The organizers of An Unholy Harvest, Canada’s largest leatherdyke and trans-folk convergence, have announced that the Ottawa-based event will be making a move to Toronto for its 2012 edition in October.
While the move represents a great loss to the Ottawa leather community, it comes with an important change for the better: An Unholy Harvest will be completely wheelchair accessible for the first time.
“Harvest has grown considerably over the past five years, and, while we are terribly sad that our home venue, Breathless, closed last fall, it also gave us the opportunity to look for [a] bigger space that we hoped would be wheelchair accessible while still fitting with our low budget and our grassroots approach to creating SM dyke community,” says Andrea Zanin, a co-founder and co-organizer of Unholy Harvest.
It was no easy task finding an accessible, affordable, sex-positive and kink-friendly space that can comfortably fit up to 100 people. The search spanned three cities — Ottawa, Toronto and Montreal — and took months of research before organizers secured a new home for the event.
“We’re thrilled to have found fully wheelchair-accessible spaces in Toronto: the 519 Community Centre for our daytime activities and Orion’s Studio for our play parties,” says Zanin, who co-organizes the event with Ottawa kinkster Jacqueline St-Urbain.
An Unholy Harvest started as a small weekend leatherdyke event in Ottawa in 2007 and has grown steadily since its inception. It was the closure of Breathless — the venue for the first five years of the event — that prompted the search for a new space.
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