Jim Deva and his partner Bruce Smyth open the shop for the first time, in an old house on Thurlow Street.
On April 15, 1983, Jim Deva, Bruce Smyth, and their friend Barb Thomas did something quietly radical: they opened a bookstore. Upstairs in a converted house at 1221 Thurlow Street, just steps from what would become the heart of Davie Village, Little Sister's welcomed its first customers — the first queer bookstore of its kind in Western Canada.
It's hard to overstate how bare the shelves were everywhere else. Finding gay and lesbian literature in Vancouver in 1983 was nearly impossible; mainstream shops carried little to nothing that reflected queer lives, experiences, or desires. Jim, a trained teacher with a degree in English literature, and Bruce, his partner, had grown tired of coming up empty. So they built the place themselves.
The name came from a beloved cat, Little Sister, and it fit perfectly — something intimate and defiant, a small creature with a big presence. The store was modest: a second-floor walk-up, no street frontage, a living-room feel. But from the very beginning it was more than a place to buy books. It was a gathering space, a spot where young queer people ventured in for the first time as they came out, and a de facto community centre for a neighbourhood just finding its voice.
Within months, the AIDS crisis would begin tearing through the West End, and this small upstairs shop would become a lifeline. But on that first April day, the mission was simple: put queer stories on a shelf and let people find them. Forty-three years later, that's still the job.
