At what point after the dearly beloved are dearly departed do we take the polite mask off memory and let posterity in on the full story?

Do we wait until there’s nobody left to sue, or tell all while there are still enough survivors to know what’s really what in the maze Gore Vidal called “the charnel house of truth”?

The latest steps in the beatification of Jamie Lee Hamilton suggest to me that now might be the time.

I knew Jamie Lee Hamilton longer than most of those clamouring for honours to be heaped on her memory. We first met when she was a fifteen-year-old waif hanging out at the fringes of the gay scene. Cute and sassy, she fit right in.

Jamie’s early years in the scene were a whirlwind of drag shows, gigs at a local steam bath, and the street level sex work that became the basis for her later activism. As the gay columnist for the Georgia Straight and later as editor of the West Ender, I was able to give her adventures lots of coverage, and our friendship thrived.

Over the years Jamie nurtured two kinds of friendship. First were her alliances with politicians, academics, activists and media. Folks who could be useful to her in her quests for fame, influence, and political office. That’s where I came in.

The other sort of friends were people who were useful to her on a more short-term basis. It was the latter group who saw a side of Jamie that was hidden from the former. The bullying, manipulating, vicious side of her that only emerged once she had you firmly in her orbit, or you crossed her.

She pulled you into that orbit by befriending you in a time of trouble. Encouraging words and a safe place to crash were irresistible to transgender women, Aboriginal youth, sex workers and others on the margins of society. The care and concern were genuine, but there were strings attached. Loyalty and obedience.

There are many besides myself who saw how she treated people once they felt dependent on her in one way or another. And they’ve remained silent, mostly I imagine out of respect for the deceased, continuing a silence they had kept for years for fear of finding themselves on the receiving end of one of her many vendettas.

My own most memorable experience of being used and discarded by Jamie happened in the early years of this century. Jamie had just been evicted from her “Grandma’s House” establishment on East Pender where she was providing a “safe place” for sex workers. That endeavour resulted in bawdy house charges, and she moved on to a new location, a storefront on Kingsway.

She called me one day to ask if I’d stand as a reference so she could get a phone line. What could go wrong? She was at that location for about a year. When that went side-ways she moved on to her next venture, a thrift store on Hastings for “plus-sized women” (read drag queens and transgender women).

Two or three years went by without incident and then one day I had a call from Telus. “Hello, Mr. McKeown? This is Telus / Dominion Directory calling about the $10,364.85 you owe for advertising in the Yellow Pages.”

WTF?

Apparently, I had “cosigned” for a half-page ad for her “Tricia Foxx Entertainment” escort business, an ad which had never been paid for. What was I proposing to do about it?

I called Jamie, who went into full denial mode. She hadn’t signed the contract. The woman from Telus must have forged her signature. We would see them in court! Note the “we”.

I wasn’t about to appear in any courtroom with Jamie. Fortunately, I had a college friend who was an executive at Telus and was able to make it all go away.

Jamie never asked what had happened, even when she might have thought that the subsequent bankruptcy of my bookstore might have been connected to that bill. She never asked.

I certainly got off easier than the two guys who advanced her $10k when she’d applied for a grant to pay for cell phones for sex workers in the DTES. The grant came through. They never saw their ten grand again.

But at least she didn’t make me the offer she did the carpenter who fixed up her thrift store.

The bill came due, she pled poverty and offered to send “a couple of my girls” over to work off the balance. He declined, and was never paid.

Straight journalist Carlito Pablo’s recent report contains a lot of truth about the good that Jamie did in the community, advocating for multiple causes, but it also contains some romanticized fictions. Like the assertion that Jamie had longed to move back to the West End for all the decades after the sex workers’ expulsion from that neighbourhood (another story badly told) and that her final home at Mole Hill was a wonderful final homecoming.

Jamie had several West End residences over the decades. Her “Tranny Shack” enterprise on Davie Street, where the Gurkha Himalayan Kitchen restaurant is now, led to a controversial “raid”, one of many such visits from authorities on her always unlicensed businesses. She was forever “in the process of applying” for licenses that never quite materialized. About six years ago she lived for at least a year in a commercial space on Alberni near Denman before finagling her way into social housing on Seymour Street.

I visited her several times in all three of those locations and can tell you that she was in residence as well as in business.

In those locations she continued her practice of setting up a room as a porn theatre and matching up various sex workers with the roster of clients she had built up over the years.

Don’t tell me otherwise—I and many others can tell you firsthand what went on just about everywhere that Jamie settled down. They were always billed as spaces for cross-dressers to safely pursue their fantasies and transgender folks to socialize in safety. And that was true. But there was always a little nook for whatever hanky-panky was on offer.

And it was the hanky-panky, along with her bullying nature and outright viciousness when crossed, that resulted in Jamie being expelled from more organizations and dropped by more political parties than most of us have ever joined. She certainly enjoyed “outing” at least two senior city officials whose offences really boiled down to being involved in enterprises that she viewed as competing with hers. She delighted in putting their jobs at risk.

Her tendency to hint at things she claimed to know about the private lives of public figures caused CBC Radio to air the only apology/retraction I have ever heard on that station. She’d been interviewed about her work with transgender sex workers and pretty clearly intimated that then city councilor Jim Green was a big fan of the girls.

She didn’t come right out with it, but it was pretty clear. There must have been some busy lawyering going on for the next hour or so, at the end of which a CBC announcer provided a solemn “clarification”. But the rumour was out, which was the point.

And we’ll never know (and don’t need to) the truth of the story she delighted in sharing about how a former mayor had been, pre-political career, a regular visitor to her cross-dressing workshops. She just loved to stir the pot, and damaged reputations and false rumours were collateral damage. Or maybe the point of the exercise.

Politicians and bureaucrats alike feared her wrath and often bent rules or simply looked the other way. It was easier that way.

Jamie’s burned bridges spanned most sectors of the LGBTQ and anti-poverty communities.

She and I hadn’t spoken for a couple of years when one day, shortly after her stroke and just before her move to Mole Hill, I met her as I was getting off the bus on Denman Street. She was trundling along on her walker, and of course I said hello and asked her how she was doing. I’m not a complete monster.

“I’m doing pretty well” she replied, paused and then said “Kevin, Can I have a hug? I’m so sorry for so much. Life is too short and we’ve been friends for so long.” Of course we hugged.

There are many who feel that her dumping of 67 pairs of high-heel shoes on the steps of Vancouver City Hall, drawing public and official attention to the women disappearing from the DTES, made up for all the misadventures of this deeply troubled woman.

That’s exactly how I feel. Jamie and I got together several times after our Denman Street reconciliation, and I spent a couple of hours with her at her Mole Hill home the day before she was moved to hospice care. She knew the end was near and we held hands as we remembered the good times and the bad.

I loved Jamie Lee Hamilton as a friend and will always cherish her memory. But I cannot sit by while others, for their own reasons, make her out to have been some kind of saint.

Courageous, good-hearted, deeply flawed. RIP my dear friend.