Xtra West - Issue 291, Oct 14, 2004

	COVER STORY QUEER HERO Part of the pot-arazzi story by Diane Claveau / Winning a short-story competition a decade ago changed John Patrick Gordon’s life. His story took top honours and the grand prize was a quarter ounce of pot.
	NAKED EYE 1134 Burrard is ideal story by Gareth Kirkby, Managing Editor / We’ve all encountered them, tripped over them on the sidewalk, heard them at night in Nelson Park. Youth with nowhere to go, nothing much to do. Some live on the streets—and about 35 percent of those identify as queer.
	HUMAN RIGHTS Kissers tossed from Whitehorse cab story by Jeremy Hainsworth / A gay Vancouver artist says his human rights were violated by a Whitehorse cab company whose driver kicked him out when he kissed another man.
	COMMUNITY POLICING Community won’t let go story by Robin Perelle / Momentum is building in the gay community’s drive for a police apology. The idea for an apology stems from a trans man named Jessie MacGregor who first raised it publicly at city hall’s Stonewall commemoration, Jun 25.
	GO VOTE Improving democracy story by Robin Perelle / “I was absolutely shocked,” says Jim Deva of the first time he ever cast a ballot in a Vancouver municipal election.
	GOLIATH'S RAID Justice delayed? story by Amy Steele / CALGARY— The Goliath’s bathhouse trial is taking longer to wind its way through the provincial court of Alberta than many other criminal cases, including a recent first degree murder trial.
	DAVIE VILLAGE Stretching and growing story by Robin Perelle / With its marketing plans progressing, its first street fair drawing crowds, its new full-time coordinator taking over the administrative details and its board turning increasingly gay, the Davie Village Business Improvement Association (BIA) is finally coming of age.
	NEWS In brief story by Xtra West staff / WEBSTER TRAIL CHANGES The two men facing manslaughter charges in the 2001 beating death of Aaron Webster could be tried separately if applications begun in BC Supreme Court on Oct 6 succeed.
	SLAP & TICKLE Just say no story by Elaine Miller / She was young and new to the leather scene; so new that I could actually see the wet behind her ears. Or maybe it was a trick of the light. I’d known her since she was a vanilla lesbian. I hadn’t mentored her into leather, though—she’d found it all by herself, and here she was at her first play party.
	WHAT THE FUCK Lesbian love death story by Ann Travers & Bubba Jones Patton / Has sex become passé? Boring? Too much effort? Fags have been talking about it recently in the pages of this paper. But what about lesbians? Are lesbians bored of sex? We asked a select group of lesbians to tell us whether they were snoring through sex, ignoring opportunities for it, too bored to be bothered with thinking about it at all, or ravingly enthusiastic about fucking and getting fucked. We share our findings with you.
	INTERNATIONAL WRITERS FEST Prudes vs libertines story by Michael Harris / “We all know that straight men don’t read.”
	CALGARY GAY THEATRE Tapping the rural mentality story by Kevin Allen / Often the political events of our day seem distant and surreal. Yet sometimes they interact with us directly and become the fodder for contemporary theatre. Case in point is the new play Dear Mr Klein by Alberta writer Bruce Chambers.
	ALLEY CATS Kitties fall flat story by Michael Harris / We’ve been promised queer Broadway before. But that usually amounts to a token gay guy playing wingman for his straight buddy. Either that or we’re handed an ounce of queer subtext so heavily coded that we need to make documentaries explaining just how “present” gays and lesbians are. And the “tragic fag” is dead by intermission anyway.
	THAT ’70S HO Sex guru comes to town story by Cecilia Greyson / I admit it. I was a bit nervous when I called famed artist and sexologist Annie Sprinkle for an interview. With a 32-year career ranging from porn films to performance, I assumed she’d get talking about G-spots and genitalia right away. So how did we wind up discussing breakfast cereal?
	GAY TRAVEL Escaping the rat race story by Michael Harris / In his affecting travel memoir, A Different Person, the poet James Merrill devotes an entire chapter to explanation—why must he travel? Where does the lust for something new begin? For Merrill, as always, the answer is internal. Only by the shock of the new can he hope to improve upon himself.
	TRAVEL Far west of Polynesia story by Brett Josef Grubisic / Seeing that there are myriad reasons and expectations for travel, it makes perfect sense that travel writing is so elastic.