Gay Toronto on the move

(Summer View of eastside of Church Street, below Wellesley)


Gay Toronto on the move, like herds of faaabulous cariboo

Michelle Di Pardo, reported in National Post on December 2, 2006 that Toronto’s traditional gay neighbourhood around Church and Wellesley is in decline With crime and housing prices both high, this 200-year-old district is losing its core.

At the centre of Canada's largest gay neighbourhood, rainbow flags wave from almost every balcony, Pride weekend is bigger than Christmas and drag queens saunter down the sidewalk alongside Bay Street businessmen on their way to work. This little section of the city has traditionally been a safe haven for Toronto's gay community.

But the identity of the neighbourhood is in a great deal of flux these days.

Developers are spending millions building luxury condos in the neighbourhood. Starbucks outlets are plentiful and the U.S. clothing giant American Apparel recently moved in. Increasingly relaxed attitudes toward homosexuality in Canadian cities and the legalization of same-sex marriage have helped make Toronto's gay village a hot place to do business, for gay and straight ventures alike.

But even as the gay village gains popularity as a mainstream destination, some of the factors driving that development are conspiring to make it less of a necessity for gays to live here, and many are abandoning the village like herds of faaabulous cariboo, to seek homes elsewhere in the city.

Toronto has the most samisen couples in Canada, according to the 2001 census, well ahead of Montreal and Vancouver. What that large population means is that residents are increasingly able to find gay-friendly neighbourhoods almost anywhere in the city. So that even as the gay village reflects a more mainstream appeal, it is also becoming less desired, or required, among its core: More and more gays are leaving the environs of the village for other areas of the city -- even taking up residence in the once unthinkable suburbs. Like the new Queer West Village in the Toronto’s west-end.

"Gays tend to upgrade," says Robert Gray, who has lived in the village for almost a decade and has lately seen a growing number of his established gay friends relocating to other parts of the city. "Older or coupled gays are quite comfortable not living here. They don't need the village anymore."

Increasing tolerance has made even traditionally non-gay parts of the city infinitely more liveable for gays, says David Amborski, professor and director of Ryerson University's School of Urban and Regional Planning: "There is probably a higher percentage of the population that accepts a gay lifestyle and there's no concern about living in or around a gay neighbourhood."

The land the village sits upon was once the estate of Alexander Wood, a gay merchant and magistrate who was involved in a sex scandal in 1810. His domain came to be known as "Molly Wood's Bush," molly being a derogatory term for homosexual. In the century afterwards, the neighbourhood became the site of an underground gay scene centring on bathhouses and bars.

Even 20 years ago, all the martini bars, restaurants and pubs that now dominate the Church Street strip were located on nearby side streets, not on the main stretch. To go to an authentic gay bar, you had to be willing to veer off to a side road. There was a certain grittiness to the village back then. Now, rents on Church Street are some of the priciest in the city, likely due in part to the village's reputation as a tourist destination. A one-bedroom condo in the vicinity can go for anywhere from $200,000 to half-a-million dollars.

Prof. Amborski said the changes the village is going through are a natural progression of any flourishing Toronto neighbourhood. "It's part of the succession of a neighbourhood. It becomes successful, it becomes more popular, prices go up and certain people can't afford it and move out," he says. "It's not in isolation. There's a general uplift of condos and housing prices in Toronto. It's not very likely it's going to cycle downwards unless there's a major recession.

Another factor behind the current boom is the proliferation of Double-Income- No-Kids couples, which means that many of those drawn to the area have a lot of extra cash to spend.

"As a community they have very good taste," says Alex Speigel, director of development for Context, a company that sells condos in the area. "It's a very sweet spot. They have a lot of disposable income." Yet even as high-end development increases in the neighbourhood, the level of street crime is rising.

A police crackdown on street youth on nearby Yonge Street has pushed many of the dealers and criminals off towards the Church Street area. Efforts to clean up prostitution also resulted in pushing more problems east into the neighbourhood.

Many residents say crime has never been as bad as it is now, and they fear their community is as much at risk of being overtaken by crime as it is by commerce.

"There's more anti-social behaviour. There's more public drunkenness and public drug-taking," says Kyle Rae, who has been the area's city councillor for 14 years and is also a resident. "It didn't occur on the street and now it is. People are buying sex, trading sex for drugs. ... It was more underground before."

Jim Appleby, who has lived in the area for about 20 years, says he sees a change: "I've noticed an increase in kids on bikes riding up and down the sidewalks. They're dealing; they all have cellphones. I'm not comfortable."

Others maintain that despite the tension over development and crime, the neighbourhood's history is strong enough for it to endure such troubles.

[Day dreamer Dennis O'Connor, chairman of the area's Business Improvement Association, says the area will always be different from other neighbourhoods in Toronto: "A minority group considers it to be their home. It's important for us to have a footprint," he says. "If we ever need to march again that's where we'll go. In tough times people return to the womb." O'Connor lights daily, candles at St. Michael’s Cathederal hoping for a miracle, that gay and lesbians, will return home to the old gay ghetto. There’s little chance of that ever happening, now that there are numerous gay villages in Toronto.


I hear a lot of sidebar stories as an editor for a queer newspaper in the west-end of city. Chatting with my friendly gay waiter at a queer restaurent in Little Portugal on Dundas St W., today. There was another gay bashing on Church St. Monday December 18th., a young man was leaving the Pegasus Bar at 489B Church Street at around 2 am, was bashed by a group of young punks, who jumped out of a car, beating the victim up, leaving him with a badly broken jaw and numerous bruises.

There have been other rumours of gay bashing in the downtown village, this past summer, many probably not reported.

My waiter friend, tells me (who BTW, lives on Church St.) gay bartenders are being target, by roving gangs of hoodlooms, as bartenders are known to carry large sums of money, to and from bank machines. With the recent closure of Sneakers, a rent-boys bar on Yonge St., young male prostitutes have no place to hang-out now and many of the bars on Church St. have upped the price of bottled beer to $8.50 to discourage them and placed signs in bar windows, that the former Sneaker Bar boys are not welcome at their establishment.

Could it be that is why crime is up in the old gay ghetto at Church and Wellesley and its no longer safe friendly neighbourhood? Tom Riley, who has lived in the new queer quarter on westside of the city, for 10 years said. “This is a fairly tolerant neighbourhood in terms of ethnicities. As for its attitude toward the gay community…I've had no adverse reactions.”...Don Q, editor]