When I came up to Calgary from Lethbridge in June ’97 for my first parade, well, let’s just say I wish I remembered more. The vodka was freely flowing the night before at Boystown, and a boy with icy blue eyes kept me up late, and the parade is a blur. I do know that my intended spectator-only status was derailed when said boy with blue eyes beckoned me from the group he was marching with and suddenly I found myself in a parade.
That wouldn’t be the last time.
In fact, by 2003, I was part of the group planning the parade, in a year that got derailed by the vilest transphobia, in a year that half the board up and quit within three months of the parade, in a year that sent myself scrambling to keep everything on track while emergency recruits like Mickey and Arron and Murray kept the society sound – and got us a much-overdue proclamation from then Mayor Smith.
My last time in a parade was 2014, when EVO was celebrating its first Edmonton pride. Then, the parade was downtown, right on 102 Avenue at the bar, and our circus float cheered so loudly as we rolled by the bar we were still just newly calling home. Torrential rain followed.
The parade then moved across the river and for a few reasons, we opted out of participating, although I was super honored to be asked to help judge the entries one year. Edmonton’s parade in 2019 was cancelled and while I do suspect it would have come back the next year, 2020 had different plans for Edmonton and the world.
Here we are five years past that now, and the new group running Pride Fest has taken the important first steps to bring back the parade. I sat down with Michael Phair and CTV a few weeks back to talk about the history of our parade and what the return means. Making this post mostly just as a way to share that link, because, you know, Meta gonna Meta
Read it here and read more about the history of Edmonton Pride here
Twice last week I was asked, “why do you do it, EVO, gay bars, why?” This was after conversations about the changing nature of gay nightlife, the ongoing and eternal combination of construction and crime, the $20,000 in vandalism the new space has been hit with in just four months, and all the other headaches of owning a business that aren’t unique to gay bars and that any other business owner can understand.
Jokingly I replied, well, it’s not for the money, that’s for sure. The days are gone when a gay club was a license to print money. Those days left when the rest of the world began to accept gay people safely into their spaces, and the need for gay bars began to get watered down. Half-jokingly, I also replied, what else would I do, fifty is too late to start over.
My standard, more serious answer though is that yes, there’s lots of problems and stress and it can very much feel like pushing a boulder up a hill without ever reaching the top, but when it works, it works. There are nights when the vibes are right, when the crowd is right, when the music is right, and when the problems that usually happen just for whatever reason don’t, and you’re standing in the DJ booth and looking out at a sea of people, and they’re glowing. The space is glowing. It is a golden moment that any nightlife entrepreneur knows.
Gay bars just aren’t any nightlife though, I will add, whenever I am asked that question. Pop up events may be dominating the scene in many cities, but for a visiting queer, they don’t know what straight bar on what night is safe for them to cruise and connect. They need the gay space. For someone just coming out, who’s always felt different, who’s never been in a space where they’re the majority, they need the gay space.
That’s all true, and that’s why it’s still #yourgaybar even though it might make more sense to just be a community pub, with less potential gay stigma. That’s why the pride flag is still in a window, even though that window keeps getting smashed. Because the cost of replacing that window is still less than the cost of changing what and who we are.
But, those answers, while true, aren’t necessarily the truth of why *I* do it. My journey into gay nightlife began 26+ years ago when I moved back to Edmonton from Lethbridge and sought a gay job, any gay job, as a means to re-create the connection and community I had found in Lethbridge. But even that isn’t “truth.” No, the truth goes back a lot further.
Picture it. Fort Saskatchewan (population 12, 500, circa mid 80s). Whatever popular was, I was the opposite. I was an overachieving teacher’s pet, with really only one good friend, and I spent most Monday mornings listening to everyone talk about their wild and wonderful weekends, parties I wasn’t part of. I was awkward as fuck, and probably only partly because I was deeply in a closet that I didn’t even have language to define. I was desperate to fit in, to be the life of the party.
Zoom ahead 20 years, skipping past some Roost dancefloor moments that reinforced the awkwardness of that kid (Jazzy, play Cyndi Lauper ‘You Don’t Know Where You Belong’). The year is 2005. I have carved out a niche for myself in Edmonton nightlife, even though my recent attempt at a monthly magazine has failed, as has my marriage. I am managing Buddys at its absolute height, as the Roost starts its descent from its decade and more dominating Edmonton gay nightlife. All the friends of my first few years have essentially deserted me, because they’re loyal to their bars, and Buddys is not theirs. No, in 2005, Buddys is, very much, mine. From sailor parties to Stardust Lounges, through an endless parade of twinks competing in an endless variety of amateur nakedness. I’ve got a hot boyfriend, and I’ve got a hot job, and I realize this is what that long forgotten kid wanted. I’m the host of the party everyone wants to be at. When all these people start their Monday mornings, they’re telling tales of their weekend shenanigans at the parties I was throwing.
It didn’t last, of course. In the end, very little lasts. But the moments of gold stay gold, even two decades later. You might think you know the answer now, to the question that started this Wednesday ramble. For 2005, read 2025, and for Buddys, read EVO, and of course it seems obvious: hosting the party everyone wants to be at. And that’s not… untrue… but the deeper truth is: I hold on, in 2025, to that moment in 2005, because it’s still 1985 and I just want everyone to be at my party.
So maybe EVO needs me because I’m the face of it all, but I need it, too. Maybe I do do a balance sheet every party where I add up the people there and subtract the people who chose not to be as if the sum I eventually reach has something to do with my inherent worth as a person, but I also know that there’s hundreds of people who will still spend a Monday morning reviewing their weekend, or their life of weekends, and I’ll be there, maybe in the background, maybe in the shadow, but part of their life. And even if I’m not front and center in their moments of gold, maybe I helped make those moments happen for them.
And that’s a legacy to be proud of.
We were at the gay bar when we got the call. “Does anyone know where he is?” No one did. He wasn’t there. But it made sense they could call there for him. He was one of us. It was logical, even likely, that he’d be there, or at least, that someone there would know where he was. A search began, one that ended in tragedy. We were at the gay bar when we got that call too. They knew where he was, now. Or at least, they’d found the body.
They are places for joy, freedom, liberation, celebration, but for many, they are also a place for grieving. A community that comes together regularly at the same watering hole finds family there, and when that family suffers loss, it’s around that watering hole they gather, to share the stories and the tears, to ask the questions, sometimes to find the answers.
I wonder what it was, my first encounter with grief at the gay bar. It certainly couldn’t have been that 2017 night, when Lonny went missing and then was found, and that means it certainly wasn’t that 2018 night, exactly a year later, when we were gathered at the gay bar to remember Lonny, and a phone rang again, with another loss, another set of answer-less questions. And it wasn’t that night in 2014 when the rumors ran rampant through the community about a murder. Nor was it all those nights in 2009 and 2010 when we watched another death slowly happen, a boisterous laugh slowly descending into sickness. Nor even years earlier, in the same bar with the same man, when we got a call, but there was work to do, then shooters to drink, and then and only then, obituaries to write, never even thinking that there would be a night when I’d be sitting there furiously scribbling an obituary for him.
I suspect for me, the first time I linked a gay bar to grief, it was external grief. It was to the gay bar I ran, drunk and overwhelmed with emotions following my cousin’s funeral. Already way back then, in 2002, it was the gay bar family I needed to cope with loss in my “other” family. As that gay bar family grew and grew, so too did the body count.
I’m too young to have lived through a time when gay bars equalled grief in a very different way. I was standing outside where Flashback was the other day, guiding a group on a queer history tour. “Why did Flashback close,” someone asked, and I thought about the recently-released documentary on Edmonton’s “54 of the Prairie” and talked about how much more eloquent it was than I could ever be in explaining the impact of coming to the dance floor every week only to see another empty bar stool, another empty go go box, where the body that used to be there every week, was gone. AIDS reached in with a cold claw and ripped the heart out of so many gay bars.
I wonder what it was like for the staff then. I know the burden of being staff in a gay bar during one of those spontaneous gatherings born by grief. You want to grieve too, but you cannot. You have cocktails to serve, and the people there want your ear, to share their pain; pain shared is often pain lessened. It is only later, when those crowds go home, that you have the chance to share your own pain, with co-workers or close friends. With gay bar family. And maybe, you’re alone at the end of that night, and all that pain can break free from you in a howl that echoes off a wall, like its the latest bass drop from the DJ that was there just before.
Then, as now, as always, the show must go on. There are people gloriously unaffected or unaware by the communal grief so many others are sharing. They have their own lives, their own questions, their own griefs, and they might be there just to drink and dance, no interest in the personal pain their bartender might be feeling. We learned that again in 2014, when the call came that a grandfather who had been failing had finally fallen; but there was literally a show happening, and people needed drinks, and the show needed tech, and it was busy and rent had to be paid, and grief could wait. Grief is patient that way; it can always wait. It will sneak up on you and remind you it’s there when you least expect it. Maybe there’s a note in the latest pop diva hit that pings the part of your brain that heard that same note in some long ago hymn, and suddenly, you remember. Oz is great, but Kansas is always there. The technicolor ends.
Last Call always comes.
And when it does, I hope there’s a space you can go, with people who can share your pain because they shared your love. In the end, isn’t that what it is? Grief is just love. The final outpouring of love that never ends. Love isn’t buried with the body; love isn’t interred with the ashes. The love that was there in the happy hours remains long after Last Call is called. It’s the shooter you pour out and leave sitting at a chair now empty. It’s the sea of Superman shirts on a Sunday afternoon. It’s the guy who comes down to see you when his brother dies because he needs someone and he knows you’ll be there, at the gay bar. It’s the pool tournament in memory of. It’s her crown on display; it’s his picture in spotlight. It’s a spray of tattoo’ed stars for the too many too soon lost to addiction and suicide.
Of course there will be grief in gay bars, because there’s connection and community and love in gay bars. And that’s what I remember.
To Vicky (August 5, 2007), LJ (August 5, 2017), Tina (August 5, 2018)…
To Josh and Josh and Darcy and Ben, to Ashley and Chris and Paul and Sam, to Steve and Dickie and Chris and Gunnar and Bella and Dylan and Brennan and Coco and Matt and Alvaro and Dominic and Sue and Brent and Ryan and Jude, to Ralph and Chuck and Kevin and Kylie and Brandi and Eldin and Pam and Lane and Michelle and Tina and Lori and James and Conrad and Dow and Deb and Jim… and all the other amazing people with numbers on both sides of their dash
