Ottawa's Queer History

Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Don't you just wish...

...that once, just once, you could find out more about the ads that you see in old papers? This ad is an example of just that. Don't get me wrong, I am grateful for spotting it, for the offers evidence of what I'd already uncovered: That Elgin and the Golden Triangle (the area bounded by Elgin, Lisgar and the Canal) was a place that in the 70's and 80's had a lot of homos in it living in it , partly due to the number of large and at the time cheap places to live, which a lot of young queers lived in with a bunch of other people, usually other queers.
However, wouldn't it be great to hear the story of this place? How long did it last, how did the place come to be? Did the collective ever have any hassles from the neighbours, or the landlord? What were the living arrangements like? What were the parties like? How did it all end, and what happened to Mike, Dave, or Denis?

Friday, June 10, 2011

four months later...

Okay, I am lame and have been spending more time working on bicycles rather than on homos, but here is the first of my interviews that I did over the winter... please forgive the rough edit on this one; the next few will be better.

-Grant

An interview with "Fred"

We’ve we have skipped the first year in Foreign Affairs where the level of paranoia was scary.

Let’s talk about that.

Oh it was scary it was very scary and here’s my story which is really, it’s a terrible story I have told it to anybody who will move, so you might as well hear it. So um… my dad had one friend in Ottawa and he ended up being an assistant deputy minister at uh, in Foreign Affairs, a very nice man. And he greeted us. We were, we joined on June 2^nd, 1969, and either on June 3^rd or June 4^th, at some session where he spoke, this friend of my dad’s, Montre – Montreal establishment, because there were some Montreal anglo-establishment people who came here right, and he said “blah blah blah blah, and if anybody is homosexual”, I would think he would have said, “…would they please come over and identity themsleves later, so that we can take steps for their orderly departure from their government of Canada.” Now, I had been recruited in England, they’d paid my trip back, it was my carreer, um…you can imagine your third day here what kind of message that is. And the level of paranoia, I tend not to be a kind of paranoid guy, but I quickly got to know a number of gay people older than I was in Foreign Affairs, External Affairs in those days, and it was crazy, it was crazy. Um..some of them who are older than me have never recovered from all of that. They are single men who have probably only had paid sex in the past 30-plus years are just –

Unpaid sex?

Only paid. Yeah.

Okay.

Oh Yeah. In other words they have become unattractive, weird, weird. And and part of that is because of looking over their shoulders all the time. The level of looking over your shoulder, the who’s being tracked all this stuff that was going on. Now I’m not sure that it’s the whole question of uh, was there not an ambassador who committed suicide? Was it the guy in Egypt?

I think he was in Asia.

Okay. Anyway, that and people having lost their jobs. We knew there were questions about people having lost their jobs. And we’re talking about, I mean the gay men that I knew were, you know we were, we were numbered. Now of course Foreign Affairs wants gay men because they’re cheap to send abroad because they’re maximum two people, as opposed to these people who travel with children who have to go to international schools right? It’s all gay, it’s crawling with gay men now. It’s totally changed.

Oh I think it was crawling with gay men back then too.

I…Um…probably more…I had a number, I would have known a whole slew of them and I can identity, I can identify them.

How did you meet other gay men then if Foreign Affairs was so, a place, and you know, we can also talk about the civil service in general, [was] so paranoid.

No, the civil service, less paranoid. You know, if you were in a, if you were in a… scientist or energy [mines], or resources it would just be different.

Oh okay.

It would just be different. So how did I meet them? I can remember there was just a stunning looking man who was on, (00:18:01) (1 Hour)part of foreign affairs was the building that is no longer there right beside the Chateau Laurier called the Daily building.

Yes!

And I was on the fourth floor of what used to be Gambel’s Department Store and I used to – it was just a big walk around this ridiculous fourth floor. Huge space, huge everything and seeing, seeing a man and the vibes were such that you know just I sort of knew and so I don’t want to say that I quickly identified, something like that, and he ended up being a guy who was in a relationship and we became, he and his partner and I became friends for thirty...well until 2001, till my previous partner ended our relationship and I just cut off a whole lot of people.

Okay and just to make sure, Daily building held Gamble’s Department Store?

It was Gamble’s Department Store, and it was then became the Daily Building which was Foreign Affairs. One of the Foreign Affairs buildings.

Oh okay. So it wasn’t Gam – you met him on the fourth floor of –

The Daily Building.

What were the dinner parties like in time. Were they pretty common?

Yes. Yes. Much more than now for me. Um…oh my god dinners…it was the whole dinner circuit especially for me between, well between 1975, 72 and 2001 it was constant. Dinners, in fact we one gave, we gave gay parties, had 50 people once for…did we feed them? Probably. Oh yeah.

Why do think? It sounds like they weren’t unique to Ottawa.

Oh no. All over the world. All over the western world.

Why do you think they were so important?

Well gay guys, it’s at home. It’s in a secure environment, it’s…you put in a day’s work and so people come over for dinner. I mean you’re en group. You know it’s not like going out and being part of a choir practice, or playing golf or whatever, it’s was the, you weren’t gonna…men socialize, straight men socialise over sporting activities or something, single interest group kind of things, whereas gay men well that’s the way they socialise. Is that it? Perhaps. That’s the way they socialized then. That was a way of making your own history and putting down your roots pretty deep outside of your job and doing, for a number of people, what was a…you know, middle class kind of thing. You know I was a bit you know, people knew that I came from, you know I had some privileges and things and so it was what I saw here were a whole lot of people wanting to entertain and entetain well etc. and in those days wanting to have all these rules around how grand the dining room table could be etc. and I had, it’s how I had been brought up with servants and all of this stuff and I had no interest. And they, because I didn’t either decide to do something that I was supposed to, my father was very counter culture, but he was born with a gold spoon and you know, very prominent family. Um…we just sort of dismissed things. I would have this (gasp) “Bill how could you be doing that?” type of thing. So there G

This was the gays –

The gays here, yeah

were freaked out because there was an eddicat to the house parties?

Oh for sure! There was edicat about you…you needed to know how to do things and…Of course you had to do a…oh my god yes.

The gay, uh, the gay house parties were pretty formal?

Well not shirt and tie, but mean if you, if there was, you know, you needed to have the right fork the right way and never nose the cheese and do all of these various things and that was, you know, fine. They were grand and fun, lots of crystal and all of that and that was you know what, it was a way for a whole lot of guys, you know if you were in Foreign Affairs it was a good chance you’d been brought up in at least a middle class, if not an upper-middle class environment; your father might have been the president of a large cooperation because you know, to have made it to Foreign Affairs you would have had to have had a lot of opportunities where you did things where you learned how the world worked so in the written exams and in the interviews you could be a worldly person. That’s all changed since then; there looking for economists duh duh duh duh [etc.]… But they were looking for worldly people then so that’s what – and this was only Foreign Affairs that I’m describing, I don’t remember there being non-Foreign Affairs people in the first ten years of my life. There would be the partners who weren’t Foreign Affairs, but there was the core was a Foreign Affairs gay.

So these house parties you’re talking [about] were kind of like the…how should I say this? The elite of the civil service in a lot of ways?

Yeah. Now you said there would have been a parallel. The elite in the 60s and 70s was Privy Counsel and Finance, but…

And Foreign Affairs.

Foreign Affairs would have viewed itself as the top because they’re recruiting more worldly people…

Yeah.

…and Privy Counsel and Finance would be parallel…

But more, a little bit more wasp -ish. (00:30:15)

Yes and what you had said about the gays in Foreign Affairs and their numbers, those numbers would be greater percentage-wise than they would have been in Finance and in PCR.

So these house parties that you are talking about were clearly stratified among, you know, a certain class of people…

Yes, very much.

…and a certain occupation.

Well they were all Foreign Affairs people, or their other half.

And you’re saying that basically there weren’t working class people showing up at these things

No no never. Never.

It was kinda like networking almost.

Well we all. No it was not because you…it was the network was the gay network so.

What, aside from like these having kind of well really formal dinner parties…

People wanted to put on a show because everybody enjoyed it; it wasn’t to impress people. There was no impressing people.

Okay.

But you had to hold your own up and you had to do a good job and make people feel special cause it was the time. You know, you were just actively discriminated against 20 hours of the day sort of and people knew that. People knew that you had to hide and lie and…and that was terrible. And so this was a way to close the doors and have a grand old time.

Let your hair down so to speak.

Let your hair down and live the way, you know, why not?

Well it also sounds like it was live way…you know, be able to be free, but also to express these kind of cultural mores that you picked up as a kids, sort of like through…

Yeah.

Experience. But in a gay context.

Sure. Now you see I’m the one, I would even though I’m thinking of people who’s father was like say number two or three, you know in one of the big trust companies an stuff, I don’t believe he had, he might have had a privileged background, but it was not like mine. I mean I was viewed by everybody as the person who was right at the top socially simply because I was. Now I wasn’t professionally, I didn’t do any better than anybody else, but I, you know…

(00:31:57) 1 hour

You had the family background. What, aside from dinner was there like a house-party aspect to this as well, or were they more dinner parties?

Oh one time, and we’re now moving to about 1990, on Mcclaren street we had a[n] eight-course dinner in eight different gay houses. (laughs)

On Mcclaren street?

Yeah just in three blocks.

(laughs) Wow!

And maybe I, maybe I should say seven, but I mean it was definitely it was orderves and starters and duh duh duh duh duh…salad, duh duh duh duh duh, desert…

(laugh) Wow.

And everybody would b – we had the rules right you had to, accept one person broke the rules. In other words it was about half an hour at each house let’s say, and he had us an hour and a quarter, we were all angry and pissed off at him.

(laughs)

He didn’t care about any of it. He didn’t care about any rules abut anything that guy. Why do you use queer?

Uh [it’s a] catch-all for GLBTQ community.

Okay. It’s funny you know I don’t like the world queer.

ahuh (affirmation).

But you chose that as better the GLBT.

And also like, it’s just it’s catchier for like a title, I think a little bit.

Okay.

Um…

I don’t like it at all, because I don’t like being called queer.

Yeah. I think it’s a post-modern thing, you know. It’s more of a reflection of a generational shifts.

You know because there’s an incredible movie. Dirk Boguade, 40 plus years ago and I guess if you did his filmography, or whatever it’s called. There’s a moment when he pulls down his garage door, you’ve heard about it, and it says Farr, F-A-R-R that was his name, is queer.

Yeah.

I didn’t…I just I…queer…I…but I hear you. So somebody your age and younger, queer is just natural it’s not –

It’s a little more, I mean, we politicise it definitely, you know and it’s something that’s a little bit less about like strict gender identities and much more like a attitude. Umm…a little bit more blurring of the lines of like you know, treating gays and lesbians and bis it’s like…

Really good.

You can, you know move boundaries a little bit quicker with it, I think.

But you know when you have things like “queering the pitch” and all of these kinds of things it doesn’t matter.

Yeah.

How do you think Ottawa of like as a government town, as a capitol, and as a small city, how do you think that influenced the shaping, the community and how like gays and lesbians and queers in Ottawa kind of related to one another and how like the community took shape?

00:42:16 (1 hour)

Well you know the whole thing, you know, with the government is obviously it was between 78, 77, and 83 that the whole closet/un-closet thing happened because it was in February 84 that I went public in the Prime Minister’s office. I was the first one who came, who was out. Umm…uh…that I went public and they wanted me to affirm that I was gay so maybe they were the last, I don’t know the spectrum, but that is the core period for people of let’s say now people who would have been 45 and older or 50 and older now, 50 something and older, the whole paranoia thing, um… which was legitimate cause you could have lost your job!

Yeah, from the 50s on!

From the 50s on.

[till when you are talking, 83.][CH1]

Uh so 83, so that sort of changes, that changes a lot…I lost the train of thought, whatever.

Oh we’re just talking about how like, you know, the civil service, or working the civil service impacted Ottawa’s gay and lesbian community.

Okay, so I think there is a whole lot of before and after eighty…eighty-three let’s say. Umm…you know I was out, totally out in all of my jobs from 85 onward. Everybody in my division would have known. I shouldn’t say totally out; everybody would have known. I had people, a whole lot of straight people working on the PTS campaign because I needed help and I had all these sort of ex-football types, I said “I need you to do this, I just just do it! Shop and do it!” And they did whatever I needed done; put together lists, organized that, but they packed things into....yeah.

Cool! Yeah getting back to the question, I mean did you find that, you know, the civil service people like didn’t…I’ve had a lot of, several people say, you know, gays in the civil service were a lot more reluctant to come out and be openly gay.

You know I don’t know what to say about that. Are you talking about prior to 83?

Prior to 83, and I had people saying like up into the 90s even. But maybe because you were in the upper echelons it was very different, but say for like a functionaire.

Like a clerk, you mean?

Yeah like a clerk, middle, middle, middle…

Middle level clerk, or middle level officer?

Uh…Yes…(laughs)

Because I was not a high, I was not a high level. I worked in high level environments, but I never, I didn’t get the big promotions because my brain doesn’t work that way, and that was fine.

Yeah. I um…it just seems like a lot of people really umm…reluctant, hesitant, uh…reserved after working for, in the civil service to be openly gay.

You know, there are other issues there.

Like?

You know, my father was counter culture. He, his grandfather was a titled important man and he….and his, and his mother was a, sort of shoot-of the hip American establishment gal, my grandmother was a sweetie-pie crazy, and she was sort of like “uh fuck this” and all that and that was [heard of too[CH2] ] So I al – I had “fuck this” and I had a social superiority complex, which I think I was very good at managing and you’re – what I’ve told you here I have told you as context and not saying I am better or worse. It was just giving you context. And so I wonder because I had confidence and because I knew people, Oh I did know people at the highest levels though family, and I knew if anything happened I could, there was definitely one or two phone calls I could’ve made. And in fact, and then those phone calls then got replaced by other potential phone calls at the high, at the very highest levels.

Okay. So yeah your position was somewhat unique.

Well yeah, but I worked at that. Was it, was it unique?

I think people were a lot less secure, or felt a lot less secure than you did. Um…yeah…one thing I’ve got a vibe from is that a lot of people who were more lower ranked would feel that, yeah okay legally we’re not to be discriminated against by the 80s, however you had like, you know, an office manager would could make your life really hard and rally difficult, right? Or you’d sort of end up hitting, what I call like a “lavender ceiling” right, you’ve, you know, you’d hit a certain point and not get promoted, you know.

Oh I hit certain points and didn’t get promoted, but that was nothing to do with being gay. (laughs)

Yeah. Or people getting transferred because you know, people didn’t like them in certain places.

Oh yeah see, you see I have another person who was fired because he was gay in the late 80s…

Exactly, right!

…and he didn’t, he had no backbone, but this guy worked in a department where one of my close friends was an assistant deputy minister. She was a really fast moving gal; she became the deputy minister. She’s the longest serving deputy minister. She was dean of the deputy minister community when she moved to another job a year ago and said YES!

(BREAK IN AUDIO at 00:48:34)

(1 hour)

Um we were just talking about how the civil service kind of impacted ottawa’s gay and lesbian community.

Oh yeah was I making a point there? If you don’t remember the point it wasn’t that interesting. (laughs)

Well you talked about the friend who in the 1980s got fired…had no backbone…

Oh yes! Okay so this. So his boss’s boss who was an ABM was an orthodox Jew.

Right.

And was uncomfortable, I guess, I don’t want to say through his orthodoxy, or whatever, and started to make life miserable for this guy, and anyway somehow we got in touch, we were chatting. It wasn’t a fundraiser for me, I don’t know why. And I said “look, I can have the orthodox fellow’s boss, who’s the deputy minister, I can have her spoken to immediately about you. Within 24 hours it will be done.” because my pal was here and she wouldn’t have put up for one second with anything like this, right.

Ahuh.

She wasn’t gay, but she just… I don’t do that.

Yeah.

And he never stood up for himself and his life sort of unravelled since then.

And that I think was that threat, that like possibility I think really still haunted a lot of people at that point so…What about…

I always worked on insurance policies, eh. I always had cushions. I worked on developing them.

Oh okay. And that’s maybe part of the reason why you had such an easy go of it.

Probably, but I worked on it.

Yeah.

Mhm.

Yeah and probably a lot of smart people did. But also being open, so open maybe helps a lot too.

Yep.

Cause it’s like well I can’t get blackmailed because well what are they going to blackmail me with?

Well I mean before that they had already… I mean the beginning of 84 [I was?] [CH3] the director of security, which means everybody up to included the clerk at the Privy Council would have known. They just go through things, right.

Yeah. What about your first encounter with gay life in Ottawa was these house parties.

Yep.

What about like the bigger community? What was like your first public experience of it?

It would have been the end of GO, Gays of Ottawa, beginning of PTS and I would have been involved with that throughout most of the...oh no! The first one was, so I think we’re skipping through the 70s unless you want to talk about my, you know, that would have been maybe going to bars, not often.

Let’s talk about that. Let’s talk about bars, bathhouses, saunas, clubs…

Bars, bath…was there a bathhouse in Ottawa in the late 70s besides this place, was Wellington there? Of course Wellington was there, of course it was. Oh shit! Of course it was because I went and probably some parks too.

What was the first bar you went to?

It must have been the Royal, the Lord Elgin…was it?

SOMEONE

Probably.

Yes upstairs and downstairs. And was there another one? Later it was one on Laurier called Shades[1].

The B[2]? Oh Shades.

Where was the B?

The B was above the Hungarian Village.

Oh yes! Probably, see I’m not a bar person so I’m not any of that. Oh yeah the B, I remember that. Oh as in fact you probably went from the Lord Elgin [3]to the B perhaps, did you? Something like that, a walk back and forth.

G (or CHUM)[CH4]

Yeah.

But you see my chum is more of a bar person than I am.

And uh, and Shades, you know, the other club…

And there was a guy called Les. Les MacAfee. Remember Les?

I know the name. He started…and he…

And he, did he die of AIDS?

I don’t know if he did.

Yes.

G
But he started Shades.

Correct, correct. One of the many losses in the 80s, oh my god…

Yeah we’ll talk about that for sure. What was the bar scene like back then?

From a non-bar type? It would have been, see had I had a , my closest childhood friend ended up being gay so we would have, and he was living here from 74-84, so he and I would have done things together, we would have gone to the bar perhaps, though he has a partner he stayed with the same partner, but his partner first year was in the states. Same with, same partner, they met in Yale in 1971.

Wow.

And they’re still together, they live in Chicago. Umm…what was it like? For me it was furtive because I’m not a, I’m not a social person. I, you know being brought up in certain establishments there’s a separateness. I want to say, above and apart…

Ahuh

…which is a terrible thing to say, but that’s sort of…

It happened.

Yeah! Everybody interprets it a different way, right.

(Phone rings, break in Audio: 00:53:56)

I can talk to you about the parks a little bit. I mean you mentioned Majors Hill so I would have been there a total of eight times over eight years and I remember there was all sorts of paranoia about the police.

Why?

Oh being arrested. uh yeah. Total paranoia about that. And then there was whatever that park was on the Rideau River.

On the Rideau River?

Right beside the Russian Embassy.

Strathcona?

Strathconna[4]. And I would have been there a total of eight times and I possible had sex three times at Strathcona itself and then maybe once or twice at Major Hill, Majors Hill[5]

Napean Point[6]?

Yes. Maybe picked up people once or twice along the Canal. Uh…probably picked up a people at Elgin Street, possibly picked up people at the bars.

Elgin street?

Oh just walking up and down that wooden street.
G

Really?

Oh yeah.

Street cruising? Now how did that work on Elgin?

Oh you talked about, you’re very good with words for describing certain things and the eye contact you had something else that went with that when you said it to me half and hour, an hour ago, you know, yeah the eye contact.

The eye contact.

(00:57:45) you were just going down the street there you go, right. Likw, straight men don’t look at each other like this.

(20 min)

It’s true there’s no body language involved…

No there’s nothing. In fact, in fact, if you make eye contact with a straight man you lose his eyes.

Yeah and the once over, the slowing of pace…

Oh the whole thing.

The turning around to look.

Oh, fatal.

(laughs) What about like, was there dress, or you know, a fashion that, you know would kind of make you go hmm…gay.

No. If the person was neater. I mean it was all, it was the package, right.

The well draw….

Doing the best you can do with whatever God gave you, was part of it.

Mmm true.

Yeah, package it well. Still now.

(laughs) Eyebrow.

It’s the same thing now. It’s the same thing now for my generation, and it’s, it starts to vary as you get younger whatever the look’s gonna be. There was always, there was discrimination then against effeminate man, and I don’t know what it is now. It continues?

I think there is probably a little bit more room for that now, but I mean straight acting is still something you see on Squirt[7], all the time.

What is Squirt?

It’s an online cruising space.

Oh yes yes, yes.

I think…

No fats nor femmes need apply? Have you ever heard that?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.. You know it’s just interested because I have asked people about Elgin and people have said it wasn’t really that gay.

Okay.

You’re saying that…

Oh I just remember, two or three times, between Lisgar and McClaren picking somebody up. I wasn’t looking to.

When was this? 70s, 80s?

25 years ago? No it would have been 70s and then it would have been mid 90s. Because somewhere in the 90s, when I, no well when my chum after ten years started to, started to, out whatever he had to get into other stuff outside of our relationship to be able to stay there. There is nobody upstairs, so who., where are these people? Anyway, at that point I started to relax a bit about it because we had been totally together for all of the 80s, nobody else. What a wonderful. what a safe way of having lived through the 80s; we met in April 81.

Okay.

Anyways, so.

Elgin was kind of like…I am just wondering how Elgin developed as discourse of gay. I guess a lot of gay people lived in the Golden Square Triangle.

Perhaps.

Or, Golden Triangle.

Golden Triangle, yeah. I better, I better take a step back from saying any more about this because I don’t know. And the more you’re asking the more I am thinking of one encounter in the 70s and one encounter in the mid 90s and that’s it. And I…

On Elgin street.

And the thing is I was with, I was in a relationship for 20 years, so that removes 81 to 01. I was in a relationship from 74…74, 75, 76, 77 so those four years we were together and then we started to come apart at the end 77 and so I would have 78, 79, and 80 I would have been active then and that’s when I went to Wellington a lot.

To Wellington?

Wellington Street Baths.

Oh okay.

What are they? Club Baths.

Yeah. Sorry I thought we were still talking about Elgin.

Okay.

But uh, what about, oh let’s actually take a step back before we talk about Club Ottawa. Um, what about encounters in, or your, you know, impressions of park cruising in this town. Did you, did you feel like that was a really common way to meet people?

Perhaps. See I can remember doing it in London. (01:02:02) (1 Hour)

I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of the Ponce Street Loo [8] in London.

I know Tea, Tea rooming was a big thing.

Okay, so where Sloan Street comes down from Night’s Bridge down to Sloan Square, there was a street called Ponce Street and they actually had a loo there and I remember I was stopped by the police. “If we ever see you little bugger here again, you’re finished!” That would have been 1969, February 1969. So yeah smartened up around that and I cruising the parks, I mean, you just had to be really careful, that’s all.

Yeah?

Oh yeah. For the whole time that I was around, but I it’s because I had that over me from London I took it applied to, I just maybe took some of the London experience, married that with whatever I had heard from various people talking and was extremely careful. But remember I had, I had chums right. I had three major relationships.

Yeah. Um…how did you go about like, meeting people in the parks?

Well it’s, it’s I mean you’re looking, right? And there’s people there, you’re going by and if something works, your heart is pounding and excitement and now I don’t rem… I am not remembering. I told you I had picked up some people and also had sex with people because you went into bushes perhaps, is that what you did? So you would go into bushes you, I don’t know and you pull[ed] your dick out, right?

Pretty much.

Probably that’s it, I don’t remember.

And you talked about Strathcona.

Correct.

Now, I have hears weird things about Strathcona that it’s always been around, but not a lot got done there, right. People have always said yeah I have heard about Strathcona, or I went there, but it was always kind of disappointing, yet you’ve managed to you know…(inaudible)

Well because that was, it was a quiet place. I think people not only met, but had sex there.

You did?

Oh definitely.

Where would you start? Like what was the logistics?

Parking lot.

The parking lot? So that was a little bit further south.

It’s coming off, is that coming off Somerset? Is right in front of Somerset?

Yeah.

It’s right in front of Somerset?

Uhuh, yep.

Or is that Osgoode or?

Yeah that’s Somerset I’m pretty sure.

Is that Somerset that runs through?

Yeah.

And so there, you’d start there and then you’d walk beside the apartment building in the dark area, right? You’d walk all the way there and walk back.

Between the apartment building and the river?

Correct. And so you would have turned right, you’d head south and then turn back. You wouldn’t head north…

Okay.

…toward the Russian Embassy.

Ohhh okay. See I always thought it was more the Russian Embassy that was easier, but okay…

Oh you know what it may well have been.

I don’t know. I really don’t know. I’m kind of like am going through my own mental landscape and kinda…

I would have said right and the same with the driveway, it would be the dark areas of the driveway, those, the pathways.

The pathway…

So the inside, we’re not the queen Elisabeth pathway?

Oh the canal.

The Canal. So we’re not on the Canal, so we’re on the sidewalk that’s west of the Canal and especially we’re on those areas, this is my experience, where you’re right beside the houses and there are bushes separating you from the uh…

The parkway.

From the parkway.

And those bushes were…

I don’t believe…was there sex in those bushes? I don’t know.

I know there was a lot around the Nurses’s College and the German Embassy.

Oh yeah. Yes! But I wouldn’t know.

When were these times really, these places really busy? Like when did you go there? Evenings?

Oh Evenings, only evenings. Never daytime.

Late? Early?

I’m not a late kind of guy so…it would have been, it was dark.

Okay. Were there re? around spots? (01:06:01) 1 hour

I would have thought so. No, I knew a man who is probably 70 now and up until 20 years ago when he would have left town, 15 years ago…20…he went to the park in Gatineau, where you go by car, every night of his life for probably 25 years. You know the one I am talking about? If you, do you know Fournier? So you are going across the McDonald Caritier bridge, and you can go up and you can split, you can go on the highway that is heading north to Wakefield, or go right on the highway that is going to Buckingham.

Yeah.

Those four lanes in both cases.

Oh Lac Leamy.

Yes. Is that it? So if you get out before that it’s Fournier. And you go along, and you can take a left before you get to those lovely old bridges, the lovely old bridge, take a left into the park and do that loop. So he went there every night of his life.

Oh interesting.

Which makes me thing that the stories you’ve read about –

(inaudible)… In other words Jacques Cartier Park.

Jacques Cartier Park?

Or the…Yeah that place..

It faces Lac Leamy.

It faces Lac Leamy?

Yeah. The south side. Yeah parts of it are on the south side of Lac Leamy.

And there’s a beach on that park on Lac Leamy.

Is there?

I think so.

Okay.

You know in the books…

Oh I know what you’re talking about. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

In the books about life in New York…

Mhm.

Is that you? Are you calling it quits? Go immediately!

[1] Shades: a bathhouse on Laurier.

[2] B: A bar across from the Lord Elgin.

[3] The Lord Elgin: A hotel on Elgin Street and a popular hang out for gays back in the day.

[4] Strathcona Park: A popular cruising place in Ottawa by the Rideau River.

[5] Majors Hill

[6] Napean Point

[7] Squirt: Online cruising space.

[8] Ponce street, London.

Saturday, February 19, 2011

Closeted Geography

So here is a big post. It is the first draft of what i call the 'lens' of the thesis, which is to provide the focus and the theme of the whole thing. What I am arguing is that Ottawa's queer spaces were more closeted than open, and while this was certainly not ideal, it was a strategy that allowed for survival and resistance, albeit at a cost. This section is not grounded in history yet, meaning that i don't provide specific examples of places that I am referring to, and definitely not Ottawa spaces. That will come, certainly in time.

Right now i am throwing this out here to see what people think, do you like it, hate it, think I am full of it, or have something to work with? How would you cahnge it or finesse it? All your comments would be welcome.

Warning, it is kinda long (2000 words). Pour yourself a cup of tea.

Grant.

Ottawa’s Closeted Geography.

Initially, Ottawa Queer History intended to explain why Ottawa, despite its size and status as capital city, never developed a queer village. I wanted to explain how Ottawa as a city encouraged people to stay in the closet and not be open with their identities and sexualities. Ottawa, as national capital, was shaped to reflect the heterosexual, middle-class values of the majority of Canadians. Ottawa as a city-wide space emphasized these values in its public spaces, its demographics, its institutions and its dominant form of employment, the federal civil service. All of these elements helped to construct a discourse about the city as quiet, reserved, family orientated and generally conservative. The other side of that discourse was that Ottawa was not a place to go (or stay) if you were different; you would not fit into its homogenous culture. If you did live in Ottawa and you were queer, you would be living at the margins of the city, and life would be expressed through a closeted geography rather than an open, visible one.

All the statements above are problematic, for a number of reasons. While the dominate discourse regarding Ottawa widely constructs Ottawa as a conservative town, it tends towards essentializing the city as being without any sort of non-mainstream culture, which Ottawa certainly does have. It ignores the many instances of transgression that have occurred in Ottawa, despite the security apparatus that had Ottawa’s queers under surveillance and oppression during the Cold War. It also tends to construct binaries that, while useful when firist seeking to grasp large concepts, ultimately fall apart when used to explain spaces as complicated as cites, even ones that are understood to be less heterogeneous than Ottawa.

Using the term ‘closeted geography’ is problematic as well, for it suggests a negative, pessimistic construction of a queer community and its places. I think this is not so. Certainly, a closeted geography is not as demonstrative nor as immediately accessible as a more open geography of queer culture, but for Ottawa specifically, and for smaller cities and towns generally, it is more than a means of allowing queer community to merely survive; it can allow it to flourish. Part of the reason that closeted geographies and places can do so is that, despite the binary that it implies, most closeted places are never completely closeted. Like urban geography as a whole, queer geography rarely falls neatly into one column or another. Often queer on the inside and straight on the outside, or just queer to a point, these places, while flawed, opened up avenues for queer expression that were vital for the city’s queers and remarkable for even existing considering the climate of the past.

If anything is easy to define and essentialize, perhaps it is openly gay places, such as the gay bar in a gay village in a large, metropolitan city. Openly queer spaces have no ambiguity to them, they perform and present themselves as queer spaces. That performance is executed in several ways. Most openly queer places are in plain sight: they are street level and are part of the public streetscape. They have large windows that allow the public to see in and for patrons to look out (all the better for cruising). Open places advertise themselves to the public as queer: they often have signs over their establishments with suggestive names (The Manhole has always been a favourite of mine, followed by Woodies). Any advertisements in newspapers will make the queer focus of the club explicit, often with the use of models, and sexually suggestive imagery. The spaces themselves encourage expressions of attraction from their patrons, at least in establishments where that is appropriate.

An openly queer space will be homo-normative, as opposed to hetro-normative. A homo-normative establishment may have some straight clients, but the place is aimed at a queer clientele. This can mean several things. If the place is a community center, services would are aimed at addressing queer issues: discussion and support groups would be majority queer and would focus on queer topics. Bookstores would focus on providing queer authors and topics. Entertainment is aimed at the many, varied queer tastes. Another aspect would be that they are usually queer-owned, and have a commitment to the community that they serve. These places would not be queer on one night and then straight another, in order to maximize profits, these places are always queer, even if they attempt to draw different demographics from the community on different nights.

Homo-normative places are political, beyond the assertive, enabling performance that their existence have in a given urban space. These places stake out space in the city and start to queer the surrounding space. Often, when one openly queer place is established, the whole neighbourhood is reconsidered by a larger audience as a space with queer possibilities. If there is or was a queer presence there, it comes out of the closet and becomes part of the public discourse of the area. Open places serve as fronts for the community to assert its presence in a city, and often will serve as places for political organization as well, either through allowing activist groups meetings, or holding fundraisers. Open queer places, whether or not they are politicize actively resist and disrupt heteronormative space.

Closeted geographies are not so disruptive. They do not challenge the established hetro-orthodoxy of the area in which they exist.. Often, they are in locations that are out of plain site, or are in areas of cities that have few eyes present, expect for those seeking out queer spaces that they wish to experience. It is not uncommon to find queer spots in areas liminal spaces, such as those that have fallen into decline, or areas that while busy during one part of the day sit practically abandoned the other times. Examples of this temporally shifting areas are office parks and warehouse districts. Ottawa’s own downtown, virtually deserted at night, has s been exploited by many bars over the years, as has Hull, which was widely understood to be outside the boundaries of Anglo culture (and the Ottawa police). Bars and spaces that do exist in busier areas of town are often tucked away, on second floors, in basements, or on side streets, sometimes combinations of the three. Today, three of the four bars in Ottawa are not on ground level in an area that is busy at night. There are economic factors for this: the less expensive rents allowed owners to survive any economic hardships for longer. Out of the way sites made it easier to remain undetected offering patrons a place that was secure from the intrusions of mainstream society. Especially in the past, patrons preferred to go into places via entrances where the possibility of being seen by straights was at a minimum. Partly they feared having their sexuality discovered, the other part was the risk of being assaulted by homophobes.

Unlike open places, closed places more often restricted access, as another means to secure their spaces for their clientele, and to ensure their economic viability. Often in the past queer clubs were membership-only or one had to pass a visible inspection at the door to see if you ‘fit’ their establishment. Open places charged admission like closeted places, but it is done mostly for economic motivations. Memberships for places like bath houses served another purpose, in that they made the spaces part of a private club, and thus helping to protect from legal harassment for the acts occurring inside that, while consensual and harmless, where deemed immoral by mainstream society. This did not, however, prevent the state from attempting to regulate the behavior of those inside, such as the Ottawa Police’s raid of Club Ottawa baths in 1976.

While today queer places are fairly easy to find, thanks to the web, closeted places did not advertise their location, either by signs, or by local advertisements, unless they were in queer publications, if any city had such luck to have such a thing. Even then, there was no guarantee that a bar would advertise in them. GO Info, for example, had very scarce advertisements in it during the 1970’s and early 80’s, and few of those ads were for gay bars, establishments that could have (and considering the business they were in, should have) paid for ads. This resulted in bars being known only to the community and their friends, since the knowledge of their existence spread mostly through word of mouth.

Part of the reason that advertisements were so scarce at this time (at least in Ottawa) was that straight people who felt ambivilant or even hostile toward the queer community owned many of these places or at least the buildings where they were housed, especially bars. One reason for this was that many of the bars that were gay at the end of the 1960’s were not queer when they started, but became so. Another reason was the difficulty in acquiring a liquor license if you were a queer, or if the LCBO found out that you intended to open up a queer bar. Consequently, straight ownership affected queer place in many ways. These places, while still important to many queers, were contested sites: signs of queer affection were discouraged such as in the Lord Elgin Hotel; the establishments did not support the larger community via fundraising or community events and using spaces for political and social organizing was done clandestinely. Overall, while places were created or co-opted by queers, these closeted spaces were not overtly politicized and did not resist the regulation of space and behaviour along hetrosexual lines as did more openly queer places.

Many places that did serve the community and courted queers did so under a hetronormative guise. An example here in this city were the adult magazine shops of the ‘70’s and 80’s, examples of which were found in Ottawa along Dalhousie street. These were supposedly heterosexual spaces, sold straight sex magazines and videos to straight customers, thought often these sites had a gay section and backrooms that were often used for gay male sex.

Many places that were closeted used hetero-normalcy to create spaces for queers to meet. That was their appeal, despite the drawbacks they presented in location, quality and freedom of expression. Men who met men in parks used the fact that they were in a straight-identified space to their advantage: if found in a park at night by police, it was possible to proclaim your innocence (and your heterosexuality) by stating you were simply ‘out for a walk’, even if it was at an unlikely hour. This was not a sure means of escape, but it did provide men with a means to counter suspicions about their sexuality

Closeted geographies are not limited to physical place either. They favour mobility --of people, of space, of time ,of day-- allowing for socialization at different times by different people in straight-identified venues, thereby cloaking the common bond of the gathering, their sexuality. The events could be the community dances, sports teams and leagues, common-interest groups, business associations and house parties. Some of them were explicitly gay in name, but with a constantly moving venue, allowing them to offer security to their members, despite being in uncertain places. The fact that many of these clubs epitomized the concept of straight-looking and straight-acting helped their survival.

The long-term presence of these out-of-the-way, not-so-gay spaces will be the focus of this thesis. As wonderful and as important as gay villages are, I believe that closeted spaces are as important to queer life. It is these liminal, temporary and confusing spaces that have allowed generations of queers to have a sense of community. These places were often critiqued by their community and still are, but without them many people in Ottawa and similar communities would not have had the community they had, a community that ultimately achieved so much despite being in a city that was so hostile.

Collaborate with me!

Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Don't you just wish...

Friday, June 10, 2011

four months later...

Saturday, February 19, 2011

Closeted Geography