0:11  
On a busy night in Toronto's church in Wellesley village, you hear it before you see it. Music spilling out of bars, conversations overlapping. For some it's just another part of the city, but for others, it's always meant more.

0:30  
This is a place people have come not just to go out, but to feel seen, to find people like them, and for decades, that feeling has defined what the village is. But now, as the neighborhood continues to change, there's a question sitting underneath all of it, what happens when the spaces that created that feeling start to disappear?

0:56  
If you talk to people who experienced the village years ago, they won't describe it as just a destination. They'll tell you it changed something for them.

1:10  
It was a fun, fun spot, of course, you know, being in my early 20s and then later into my mid 20s and beyond, you know, it was always a lot of fun, because it really was a hub where you could come and feel safe and meet, meet guys and know that you know people that you're meeting were, you know, were also gay or lesbian, I suppose if you were, you know, looking for women. And that was such a refreshing change. I mean, I grew up in Whitby, and I went away to school at Queens. And, you know, you're all at that time, the era was, you're just sort of like eyeballing and checking people out so to to be I remember walking into a bar boots and buds at Sherburne and Selby, and there were like 100 or more men in there. I thought, by 21 like, oh my god, everybody here is gay. This was the most exciting thing I'd ever experienced.

2:09  
At a time when being openly gay wasn't widely accepted. Spaces like that were rare. They offered safety, yes, but also something harder to find recognition

2:22  
for some it was the first time being surrounded by people who shared their identity openly and unapologetically. It could feel overwhelming, but in a way that felt right.

2:38  
When you think about the beginnings of the village, you really have to think about the beginnings of city building in Toronto. The village came out organically, out of the building of the subway system, and so when the Wellesley Street station was opened, that you can really mark as the beginning of the village. At that time, it wasn't a gay and lesbian Village at all. It was. It was mostly what we would now call like an inner city. You know, very cheap rents. Nobody was really living there. It was, in many cases, probably farmland, if you looked at what the, what the, what the neighborhood looked like when the Wellesley Street Station first opened up, and at that time, as the as the city started to build up, as more and more subway stations opened up, more and more people started to move into the area. And you can really point to a couple housing developments, particularly Co Op. There's a couple Co Op developments along Church Street that are really interesting because and amazing that they've stayed Co Op developments all these years, but because of the fact that co ops are owned by the people who run the building, and so you can keep rents very affordable. They attracted young gay men, gay men who were fleeing. They're very homophobic religious towns in Owen Sound and all these other places around Ontario and surrounding provinces. And so slowly, over time, it started to act as a beacon to people, LGBTQ people, not just in Canada, but all around the world.

4:12  
Andrea Houston has spent years reporting on the queer community, like a lot of people, she saw what these spaces made possible, because it wasn't just only about night life. It was about finally being able to exist openly. And that kind of openness didn't come from just one big moment. It was built slowly in person, through small everyday things, conversations at the bar, recognizing the same faces each week. Over time, strangers became something closer to family.

4:49  
We used to have a friend who played piano on Saturday nights at

4:55  
flash, and so we would go down at seven o'clock and he'd lead this big.

5:00  
Sing along the bar, which was so fun as did all the other bars, a lot of them tracks, tracks five on Yonge Street, we would go specifically for this big sing along. So that was a huge community builder.

5:19  
But the way people connect here has been changing. Some of it's gradual. Some of it's harder to ignore. As costs go up and businesses close, the spaces that once held these moments are becoming less accessible, and at the same time, the way people meet has shifted

5:41  
the community was a wider spread the social capacity. Let's say ie the bars were spread around, like, there was one on Jarvis, there was one at Sherburne north, there was one. It was a sort of a spread around maybe 10 or 15 blocks, like, yeah, square. But now it's shrunk. It very much has shrunk just to like, the four or five that are on Church Street. So, and I'm not trying to think of the reasons for that, but it's certainly, I think social media and social connections that are online, the apps that have emerged are they certainly because not as many people need

6:25  
or want to go out face to face and meet, and which I think is a tremendous loss, because when you'd go to a packed bar on Friday or Saturday night or Sunday afternoon, you know you would see somebody, and you would just like start chatting or buy a drink or whatever, and, and that's where you would have real, you know, connections. And then if you discovered that, you know, you were vibing, then you would go from there. So, and that was, that was lovely, I think just now with the apps, it's a face and it's a couple comments, and then you're deciding, you know, without having the energy and the vibe behind it about, you know, hooking up or connecting, and that that saddens me a little bit. I think that's going to continue

7:12  
as we acquire more and more rights, as we fight for more and more rights as a community, as a gay and lesbian, trans, queer community, we can be safe being gay and open anywhere. Of course, that's how it should be. But that doesn't discount the need for a community, a village,

7:31  
much like New York and London and major cities around the world keep their villages as thriving places where queer and trans and lesbian people feel safe, and there are bars and restaurants that cater to queer and trans people, and as we've seen, especially in the years since the pandemic, that as gentrification becomes more and more encroaching, as rents skyrocket all over the city, as it becomes more and more difficult as a small queer business owner to keep A business going, I mean, I love, I love. Remember the beaver in Parkdale that was a favorite hangout for me, and that was what you would call a mixed space. It wasn't a gay bar, wasn't a lesbian bar, it was kind of a queer bar, right? And it was generationally diverse, but it couldn't make a go of it, not because the clientele wasn't there, but because the rents got too high for them to survive.

8:26  
For younger members of the community, the village exists in a different context. Now, it's not always the only place to feel safe or visible, but it still matters

8:39  
for me. Personally, I live a life where I'm not always around queer people. A lot of my friends are queer, absolutely, but just like that, like I play on a team which has a lot of straight girls on it. I My family is all straight. I am a Muslim, so I'm always around a bunch of straight people.

8:59  
And often find oftentimes, I find myself, you know,

9:03  
like kind of

9:06  
almost dulling myself or selling myself a little bit shorter because I don't want to, I don't want to surpass somebody else's restrictions and their their their kind of lines and their boundaries, you know, like, for example, like, if I want to make like, a gay joke, I wouldn't do it around a straight girl as much as I would around like my gay guy friends, right? And I find that when you're in the village, you don't have those restrictions anymore, because everybody knows that feeling, everybody knows that feeling, and everybody feels you, so they foster a better environment in their conversation with you, and just like how you would for them, and that just is part of the community. That's what community is, and that's how we kind of have, like, such a safe space for everybody, nobody's hated against you know, we're all there. We're all there for the same reasons. We're all there having a good time.

9:56  
The village isn't what it used to be.

9:59  
The spaces of.

10:00  
Changed, and the way people connect has changed with them, but the need behind it all is still there. For some, this place holds memories of discovery, of finding themselves. For others, it's something they're still trying to figure out in real time, and even as its future feels uncertain. There is the one thing that hasn't really gone away. People are still looking for places where they don't have to explain themselves, places where they can just exist and be understood.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai