Sur les bars queer, les descentes de police et les pistes de danse qui disparaissent

Montreal's queer history is older than most may expect. Writers like the city’s own Richard “Bugs” Burnett, author of Three Dollar Bill, have traced it back to moments like a soldier-drummer in 1648 who escaped a death sentence for "the worst of crimes" by agreeing to become New France's first executioner, and what historians consider North America's earliest documented gay establishment: Moise Tellier's shop on Craig Street, where in 1869 the apples and cake were mostly a cover story.

But nightlife proper—its inventory of music, drinks, and a room full of people who understand one another—is a twentieth-century story. In Montreal, it doubles as a map of the city itself detailing who got to dance, where they did it, and what it cost them.

Armand Larrivée Monroe, second from the right, at the Mocambo with friends in 1957. | Photograph: Armand Larrivée Monroe’s personal collection

The clandestine years

In the Sin City era of the 1940s and 50s, gay and lesbian Montreal existed in plain sight, just never under its own name. Homosexuality itself wasn't technically a crime, but the Criminal Code's "gross indecency" provision was elastic enough to cover a slow dance, so the police didn't need much. Queer life clustered around two poles: the downtown blocks near Peel and Stanley, where gay men gathered at spots like the Monarch café and the Piccadilly Club, and the Red Light district along Saint-Laurent Boulevard, where lesbians carved out corners of cabarets like the Blue Sky and the Casa Loma.

Keyword here is ‘carved out’: At Les Ponts de Paris, the Saint-André Street cabaret that became the era's best-known lesbian hangout after opening as Aux Deux Canards in 1955, the section to the left of the stage was women's turf, protected by house rules and enforced by the butches, whose masculine dress and demeanour doubled as a warning system against intruding men. A man wanting to ask a woman to dance had to go through the bouncer. Outside, police watched for exactly those butch-femme codes on the sidewalk. A block over on Sainte-Catherine, Le Zanzibar did similar duty; its old address is a pizza place today.

Meanwhile the era's tabloids worked themselves into a lather over the city's bars for "women who love women," and in doing so accidentally published a directory: plenty of Montrealers found their first queer bar because a scandalized newspaper told them where it was.

One of the more pivotal rooms of this time was the Tropical Room, a lounge attached to the Downbeat Club on Peel Street that became the city's first exclusively gay establishment in 1952, three years after premier Maurice Duplessis had bragged that Montreal's morality was proven by its lack of homosexual clubs (natch). In 1957 the owner, Solly Silvers, hired a magnetic 22-year-old from Saint-Henri named Armand Larrivée, already nicknamed La Monroe for his Marilyn devotion, to host the evenings.

Monroe did something no one in Montreal had done by building shows for a gay audience rather than about one with bingo nights, film screenings, amateur revues and drag numbers channelling Joséphine Baker and Marlene Dietrich.

In 1958 (some say it was 1959), after a year of lobbying, he got his birthday wish: men could finally dance together at the Tropical Room, a first for the city.

Armand Larrivée Monroe as Lutèce in 1960. | Photograph: Armand Larrivée Monroe’s personal collection

Liberation, raids and a pink flag

Canada decriminalized homosexuality in 1969, a full day before Stonewall erupted in New York. On the ground in Montreal, though, the 1970s felt less like liberation than like a siege.

Starting in 1975, mayor Jean Drapeau's police swept through the bathhouses and the Stanley Street bars in a pre-Olympic shake-down, prompting the formation of the bilingual Gay Coalition Against Repression and one of the largest queer demonstrations the country had yet seen. Then came October 22, 1977, when roughly fifty officers, some carrying machine guns, stormed the Truxx and Le Mystique on Stanley and arrested 146 men, the largest mass arrest Canada had seen since the October Crisis. The next night, 2,000 people shut down the corner of Sainte-Catherine and Stanley.

Within two months, Quebec's National Assembly added sexual orientation to the provincial human rights charter, making it the first jurisdiction in Canada to ban that discrimination. The bar raid did what years of lobbying hadn't.

The decade held brighter rooms too, however. The Limelight on Stanley, where DJ Robert Ouimet spun from 1973 to 1981, welcomed a crowd that was gay, straight, Black, white, francophone and anglophone, which Ouimet argued made it better than Studio 54. It was also one of the few doors reliably open to trans women: Michelle de Ville, remembered as the city's first "door bitch," recalled being turned away from the gay male clubs of the decade but never from the Limelight's floor.

And from 1968, an ex-wrestler named Denise Cassidy, forever known as Babyface, began running the city's first lesbian-only clubs, from La Source through Baby Face Disco, a tough business she managed for fifteen years. Her early rooms—one stood where Concordia's Simone de Beauvoir Institute is now—ran on strict dress and etiquette codes meant to keep the liquor board and the police at arm's length. When respectability failed, patrons organized: lesbians boycotted Chez Madame Arthur in 1974 over harassment from the bar's own staff, and rallied again after police raided nearby Chez Jilly in 1976.

In June 1979, activist John Banks dyed two bedsheets pink, cut them into a triangle because the rainbow flag hadn't reached Montreal yet, and marched at the head of the city's first Pride alongside Monroe. Fifty-two people walked Saint-Laurent Boulevard from Sherbrooke to Duluth.

Canadian singer from Quebec Alys Roby, applauded by a lesbian audience at L’Exit II. | Photograph: Archives lesbiennes du Québec

Two golden ages

The 1980s split Montreal's queer nightlife in two directions at once. On the Plateau, lesbians built what geographer Julie Podmore calls the golden age of Montreal lesbian visibility: a genuine enclave along Saint-Denis, with the bars Labyris and L'Exit arriving in 1982 and the feminist Lilith in 1983, surrounded by bookstores, cafés and community offices. The scale is easy to underestimate: between 1973 and 1995, Podmore counts some thirty lesbian bars, cafés and restaurants in the city, plus four bookstores and nine community offices. These were rooms owned and defined by the women in them. Lilith co-owner Pauline Lacroix put it plainly: she wanted a place where lesbians could exist among lesbians and hold onto their self-esteem, so she built one that hosted art shows, concerts, and book launches between dance nights.

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The clandestine years

In 1958 (some say it was 1959), after a year of lobbying, he got his birthday wish: men could finally dance together at the Tropical Room, a first for the city.

Liberation, raids and a pink flag

Canada decriminalized homosexuality in 1969, a full day before Stonewall erupted in New York. On the ground in Montreal, though, the 1970s felt less like liberation than like a siege.