A look back at the man behind the counter, the activist behind the fight, and the legacy that still shapes how this store operates.
Jim Deva was a trained teacher with a degree in English literature who couldn't find books that spoke to who he was. So in 1983, with his partner Bruce Smyth, he opened a store to sell them. That was the beginning. It was nowhere near the whole of it.
Over the next three decades, Jim became a mentor, an organizer, and one of the loudest voices against anti-gay violence in Vancouver. He stood in front of the cameras through the Canada Customs fight. He kept unlocking the store after each of the three bombings — a defiance one filmmaker called “a real gut-level courage.” And he cared about the whole neighbourhood: public safety, livable streets, the kind of city Vancouver was becoming. He wasn't a single-issue man. He believed a good city was one where everyone got to stand in public as themselves.
When he died unexpectedly in 2014, at 64, thousands came to his memorial. NDP MP Libby Davies told the House of Commons that Jim Deva “held the door for many to come out.” In 2016, the city named its first pavement-to-plaza project after him, at Davie and Bute, marked by a giant pink megaphone — a permanent Speaker's Corner in the heart of the Village.
Jim believed a community is something you build together, one conversation and one open door at a time. That belief is still the operating manual here. Every choice we make about this store gets measured against it: does this serve the community, or just the business? Jim already answered that question. We're just keeping the door open.
