Numbers Cabaret was once just someone’s house. There's a fireplace tucked in a corner, a downstairs area with footsteps scratched into its surface and a stripper pole that stands as proud and tall as a monument. When I went to their Thursday karaoke, I saw the kind of place where people sang with passion, not needing to glance at the prompter’s words. They performed to people they knew and cared about, and that familiarity shone in each person’s timber and vibrato. The three levels of Numbers are still a home, turned into a space for jubilation, community and queer joy.
Numbers took up residency on Davie Street in 1980, becoming the oldest continually-operating gay-owned business in the West End. For most of its tenure, it acted as an underground space for people trying not to be associated with the taboo of their identity. Because of this, records of the venue seem to be scattered amongst unrelated newspaper clippings and random personal accounts, set against the backdrop of resilient figures standing against hatred to find acceptance and joy.
The story of Numbers is intertwined with that of Davie Street and the West End as a whole. After the Second World War, many discharged sailors found themselves in Vancouver, forming small pockets of queer community entirely in secret. The neighbourhood grew as Vancouver gained a reputation for being a gay-friendly city — Ron Dutton, a historian focused on Vancouver’s queer communities and the creator of the BC Gay and Lesbian Archives, told the Vancouver Sun in 2011 that there’s evidence of secretly-operating gay bars stretching back nearly 90 years from today.
Jim Deva, the owner of Little Sister’s Book and Art Emporium and a pillar of the West End queer community through the latter half of the 20th century, argued that the 1969 decriminalization of homosexuality was the real genesis of the gay community in Canada and Vancouver alike. Once the anti-liquor laws were removed, gay bars no longer needed to be in Yaletown, seen as dark, industrial and anonymous, but could flourish in spaces dedicated to a queer clientele.
Despite decriminalization, discriminatory laws and anti-gay sentiments choked the nightlife of young gay men in the ‘70s and forced almost prohibition-like secrecy on any business catering to them. Pockets of underground communities started to form and consolidate across the West End of Vancouver — then a residential neighbourhood.
Numbers was born into this space in 1980. Its niche was providing a space for queer people to finally be themselves — at the club if not politically or publicly. Numbers catered to openly queer men, allowing them to be themselves, to be human, at least while they were within its walls.
But as those familiar with queer history will know, the 1980s were a time of panic, death and tragedy in the community. AIDS, then known as Gay-Related Immune Deficiency (GRID), was first reported in Canada in 1982. Davie Street, which housed the largest gay population in Vancouver, was hit first.
For Vancouver’s gay community, living through the AIDS epidemic was a daily exercise in hopelessness. Bob Tivey, the first director and co-founder of the support group AIDS Vancouver which formed in 1983, kept a clipboard of people in BC who AIDS killed. Some were friends, some were strangers — and the names kept piling up.
Tivey helped found and run AIDS Vancouver in its genesis. In 1986, he told the province that, before the epidemic, he had worked odd jobs around the city and felt like he had no focus in life. When AIDS hit Vancouver, he volunteered in a hospice and provided crisis counselling to assist the dying. He said that AIDS helped centre his life, and gave him a larger purpose to commit to.
Tivey helped inform the public about AIDS and its real and realistic impact. He was a voice of the organization, giving several interviews to the press about the work they were doing. During the height of the epidemic, he and other members took calls from heterosexuals worried about contact with gay people in their lives. Tivey is remembered for his fearlessness and compassion, working with those on Davie Street to quell the fear that built like pressure in a volcano.
AIDS alienated queer people from each other and created insular communities vulnerable to acts of hatred. The late ‘80s and early ‘90s were fraught with these acts. In what were called “gay bashings,” young straight men, mainly teenagers and young twenty-somethings, would go into queer spaces and terrorize their occupants — hate crime as communal bonding.
Davie Street and Numbers were magnets for these attacks. Men who would take shortcuts from Numbers to Buddy’s to Celebrities — other Davie clubs — were so targeted that police would have to patrol these areas specifically on the lookout for “groups of young punks.”
The police did not effectively deal with this epidemic of hatred. These crimes were underreported, but frequent enough that police heard about these issues. One survey in 1992 said that nearly half of the gay male respondents had been beaten at least once in their lives for being gay. Another found that 87% of gay men would not report these crimes to the police. Jack Froese, a Vancouver constable, said that he didn’t feel that “gay-bashing” was rampant in the West End compared to other crimes. Some men felt like the police were more eager to arrest gay men for infractions than to prevent attacks.
When a community feels unsafe just participating in their culture, despondent in their only places of joy with no institutional help to turn to, they learn to fight back. Self-defense courses and other groups started to pop up on Davie. Others aimed at creating assistance programs for those who have been attacked. All of these organizations had to be community-built because law enforcement wasn’t supporting any meaningful effort to address this tragedy.
The history of Davie Street should not be painted by the stains caused by the reprobates who treated queer people as an outlet for pent up aggression. Those who have committed acts of hatred, many of whom are now firmly in their middle ages, should carry that guilt and shame until the pallbearers place them into the earth. What should live eternally is the people who fought back. The names of those who have created and protected a community should be known. They must be remembered.
One group that aimed to protect the residents of Davie Street from the spike in gay bashings were the queer patrol, or the Q street patrol. Groups of gay men and lesbians wore black bomber jackets, berets and boots to tour the west end and try to protect people from these attacks. They stood outside of bars and clubs late at night, projecting needed energy to push back against those who wanted to tear down a community. Members joined to combat the fear these times of terror caused.
David Perritt, a 29 year old Q street patroller, joined because he didn’t want to keep feeling like a victim. In the Vancouver Sun article discussing the genesis of this group in 1992 — “Queer patrol doesn’t have limp wrist, only needed muscle” — he talks about how he was sitting with friends drinking coffee when five men broke a window and attacked him. “The bashers are looking for a victim, so you don’t conform to what a victim looks like.” He took up arms and joined an organization that actually tried to protect the community.
How does this community extend to the modern day? One gay resident Tim Stevenson, the first openly gay minister in the United Church and former MLA and cabinet minister, said in a 2011 Vancouver Sun article that Davie Street was losing its relevance in modern queer society because the community doesn’t need to be so insular. Dutton expressed a similar sentiment in a 2024 interview with the Ubyssey — the internet has let queer spaces move away from physical locations, he said; so how do physical queer spaces survive and thrive?
The community focus of numbers was made clear when I called John Clerides —, the current owner of the cabaret who took over the operations when the founding father Phil Moon had to step down —. He worries that Numbers might be the last of a dying breed. He and his team are desperately trying to keep the flickers of community alive. talked to me about how it was to work a small, community centered business in Vancouver in an environment desperately trying to keep the flickers of personality alive. When he was younger, he said, “when I was growing up in Vancouver [that allegedly] there used to be 23 gay bars in Vancouver. [When] I was going [out] “there were a plethora of other bars, and [now] they're all gone. Everything's gone. It's all developed. Vancouver has been sanitized.”
It is apparent Clerides carries the torch of Numbers and the identity it holds with the help of others. He told me that he listens to his clubbing aged daughter to try to bring people in, and delegates to his team to try to make everything work. His focus through everything is to try to keep safe spaces in the Davie Village alive. Numbers maintains its place in Vancouver’s queer community because it actively chooses to be a welcoming space — to maintain what it has stood for since it officially opened its doors 40 years ago.
Mike, one of the regulars I had the chance to talk to during the cabaret’s weekly Thursday night karaoke, sings with a passion seen only in Romeo professing true love. He’s been going to Numbers for 17 years. He spoke to me about how, even through changes in owners and remodelling, the cabaret maintains its identity through specific and mindful choices. He told me that “[this community] comes with the people. It comes with wanting to create an environment where people are welcome and people are going to be respected [and free] to be creative, fun, intelligent, and be themselves.”
Two other people I talked to Thursday night had — according to Matilda, the host of Numbers karaoke — been coming to sing there every week for years. Charlotte, who was wearing a fake moustache, grey hoodie and backwards cap, had gone there for three years. Axel, wearing a blond wig, had been going for ten. They had come up with their own theme for the evening: gender bender. To them, Numbers was just a wonderful place to be. “I can be like myself 100 per cent. I don't need to worry about anything. I can leave my phone on the table,” said Axel. “We know the bartenders and the bouncers. It's small, so it feels intimate,” Charlotte said, smiling through her fake moustache.
The last regular I spoke with was the bartender, emphatically introduced to me as Dancing Dan: a 67 year old buff ginger man who wore a south park hat, peanuts vest, superman t-shirt and a mickey mouse kilt. He carried around a plastic light-up wand that he gesticulated with like a king with his sceptre. Talking with him was like communicating with a river — he jumped to different trains of thought as easily as taking a step.
He told me he had been coming to Numbers since he was probably too young to be there. He saw the club’s highest highs and most frightening lows. But Numbers was there through it all, creating a space where you could be yourself, safe in an unsafe world.
“[Numbers] is heritage for me because I'm the oldest guy in here now,” he said, “and I'm still dancing.”
The history of Numbers is the history of Davie Street. That history is one of people trying to help their community, to help their people in the most dire of situations. Numbers Cabaret was one of the first places that queer people were served as themselves. It wasn’t about placing a veil of conformity that reaches to parts you wished were hidden, but being given a drink and a dance as a person. Through attacks and terror, you still went to Numbers, to clubs, to Davie. Now you go to Numbers for the history, the people, and to be part of a community that has done so much for so many people.
I interviewed Dancing Dan on the sidewalk outside the cabaret. Drag queens walked by us as we talked. Boas lay on over shoulders and hair was pressed perfectly even in the final hours of Thursday night. One queen, wearing some of the tallest boots I’ve seen, walked with a shorter man and firmly held his hand. Dan, in the middle of a thought, stopped and looked at them for a second.
“See, our generation fought for that. Now it's okay,” he said to me. I nearly cried on the bus ride home.
Life may not be a cabaret, but when people sing with us, the music can be that much louder.
