With the rise of sexual preference equality in this century
I would like to parade here that in desperation when I arrived in Vancouver
with my family with the idea of becoming a photographer I found no open doors and so I became someone ahead of his time.
I was saved from having to wash cars at Tilden-Rent-A-Car
for the rest of my life by the CBC and by a new upstart gay weekly publication
called Bi-Line.
A writer called Jack Moore and I were the only straight
persons in the publication’s masthead. As I was afraid that my reputation would
suffer by using my real name, for a while (and only for a while!), I went by
the name of Strut McPherson (then the name, reversed, of the front suspension on
most good cars of the time.
It was working at Bi-Line that I discovered the real uses of
K-Y Jelly, what tea at Faces (a very pleasant gay club on Robson at that time)
was all about, and most important how to photograph the male nude body before I
ever thought of undraping women (my real interest).
Because I took all the photographs for the weekly I was also
instructed to shoot ads. These ads had a definite gay content to them. Of those
ads they were kind of either funny or obviously gay. But I did a third set for
ads by a then popular stereo equipment shop called Vancouver Sight & Sound
where I used as a model an up-and-coming singer/actress of the early punk
movement in our city.
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| Gina Daniels |
It is only because of my present effort to thin out my files
that I have found these tear sheets that remind me that my roots in Vancouver
photography could not be pinned down to this or that.
