I was talking to someone recently about the age of bars for queer women in Toronto in the late ’90s and early 2000s. The three options for women were, more or less: very drunk rainbow gays, pantsuits and drag kings. After that conversation, I realized I romanticize the time when we had spots just for us, those spaces weren’t great—at least not for me. To be fair, they couldn’t possibly speak to every subsection of queer women in or visiting the city.
I found myself gravitating to the subcultures I was more drawn to, trying to carve out space in those. I went to regular events for queer women in bars that were otherwise not strictly for lesbians. And when that became available to me, I found community online: first through blogs (Diaryland, then LiveJournal), then social media (Friendster, then Myspace). Conference culture was booming and they were not all academic or professional in nature; there were places to go annually, often in the U.S., where (largely queer) people would gather for fat liberation, anarchist organizing, trans health and anti-racist efforts. The critical movements at the time were not exclusively queer, but queers were plenty: the anti-fascist movement, the anti-globalization movement, the pro-choice movement.
All of these movements needed money, so every week was another fundraiser. Cabaret events were alive and well. You could see your favourite performance artist or spoken word poet multiple times a month, there were reading series and queer bands playing shows to support this effort and that. And there were bars around town that would host us, some more adequately than others.
There’s a story I tell that, in truth, may be three different stories that have merged in my head. Two queer women writers put out a (physical!) newsletter called The Chick List (or something!); it was photocopied on pastel printer paper and bound with staples. In that fairly short-lived and very DIY publication, I found an ad that led me to my first foray into media (campus community radio). At the launch for one of the newsletters (for which I probably wrote a poem, at which I probably read a poem), at a lesbian bar (R.I.P. Pope Joan on Parliament St.), I met the woman who would give me one of my first adult jobs.
This was the cycle: physical media launches in a physical space, connecting us with immediate community and expanding our networks. It was the norm, and a thing I think a lot of people took for granted.
In all honesty, this Xtra Magazine series, Taking Space, could be a full anthology. There are endless topics related to queer gathering spaces that we could get into—10 of which we have! When you think about it, a lot of the hot-button debates within the queer community are about physical presence: kink at Pride, for example, or the need for spaces for queer families with children or who’s included in “women-only” spaces.
What we’re up against these days is a lot. Gentrification and rapidly rising commercial rents make it hard for independent businesses of any sort to survive. The political climate and emboldened right wing makes opening or sustaining such a space a risk. People are struggling financially, and spaces that need money to survive don’t always have it coming in from their patrons. And yet, some of these same factors make gathering spaces more essential than ever. LGBTQ2S+ activists need places to organize. Young queer and trans people who may not be safe at home or school, as provinces enact “pronoun policies” and the like, need places to meet one another. And, yes, we also still need places to cruise, fuck and pick up. All of these things exist in the same ecosystem; all are important.
Outside of what the cishet normative world wants for us, there are also inter- and intra-community discussions: How do we make spaces accessible for community members with disabilities, or those in recovery from substance use? How do we also preserve the rights of community members who choose to use substances within that? We’ve delved into some of these topics in this series.
With no shade to gay bars (which are so much more than just being places to drink in queer history and community), we wanted to go beyond “Where have all the gay bars gone?” into “What now?” What we found is that more and more new spaces are popping up that are queer-inclusive rather than queer-exclusive—see women’s sports bars, or romance bookstores. Is this the future queer people want, where we aren’t siphoned off on our own island? Or, could we also preserve the island? This is what we’re exploring here.
The days of queer media being created at Kinko’s and easy-access performance art (please ask me about the “pleather daddy” act I used to do with a cardboard cutout wearing a garbage bag—except don’t) may be mostly behind us, but we’re here, we’re queer, we need places to go. To exist as our whole selves, to gather with friends and meet new ones, to run into our exes and nemeses (a vital part of queer culture, IMO), to resist, to make out, to party and to exhale. Join us on this voyage through queer space (literal, though not of the planets-and-stars variety) and time, have these conversations with us, and bring these conversations into your own lives.
Why you can trust Xtra
