It took a Village: 57 stops on the long march to Pride
Legacy project chronicles history, milestones of LGBTTQ+ community
Glenn Crawford suggests meeting in the parking lot between Staples and the Book Bazaar at the Corner of Bank Street and Gladstone Avenue.
It seems like a rather mundane place to start a historical walking tour. But Crawford, the research and project leader of the Village Legacy Project, assures that this newly paved lot is a storied space. Notorious, even. In this location there was once an upscale cinema called The Rialto, which opened in 1931. But it became increasingly seedy. By the 1950s and ’60s, it was known as the “Rat Hole” and was a gay cruising area. Later, the building that is now home to the Book Bazaar had a basement bar called Bottom’s Up.
This spot is one of 57 stops on Marching to Equality, a walking tour Crawford has compiled for the Bank Street Business Improvement Area.
Stops range from the offices of the advocacy group Gays of Ottawa to the Centretown Pub, which was the city’s longest-running gay bar when it closed earlier this year. The walk, which can be accessed through the website and an app, stretches from Gladstone to Wellington and a few blocks on either side.
This neighbourhood has been known, unofficially, as the “gay village” for the past few decades, but there has been a push for official recognition, as has been the case in many other large cities.
“Bank Street has such as strong history. There really was a movement to create something more substantial,” says Christine Leadman, executive director of the Bank Street Business Improvement Area. “It’s a pretty incredible story. As a business area, we don’t want to lose those histories.”
The first village sign was unveiled in 2010. Last year, the city painted rainbow crosswalks at the corner of Bank and Somerset. The Village Legacy Project will be launched on Monday to coincide with Pride Week and Canada’s 150th birthday.
The project will be rolled out in several phases, starting with the website and the app, followed by plaques and banners.
Crawford’s job has been to chronicle the milestones and landmarks of the LGBTTQ+ community.
Crawford combed through archives and media reports, but felt it was important to tell the story from the perspective of those who lived it.
“What’s great about the project is that it’s still recent history. We’re talking about a civil rights movement that happened within my lifetime. I could record the history of people who can still talk about it. It was a remarkable generation. There’s still a lot to be done, but we’ve come a long way.”
Charlie Hill, now 71, was one of the people Crawford interviewed.
Hill, an Ottawa native, was a University of Toronto student in 1971 when he was with a group of activists who stood on Parliament Hill on Aug. 28 to read a document demanding equal rights in the eyes of the law. Hill has been out since 1969 and recalls being arrested in a Montreal bar in the mid-’60s for an “indecent act in a public place” — dancing with another man. He was acquitted.
That day in ’71 on Parliament Hill, he was aware that RCMP officers might be taking down his name. Hill didn’t care. “You only have to be afraid of fear,” he says.
The LGBTTQ+ community in this civil service town has struggled to survive and define itself in between the epicentres of Montreal and Toronto, says Crawford.
During the Cold War, gay men were considered susceptible to blackmail by Soviet agents. Pinkie rings and driving a white convertible were considered suspicious. The RCMP enlisted Carleton University’s Dr. Frank Wake to develop scientific tests, including the “fruit machine,” a kind of lie detector purported to discover hidden homosexuals by measuring the dilation of pupils when subjects were shown nude photos. Security officials investigated more than 8,000 people in civil service jobs, and more than 100 were forced to resign.
Crawford summarizes his findings about what life had been like in the LGBTTQ+ community years ago into three categories: cruising, carousing and rabble-rousing.
First, the cruising. When there were no or few gay bars in Ottawa, men often resorted to seeking out companionship or sex in public places such as parks. It was risky, and many of these places happened to be in the backyard of Parliament Hill, including Major’s Hill Park, the tunnel that connects the Château Laurier and Union Station, and behind the Parliament buildings themselves.
“Mackenzie Avenue was hustler street,” says Crawford.
Next, the carousing. Crawford has collected reports of 64 gay bars in the capital region, although there were usually only five to eight open at any one time. Among the most legendary: Chez Henri in Hull, Club Polo at Bank and Sparks streets, and Club Private, a menonly dance club.
“We didn’t have spaces. We had to create our own,” says Crawford.
“People had a need to connect,” says Hill. In the 1970s, dances were a place where the social became political.
“There was strength in numbers. Gay people, usually, aren’t born into gay families,” says Hill. “There’s tremendous isolation if you can’t communicate with your parents or with your colleagues.”
And then there’s the rabble-rousing. Ask Crawford what he considers to be the village’s ground zero, and he points out an innocuous apartment building on Somerset Street where a group of men met in 1971 to create Gays of Ottawa, known as GO, which later produced a hotline and a newspaper, and created new organizations including Pink Triangle Services and the AIDS Committee of Ottawa.
In 1975, members of GO marched on both the police station and the Ottawa Journal after Warren Zufelt jumped to his death from his apartment window. Zufelt’s name had been on the list of customers of a prostitution service, a list police had released to the media, which dubbed the case a “vice ring.” GO filed a complaint with the Ontario Press Council and its leaders met with mayor Lorry Greenberg to demand an investigation into police handling of the case.
In 1989, 300 people walked in Ottawa’s first Pride parade. But that year also marked a series of attacks on men in Major’s Hill Park. On Aug. 21, Alain Brosseau, a waiter at the Château Laurier on his way home from work, encountered a gang of youths on a hatefuelled rampage. They attacked Brosseau, dangling him from the Alexandra Bridge and dropping him to his death in the Ottawa River. The youths then invaded the Orléans home of a man whose wallet was stolen a few days earlier, and assaulted two men, slashing the throat of one and stabbing the other in the eye.
The incidents were so disturbing that representatives of the gay community met with police in July 1991 and formed the GLBT Ottawa Police Liaison Committee, one of the first in Canada.
Crawford says he knows many of the people he interviewed for the project, but he still learned new things.
“What I feel is exciting about this project is that it takes it out of the history books and makes it accessible. It’s not the sort of thing that’s taught in school.”
As gay culture has moved into the mainstream and people meet each other though online dating sites and apps, there has been a decline in the number of “queer spaces” such as bars, says Crawford. There are now only three gay bars in the city.
LGBTTQ+ people are assimilating and the village is becoming less of a hub. As cyber spaces proliferate, youth are losing that same sense of community older generations experienced, he says. “There is still something to be said about being with people who can be their authentic selves.”
The village is changing. One of the spots in the walking tour is 318 Lisgar St., the final home of the Gays of Ottawa Centre, located in a space above a laundromat. It was accessed by a set of stairs wide enough for the long lineups that would form during dances because the space could only hold 75 people. It was here that creating the AIDS Committee of Ottawa was proposed in July 1985 as the AIDS epidemic raged. The space where the office once stood is now a vacant lot.
Villages across North America have been under attack recently for becoming too gentrified. Their vibrancy makes them attractive to tourists, but critics fear they’re turning into theme parks that fly the rainbow flag.
“Villages are often marketed as capitalist ventures,” says Hill. “Places change and things move around. The real village is in your head.”
What: Ottawa’s first gay bar Where: 166B Laurier West:
“The B,” as it was called by regulars, was opened by a group of straight bartenders from the Lord Elgin who loved their gay clients and recognized them as a
large and otherwise ignored group of customers. “It wasn’t a particularly nice bar,” notes Crawford. “We’ve heard more than a few folks describe it as a dump, but it was a space we could call our own at a time when other bars only tolerated us, or hated us but took our money anyway.”
The founding of Gays of Ottawa
What: Where: 270 Somerset St. West
In September 1971, Maurice Bélanger and Michael Black invited five others to their apartment on the ninth floor of 270 Somerset St. West to talk about forming a rights group that became Gays of Ottawa, or GO, which later held meetings in the basement lounge of St. George’s Church, now St. Peter and St. Paul’s, at 152 Metcalfe St. Gays of Ottawa organized its first dance at 160 Chapel St. in June 1972, and it attracted more than 100 people. GO ran dances there until January 1975, when the liquor board deemed the building residential and not commercial.