The slow death of the Gay Village

The first time I visited the Gay Village in 2016, it was by accident. At 15-years-old, I stumbled upon the neighbourhood when I took a few wrong turns looking for a thrift store. A sea of colored bulbs and eccentric people welcomed me. Gaggles of gender diverse people chatted in groups, like clusters of wildflowers; unbound by societal pressures. I felt out of place, a stain on their creativity and hyperaware of the disguise I was wearing. I'd managed, so far, to hide my identity from others and even from myself.

But in the Village, I felt exposed and seen in ways I hadn't imagined possible.

It took me five more years to find the woman those people had seen in me. I'm not sure I can say I'd be the same today without that “wrong” turn. That's the power of the Village.

Montreal's Gay Village is iconic. One of the largest in North America, the Village occupies a good chunk of the downtown Ville Marie borough, bordered roughly by Ontario Street to the north, St. Catherine Street to the west, Papineau Ave. to the east and St. Hubert St. to the west. The area is a safe space for the queer community, but in recent years, many feel its accepting air has grown stale, the colors one note, and the clientele mainstream.

By the time, I could frequent the Village as an adult, five years had passed. In that time all the businesses catering to lesbians and sapphic non-men attracted to other non-men had closed. The shine of the Village rusted with time, and when I returned, the wildflowers were wilting.

I am not the only one who has noticed. Danielle Foster, a queer student at McGill University, who visited the Village with her family when she was younger, remembers its enchantment.

"I remember just how excited I was cause where I lived in New York [State], there was no Gay Village," she said. Though years had passed since she visited, Foster expected more from the Village.

"I came to this new city, a new country to meet my people […] and I noticed that there wasn't really any [lesbian spaces]. It was all-male spaces. It was like, well damn, what's there for us?"

The first time I went to a gay bar, I met a group of queer women from Ottawa. “You're lucky to live in Montreal,” they told me. “You get to have a whole village.”

But I don't feel lucky; I feel deceived.

It isn't as if Montreal never had lesbian bars. Denise Cassidy, better known as Baby Face, was responsible for opening the first lesbian-only bar in Montreal. The former pro-wrestler, Cassidy, opened Baby Face Disco in 1968. With its strict no men rules, and dress codes, it ushered in a new era. In the 80s more lesbian-only bars and lesbian spaces opened all over Montreal.

But by 2013, the last straggler—Le Drugstore—would close its doors.

All that remains are a handful of lesbian-owned businesses scattered around the Plateau and a lesbian-friendly bar in the Mile-End, Notre-Dame-Des-Quilles--the Bowling Bar. However, in the Gay Village, all that remains are male-dominant spaces and the husks of forgotten haunts.

Most of the gay businesses in the Village changed with the turn of the 21st century. Julie Podmore, a geography professor at John Abbot College, focuses specifically on the movement of lesbians within the city and in recent years the emergence of new lesbian neighbourhoods. She says the first-ever World Outgames hosted in Montreal marked a turning point for the Village.

The World Outgames was a massive sporting and cultural event meant to bring together artists and athletes. The games hosted 35 sporting events, drawing over 10,000 athletes and hundreds of participants for the cultural aspects. Additionally, The International Conference on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) Human Rights attracted over 1,500 participants to discuss the community's rights globally.

The games' success and the closure of Ste-Catherine Street West for cars were the first dominoes to fall.

"It was sort of like a pivotal point, I think, when Tourism Montreal, the city of Montreal, all kinds of entities start to realize, this is a very commercially viable part of the city," says Podmore. "Tourist promotion for gay tourists was certainly going on in the late 90s and early 2000s. But tourism promotion of the Gay Village as a place to go to, like Chinatown or Little Italy or something like that, I think that really takes off for a mainstream public after 2006."

The continued summer closure of St. Catherine Street West to traffic and the iconic Boules Roses—the famous hanging balls—along with touristic investments from numerous levels of government, changed the neighbourhood. But the differences wounded non-cisgender gay men the most as the remaining bars seemed to cater to them.

"A lesbian clientele is never really super attractive clienteles to the kinds of business owners who have owned the bars and spaces in the Village," says Podmore. "[Big time investors] are not going to be specifically marketing to this group of women, who tend not to go out quite as much as gay men."

In recent years, several lesbian and sapphic groups have made efforts to change things.

Ellelui's founders Lucia Winter and Taylor Douglas are trying to meet the demand for lesbian spaces. Most of their work focuses on the Plateau and Mile-End neighbourhoods, not the Village, because of exorbitant property prices and hostile treatment women business owners have experienced there. It hasn't been easy, and Douglas claims issues within the community make it harder.

"I think it's an issue of progress and misogyny within the queer community," Douglas says. "I think that it's a hard issue to begin to unpack, especially with the prevalence of white cisgender queer men in the Village that are super happy to have their own space but aren't super happy to be inclusive about it."

Ellelui demonstrates the willingness of lesbians and sapphics to find space and invest in neighbourhoods. Hundreds of sapphics gathered outside the Bowling Bar on Sept. 18, 2021, after a Facebook event by Ellelui gained popularity. Unfortunately, the bar's COVID-19 capacity capped out less than an hour after it started.

Their success didn't end there. Ellelui's latest event ElleLui x Le Cagibi Trans and Non-Conforming Appreciation Night & Party, saw tickets sell out in 45 minutes.

"This started for me as, ‘We'll see if this works’. I definitely want to open a gay bar, a lesbian bar, a queer bar in the future." Lucia Winter, co-founder of Ellelui said. "I think doing this has really shown Taylor and me that it's possible even without those things. [The events] made me feel confident that we could do something very soon that solidifies our place in Montreal."

Winter and Douglas are hopeful these events will lead to a permanent space at some point, and they believe there's still time for the Gay Village.

"I think people are visibly irritated with the way that some things have gone down in the Village," says Douglas. "And I think that there's potential there for more grassroots organizations, and businesses to crop up. […] Ones that will decentralize the space around the corporate gayness and it's all very possible in it, and it can happen very soon."

Perhaps the changes and the exodus of queer women and femmes from the Gay Village is the start of a new and more inclusive community. Lesbians, sapphics and others may have simply grown out of the old haunts, or at least that’s what Podmore suspects.

“I think we're sort of at a crucial point… I mean there are a lot of other populations making space in a neighborhood now in a very kind of visible way. And then there's also the sort of mainstreaming of the commerce there…” she says. “So, there's less and less of LGBTQ homeowners that maybe like gay-owned businesses and so the clientele is shifting the kinds of businesses that are shifting. And so that changes the politics of the space.”

Five years after I first visited, a husk of the Gay Village remains. The sunken eyes of empty storefronts follow me as I walk along that stretch of Ste-Catherine St.. The red sores of corporate development and the decaying bones of the Village make me wince. But I’m not sad.

The meadow I once found is withered but I swear if I look closely enough, I can see the seeds of new wildflowers floating in the city winds.