Empress of Vancouver reigns over Reel Pride

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This article was published 25/09/2023 (1122 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Oliv Howe has spent all her 70 years refusing to colour within the lines.

She has found no room for boundaries, going back to when, as a seven-year-old, Howe was called a “fairy” on a New Brunswick school bus and retaliated by burning down the transgressor’s family barn.

Her defiance continues to this very day, building allies within Vancouver’s LGBTTQ+ community, where the longtime drag queen and trans pioneer lives, while poking fun of “homonormative” gay people who marry and raise children like “heteronormative” straights did in the 1980s.

It’s Oliv (pronounced oh-LEEV) Howe’s lavishly costumed story that’s the focal point of The Empress of Vancouver, a 2023 documentary that is the flagship movie at the Reel Pride International Film Festival, which begins Tuesday and runs until Saturday at the Gas Station Arts Centre.

The Empress of Vancouver screens Saturday at 9 p.m. and is the festival’s finale.

“The skill set I had learned while surviving on the streets as a very young person, 12, 13 years old, served me well by the time I was in my 20s and I used that experience to my advantage,” says Howe, who remembers hitchhiking through Winnipeg as a teen in 1970 and ’71 and hanging out with bikers while saving enough money to get to Vancouver, where she has become one of the city’s most flamboyant personalities.

She became the 10th empress of Vancouver in 1981, a position in the city’s gay community that required extensive campaigning, not unlike running for mayor.

Her embrace of punk culture and performance — her burlesque skills remain as apparent in 2023 as they were in 1981 — was unlike any other previous empresses.

“Where did we sign on where we all had to look like the Queen Mum?” she remembers of her more conservatively dressed rivals.

She narrowly won the honour and used those vote-gathering skills to back Mike Harcourt’s successful bid for Vancouver mayor later that year.

Howe urged the city’s LGBTTQ+ community to rally behind Harcourt; when he won, he made a gay-unity proclamation that his predecessor refused to do and allowed a parade that would become the genesis of pride celebrations that have become annual summer rituals across Canada.

“She has a bigger-than-life personality and is a totally one-of-a-kind person. She’s a local icon,” director Dave Rodden-Shortt said last week in the midst of a counter-protest rally in Vancouver to combat the anti-LGBTTQ+ rhetoric of the 1 Million March 4 Children, which was held in cities across Canada on Sept. 20.

Howe has taken part in question-and-answer sessions after screenings involving teenage students. She gets a kick out of their curiosity as well as their teachers’ discomfort.

“If some kid is questioning something, there should be a safe environment for them to ask questions,” Howe says. “Where do you want kids to learn this stuff — on the street, which is where I learned it? Not every kid I knew growing up on the street made it past being a kid. They were either killed or killed themselves.

“If you worry about drag queens reading to your children, pick up a book and read it to your children.”

Rodden-Shortt’s film is part cinema-verité, showing us Howe’s outlandish life and friends, and part historical document, revealing footage from the empress ceremonies of 1981 once thought lost. It also documents how the deadly effects of HIV in the 1980s tore through Howe’s friends and through the world’s LGBTTQ+ community.

While Howe remains tough and outspoken about how the pride movement has evolved — “Just for the record, I can’t stand rainbow everything,” she says with a laugh — the film reveals the inner person beneath her thick skin and thicker makeup, especially when she reacts to photographs of friends who died from the effects of HIV.

“It was horrific,” Howe says in the film. “You’d see someone at the bar and a week later they were dead.”

The Reel Pride festival showcases nine films from around the world this week, including BAFTA-nominated Blue Jean (Tuesday, 7 p.m.) about a closeted teacher fearing a new student will expose her sexuality; a selection of nominees from the festival’s short-films competition (Wednesday, 7 p.m.); Édouard Louis, ou la transformation (The Many Lives of Edouard Louis) (Thursday, 7 p.m.), a doc about the French writer.

Alan.Small@winnipegfreepress.com

X: @AlanDSmall