ABSTRACT
The transcripts of hearings and trials for consensual homosexuality are a key source for lesbian and gay histories. While trial dossiers are rich troves for social narratives, the documents they contain often include ambiguous and contradictory details. This chapter explores ways that trial dossiers can be assessed for applied scholarship and contemporary activism. It describes an approach to urban research that explores trial dossiers for policy development, planning, design, and management for physical, social, economic, and cultural aspects of inhabited spaces on various scales, from local sites to metropolitan regions. The chapter provides the most thorough review of trials for sex crimes in the province that might have been undertaken in the 1990s, combined with previous mentions of trials whose dossiers could not be located in the British Columbia Archives. As the urban population and state regulation of sexuality expanded in the twentieth century, so did the number of trials concerning homosexuality.
