The Disney-fication of Church St.
I once got thrown out of the Rose, the now-defunct lesbian bar on Parliament St.
I was there with friends, all male, all gay, and who knows what we were doing in a dyke bar, but in any case we didn't last more than a couple of minutes before somebody told us we had to leave, we weren't allowed in unless accompanied by a woman.
I was mildly pissed off (on a scale of one to 10: a wimpy one) but I also understood their position. The Rose was one of the few dyke bars in a city that has never had very many (and still doesn't) and it wasn't like I was going to add to the sexual excitement.
Nobody does gender segregation anymore. Even at the time, it was mildly dated, a leftover from the very 1970s war between lesbians and gay men over issues like youth sexuality and porn.
(And, these days, it's probably just plain illegal. A Montreal leather bar that is men-only – except on Wednesday nights – recently refused service to a 20-year-old woman and promptly found itself slapped with a human rights complaint.)
But I thought of this long-ago incident one recent Saturday night as I stood in the middle of Woody's shortly after midnight and watched a couple of straight women dance in the centre of the bar.
Woody's is Toronto's pre-eminent gay bar and if there are straight women there on a Saturday night at the peak of the cruising hour, well, it's the decline of the gay empire, the Disney-fication of Church St.
No comments:
Post a Comment