Toronto’s Gay Village: Built-form as Container for Social Heritage
Themes:
social responsibilityurbanOntarioheritage
What:
Paper
When:
4:30 PM, Thursday 25 May 2017
(30 minutes)
Where:
The Niagara Pumphouse Arts Centre
- The Studio
How:
The OED defines heritage as “that which has been or may be inherited. ...”1 This implies a linear succession –but what constitutes heritage in the LGBTQ+ community, where marginalization has defined life experiences for centuries? Unlike race, religion, or other marginalizing societal factors, gender identity and sexual orientation are not passed down to children from their parents. Since the post-war beginnings of gay rights activism in North America, gay villages in urban centres have acted as classrooms where this heritage has been passed down.
The clubs, bars, and bathhouses that formed the first gay villages, often using undesired retrofitted buildings,2 created places of nurture but also of segregation –a closeting that can be detrimental to progressions desired by contemporary gay rights movements. Today the sense of safety is extending beyond these areas, slowly making them obsolete. The villages do not necessarily embody heritage as built-form, rather, they remain built-form containers for the social heritage they house.
According to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, the closet’s existence has given gay culture and identity a level of consistency, but has also acted as a driver of change. Too much focus on the “continuity and the centrality of the closet” over history, results in its glamorization.3 How do we, then, treat heritage in its physical manifestation of the closet–the gay village? Should we strive to keep these villages alive, knowing full well that the reason for their existence has been marginalization?
The model for preserving queer heritage must adapt to reflect these new realities. This paper argues for the separation of historical education and awareness from the continued ghettoization of the LGBTQ+ community in space through a chronological case study of the Church and Wellesley Village. It will shed light on formative spaces and events in the Toronto LGBTQ+ community through the lens of Sedgwick’s queer theory.
1 Oxford English Dictionary, , accessed February 24, 2017.
2 The building that houses the historic Stonewall Inn –arguably the home of the gay rights movement– was, for example, initially designed to be stables.
3 Eve Kosofsky. Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1990), 68-69.
The clubs, bars, and bathhouses that formed the first gay villages, often using undesired retrofitted buildings,2 created places of nurture but also of segregation –a closeting that can be detrimental to progressions desired by contemporary gay rights movements. Today the sense of safety is extending beyond these areas, slowly making them obsolete. The villages do not necessarily embody heritage as built-form, rather, they remain built-form containers for the social heritage they house.
According to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, the closet’s existence has given gay culture and identity a level of consistency, but has also acted as a driver of change. Too much focus on the “continuity and the centrality of the closet” over history, results in its glamorization.3 How do we, then, treat heritage in its physical manifestation of the closet–the gay village? Should we strive to keep these villages alive, knowing full well that the reason for their existence has been marginalization?
The model for preserving queer heritage must adapt to reflect these new realities. This paper argues for the separation of historical education and awareness from the continued ghettoization of the LGBTQ+ community in space through a chronological case study of the Church and Wellesley Village. It will shed light on formative spaces and events in the Toronto LGBTQ+ community through the lens of Sedgwick’s queer theory.
1 Oxford English Dictionary, , accessed February 24, 2017.
2 The building that houses the historic Stonewall Inn –arguably the home of the gay rights movement– was, for example, initially designed to be stables.
3 Eve Kosofsky. Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1990), 68-69.
