Celebrating LGBTQ history
N.L. town’s summer event aims to unite province’s gay diaspora
ST. JOHN’S, N.L. An event planned this summer in a small Newfoundland town aims to unite the province’s LGTBQ diaspora and celebrate the lesbian history of the aptly named community of Broad Cove.
“Come Home Queer” is a play on the province’s Come Home Year tourism theme, which invites Newfoundland and Labrador expats to return to the province for a visit this summer. The event, running July 15-17, is set to take place in Broad Cove, N.L., where about 30 lesbians — most of them friends from St. John’s — have been settling or summering for the past three decades.
Organizer Gerry Rogers has planned a performance by Kellie Loder, readings by authors like Eva Crocker, and storytelling events about the province’s LGTBQ history, including the story of Broad Cove, located about 100 kilometres west of St. John’s.
“It’s busting myths, you know? Rural Newfoundland and Labrador is not backwards,” said Rogers who, after 30 years of visiting the town, is now building a house there to retire in. “There are lots of people here now who have children or grandchildren or relatives or friends, people in their own community who are queer. And there is acceptance.”
“The broads came out!” she added.
In a province known for its uniquely named communities, Wanda Crocker says it was purely coincidence that lesbians settled in a town whose name — broad — is an old-fashioned and sometimes derogatory term for a woman. Crocker is said to be the first one to arrive — she bought a home there with her partner in 1989, and they began inviting friends out to stay with them, Rogers included.
Their guests would pitch tents in the yard and spend the weekend, drawing curious stares from residents, Crocker said in a recent interview. “They’d be stopping on the road and they have their binoculars out … we would just tell them that this is the Holy Heart reunion,” she said, referring to the Holy Heart of Mary high school in St. John’s, which used to be an all-girls institution.
She laughs when she imagines what they must have thought: “Like, my God, they were a poorlooking crowd, that class … they all had short hair and glasses!” It didn’t take people long to figure things out, she said. Nor did it take long for her friends to start buying their own oceanside houses in the town.
Broad Cove has since amalgamated with the towns of Small Point, Blackhead and Adam’s Cove, and roughly 385 people live in the area, according to Statistics Canada. The town sits along the northern shores of Conception Bay, on a peninsula home to places like Heart’s Desire, Dildo and Red Head Cove.
In 1985, a Newfoundland town named Gayside voted to change its name to Baytona.
Residents of the town, which is about 420 kilometres northwest of Broad Cove, said they were embarrassed by the name. That kind of homophobia, however, isn’t part of the story of Broad Cove, Rogers and Crocker said.