At Vancouver’s Queer Town Hall Under a Disco Ball - The Tyee

Listen to this article 10 min Ky Sargeant looks a little stressed. ANNOUNCEMENTS, EVENTS & MORE FROM TYEE AND SELECT PARTNERS Take a Trip with Us: VIFF’s Documentary Series Spans the Globe ‘Insights’ takes audiences far and wide with stories of struggle, triumph and renewal. Clipboard in hand, she’s glancing around the room, performing a mental head count. She’s expecting about 175 people at this event. So far, fewer than 50 are inside. “Why can’t gay people ever show up on time?” she asks, to no one in particular. In return, I offer a joke: “They probably think it will be like a drag show and start 30 minutes late.” We’re standing in the Birdhouse, a queer arts and event space in Vancouver’s Mount Pleasant neighbourhood that regularly hosts drag performances and dance parties. Today looks a little different: the bar is closed, the lights are on, and the giant disco ball looming overhead remains stationary. It’s around 12:30 p.m. on a Sunday, and in half an hour, politicians, not drag performers, will take the stage. The town-hall-style panel discussion ahead of Vancouver’s Oct. 17 municipal election is called Take Back Your City and is meant to cover issues important to the local queer and trans community. The Tyee is supported by readers like you Join us and grow independent media in Canada Sargeant, who also does standup comedy under the stage name Kay, organized Take Back Your City with a clear goal: to get more people engaged in municipal politics. She organized the event with support from environmental non-profit Dogwood BC and No AI Vancouver, a grassroots activist group against the construction of AI data centres. “If you are really interested in making change in your city, pushing something that is going to impact the lives of yourself and your neighbours, municipal politics is really the place to do it,” Sargeant tells me over the phone the day before the event. While queer and trans people are typically more politically engaged than their heterosexual and cisgender peers, municipal elections historically suffer low turnout. In the last Vancouver municipal election, only 36 per cent of eligible voters cast their ballot. The numbers are even bleaker for people aged 18 to 34, who have the lowest voter turnout rates and the highest proportion of LGBTQ2S(IA)+ people of any age group. To Sargeant, this gap exists because spaces where citizens are invited to engage in municipal politics “are not typically for us.” She points out how…