A beacon goes out in city’s west end
The Beaver’s closing means loss of venue in LGBTQ community
JP LAROCQUE
On a cold winter’s night, the Beaver stood like a beacon on the Queen West strip.
The interior of the bar presented itself to pedestrians shuffling past on the icy sidewalks as a study in contrasts: brightly lit, condensation creeping along the window panes, jackets piled high along the walls. A bouncer would usher you inside and there you could slip between sweaty crowds of patrons waiting for a drink, a DJ spinning a popular tune as a local drag queen would dance on the tiny elevated dance floor.
Such a scene now, with COVID-19 and physical distancing, seems almost from a bygone era and owner Lynn McNeill recognizes that. This month after almost 15 years of operation, the bar announced that it would close due to the pandemic — a major loss to the city’s LGBTQ+ community, which has seen a number of its venues under threat of closure.
“Our space is just not conducive to the (realities of this virus),” he says. “It’s too tight. It’s too narrow. You can’t social distance. And our people — the people who love the Beaver — are socially aware, politically active and sensible. They are not going to go for a sweaty dance party where they’re rubbing up against each other.
“As much as they’d like to, they realize it’s just not the time to do that.”
The bar opened in February 2006, the brainchild of McNeill and club promoter and artist Will Munro, who died in 2010. Munro had nurtured a queer alternative scene beyond the city’s Church-Wellesley village with events like Vazaleen at Lee’s Palace, and the duo saw an opportunity to create a more permanent space at 1192 Queen St. W. in an old brunch spot owned by friends. It was an immediate success.
“It was a great, vibrant social neighbourhood,” says McNeill. “There were lots of warehouses across the street, lots of artists and lots of interesting people living there. And they were the wonderful people who populated the Gladstone, the Beaver and the Drake in those early years.”
But the area south of the bar, known as West Queen West Triangle, eventually became slated for redevelopment. The old industrial warehouses and lofts went down, replaced by a series of massive condominium complexes. The new tenants shifted the demographic makeup of the area, forcing many of the artists and marginalized individuals who made up the bar’s regular clientele out, and the surrounding businesses soon changed, focusing on a different — and more moneyed — customer base.
“The bar eventually became out of sync with (the strip),” says Beaver co-manager Adam Cowan. “If you’re going to go see the most brilliant … amazing drag queens … and you’re walking past red carpets with people wearing more than your net worth, you kind of feel like the neighbourhood isn’t for you anymore.”
And yet despite the encroaching gentrification, the Beaver remained a destination for queer art culture, ushering in a period that saw the west end as a popular location for LGBTQ+ businesses. Spots like the Henhouse, the Steady and Holy Oak popped up shortly thereafter and the community grew, with different patrons and performers discovering the bar. “Generationally, (our patrons) changed five or six times, from the style of music, to the style of performance, to the art that’s done,” says McNeill. “The bar has continued to be a popular, relatively happy place, and I think that’s because incredible staff over the years have created interesting events and given the space over to local promoters.”
It’s part of the reason McNeill and Cowan refuse to be pessimistic about the bar’s closure, even considering fewer queer spaces in the city. Both imagine the Beaver will reopen in a new location at some point in the future.
“I’ve basically been putting money away and saving to get a new venue for about a decade of my working life,” notes Cowan. “I’m hopeful that even with businesses closing, it can present us with an opportunity to get a nicer spot that can hold more people and give the community what it deserves.”
McNeill agrees. “I will help about as much as I can, but the new generation is enthusiastic, super competent and energized. There are tons of people out there who want to do stuff and we just need to find a place where we can bring them together to do it safely.”
McNeill also thinks that the Beaver did what he and Munro set out to do all those years ago, which was advance an evolving sense of what queerness can be in a city by taking it out of one specific neighbourhood.
“If you think about how the world has evolved and how urban culture has evolved to include so much more of the queer community and diversity in general, we’re in a much better space than we were 15 years ago … and hopefully we can maintain that trajectory.
“And I don’t doubt for a second that once this mess is over, (our community) will create another set of cool, new interesting places.”