The café, on Charles Street, was a tongue-in-cheek stab at Joe's Cafe a block away, where a few years earlier the owner, Joe Antunes, caused a furore by asking two lesbian customers to stop kissing.
Antunes, a former Portuguese matador, hadn't meant to wave a red cape in front of the bull dykes and broader lesbian community of Commercial Drive. He maintained he was simply trying to uphold family moral values in his popular café, known officially as the Continental Billiards and Toureiro Cafe. His place had long been supported and patronized by lesbians.
But in complaining about the public display of affection, Antunes underestimated the fighting spirit among lesbians and gays who, in the 20 years since the gay and lesbian rights movement had started, were still fiercely passionate about defending their rights.
"Josephine's opened in the 1990s tongue in cheek. It was a hangout for lesbians. I mean, anybody could go there, but it really was my tongue-incheek response to Joe's," said Hogan, 72.
Today, Josephine's is long gone, a victim of a fickle business environment. Hogan couldn't get enough volunteers to keep the place running. Joe's, however, is still turning out its dark cappuccinos with tall, thick starch-like foam pillows. The lesbians have found other places to sip their confections, but his business is one of the few on the Drive that lesbians and gays with long memories still boycott.
That cannot be said of other places along the Drive, whose grocery stores, bakeries, restaurants and coffee bars are patronized by the area's strong lesbian community. If Davie Street in the West End is synonymous with Vancouver's boisterous gay male community, Commercial Drive is certainly home base for the city's gay women.
And on a Saturday in July one day before the Gay Pride Parade downtown, the Drive is turned into a parade route for the annual Vancouver Dyke March. What it lacks in the outrageous costumes of the Pride Parade it makes up for in political messaging.
Commercial Drive, long the spiritual centre of the city's left-leaning residents, became the focal point of Vancouver's lesbian community largely out of economic necessity. While gay male couples are at the top of the economic heap, surpassing even most heterosexual couples, lesbians are down near the bottom in terms of family income.
Ellen Woodsworth, a Vancouver councillor who has been openly lesbian for more than 40 years, attributes this to the "invisibility of the lesbian."
"There's that basic economic reality that two lesbians put together have 60 per cent less of an income than two gay men put together," she said. "It is the invisibility of lesbians in society. How many times do you hear the word 'lesbian' said in council chambers, or even the newspapers or the media? They might sometimes refer to Ellen DeGeneres, but there is this almost complete silence towards lesbians. That has a lot to do with being women and not having the economic power."
As a result, many lesbian couples - often with children from former marriages - sought out the cheaper living conditions of Vancouver's east side. Exactly when this started isn't known. But in the 1970s and 1980s, as lesbian and gay liberation movements were gaining ground, women often formed collectives, living in the large houses that proliferate in the neighbourhood around the Drive.
"It emerged a long time before I came over here. It had something to do with the economics. Commercial Drive has gone through a lot of changes over the years. It was pretty laid back years ago," said Hogan, who is now the chair of Vancouver city's lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer advisory committee.
East Vancouver wasn't just popular among lesbians.
Many feminists have made their homes around the Drive. The Status of Women kept offices at the corner of Commercial and Grant, along with the Women's Health Collective.
In 1984, Bet Cecill and several friends recognized the need for social and political services for lesbians. They formed the Vancouver Lesbian Connection at Commercial and Venables. It was the first service of its kind in Canada, according to Ron Dutton, the archivist for the gay and lesbian communities in B.C.
The service was eventually replaced by the Vancouver Lesbian Centre, which continued to exist for another dozen or so years before folding due to funding cuts from government supporters.
Claire Robson, a relative newcomer to Vancouver's lesbian scene, teaches writing to older lesbians and gays on the Drive. She notes that unlike Davie Street, Commercial Drive doesn't have many bars. Most lesbians don't seek out the party scene in the way that gay men tend to do, she says. But if the Drive lacks nightclubs, it makes up for it with an earthy liveliness.
"There is a vitality, a cultural richness on the Drive that I don't think you get on Davie Street. I think what you get there are established businesses," she said. "What you get on the Drive is individual quirkiness and grassroots entertainers."
Robson moved to Vancouver six years ago from Boston, where she saw parallels in the reasons lesbians moved to the east side.
"It reminds me very much of Jamaica Plain in Boston. The lesbians can't afford to buy in the West End, so what they tend to do is move into very mixed down-at-heel neighbourhoods and where the lesbians go, gentrification follows," she said.
To some degree, that is the problem facing the Drive's lesbian community now. Like Davie Street, the area is becoming upscale and the very economic conditions that drove lesbians to seek out east Vancouver are now driving them further out. It's harder to find affordable housing, Hogan said, and lesbians are still finding it tough.
"Now there aren't so many big houses you can afford," she said. "There are still a lot of lesbians who live around here. It's important to know that a lot of queer people, gay people, lesbians live in other communities than the West End, which a lot of people get tired of hearing [about]."
Hogan and Robson organize an annual "Bold Older Lesbians & Dykes" conference called BOLDFest. Hogan is also an organizer of Menopausal Old Bitches. Both of those groups, along with the Vancouver Dyke March, keep the lesbian activist drum beating in the heart of Commercial Drive.
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