By Maighdlin Mahoney<\/p>\n
\u201cYou go and you walk into this room and you\u2019re like \u2013 oh, here are my people. They\u2019re not in the village, they\u2019re here.\u201d<\/p>\n
Phil Villeneuve is a queer DJ, promoter, and cultural organizer in Toronto\u2019s west end, which is the home of the city\u2019s alternative queer scene. Over the years, bars there have catered to queer women, trans folks, and queer people of colour; in short, all of the people who often feel alienated by the predominantly white and masculine-dominated spaces in Toronto\u2019s well-known gay village at Church and Wellesley.<\/p>\n
Keeping these spaces alive and thriving has never been easy, but the west end has a long history of resilience. However, the current wave of COVID-19, combined with the lack of government support for queer businesses and performers, is pushing that resiliency to its limits.<\/p>\n
\u201cI know a lot of performers where performing was their main source of income,\u201d said Imarra, a drag performer who hosts weekly drag nights at Nightowl<\/a>, a bar on College Street.<\/p>\n Drag performers and queer bars are the lifeblood of the west end scene. Both have been hit hard by the financial strain of the pandemic.<\/p>\n The summer and fall of 2021 saw a major comeback for west end bars after a difficult winter. Performers and organizers were hopeful that venues could keep operating indoors with reduced capacities.<\/p>\n However, the arrival of the Omicron variant in Canada changed all that. When the Ontario government closed indoor dining on January 5, queer bars and drag performers suffered huge losses of income.<\/p>\n \u201cPeople are scared for sure,\u201d said Bombae, a drag queen and frequent host of outdoor drag shows at Sweaty Betty's<\/a> on Ossington. \u201cPeople are so scared about how they\u2019re going to pay bills for February and March.\u201d<\/p>\n For Jay Deszeld, the former co-manager of The Beaver<\/a> and a current employee at Sweaty Betty\u2019s<\/a>, the pandemic has only exacerbated a pre-existing problem.<\/p>\n \u201cThe biggest difficulty to running any queer or alternative establishment is that you don\u2019t have access to mass market money,\u201d said Deszeld. \u201cYou\u2019re catering to a group of people who unfortunately don\u2019t have a lot of money on average.\u201d<\/p>\n Jack Gieseking, author of A Queen New York: Lesbians, Dykes, And Queers<\/em>, has studied the ways that queer people struggle to buy and hold onto space in cities. To them, the frequent closures aren\u2019t the whole story.<\/p>\n \u201cIt felt to me that this kind of constant sadness and loss in spaces was masking the constant labour and connection and community\u2026 that my participants took a lot of their identify from.\u201d<\/p>\n Toronto\u2019s west end is no different. Despite the uncertainty of the coming months, the prevailing sentiment amongst folks who\u2019ve made the west end home is that the queer scene is not going anywhere.<\/p>\n \u201cThe city and the way things are going with all these venues shutting down is forcing us back into the underground,\" said Villeneuve. \u201cBut from the underground bubbles up the most amazing magical stuff.\u201d<\/p>\n To hear more, including whether to expect fake blood or ranch dressing in a west end drag show,\u00a0listen to the segment below:<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By Maighdlin Mahoney \u201cYou go and you walk into this room and you\u2019re like \u2013 oh, here are my people. They\u2019re not in the village, they\u2019re here.\u201d Phil Villeneuve is a queer DJ, promoter, and cultural organizer in Toronto\u2019s west end, which is the home of the city\u2019s alternative queer scene. Over the years, bars…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":120,"featured_media":79672,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[57,218,219],"tags":[3012,4569,3949,1485],"radio":[1380],"origine":[267,269,273],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/canada-info.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79666"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/canada-info.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/canada-info.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canada-info.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/120"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canada-info.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=79666"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/canada-info.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79666\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canada-info.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/79672"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/canada-info.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=79666"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canada-info.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=79666"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canada-info.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=79666"},{"taxonomy":"radio","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canada-info.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/radio?post=79666"},{"taxonomy":"origine","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canada-info.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/origine?post=79666"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}