Making a Scene: Femme Cultural Production in Toronto, 1990-2000
During the 1990s, Toronto was the site of a proliferation of femme-led political organizing and cultural production. The oral history narratives in this collection identify over 100 different political and creative events or projects led by queer and trans femmes just in Toronto during this time. These events created a vibrant queer scene in the city that included arts events, like theatre performances, readings and book launches, and numerous cabarets, such as Strange Sisters, Clit Lit, or Dirty Babette; festivals, such as Desh Pardesh and Counting Past 2; and, spaces for dancing and nightlife, such as Hump. There were also collaborative projects that had both political and cultural impact, and led to the production of films, books, performance, and community services.
Desh Pardesh flyers from 1990.
"The Desh parties were so much fun. […] A room full of queer South Asians and our allies. Great music. It was a place where you could feel your whole identity being present, right? Being South Asian, being gay or lesbian or bisexual. Having a lot of fun. There was a lot of rubbing up against people. The music was great. It was really a sense where you could be the different parts of yourself in one place. [...] Those were not easy spaces to find, right? They were very unique."
Event flyer for Sheila Chevalier's party called HUMP.
"If you didn't go out, how could you be gay? [...] When you're young and you're exploring your sexuality and exploring your identity, you want to be around others like that to explore it. Like, that's essential. And you didn't have dating apps you just swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe; so you had to actually go look, you know? [...] I think it made the creation of space so critical. I think that like that's what Dirty Babette was about. We need space. We need space to be ourselves, we need space to gather."
Cover of the program for the third edition of the trans art festival, Counting Past 2.
Some femmes describe being motivated to create services and supports that didn’t exist, to cultivate greater safety and solidarity at a time when queer and trans folks could still lose their housing, employment and even their children just for being themselves. Others talked about the need to be with other queer people and the creation of spaces and events to fill that need. The 1990s were the last analog decade – there were no online communities. If you wanted to make friends and build community, you needed events and spaces to go to. Femme-led events offered spaces for connection, for play and sexual exploration, and for queer world-building. In this way, these events were critical to an emerging and evolving queer and trans politics by allowing people to engage with the possibility of something better.
"It was trans women sex workers that created spaces in Toronto. You know, we were hitting all these spaces, and people didn't know what to do with us. […] All these agencies that had a lot of funding, they just didn't know how to address, not only being trans, but being sex workers, right? Because it went against everything they believed, right? When that triple murder happened in '96 that's when we fought back. We said, 'hey, we need shelters that accept us as trans women. We need shelters that allow us to go to work, because sex work is work. We need spaces where we can be together and be safe and be able to engage and have community.' And it was the sex workers that pushed for those things and made it better for everyone in the community."
Poster for Carol Thames' play called (In)Visible.
One of the defining features of the culture that femmes were producing was its attention to the complexity and multifaceted nature of identities, and creating spaces for those who were excluded from mainstream white gay culture—trans folks, queers of colour, punks, kinksters, bisexuals, and more. The idea of ‘queerness’ itself was new and the term was used more and more frequently to suggest the inclusion of a much broader range of identities beyond gay and lesbian. Narrators described the divisiveness of the queer community in the early 1990s and the desire to create spaces and events that were more diverse, intersectional, and inclusive. In many cases, it was queer and trans femmes creating some of the first spaces that could make room for these differences without losing sight of the complexities.
"I don't remember there being a lot of other femme, fat performance stuff. […] I mean, we would take it seriously and we would rehearse and practice and, like, learn steps and try things out. And then I feel like pretty much everything we did people went bonkers for. But that's where we got our fuel, was from that enabling audience of community. I'm sure there were elements within that [audience] that were doubtful or fatphobic or not into it, but all we heard was that ‘YES!’ So made it possible to keep doing it."
Flyer for the Clit Lit event curated around the theme "Hussies for Humanity: Sex and Activism."
Narrators recounted how queer femme cultural work at the time was about rejecting respectability politics, claiming our non-normativity as a strength, and challenging the normative whiteness of mainstream lesbian and gay culture.
"[Clit Lit] wasn't reined in the way, you know, certain types of queer representation at that time—or lesbian and gay representation, trans representation—was oriented towards demonstrating that we weren't monsters. It's like, 'no, we're monsters, monsters are better,’ you know? So, femme in that space, you know, as being like a place where desire and pleasure were really centred, right? […] A lot of queer femme work at that time, cultural work, was also about challenging the normative whiteness of LGBT formations, and so a space like Clit Lit you know, ended up being pretty much a contested space in a way that Clit Lit was game for."
"When I look back on Strange Sisters I feel like it reflects this confluence of the activist kind of political communities that I was a part of: the leather communities, the arts and culture, performance bar... Yeah, it was a very intersectional space. […] There was this mix of queerness, femmeness, activism, sexiness—for lack of a better word—sexually charged, embodied. [...] I think Strange Sisters was, for me, in a way—not that our communities were without problems—but there was a kind of utopia present, right, or that we created this utopia, these complexities, these nuances of who we are to each other. [...] So yeah, there was something quite special about the programs."
Event listing in Xtra for the 1993 edition of Strange Sisters: A Sexy Lesbian Cabaret.