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.
