Mixin’ it up at Five Sixty

Lesley Ewen
49, sexual orientation: “I’m sexual”

“I’m mixed. I’m Jamaican and Scottish. So I think the only way forward — the enlightened way — to move forward is to embrace mixture and synthesis and to embrace all. My favourite phrase is, ‘Just take the fences out of the pool.’ I almost think we need to move beyond gay or straight because there are so many people who are not self-defining as gay or straight. They’re challenging that binary.”

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Asha Gill
42, sexual orientation: straight

“The first time I walked into Graceland was when I was 18 years old and had my fake ID, and the first thing I saw were drag queens on roller skates as waiters and waitresses and bartenders serving us, and my eyes were like saucers. I thought it was the greatest cross-cultural thing I had ever seen. Graceland was the first place that I had experienced mixing like that and probably not so much until today maybe.”

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Jake Wolpert
26, sexual orientation: straight

“I don’t know if they’re losing a space as much as gaining one. If the mixed club can be successful here, why not other places? Eventually, they should all be mixed and it shouldn’t matter.”

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Tristin Toker (right, with friends)
20, sexual orientation: straight (gay, gay, gay)

“They’re just my friends, not my ‘gay’ friends. It shouldn’t be separate clubs. We’re all the same. It doesn’t matter who we like.”

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Duncan Muir
37, sexual orientation: straight

“I live a couple of blocks from Davie. We go to Celebrities all the time. I think every club is mixed in Vancouver. That’s the way I look at it.”