Gay bars in old quebec city

T he first time I went to a gay bar, I was eighteen years old. It was induring a pivotal summer between the first and second years of university, when my friend Sarah and I—still navigating the transition between adolescence and adulthood—decided to take a trip to Quebec City.

Both of us are queer, but prior to that weekend, we had spent most of our time awkwardly fumbling around straight-dominated spaces in Ottawa, trying to figure out who we were and whom we liked. We were fascinated by the idea of it, imagining the debauchery we might get into and the fellow queer people we might meet.

It felt a little taboo, but we were in a new city, safe from the leering eyes of familiar faces in Ottawa. We could be ourselves here, we thought, and what better place to do it than Le Drague?

LGBTQ+ visitors

That night, as we entered the bar, we saw our first drag queen. The crowd let loose an almost feral sound—an emittance of pure giddy joy. The next few hours were a whirlwind of thrilling escapism—our very own gay fantasia. Listen to The Deep Dive. Before Le Drague, I had never been old so many gay people, nor had I ever seen others so shamelessly wear their queerness on their sleeves.

That experience led to countless other reckless, wild nights at gay bars in Ottawa and beyond. I came of age within the musty walls and sweat-soaked gay floors of these spaces. They are where, for the first time, I felt like I was part of a community. To be queer is to be different; queerness comes with a hyperawareness that most of the people in a room are not like you and some of them might even hate who you are.

Gay bars eliminated that, allowing me to be in the majority—even if only for a night. But opportunities for the gay bar adventures that have been so pivotal in the lives of countless queer people are growing increasingly sparse. Over the past two decades, these spaces have been disappearing at alarming rates.

With each closure, it becomes clearer that, in order to preserve these safe spaces, bars need to reposition themselves for new realities. D esignated queer spaces have existed in the country for more than a century. The earliest known establishment in Canada, the deceptively named Apple and Cake Shop, operated in Montreal in the s.

As an Montreal Star city revealed, it was no ordinary bakery. Over the next hundred years, more queer spaces popped quebec in cities around the country. But, because homosexuality was a crime in Canada untilthey were forced to operate in secrecy. Gay bars became a vital element of the queer experience, facilitating sexual encounters that could have resulted in arrest or worse.

Despite the covertness of these spaces, they were still regularly surveilled and raided by the police, resulting in hundreds of assaults and arrests. Names were occasionally publicized, which could destroy the reputations of privately gay people. A new era was ushered in after homosexuality was decriminalized, but this legal change was mainly bar.