Jamie Lee Hamilton Dies, Was Legendary Sex Worker Rights Advocate

Jamie Lee Hamilton, perhaps Vancouver, British Columbia’s most outspoken and best-known advocate for sex worker rights, died on Monday at age 64. The cause was reported as cancer, with which Hamilton fought a prolonged battle, according to the Canadian Global News site.  Hamilton was also a vocal transgender rights activist, and ran for Vancouver city council in 1996 as the city’s first trans candidate for public office. But Hamilton was also remembered for controversy, even criticizing other activists when she felt they were losing sight of their goals. “She kept everyone in check if you were straying down the wrong path,” said writer David C. Jones, a close friend of Hamilton’s. “She was an advocate against the Pride Society for getting too commercialized; she rattled a lot of cages.” Hamilton herself became a sex worker as a teenager, and began her gender transition in 1969, according to The Vancouver Sun.  In 1998, when sex workers were disappearing at an alarming rate from Vancouver’s streets, Hamilton was among the first to declare her belief that a serial killer was at work in the city—and that police were not taking steps to stop him. In an act of protest, she dumped 67 pairs of stiletto-heel shoes outside Vancouver City Hall. There were some individual police officers who were sympathetic,” Hamilton said in an interview, looking back on the episode. “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.” In 2000, a local farmer, Robert Pickton, was arrested and charged with 27 counts of first-degree murder in the series of disappearances. He confessed to 49 murders, but was ultimately convicted of six. Hamilton opened a refuge for sex workers in Downtown Eastside Vancouver called Grandma’s House, which she said served as a safe haven where the women could also be provided with meals and access to medical care. But police closed the establishment in 2000 as a brothel. Just three years ago, Hamilton co-founded Vancouver’s sex worker memorial, “a retro lamp post with a red bulb,” outside a church in a neighborhood that had violently kicked out sex workers—including Hamilton herself—from the area almost 30 years earlier. The memorial remains one of the few of its kind in the world. “She was just always so fierce and undaunted and unflagging in her drive to live and to snatch every bit of meaning and pleasure and everything worthwhile out of life that she could,” said her close friend Becki Ross, who co-founded the memorial with Hamilton. Photo By Jamie Lee Hamilton Facebook