Femme in the City: Shaping Toronto's Queer Legacies
"That desire for newness is also about an opportunity to reinvent oneself [...] so Toronto was a bit of a fresh start. It was a bit of a hub for trans community organizing, cultural and political. [...] I think there was a bigger queer of colour community here, there was a much bigger dating pool, there were multiple queer bars, there was a femme scene taking shape, and it it was taking shape at a moment where I think lesbian politics, queer politics, were becoming more open to trans people's presence, and so it meant that I started just having relationships with other queer femmes that were less mediated by old dividing lines, I guess. And Toronto seemed to be a place where that could happen."
Femmes were drawn to Toronto in the 1990s for many reasons: education, access to better healthcare, more lucrative work, cultural diversity, active arts scenes and community activism, and the ever-alluring glamour of a big city. By the 1990s, Toronto already had a rich legacy of gay and lesbian-feminist activism and organizing [1], and femmes mapped their own culture onto the blueprint left by the city’s previous generations of queer community and cultural actors.
This map includes 56 locations remembered by the narrators of the Femme Story Archives.
The sites include spaces for nightlife, art and performance spaces, community and educational spaces, and more.
Click the arrow in the top left for more ways to explore.
"People could come to Toronto and still be themselves. It was not an expectation that you become 'Canadian,' whatever that is, right? So, you had, you know, the gathering of an Italian community, you had a gathering of the Chinese community, you had a gathering of the Jamaican community. You had, you know, a gathering of communities throughout, whether they were in Scarborough or East York or North York or, you know, old Toronto. There was a space that you could go and say, 'I'm going to get a patty, and I know where to get a patty.' And I go to that area, and I hear a sense of belonging. I hear the language. I see how the people move through the world."
Matchbook from The Rose Cafe, a popular lesbian/dyke bar at 547 Parliament Street.
In the 1990s, Toronto’s Church-Wellesley Gay Village was still a beacon for young queer people coming out in and to the city; for our narrators, it was the site of first apartments, first nights out in a gay bar, and the iconic Pride Toronto festival. At the time, it was still unsafe to even hold hands in other areas of the city. But The Village was largely shaped by cis gay men’s culture, and a site where our narrators encountered racialized ideals of queerness, femmephobia, and a refusal to share space. Misogyny and racism were factors that pushed femmes to gather and create culture in other areas of the city, establishing many of the events and spaces that created what would later be described as "Queer Queen West."
"[My first girlfriend] took me to a lesbian bar in Toronto. It was on Church Street. But she took me in and I just saw the back of a woman in the bar and she had long dark hair down to the middle of her back like big, thick black waves, I think she was South Asian. And immediately I was like, 'Oh, that's a possibility here?' Her femme-ness is the only thing I remember about that bar, actually."
In the 1970s through the late 1980s, the east end of Toronto was home to some of the city’s earliest lesbian landmarks, including the Lesbian Organization of Toronto (LOOT) headquarters (345 Jarvis Street), and bars like the Blue Jay (Pape & Gerrard) and the Cameo Club (first at 95 Trinity Street and then 1130 Queen Street East).
Toronto Women's Bookstore at its 85 Harbord Street location.
One narrator described Parliament Street—east of The Village—as “the women’s quarter” because it was home to lesbian bar, The Rose (later Pope Joan); the all-women's social club, The Women’s Common; and, women’s social and health services like Jessie’s Centre for Teenagers (now known as Jessie’s - The June Callwood Centre for Young Women). But by the 1990s, queer culture was beginning to move west, thanks to cheap art galleries, bars and venues like The 360 (a legion hall at Queen & Spadina), Cameron House, Ciao Edie, the Boom Boom Room, and the Toronto Women’s Bookstore, and numerous events like Kush’s Desh Pardesh, Christy Cameron’s Dirty Babette’s cabaret, Will Munro’s monthly Vazaleen, Shelia Chevalier’s Hump, and others. In our narrators’ telling, the west end had become the new hub of radical queer culture. Femmes were often at the helm of these new cultural spaces that supported more diverse queer subcultures and movements.
"It wasn't until I came to Toronto that Black women were like, ‘I really love your aesthetic. I love the size of your lips. I love the colour, I love…’ whatever. And I wasn't getting any of that in London. And clearly, carrying that is a trauma. So, I then started to adorn myself through makeup in ways that I hadn't really done before. I did it mostly when I moved, I think, out of Toronto because I was feeling so isolated. I was like, ‘I need something that really is about me, for me.’"
For several of our narrators, Toronto was a place of femme possibility and freedom. In comparison to other major Canadian cities like Vancouver, Calgary, Halifax, and Montreal, Toronto felt like a place where queer women could wear long hair and miniskirts, participate in trans community-building, and relish a sex-positive queer culture that included kink and butch-femme eroticism. Our narrators pointed out many factors that contributed to the sense that Toronto could hold such possibilities: the size, its cultural diversity, its status as an educational and political hub, and the, relatively, low rents that were still available in some parts of the city.
"At U of T there was the first queer conference. [...] And that is where I first started wearing my miniskirts [...] There was... more permission. I didn't feel like I was going to be judged, I think. And I remember a moment at Buddies. It was an evening and I had a miniskirt on and someone from Montreal, who I'm not naming, actually had the gall to shame me for wearing my miniskirt. And I said, 'No, you don't get to do that here. This is Toronto.'"
Femme life and culture was also nurtured outside of venues and bars. In their homes, femmes edited anthologies, made films, and hosted literary nights together, producing cultural texts but also the deep ties that sustained the community. On the streets, femmes engaged in conversations about sex and sexuality and boldly displayed their queer femininity, despite the risk of harassment and violence. Here, they participated in the long tradition of enacting queerness publicly as a form of resistance, which helped signal that Toronto was a safer space for queer expression.