Cancer claims Vancouver sex workers advocate Jamie Lee Hamilton
Credit to Author: Scott Brown| Date: Mon, 23 Dec 2019 18:50:09 +0000
Jamie Lee Hamilton, a longtime advocate for transgender and sex workers in Vancouver, died Monday following a lengthy battle with cancer.
She was 64.
In a Facebook post, friend David C. Jones, a Vancouver entertainer and writer, said Hamilton died at 1:36 a.m. at the Cottage Hospice, where she had been receiving care since Dec. 9.
“On Saturday, many friends and family gathered by her bedside as she was baptized and we all sang Amazing Grace by her request. A picture of her mother Alice Hamilton was on her window sill at the hospice looking over her,” wrote Jones. “A tireless advocate and activist she fought for this city and particular for sex workers.”
Hamilton was among the first to sound the alarm that a serial killer was preying on sex workers in Vancouver. She protested police inaction in 1998 when she dumped 67 pairs of women’s shoes on the steps of Vancouver City Hall to raise awareness about missing women.
“There were some individual police officers who were sympathetic,” Hamilton said. “But the political opinion of the police department was obscene: That [the missing women] may have moved away and there was no proof of a serial killer.”
Robert Pickton was arrested on Feb. 5, 2002 and later charged with 27 counts of first-degree murder of women who disappeared from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.
Police found the DNA of 33 missing women on Pickton’s farm in Port Coquitlam.
Pickton, who confided that he had killed 49 women, was convicted in 2007 of six counts of murder.
Jamie Lee Hamilton announces her run for council in 2005.
Hamilton established and operated Grandma’s House on Pandora Street as a safe haven in the Downtown Eastside for sex workers. It was later closed as a “common bawdy house” by police in 2000.
‘That wasn’t the sole purpose of the house,” Hamilton told the Vancouver Sun in 2000, adding 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.”
In 2016, Hamilton spearheaded, along with University of B.C. sociology professor Becki Ross, the construction of Canada’s first Sex Workers Memorial outside Vancouver’s St. Paul’s Anglican Church, at the West End intersection of Jervis and Pendrell.
The memorial, a retro lamp-post with a red bulb, honours sex workers who frequented the neighbourhood until the early 1980s, when they were driven away by city hall, police and the provincial government.
Hamilton became the first transgender person to seek public office in Canada when she ran, unsuccessfully, for city council in 1996.
It was the first of many political campaigns for Hamilton who also ran for Vancouver park board and school board.
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