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Once upon a time in a gay bar A PhD student uncovers the history of Montreal's gay nightlife by JACQUIE CHARLTON
The 49-year-old Higgins has been president of the Archives gaies du Québec since 1983. For the past 10 years, he's been working on his PhD dissertation in anthropology at McGill, on the history of the emergence of the gay male community in Montreal before 1970. In addition to archival research, Higgins interviewed 31 people who remember the scene firsthand.
Municipal court records, which would have been the ideal source for Higgins's research, have unfortunately been lost, burnt or are for some other reason unavailable.
In the mid-'70s the gay bar scene began its migration from the Peel/Stanley/Ste-Catherine area to its present locale around Ste-Catherine east of St-Denis. Higgins admits there is probably some truth to the widespread rumour that then-Mayor Jean Drapeau wanted to "clean up" the downtown core before the 1976 Olympics. Certainly, police raids on downtown clubs--sometimes with machine guns--were common; there is evidence that police in the '70s had a quota of gay bar arrests they had to fill each month. Gay bar owners and patrons, fed up after a number of major arrests in 1975 and 1976, began the big move east, where the Montreal gay scene thrives to this day. But the scene in Montreal is anything but ghettoized: "You've got a tremendously diverse world of bars and other places here--of parks, shopping areas, sports facilities," Higgins says. "The gay scene in Montreal is very complicated, very widespread. In Toronto, there's nothing outside of the Yonge Street corridor. Francophone tolerance is much greater. Montreal really is an open city." Higgins's presentation, Pervers-Cité: Montreal Gay Life from 1930 to 1980, takes place in French on July 31, 1997 at 8pm at the Pavillon Hubert-Aquin, UQAM, auditorium AM-050, on the southeast corner of St-Denis and Ste-Catherine. Cost is $10, with pre-sale tickets available at both Priape (1311 Ste-Catherine E.) and L'Androgyne (3636 St-Laurent). All proceeds go to the Archives gaies du Québec. For more information, call 287-9987 |
The first recorded location of a gay meeting place in Montreal was a small store that sold cakes and apples on Craig (now St-Antoine) near St-Laurent. There is a newspaper report dated 1869 that describes the arrest of a number of men at this store for what the journalist called "abominations." Though the abominations weren't specified, says Ross Higgins, "It's quite clear what was going on."
Nineteenth-century references are both rare and veiled; newspaper references avoided calling homosexuality by name, preferring instead to encrypt the information for more discerning readers. The Champ-de-Mars area was apparently once something of a cruising spot. A newspaper report in 1886 describes an entrapment arrest for unspecified crimes; fashionable clothing was noted in the story as well as talking in "sweet tones."
Painstakingly, in the '30s, a gay bar scene began to develop. In its original incarnations, ostensibly straight establishments would unobtrusively set aside a section of tables for gay patrons. "You had to be very discreet," says Higgins. The Piccadilly bar in the Mont-Royal Hotel (now the Cours Mont-Royal) was the swankest and most popular of these divided gay-straight bars. There was a language division and corresponding class division even in the gay world in Montreal: upper-class anglophones went to the Piccadilly while working-class francophones went to the Monarch, which opened in the early '30s on Ste-Catherine near de Bullion. Though it was demolished in 1996 and, in Higgins's words, "was not a thriving place in the last years," the Monarch could boast of being the oldest gay--and, importantly, exclusively gay--bar in Montreal.
In 1952, a downtown club opened with the then-daring distinction of being solely for gay men: the Tropical Room on Peel and Ste-Catherine where Carlos and Pepe's now stands. The beginnings of gay entertainment in the city began there due in part to the club's gay maître d', who put on a number of gay entertainment extravaganzas, including drag shows and one wildly popular body-building display.
A dizzying rise in the number of gay establishments during the '60s followed, many of which were opened by gays themselves. Along with the rise was an ongoing campaign of police raids on gay establishments; in 1968 Montreal police admitted to having files on 12,000 homosexuals they had identified as a result of raids on gay clubs (The tradition, many will recall, was continued on February 17, 1994 when 165 men were arrested at the Katakombes gay bar).