (1998a) Monuments policy toughened,

The Vancouver Sun, 11 Dec.: A.3.

Todd, D. (1998b) Parks rule out controversial monuments,

National Post, 11 Dec: A.11.

Todd, D. (2003a) Getting high on hate and looking for

trouble, The Vancouver Sun, 19 May: B.1.

Valentine, G. (2004) Moral geographies of sexual citizen-

ship, in Lee, R. and Smith, D.M. (eds) Geographies

and Moralities: International Perspectives on Develop-

ment, Justice, and Place. Malden, MA: Blackwell,

pp. 199 – 210.

Vancouver Park Board (n.d.) Welcome to Stanley Park,

,http://vancouver.ca/Parks/parks/stanley/landmarks.

htm. (accessed 11 June 2009).

Whitehead, M. (2004) The urban neighbourhood

and the moral geographies of British urban policy,

in Johnston, C. and Whitehead, M. (eds) New

Horizons in British Urban Policy. Aldershot: Ashgate,

pp. 59 – 73.

Whitzman, C. (2002) Feminist activism for safer social

space in High Park, Toronto: how women got lost in the

woods, Canadian Journal of Urban Research 11:

299 – 322.

Yeager, S. (1996) Not in Stanley Park, The Province, 10

Nov.: A.8.

Abstract translations

Gouvernance de la sexualité et de l’espace du parc:
des actes de régulation à Vancouver, BC

Cet article suggère que le codage et le classement de

la sexualité et de l’espace au travers des significa-

tions de quelles pratiques sexuelles et de quelles

représentations de la sexualité sont appropriées

moralement dans les espaces publiques peuvent être

utilement compris comme un problème de gouver-

nance. Nous disons que des efforts à masquer ou à

rendre visible quelques sexualités spécifiques dans

l’espace publique sont compliqués et politiquement

sensibles car, tandis que les régulations écrites sont

relativement claires et définies, leur implémen-

tation, par des urbanistes, des juges, etc., implique

la discrétion significative et mène à des résultats

conditionnels et contestables. De plus, les politiques

de gouvernance de la moralité sexuelle et de

l’espace publique sont rendues plus problématiques

quand l’espace où une norme hégémonique de

comportement ou de la moralité est confrontée

publiquement est un parc iconique qui attire

l’attention intensive des medias. L’article élabore

ces arguments avec deux cas études interdépen-

dants: un débat sur la localité appropriée d’un

mémorial du SIDA à Stanley Park, Vancouver et la

réaction au meurtre d’un homosexuel qui arborait

le parc à la recherche de sexe. On conclut en

établissant un lien entre notre argument et des

déclarations récentes au sujet du futur des

géographies de la sexualité, en réclamant des

analyses qui admettent les potentialités ainsi que

les contingences des catégories comme ‘l’état’, ‘le

gouvernance’, et ‘l’espace publique’ et aussi leurs

tendances structurelles et leur association continue

avec la répression sexuelle.

Mots-clefs: espace publique, sexualité, l’etat,

gouvernance.

Gobernando la sexualidad y el espacio de parques:
actos de regulación en Vancouver, Columbia
Británica

Este papel se sugiere que es un problema de gobierno

cuando la codificación y ordenación de la sex-

ualidad y espacio están entendidos por definiciones

Governing sexuality and park space 93

D
o
w
n
l
o
a
d
e
d
 
B
y
:
 
[
C
a
n
a
d
i
a
n
 
R
e
s
e
a
r
c
h
 
K
n
o
w
l
e
d
g
e
 
N
e
t
w
o
r
k
]
 
A
t
:
 
0
5
:
5
0
 
5
 
M
a
r
c
h
 
2
0
1
0



morales que designan cuales practicas sexuales y
representaciones de sexualidad están apropiados.
Discutimos que los intentos esconder o revelar
sexualidades especı́ficos en el espacio público están
complicados y cargados polı́ticamente porque,
aunque las regulaciones escritas son relativamente
preestablecidos, su implementación, por planifica-
dores, juicios, et al., se involucra discreción
significativo y se lleva a resultados contingentes y
discutibles. Además, la polı́tica de gobernar la
moralidad sexual y el espacio público la hace más
problemática cuando se desafı́a un parque icónico
que representa las normas hegemónicas de conducta
y moralidad, y se atrae mucha atención de prensa. El
papel se elabora estos argumentos por dos estudios

interrelacionados: un debate sobre la ubicación
apropiada para un monumento a la SIDA en Stanley
Park, Vancouver y la reacción al asesinato de un
hombre homosexual quien andaba el parque
buscando relaciones sexuales. Concluimos por
unir nuestro argumento a declaraciones recientes
sobre el futuro de geografı́as de la sexualidad,
discutiendo por más análisis que se reconocen
ambos contingencias y potencialidades de categor-
ı́as como ‘el estado,’ ‘gobierno,’ y ‘espacio público’ y
también sus tendencias estructurales y su asociación
actual con la represión sexual.

Palabras claves: espacio público, sexualidad, el
estado, gobierno.

94 John Paul Catungal & Eugene J. McCann

D
o
w
n
l
o
a
d
e
d
 
B
y
:
 
[
C
a
n
a
d
i
a
n
 
R
e
s
e
a
r
c
h
 
K
n
o
w
l
e
d
g
e
 
N
e
t
w
o
r
k
]
 
A
t
:
 
0
5
:
5
0
 
5
 
M
a
r
c
h
 
2
0
1
0