gay bars - Rob Browatzke

#FBF – The Start of EVO: A Gay Bar Moment

Rob Browatzke December 10, 2022 Musings 0 Comments

When the Junction closed in September of 2012, I wasn’t sure what I was going to do next. The morning after the Grand Finale, I went on a little road trip – just me and my camera. That first year of sobriety had given me so much freedom, and nothing demonstrated it like the open road. Sobriety had also given me the gift of time to figure out the next step – time, and money. But neither were unlimited.

Meanwhile, south of the border, the economy was crashing and the government response seemed to be an unwillingness to renew work visas, even for those who had lived and ran businesses there for years. My uncles were getting deported (well, by this time, they were living there illegally actually). Did I want to move to Calgary with them, they asked. We could open up a business together. They, you see, also would eventually run out of time and money.

And so I made the call to leave behind the friends I’d made and life I’d built, and take a chance on something new. On a snowy day in February 2013, my loser drove me and all my worldly possessions through a snowstorm to Calgary; it certainly wasn’t our first snowstorm together, but in a lot of ways, it was our last.

You see, Evolution Wonderlounge was very close to being a Calgary bar. We certainly looked around. And more than looked! We found some great spaces, even put in a couple offers, but none of them ever actually happened. While we explored our options, I made some trips back to Edmonton, to visit those people I’d just so recently and dramatically said goodbye forever to. And on one of those trips, we learned that the space that had briefly been the gay bar Play was for sale.

I’d never been a Playboy, but I liked the space, and we bought into the dream of the Edmonton Ice District, and what it would do for downtown. (Narrator: it wouldn’t do much for downtown, that’s for sure!) Edmonton at the time had Buddys and Woodys for gay bars, so there was room for another, we thought, and certainly, we felt we could carve out a corner for ourselves. And so we signed a lease, even as a new gay dance club in UpStares opened.

If you’ve seen the bar, you wouldn’t have recognized it then, with its wood pillars, carpet everywhere, cockroach infestation good times. The bar had one working lightbulb when we took over, and it was so sketchy that delivery drivers and cops didn’t even like setting foot inside. Another basement bar, some drag queens said? At least make it white and bright. And white and bright it was! Then again, everything is bright and shiny when it’s new, isn’t it?

Very little about our original plan for the space stayed. The seven-days-a-week lounge, with after-work happy-hour idea was a fantasy that never stood a chance. But what hasn’t changed in the nearly ten years since we opened is our desire to be something that’s not just a bar. It was a family business from day one, and that hasn’t changed; that family has simply expanded to include so many amazing members of this community who I have worked and partied with for so long. With EVO’s ten year anniversary coming up, it really isn’t too soon to start looking back at the moments and people who have made us what we are.

Stay tuned. It’s coming.

TBT – Watching Him Die: A Gay Bar Moment

Rob Browatzke December 8, 2022 Musings 0 Comments

In 2007, I started working at Boots, a gay bar here in Edmonton.

This wasn’t the first time I’d worked there. I’d worked there in 2000, but quit to work at The Roost. I’d gone back in 2003, but quit when we started publishing Fresh Magazine and the owners at Boots thought they could control content since I worked for them. Third time’s the charm, right? No, not really, but I was desperate, and beggars can’t be choosers, of course.

In the summer of 2007, I was homeless, and to get un-homeless, I needed work, and Jim Schafer, the owner of Boots, gave me that work. I was a little gunshy, at first, having left there twice, on less than great terms, and I was also just emerging from a year and a half of essential social hibernation, where my life had consisted of getting drunk and high at home, until there was no home left. Luckily, this Boots opportunity came along and changed everything.

Now, I could get drunk and high at work AND at home.

In the end, I wasn’t even there three years, but it was a pivotal three years. Maybe it was the years as a customer, combined with the short lived previous employments that make it feel like I was there so much longer. Or maybe it was because of how it ended, and what we went through together, those of us who gathered around the corner of that little bar on 106 St. The Princess Corner.

By 2007, Boots was not busy. Woodys had opened in 2002, and a lot of Boots’ regular customers had migrated there, in no small part because of Schafer’s shall-we-say curmudgeonness. (Curmudgeonness is a word which here means “cranky, cunty, cantankerous, mixed with an abrasive layer of casual racism and transphobia.” Don’t get me wrong – this was mingled with an incredible generosity of spirit – and spirits!) But there was a core of loyal customers, and they came every day at 4 and we drank our beer and our shooters (fucking sambuca) and we laughed and we laughed and we laughed. Usually, I was nursing a massive hangover, but those happy hours numbed that (hair of the bulldog, and all). That’s how it was though – get drunk all afternoon with Jim, then stay drunk and get high. Many a night became a morning, and I was often there still partying when Jim would come in the morning to start the new day.

(Which is ironic because the first time I got hired, I was replacing someone who had stayed all night partying. I got away with murder)

And then, maybe late 2008, maybe early 2009, Jim changed. He’d always been ornery and antagonistic, but now, that crossed into a new viciousness. But it wasn’t just emotional changes. He would chain smoke until he began to hack (Yes, this is long after non-smoking bylaws. Schafer didn’t care). He would drink until he had to stumble home. And soon, not even that. He would pass out at the bar. And sometimes, even before he had started drinking. Something was very wrong.

We all knew it. We all tried to talk to him about it. Jim wouldn’t listen.

Lorne and Chatty, they could sometimes get through. Ross, Jim’s ex-boyfriend and partner in the business, could sometimes get through. But it got harder and harder, and we watched him fail. And not just watch. His failing was a full sensory experience, as he rotted away from the inside out. He had been an owner of The Roost. He had been an Emperor of the ISCWR. He had navigated the Garage Burger Bar into being an award-winning greasy spoon that dominated local restaurant awards. And he was fading. We all knew it.

If we all knew, why was it so surprising, that day in March, when he left?

You always think there’s more time than there is. Time for another round. But, too often, there isn’t.

I think sometimes about what would have happened if he hadn’t died. Boots would have still closed. How he had juggled finances as long as he did was a mystery Ross and I were never able to solve. If he hadn’t died, I don’t see a world where I’d have ever gotten sober. And yet I would give up so much of what came after for one more round, with that raucous, ragged laugh ringing from the corner of the Princess Bar.

My Pride Timeline

Rob Browatzke May 16, 2022 Musings 0 Comments

[Best_Wordpress_Gallery id=”2″ gal_title=”All images”]

My first Pride festival was 1997. Was it Lethbridge’s first? I don’t remember one in 1996, and I certainly would have gone. Lethbridge in 1997 was a very different place than it is now, with a giant Pride Fest happening at a major mainstream downtown club. Then, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance of Lethbridge and Area (GALA/LA) threw monthly events at the Croatian Hall, outside of town, and the ’97 Pride event was even further into the country. There were some queens down from Calgary (likely ISCCA, not that I knew what that was then) for a show at a little gay BBQ. Even the prospect of a slip n slide wasn’t enough to keep me there, not when my friend Dave suggested ditching for a night in Calgary, where I could slip and slide into some hot boy’s bed.

My first (and last, come to think of it) Calgary pride saw a very hungover me ending up actually walking in the parade, with Calgary’s queer youth group at the time, I-dentity. The fact that impromptu attendance at my first parade involved me being in it was par for the course of who and how I was then: gay gay gay gay gay and you better know it (as opposed to now, when it’s gay gay gay gay gay, but let me nap). And yes, that parade was empowering AF, but my clearest memory of my first Pride was the vodka-soaked kisses of Michael with the ice-blue eyes.

My first Edmonton pride was 1999, I guess? I wasn’t really involved in the community yet; I’d only been back from Lethbridge a couple months. I didn’t know then how big a role Edmonton Pride would play in my life. By 2000, I was Village People’ing and crashed the Roost float, and by 2001, I was reigning as Prince for Reign 25 with the ISCWR and was actually invited to be on a float legitimately. 2001 saw a shift in the Pride festival into a format it would keep for two decades, with the parade leading into a beer garden, entertainment stage, and resource fair.

In 2002, I joined the Pride board (then called EPWS – Edmonton Pride Week Society) as Secretary. Things were going along great with plans for Pride 2003 (The Flame Within) until blatant transphobia derailed the board. In the fall-out, one of the board members who had been tasked with parade organizing went around and cancelled all those plans before quitting. I was left the only member of the Executive, and it fell on me to cancel those cancellations, while emergency board recruits like Mickey and Erin Wilson salvaged the society. Yes, people had tried to extinguish the flame, but it burned brighter than ever that year.

It’s weird, but looking back, becoming involved with the community when I did, I saw less problems facing Pride from external enemies and more problems from within the community. The bigger Pride got, the more internal politics and ego it had to contend with.

2004’s Pride was particularly memorable for me. In 2003, Michael Brown and myself started a gay monthly magazine called Fresh (with a lot of financial help from our respective partners). While I could easily go off on a tangent here and talk about how here again internal community politics were the biggest hurdles, for the purposes of this piece, what is important is that Fresh Magazine was recognized at the 2004 Pride Awards at City Hall.

The parade shifted course again in 2005. At my first Edmonton Pride, it had gone down 100 Ave, then later, westbound on Jasper to Oliver Park, but in 2005, we were heading EAST on Jasper and ending in Churchill Square. I cannot stress enough how important a victory this was. This represented an acceptance of Pride as part of the city in a way that nothing else had. We were in the heart of the city, and here to stay – and it truly felt like mission accomplished. I was managing Buddys in 2005; Buddys etc had always had some of the most amazing floats in the parade, and I was excited to be part of that. This was the pinnacle to date of my professional fulfillment, and I still love that summer 2005 Buddys/Woodys team with all my heart. That being said, it’s possible that year was the coldest Edmonton Pride I’ve ever experienced. Although Binki and Vanity (in their Pride hosting debut) tried to keep everyone entertained, the temperature was dropping as fast as the rain, and by the end of the show, Churchill was pretty deserted. All that remained was our Buddys/Woodys team, because cold beer keeps wet gays warm!

Pride at Churchill continued to grow, but life for me was increasingly less proud. By 2006, I was a full-fledged cocaine user, and the snowfall definitely took priority over the rainbow. Which isn’t to say I didn’t participate still. Village People reunited for the 2007 mainstage (don’t ask me how, considering I was essentially homeless that Pride). And then came 2008, the first time I went to Pride still up from the night before. But the crowds continued to grow, and not just because I was seeing double.

Village People reunited one more time for the Pride mainstage, in 2009. We’d perform together a bit more after that, but never anywhere so big.

2011 was my first sober pride. It was a different scene then, compared to my first Edmonton pride. The Roost was long gone, and Boots was freshly closed. New kids on the block like Play, Flash, and Pure had dominated the 2010 line-up, but in 2011, my focus was just on our programming at Junction. I didn’t really have much interest in the parade anymore, at least not as a participant. It was time to pay off years of cocaine debt, and start shaping up professionally. The theme for 2011 was Stand UP, and for the first time in a long time, I was standing up, proud and sober.

By 2013, we knew EVO was in the works. Though I was living in Calgary at the time, I was up for Edmonton Pride to visit friends (Calgary pride had long since relocated to September long weekend to avoid overlapping with us). Little did I know then that I wouldn’t go back to Calgary. By the end of Edmonton Pride 2013, we had signed a lease and EVO, originally planned for Calgary, was about to be.

Evolution’s first Pride was 2014. We’d selected a Circus theme, because I had seen first hand how internal themes could be great for venue programming and floats. That year was the last year Edmonton Pride was at Churchill, with the parade going right down 102 ave by the bar. We were the new kid on the block now, and we were intent on making our mark. We did, for sure, and maybe we felt we made enough of a mark that that was the one and only Pride Parade we participated in. That was likely more to do with the official festivities relocating to the original home on Whyte. Whyte Pride wasn’t nearly as convenient for us, downtown, so we turned our focus inwards.

There were definitely some conflicts with the Edmonton Pride Festival Society that dampened my enthusiasm for festivities, but like any non-profit, boards change, so every year really was a fresh start. While we were professionally on a different page, I still respected the work, and was honoured to help judge the parade floats one year. Still, we missed downtown programming, and we missed programming that helped the little non-profits we worked with all year. That’s why, in 2017, we started the 103 St Community Street Festival. I’m grateful for the team at EVO that picked up my slack while I navigated the hoops and hurdles that went along with that first year, and loved seeing its huge success only grow in 2018.

In the spring of 2019, the Edmonton Pride Festival Society announced the cancellation of their events. Media picked up on this as a cancellation of Pride entirely, and I feel I spent weeks trying to correct that narrative. EPFS events were not the whole of Pride. We doubled the size of our Community Festival that year, and helped get a Pride Guide out, and so many other groups kept their programming going. Never let anyone tell you that Edmonton Pride 2019 was cancelled, because it wasn’t.

In the summer of 2019, we started the plans to relocate our Community Street Festival from 103 St to Churchill Square. With the dissolution of EPFS, it was time to go back to the heart of the city, and LRT construction on 102 Ave was forcing us off the street anyway. And then along came COVID, just as the balls were getting rolling. Virtual programming was certainly a different way to spend Pride, but at least there was something, to keep Edmonton Pride going, uninterrupted, during a pandemic.

Now here we are, two weeks away from Pride Month 2022. This year marks forty years since 1982’s Pride Through Unity, where multiple groups and businesses came together to put on Edmonton’s first pride festival weekend, in response to the 1981 raid on the Pisces Spa. (Yes, even Edmonton’s Pride can tie its origins to protest against police action). New groups like Capital Pride and Edmonton Pride Association have formed to fill the void left by EPFS, and part of this involves that return to Churchill Square we had been working on in 2020. 2019’s events had left me pretty emotionally broken, and all I wanted was to see other groups pick up the baton and run with it; that’s now happening, and now my challenge is just not letting my own pride stand in the way of enjoying the bigger Pride. Over forty events are being planned for this June, and myself and Evolution are helping enhance and elevate as many of those events as we can.

But in 2022, what makes me proudest is my new position with Explore Edmonton, bringing an increased LGBTQ2 presence to K-days this summer. My Pride journey has taken me from a little gay boy desperate to be included, to someone at the heart of things, trying his best to include and involve everyone he can. And damn – that is something to take pride in.

My History in Gay Bars, Part One

Rob Browatzke February 12, 2021 Musings 0 Comments

The first gay bar I went to was The Roost. I was only freshly out, visiting Edmonton from Lethbridge where I was going to University. I don’t remember much about that first visit. Had I known then how pivotal a role gay bars would play in my life, chances are I’d’ve paid more attention. As it was though, I was caught up in the other firsts of that night – the first time I’d met people off the Internet, the first threesome. The Roost, sandwiched in between those two things, barely made the radar.

Lethbridge had nothing close to a gay bar. The community there, small as it was, would take over local coffee shops on Thursday nights, after which a group of us would head to a straight club to drink and dance. Once a month, the gay organization would hang up some streamers and balloons in a community hall on the outskirts of town and we would all flock out there. These couldn’t compare to an actual gay bar of course. For one of those, we had to head north to Calgary, to Boystown or Detour, or further north, to Edmonton, to The Roost. (Less often were the weekends we would go to Vancouver, where we could do a circuit of bars like Odyssey, Celebrities, Numbers, Denman Station, although really, for a nineteen-year-old boy from smalltown Alberta, all of Davie Street seemed like a gay bar.)

I had been to a “gay place” before The Roost. When I was in grade eleven, my friend V had left her home in Sherwood Park and was living in youth emergency housing. There, she’d met some gay folk, and she was going to show me how okay she was with my recent coming out by introducing me to them. I bused into Edmonton to meet her at a coffee shop called Boyztown (not to be confused with the Calgary dance club of the same name; at the time, I had no idea any other spaces existed. This was 1994. There wasn’t an Internet for me to research things on). Boyztown Café, on the main floor of a building that would later have popular gay pub on the upper level, across the street from where another gay bar would later be, wasn’t everything I hoped. Or, I guess, the space was fine but the people V introduced me to weren’t what I’d hoped. I was seventeen. I wanted her to be introducing me to a gay boy who was cute, who thought I was cute, and we’d date and we’d fall in love. Instead, I met a motley assortment of people who I’m sure were all very nice but none of whom were attractive to me. I wonder what might have happened if I’d met someone else that night, or if I’d gone back to try again. Instead, I continued to fall in love with the straight boys who might be gay, as I came out more and more, then went back in, then came back out to stay.

By that point, me and my homophobic, misogynist, racist roommate with the beautiful body had dial-up Internet, which I could use to access the chat forum, #mIRC. There, I found the #gayalberta room, where I, as ‘oasis’ in honour of their song Wonderwall, met gay people not part of the twenty or so I saw weekly at gay coffee. On my next trip home to Edmonton, I made plans to meet one. I met up with C at Boyztown, then we picked up his boyfriend E and went to a movie. The movie was Fear with Marky Mark, who was at the height of his Calvin Klein fame. After that, C and E asked if I wanted to stop by The Roost before heading back to their place.

Like I said, I don’t remember much of anything about our short time at the Roost. It was a Tuesday. The crowd wasn’t huge, but the male stripper they had drew in a crowd at midnight.
The Friday after, I was out with my… IDK, straight ex boyfriend and his girlfriend. We went to Rebar, an alternative club on Whyte, but then I persuaded them to check out The Roost. Already, straight space, even as queer-friendly a straight space as Rebar, didn’t feel like home to me. I had finally found where my people are, and it was gay bars.

A few weeks later, I took advantage of a break in summer session to go back up to Edmonton, for more of the same: meeting new people off mIRC at Boyztown and then heading to The Roost, including one night in drag just for kicks.

That would become the pattern during school breaks, whether it was Thanksgiving or Reading Week, or whatever. I was navigating all the normal chaos of a kid coming out, but it all melted away in the gay bar. The dance floor was sacrosanct. Please check your boyfriend drama at the door. It helped that I didn’t live in Edmonton, for sure. I could fly into town, party and play (not in the PnP sense of the words), then go back home, leaving whatever fall out happened to get cleaned up by the locals before my next visit.

I would stay with my parents during these trips, although the bar nights usually involved “sleepovers at friends”, which was a more parental-friendly way of saying I was hooking up. My mom was doing her best to embrace the gay thing but had a rule against me bringing anyone home. We also lived out of town so bringing a guy the forty minutes back home wasn’t something I was super excited to do anyway.

It did happen once. Usually I was meeting locals but one June trip up, I met a boy who was also visiting, from Victoria and gods he was beautiful. Still, there was just nowhere to go. However, when I saw him there the next night as well, I knew this had to happen and brought him home, sneaking him downstairs. This wasn’t the first boy I’d had sleepover, but straight ex boyfriends don’t count (even though they may have the same name).
Years later, that beautiful one-night-stand would briefly date my ex before taking his own life.

Between that first time at The Roost in June of ’96 and the time I finished my degree in December of ’99, I really did fall in love, not with a person but with Edmonton in general and The Roost in particular. Jaunts to Calgary and the bars then always seemed to result in less friendships and more drama, and Vancouver, while over the rainbow wonderful, didn’t have the home base advantage. When I finished my degree and needed to figure out what I wanted to do with the rest of my life, the answer was simple: go home and be professionally gay.

At that point, I already had a few years of professional gayness in Lethbridge, volunteering with the gay group there. I figured that, more than the degree I’d just spent four years and forty thousand dollars to get, would be enough to get my foot in the door at a place like The Roost.
I moved home from Lethbridge in March of 1999 and my life, already really fucking gay, got gayer.

Dancer from the Dance by Andrew Holleran

Rob Browatzke April 4, 2013 Reviews 0 Comments

This is he story of gay life in New York in the late 70s, from the tenements of the Lower East Side to the beaches of Fire Island, from the bars and the baths to the avenues and the parks, all the places where gay men cruised for cock and love. It is a story about too often having to sacrifice substance for style, and how, once in a while, you do the opposite. It is a story of decadence and despair, of lust, love, and the lies we all tell, of coming out and the end of innocence. It is the story of Malone, beautiful, romantic, idealistic, and Sutherland, queeny, campy, and jaded. It is the story of how they met, became friends, and how their friendship intersected and impacted the lives of the people around them.

The story begins with two friends exchanging letters. One still lives in New York, and his letters are filled with the streets, with the cold concrete and the stench of the city; the other has fled south, and his letters are idyllic, ripped from the pages of Gone with the Wind in their descriptions of the beauties of the deep south. They talk of old times, of the sex, drugs, and disco of their youth in New York, and how they, like everyone, loved Malone, charming, handsome, and searching for love.

Andrew Holleran’s prose is beautiful, breath-taking. Even the most graphic or ugly matters end up painted with that nostalgia that makes every memory brighter and bigger than it was. Men come out. They fuck. They love, if only for a night. They repeat the next night, at a different disco, on a different street, with a different man. But it is the same disco, the same street, the same man. Except for Malone, who stands apart, above, and Sutherland, whose age, whose camp, whose small dick and whose use of speed, has set him apart in a different way.

The New York scene is captured elegantly, a snapshot of a time, just post-Stonewall, when they gay ghetto was just forming. It is a country away from San Francisco, where old gay men go to die. It is a city of Angel Dust and Quaaludes, of red hankies and Pink Parties. Gay men gather, they gossip, they judge, they dance. They dance to feel, they dance to escape, they dance because not to dance is to die. In a dancefloor filled with bodies, shirtless, sweating, swirling, they lose themselves, and find themselves.

This isn’t a light and fluffy read, but it is a glorious one. The plot is one that could be lived in any city, any bar, any Saturday night. The characters blur together, because they’re all the same, except, of course, for Malone, on his pedestal, and for Sutherland, on her throne. I can see why this novel has been described as one of the most important works of gay literature. Its themes of loneliness, of superficial yet enduring friendship, of the quest for love, are as real today as they were then, and its characters could be recognized on the dancefloor of any local club.

The passion for music, for movement stands out. When dancing, it is both a communal experience, and an alientating one. While the dancefloor can be seen as a metaphor for the gay community, how when dancing, you can be a part of something bigger yet still be apart from it, it is also, simply, a place to dance.

This isn’t a novel you read; it is a feeling you experience.

This review was originally published on homorazzi

The Future of the Gay Bar

Rob Browatzke June 5, 2012 Musings 0 Comments

Does the gay bar still have a place in this more accepting world?

For years, the gay bar was an oasis. Only there could gay men and women find like-minded others. Only there could they find revelry and romance without fear of reprisal. It was in those gay bars that they plotted their revolution: a struggle for equal treatment, against discrimination. It was in those gay bars that they dreamed of a world where sexual orientation, like gender, like race, was simply a non-issue. It was in those gay bars that they came together as a community to fundraise for HIV/AIDS research, for pride centres and hotlines, for all sorts of GLBT causes that couldn’t get money from the outside world.

As time passed, as equality before the law became more real, as acceptance from the straight world began to be realized, suddenly those bars became less relevant. As the queer community expanded in pride and strength, it expanded into a plethora of social and sports groups, catering to all the interests under the rainbow. You didn’t have to go to the bar to meet other gay people; you could join the gay bowling team, gay curling team, gay swim team, etc. Still, the gay bar was the focal point of the community, the nightly watering hole and the Pride Week party central.

As time passes, as sexual orientation becomes less and less an issue in the minds of most people, especially the younger generaton, those bars become less relevant, again. No longer do you need to seek solace, safety, and solidarity within the walls under a rainbow flag. Now, when you want to go out for a night of drinking and dancing, you can do so at a bar that caters to your musical taste, or that’s stumbling distance from your home, or any number of criteria other than who you’re sleeping with.

(As a side bar, the impact that the world of online cruising has had on the gay bar is huge. Why get pretty and go out, play the Stand-and-Model games, when you can simply log onto any number of sites and have sex readily delivered to your door?)

As the queer march towards acceptance continues, what will become of the gay bar? What roles will it play in a world where its existence is not only no longer as needed but also, for some, no longer even desired? It is easy to envision a world where the gay bar is a kitschy stereotype of itself, a novelty not a necessity. The battles begun in gay bars, when won, would inevitably result in the extinction of those very bars. Even look at our own community, where a number of “straight” bars have nights catering to the gay market, or simply a mindset where, gay or straight, all are welcome. This is what we wanted, no?

Still, I feel that the days of the gay bar are not gone (and not only because I’m in the industry). To have that space where we are the majority, where we can have our drag shows and leather nights and lesbian folk singers, etc.. To have that community space where we can have our meetings and our fundraisers, that gay-owned and operated space where we can support our gay businesses with our gay dollars. To have those rainbow-clad walls.

That being said, the needs of the bar-going queer community are changing, and the queer bars have to change to match. No longer do they have a monopoly on that crowd. This forces change, and that change will be for the good. For the gay bar to survive in a world where the rainbow flag can fly freely anywhere, that change has to be.

Originally published on QMagazine

Tag: gay bars