I talk a lot about my GAY history, but one thing I don’t often write about is my GUY history.
Today, I found out someone I used to see every week passed away last month. Motivated to find a certain picture of him from “back in the day”, I deep dove into a folder that I think many of us have, even though most probably wouldn’t own up to it. Even as I type that, I’m not sure I’ll ever hit PUBLISH on this one.
Because you see, there’s a folder that I’ve copied from one computer to another for years before sticking it in an online photo storage service and letting it collect cyber dust. In that photo, there’s a collection of boys I thought were beautiful, right-clicked and saved off gay.com or Nexopia or dudesnude, back in the days before there were thousands of pictures of everyone all over everywhere. In these pics, they’re still beautiful, because that’s what a picture does: freeze frame captures of a simpler time.
Maybe it’s creepy, this folder, but they’re postcards from my past. Keepsakes of the boys I crushed on, the boys that crushed me. The Ice Princess, the Lifeguard, the shiny happy twins. A gay.dom date that was great. A gay.com that wasn’t. The flight attendant from Toronto. The straight bartender from Play. The other straight bartender from Play. The ex-boyfriend of my ex-boyfriend, pictured with his now ex-boyfriend. The models from my magazine. The Buddys VIP card pics of a few boys I thought were just the MOST beautiful. It’s mostly faces. Well. And butts. A lot of butts. But mostly, a collection of faces lost in time, before the ravages of age and alcoholism and meth and failing health.
But there, in that folder, they’re still young and beautiful. Always young and always beautiful. They’re low-res and grainy and too many have the Nexopia logo in the bottom corner. I can look at the folder, and I’m teleported back to a time before life lifed them the way life always does. I probably did tell them all that I thought they were beautiful, but never enough. Especially for the ones I can never say it to again.
Take a thousand pictures. Tell people you think they’re beautiful.
And if you have a folder that you stored a younger me in, thank you for seeing something I never saw.
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
My brother was fifteen when I left him.
He was mad about it. I know he was, because years later, he trapped me in a dark corner of The Roost and told me all about it. I was just there to drink and watch the drag show, but instead, I got to just drink and listen.
This wasn’t the first time I’d run into my brother at a local gay bar. That had been Buddys, much earlier, and as I hadn’t known he was any kind of gay, I was much too in shock seeing him there to listen to much of what he said, which was mostly comparing notes on who we mutually knew, what he thought about them, what he thought I should think about them, etc.
That night at The Roost though, it was different. It wasn’t good natured if awkward gay gossip. It was the drunken outpouring of all the ways he had resented me for leaving him. It’s not like I left just for fun. I was off to University; leaving home was mandatory – both for school and for sanity. The year before I left hadn’t been a good year. I’m not saying I was completely crazy, but ask anyone who knew me then and those are the words they’d use. I was in pain – and leaving was the only possible solution.
I’m not sure if I even spoke to my brother at all that entire final year at home.
You see, we weren’t ever close. There were only three years between us, but it was enough of a gap, I guess. He was close to our sister. She was two years younger than him, so five younger than me. They had each other growing up for sure. Siblings and besties. That wasn’t the relationship I had with either. That night at the Roost, I couldn’t help but compare my relationship with my younger siblings with the relationship between my boyfriend at the time and his gay brothers – they were so close. But not Tim and I. No, our relationship was more a classic example of how hurt people hurt people. The anger and violence I endured as a kid, I passed it onto them, rather than protecting them from it as a big brother should. Those are the earliest memories I have of my brother, me raging and violent towards him, him looking up at me for help and protection.
This was a far cry from my mom’s first memory of us. That memory was my brother still in the hospital as a newborn baby. We were there, you see, to choose from one of the kids available for fostering and eventual adoption. My brother was apparently crying, crying, crying, and my response was to tell my mom to stick a bottle in his mouth to shut him up and bring him home. I’ve heard the story enough to be able to see it in my head, but it’s not a real memory, and it wasn’t a proper solution either – a bottle may quiet pain, but doesn’t solve it.
We both learned that lesson. I often think about the way we both self-medicated with alcohol, our parallel journeys deeper and deeper into drunken oblivion. We were so similar, in the throes of our growing addiction, our rage exploding out of us on the other side of the bottle. We started the same; we manifested the same; but we ended so differently.
In 2011, I was able to break the chains of addiction and live sober. That I was able to do successfully, that time, is a combination of luck and will-power and timing, but one of the challenges I’ve found in sober living is an impatience with those I see on the same dark path. Too often, I’ll try to give the tough love I probably needed sooner; too often, they don’t need lectures, just listening and love. But the drunken certainly push my sober buttons, and no one as much as my brother did. He pushed them so regularly that even as grown-ups, we weren’t much closer than we were as kids. And the chance to change that is gone now.
You see, earlier this year, damage from prolonged alcohol abuse took my brother away. Today, on what would have been his forty-fourth birthday, I just find myself thinking – about all the guilt and the regret, but mostly, I find myself thinking about that last time it was just him and I, in the hospital. He was in an out of consciousness, and we don’t know how much he understood about what was happening to him. But on his second-last day, he had a moment more lucid than not, when he asked me when he was getting out. I said, I don’t think you are, Tim. He said, ever? And then he was out again. But the look on his face, there at the end, in that moment, was him looking up at me for help, like a baby brother should be able to get from a big brother, and there was nothing I could do. Even now, months later, that “ever?” lingers in my brain, so broken, so desperate. He didn’t want to be there dying; he had built himself a beautiful life with a loving partner and long-term successful career and he just needed help. All the moments I could have helped him – the way we could have been there for each other coming out, or the way I could have tried to protect him better along the way, or the way I should have fought harder for him to find the same sobriety I found – all those moments had slipped away. Like he did the next morning.
My brother was forty-three when he left me.
The check-in window at Down Under was the first place I saw him.
I probably heard him coming down the stairs and headed to that window to greet him before he could push the annoying buzzer that even after just three months, I had grown to loathe (it always went off in the middle of some particularly good gossip). When his face appeared in that window, I thought he was simply beautiful. He had these wavy brown curls that hung to his shoulders, framing a face too ethereal for this earth. He was an angel.
I finished my shift a few hours later and he was still checked-in. It’s possibly the fastest I’d ever cashed-out and stripped down, meeting him in the hot tub and almost immediately taking him back to my room where what we did was anything but angelic.
That pattern repeated a few times over the next few months, and in one of my life’s great What If’s, I will always wonder what could have happened had I been single and been able to pursue something more than random bathhouse nights. Even the first night, there was intimate connection that transcended the simply physical, and it wasn’t just in my head. On the third or fourth night together, when we’d brought in a third, he commented on our connection and asked how long we’d been together.
I started to run into him outside the baths, as one does, and he’d never give me the time of day. This earned him the moniker Ice Princess, and I couldn’t help but wonder, was he icy because he just wanted to freeze out bathhouse tricks from real life, or was it because he too wanted something more?
Our lives ran parallel for years, out of sync just enough to never meet. I’d be single, but he wasn’t. He’d be, but I wasn’t. I’d be too high. He’d be too high. Life dragged us both through the ditches of addiction, but that great What If always wandered through my brain whenever we’d see each other. Somewhere, in some other timeline in the Great gay Multiverse of my life, that initial connection evolved into something deep and lasting. In that other timeline, we’re celebrating our anniversary out for a night at the theatre before heading to the home we built together for a night of a passion that never faded from that Friday twenty-five years ago today.
There was one last hook-up, fifteen years after our first, where he messaged my freshly single profile on Grindr, and there was no way I was going to miss that opportunity to re-visit the past. His body, our sex, it had spent a decade and more on a pedestal in my brain, and now that the stars had briefly aligned, I was at his place as fast as I’d towelled-up that long ago Down Under night.
Like so many things on pedestals, the fantasy was better than the reality. The intervening years had featured too much drug use for that distant synchronicity to still be present.
And yet, I saw him last week, in passing, just two bodies passing on a stairwell and exchanging a quick hi. And those icy blue eyes still had the magic.
Today marks the 25th anniversary of my career in Edmonton gay nightlife beginning. Twenty-five years! They passed in a blink really. Then, I was fresh out of university in Lethbridge, just freshly moved back to the area, and all I wanted was a gay job. Connection and community, those were what I needed to find, moreso than a career. The Edmonton Rainbow Business Association’s Pride Pages listed all the local gay businesses, and I dropped off resumes. The Georgia Baths was the first to reply with an offer.
You can learn more about the Georgia Baths here, in a piece partly written by me for the Edmonton Queer History Project. In brief, it had been a gay bathhouse for years, but mostly under the radar. That enabled it to survive through the Pisces Spa raid, the aftermath of which saw another baths close its doors. The Georgia also survived through the height of the AIDS crisis, which saw so many bathhouses coast to coast close down. The Georgia hadn’t promoted itself as gay space until the late 90s, after the much-publicized opening of Down Under. Then, to compete, new Georgia owners Richard and Terry started to advertise, including in those Pride pages, where I found them.
I’d never been to the Georgia as a customer. I’d been to Down Under, and definitely would have preferred a job there, but the Georgia was the one that offered, and I needed income. After all, I had a Bachelor’s Degree to pay for, and definitely wanted to get out of my parents’ basement. My parents thought I was working in a coffee house; rolling towels wasn’t exactly what I’d gone to school for. Connection. I was seeking connection. But these weren’t the people I wanted to connect with.
The ironic thing is, the “smattering of trolls and 70s porn rejects” I wrote about in that journal entry? They were likely the age I am now.
If the past twenty-five years of my gay nightlife journey are just a blink, my time at the Georgia is only the teeniest part of that. Days after starting there, I got the awaited interview at Down Under, and things changed. But the Georgia was the first step on a path I hadn’t ever intended on walking. I may not yet know the final destination, but let me tell you, the journey has been beautiful. Over the next weeks and months, I look forward to looking back on some of that journey. And you’re welcome to come along.
Just finished an interview with Taproot Edmonton about the history of lesbian space here in Edmonton and it has me musing about my own lesbian history, especially with regards to my time in gay bars here (2024 marks my silver jubilee of Edmonton gay nightlife so the musings are gonna muse for sure!)
I never went to Club 70, Edmonton’s first gay bar. It’s very much before my time. It was a space for men and women both, but I don’t know that that was because of desire as much as necessity. The story goes, lesbians came early, filled the jukebox full of quarters for their country tunes, and by the time the gay men were done primping and preening and ready for something poppier, that juke box was booked solid, and so, Flashback was born.
My own gay history begins somewhat similar though. Like Edmonton in the days of Club 70, Lethbridge in the late 90s didn’t have a large enough out community to sustain gendered spaces or events. No, instead we all gathered together in a hall once a month for dances aka Homohops, and maybe just maybe, that’s my taste of what Club 70 was like: everyone dancing together, man with man, woman with woman, as God intended. (In 2024, this paragraph feels exceptionally binary.)
Monthly hall dances were a thing in Edmonton too. Womonspace started in 1982, and they were all about those hall parties right from the beginning. Small wonder. After Club 70 closed and became the short-lived lesbian-owned Cha Cha Palace, it became Boots n Saddle, and they were pretty public about not wanting lesbians there. Other bars at the time, like The Roost and Flashback, had up-and-down relationships with the lesbian community, often tossing them a Wednesday or Thursday for a women’s night. Womonspace ran events at places like Steppin’ Out and Option Room over the 80s and 90s, but they remained the go-to source for all things socially Sapphic.
By the time I moved back from Lethbridge and started my journey into Edmonton gay nightlife, Edmonton had its very own brick-and-mortar lesbian space, right out the alley door from Boots. Secrets was where we went for Wings and Bingo, early in the night before heading over to the Roost (this was back in the day when you went to bars to hook up, yes kids, pre-apps!) Secrets, under the ownership of Liz Gates, wasn’t Edmonton’s first lesbian bar, but it was certainly iconic. And like all Edmonton gay bars, yes, Twiggy worked there. (If you want to know some of the shenanigans that happened up and down the alley between Boots and Secrets, catch an Edmonton Queer History Project walking tour this summer!) Liz was very passionate about community-building; yes, the space was proudly lesbian, but never exclusive, and Liz tried to work with other bars in the city whenever she could. Even though this was also the time when one nightclub, on opening, was free for men but charged women a cover charge. (That was a short-lived move, for sure, but even years later, when managing that bar, I couldn’t get a woman bartender hired. Coat check was the best we could manage for her!)
But really, for the 2000s, my life was a gay boy among gay boys. That changed forever in 2010, when Boots abruptly shut down, and I got a phone call from Tracey and Deborah at Prism (Liz sold Secrets in 2003, it got re-branded and then re-located, and then sold to T&D in 2008). Working at Prism expanded the zoo of my life; no longer was it just chicken and bears, now, there were cougars too. And that whole assortment of folks soon relocated to Junction, in the former Boots space, a full circle moment for my life and for our community.
My life changed so much at Junction. Where past owners had enabled and abetted my drinking and drug use, Deb and Tracey gave me the tough life I needed to get sober. And sure, that sobriety came only after one Sunday Funday with the foogers (cougar + f*g) led to some poor making out choices, but it really did redirect my life. Sobriety didn’t always stop me from being a dick sadly, which didn’t always go over well with folks living their best dick-free lives, but I had my girlfriend, and my girlfriend’s girlfriend, and a dozen other strong and proud and beautiful women, and truly, those Junction days were underappreciated. Even Carla and her goddam hot chocolates.
When Junction closed and then a year later, EVO opened, the space we had wasn’t the space they wanted. Junction had been pub and eatery more than dance club, and EVO skewed young (and younger and younger all the time it feels). EVO did start things off working with Womonspace on a few events, but Womonspace was already starting to fizzle out by 2013 (but thirty years is an amazing run for a queer non profit volunteer driven social group)
With EVO, we have always tried to have events that were mostly all-gendered. That’s been a learning curve, for sure. Just even think of how much language around gender has evolved since 2013 though; we haven’t been the only ones learning! We had a short-lived series of Goddess parties, mostly with A-DJ in the booth, trying to give Edmonton’s women-loving-women folks a night more about them. In the greater community itself, lesbian-owned spaces like Mama’s and Pink Noiz came and went, and groups like Sapphic Speakeasy and ELEN came into being. We’ve loved working with ELEN the last couple years, and they really are carrying that Womonspace torch, especially in a city where so many pop-up events have been clearly male-focused. And shows like Sapphic Panic, plus 50% Sapphic DJs, keep the space lesbifriendly.
My own personal journey though, that’s a different story. My days behind the bar cracking Coors Lite for cougars are long done. I couldn’t even tell you the last time I had to decorate a Moosehead with a glowstick. That bartender interaction in a pub space let me build relationships with customers that doesn’t happen the same way now in the dark and booming space of a dance club. But when we lost Tina in 2018 or Deb in 2023, I got to see those people who worked their way into my life and my little gay boy heart.
And sure, there’s part of me that loves looking out on a dance floor of shirtless and sweaty gay male torsos, but mostly, I am happiest when I look around the club and see that it’s filled with all genders and races and ages, because that’s what our community is about, and that’s what I’ve always been about creating.
Last Seen: Winter 1998
Strictly speaking, we were never supposed to meet.
You see, I was volunteering with Lethbridge’s Gay and Lesbian Peer Support Line (it was 1997, this was pre-acronym). The PSL had a policy: no one-on-one meets. The purpose was two-fold – the safety of volunteers and the protection of vulnerable callers. But you see, there weren’t other volunteers. It was just me, for months and months at a time, and this guy, he needed to meet a real life gay person, badly.
One of those Mormons, you know.
Lethbridge in the late 90s was nestled snugly between fundamentalist Christians and Canada’s main Mormon population, and neither of them had anything good to say about the gays. Having grown up with the former, I certainly empathized with the latter. I’d been out 2-4 years at the time, depending how you looked at it, but I was certainly a lot farther along my coming-out journey than this guy, and knew I could help.
I was also in a horrible mental state and was absolutely desperate for some kind of connection. Which is less noble a motivation, true, but at this stage, honesty trumps nobility.
I was not expecting what I found, when we met for coffee – a smart, funny social work student who was absolutely dreamboat handsome. I would like to say that nobility trumped horniess, and that I stood by my morals and didn’t sleep with him. Oh, I didn’t, but that was likely more his choice than mine. “Doable if dateable” was how I described him – he was too good to be just another notch in a whittled-down bedpost. So, friends we became.
We met up a few times, even had him over to my place – where we looked through photo albums of gay parties (“See Mike, this is the fun you could be having,” I said, trying to convince him to hit up a homo hop or gay coffee night). He pointed out one friend of mine he thought was cute, and so -and nobility definitely trumped here! – I played matchmaker.
And it seemed to work. It worked enough that they both repeatedly thanked me, and I’m sure I wasn’t bitter at all, sitting there single as a pringle while the hot new gay immediately found a happiness I’d been so desperately searching for for years.
Except then he told his parents, who did what so many Christofascist parents do – wanted him to see a therapist to get “fixed”. And he agreed. And broke up with his happiness and his potential new life to focus on the cure.
And then he was dating a girl. But as his friend who had helped him through so much, he kept in touch. And then he wasn’t dating a girl, and was hanging out with another local gay, who got him drunk and took advantage of him, and so now he was gay again, but didn’t want to be. (Ironically, the same predatory gay later called me out for meeting Mike one-on-one in violation of the rules. Kettle, you’re black).
Keep in mind. This is all over about five months. It was August when we first met, and by January of the following year, he called me to tell me he was straight. “I like girls. I want to have sex with girls. I want to marry a girl, and have a family with her. Before, I was confused and experimenting.” I had no idea what to say, other than I didn’t agree, didn’t understand, didn’t think that was something he could just change. “But I’m your friend and I’ll stand by you.”
I don’t think we ever spoke again.
Part of me dreads he became a statistic of conversion therapy, so fucked in the head by it that he drove himself back deep into the closet – or ended his own life. But there’s another part of me that pictures him living his best gay life somewhere. I’ll probably never know, but Mike, if you ever read this, say hi.
Lost Boy Lost Girl
Lost Boys Episode Two: Ashley
Lost Boys Episode One: Paul
The down time of the pandemic feels so long ago, it’s hard to believe that this was our first full year of operation since 2019. Ten weeks of 2020 followed by months of closure and a few brief attempts at reopening, followed by moths of closure and a few brief attempts at reopening, followed by months of closure. March 2022’s relaunch feels so long ago, and so does that incredible energy that went along with it. COVID changed so much, most significantly the neighborhood where we are.
Anyone who follows us, knows me, or visits the space, knows that we have been hit hard by the current state of downtown. Don’t get me wrong. I still love the heart of the city, love the opportunity to work with some great businesses in the area, but it’s getting really hard, kids. The costs of 2023’s vandalism, break-ins, and robberies has exceeded $10,000, and for a small business still underwater with over $100,000 in covid debt? That makes for a hard year.
Prices are rising everywhere, but we’ve avoided big increases. The economy is hurting, and marginalized communities like queer and trans people are hurting all the more. But that’s meant no extra money to refresh the space, much less no extra money to get us closer to our goal of opening somewhere street-level, with, you know, windows and a kitchen and accessibility. That’s still the plan, but let’s be honest, the only way that’s gonna happen is with your continued love and support.
Both of which we got in 2023, loads!
It was a great year, all the above notwithstanding. We started off big, with Drag Race’s Olivia Lux being absolute pure drag excellence. Olivia was far from our only Drag Race guest. We were joined by Kornbread, Bosco, Suki Doll, Icesis Couture, Willam, Deja Skye, Kaos, Lady Camden, Heidi n Closet, Jackie Cox, Lemon, Elliott with Two Ts, Anetra, Kandy Muse, Jan Sport, Jorgeous, Tammie Brown, Jada Shada Hudson, Kita Mean, Oceane Aqua-Black, Stephanie Prince, Kiki Coe, and yes, Edmonton’s own first Drag Race star – Melinda Verga! Add on Dragula’s Hoso Terra Toma, Call Me Mother’s Justin Abit and Weebee, and Calypso Jete Balmain from HBO’s Legendary, and yes, the talent was THERE.
Let’s be honest. The talent is always here though. Edmonton drag remains diverse and ground-breaking, and we love celebrating it. Like at February’s Stiletto Awards when we crowned Tugs Cuchina and Rexy Resurrection as our new EVOs, and inducted Sucreesha Minorah, Mac U More, and Tanner Steele in the Hall of Legends. Gemma’s Dollhouse continued to celebrate trans and non-binary and 2-spirit drag talent, and Sapphic Panic continued to celebrate our Sapphic drag artists. And we tried to sponsor and support drag talent outside of EVO too, sponsoring shows at Next Fest, Fringe, Drag Me Out to the Ballgame, Taste of Edmonton, K-Days, YEG Christmas Market, and more. And as always, we remained an active supporter of the ISCWR, with their record-breaking 47th reign stepping down in August.
It was the Summer of Pride this year, but truly, we are queer and proud all year long. Still, one of the highlights of 2023 is going to be that Pride Riverboat Party. What an amazing afternoon of sun, sounds, and sick drag! We weren’t sure how we felt about August pride celebrations, but with June being Pride Month, July having queered-up festivals like K-Days and Taste, and now August hosting Pride Fest, plus Pride Cup, it’s a loud and proud community and city and we love being at the heart of it.
Community partnerships remain at the heart of what we do. Not only with the ISCWR, one of Alberta’s longest-running queer groups, but also groups like Curling with Pride, Edmonton Rage, Edmonton Lesbian Event Network, Fellowship of Alberta Bears, RaricaNow, Team Edmonton, Edmonton Pride Centre (especially their new Josh Brown Wellness Room), Chew Project, and all the other community groups that are active out there changing lives for the better. We exist to give them space, voice, and, where we can, financial support.
We are well into our planning for 2024 already – with the Stiletto Awards coming up February Long Weekend, with the tenth anniversary of Alberta’s Drag Superstar contest coming, with the tenth anniversary of our Sunday Revue coming, and of course, another Summer and More of Pride. This year has been a journey, for sure, but the lesson really driven home by the hard times was how much we still love what we do. When we work, we WERK! The magic of queer space is needed more than ever these days, and we are honoured, humbled, and so very happy to be your year-round pride bar.
Happy holidays, from all of us, to you!
