Sex Garage: Unspooling Narratives, Rethinking Collectivities (2014)

x r : n p l n N rr t v , R th n n ll t v t

Jason B. Crawford, Karen Herland

Journal of Canadian Studies/Revue d'études canadiennes, Volume48, Number 1, Winter 2014, pp. 106-131 (Article)

Published by University of Toronto PressDOI: 10.1353/jcs.2014.0018

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J a s o n B . C r awf o r d & K a r e n H e r l a n d

In the summer of 1990, Montreal’s alternative queer community came together in response to a

police raid on an after-hours party, and arrests during subsequent clashes. Reviewing the video

evidence that exists of the events surrounding the Sex Garage raid, as well as newspaper articles

and news features, the authors found that a reductionist story had coalesced out of the multiple

and varying experiences of the activisms around the incidents, spooling them into a unified nar-

rative. In this essay, the authors unspool this singular narrative through their dialogic reflections

on their different experiences of Sex Garage, and not only offer alternate stories of the events sur-

rounding Sex Garage, but also demonstrate one attempt at rethinking the ways that the authors

both tell and write the stories of their histories.

À l’été 1990, la communauté homosexuelle alternative de Montréal s’est regroupée à la suite

d’une descente policière dans un party clandestin et d’arrestations lors de conflits subséquents.

En examinant la preuve vidéo des événements qui se sont déroulés pendant la descente du « Sex

Garage Party » ainsi que les articles de journaux et les grands reportages à ce sujet, les auteurs ont

remarqué qu’une histoire réductionniste avait émergé des expériences multiples et variées issues

de l’activisme entourant ces incidents, les rassemblant dans un récit plus unifié. Dans le présent

article, les auteurs décomposent ce récit unifié dans le cadre d’une réflexion dialogique sur les

différentes expériences liées au « Sex Garage Party » et offrent non seulement des souvenirs

différents des événements qui ont eu lieu mais démontrent également une nouvelle façon de voir

comment nous racontons et rédigeons les histoires de notre passé.

Copyright © Journal of Canadian Studies. All rights reserved.

Copyright © Revue d’études canadiennes. Tous droits réservés.

Volume 48 • Number 1 • Winter 2014 | Volume 48 • numéro 1 • hiver 2014

Sex Garage: Unspooling Narratives, Rethinking Collectivities

JASON B. CRAWFORD & KAREN HERLAND

Journal of Canadian Studies • Revue d’études canadiennes

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This essay is an intentionally unconventional memory/reflection text based on our differing subject positions and our differing relations to the events in July 1990

in Montreal, now known as Sex Garage. Karen’s experience is based on her direct par-ticipation in lesbian and gay activism in the 1980s and 1990s in Montreal, including her co-organization of, and participation in, the Monday afternoon kiss-in when police brutally beat and arrested activists protesting the after-hours Sex Garage party arrests and subsequent actions. Jason’s experience is based on his research on activist history and his viewing of a compilation videotape of news reports from these events, as well as from having more recently heard and read stories about Sex Garage in queer media and from queer activists in Montreal. We include Karen’s voice in this essay as an eye-witness participant, offering a counterpoint to the official record of events. Her mem-ories demonstrate both the benefits and limitations of reminiscing about the recent past in the present—a past/present that, through visual imagery and foggy flashback recall, has led us to offer a creative alternative to the hegemonic narrative. The primary document for our reflection was Earl Pinchuk’s video compilation of personal recordings and televised reports between 1990-1993 (Pinchuk 1993).1 This video is privately held but selected clips are available on YouTube (Sex Garage 1990 2010). We drew heavily on Karen’s personal recollections, Linda Dawn Hammond’s photographs of the night of the Sex Garage raid available on her website (Hammond 1990/2000), and photographs taken during the demonstration and police actions by the activists involved, as well as other materials, which are currently held by the Archives gaies du Québec (primarily in the Fonds Douglas Buckley-Couvrette). Our research also included analysis of news reports from the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec and consideration of research on community archives, queer activism in Canada, personal relationships, and the power of media and narrative frameworks. Reviewing the video footage that exists of the events surrounding Sex Garage, as well as newspaper articles and news features, we found that a singular and reduction-ist story had coalesced out of the multiple and varying experiences of the activisms of Sex Garage, spooling them into a unified narrative. This narrative has been wound so tightly and so repeatedly printed in the popular media that the different, differing, varying, convoluted, complex networks of relationships, ideas, ideologies, practices, situations, places, spaces, and bodies have been all but eliminated from the telling and the writing of this moment in queer Canadian activism history. In this essay, we unspool this singular narrative through our dialogic reflections on our different experi-ences of Sex Garage and not only offer alternate stories of the events surrounding Sex Garage, but also demonstrate one attempt at rethinking the ways that we both tell and write the stories of our histories.

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We introduce the notion of unspooling as a way of critically disrupting the hegem-onic narratives of history. We do this in order to open the space for different stories; however, to unspool the relatively established narrative of Montreal’s Sex Garage raid and police violence requires familiarity with those narratives in Montreal-based dis-courses of LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) activist history. To this end, we offer, a dialogical counternarrative that reflects on the events of Sex Garage, and the memories and mediated stories of these events.

Unspooling Narratives: Part 1

Jason: In late 2008, I was working on a research project at the Université du Québec à Montréal called Projet VIHsibilité (2010) and was asked to find and evaluate artistic media that included elements of personal testimonies by people living with HIV/AIDS about their lives.2 The impulse for this research project was to counter the dominant media coverage of AIDS and insert the life stories of those living with HIV/AIDS into public discourse. The point of this and other similar research methods is to challenge the exclusion of people’s experiences from the production of knowledge in public dis-course and to, as Dorothy E. Smith once put it, “preserve the presence of the active and experiencing subject” (1987, 105). The use of first-person testimonies and eyewit-ness accounts foregrounds subjective experience over the claims of objective truth of traditional social scientific methods. This approach has been very insightful in recent research with people living with HIV/AIDS, demonstrating the ways the media solicit and interpret such first-person narratives (Mensah and Haig 2012). Collecting and sharing first-person testimonials, creating what Ken Plummer calls the “community of stories,” challenges the dominance of the singular point of view (quoted in Mensah and Haig 2012, 134). This kind of research requires serious investments of time and emotional energy, however, since each person’s perspective is indeed limited. As I viewed hours of films and videos, I came across a videotape labelled ACT UP/Sex Garage Video Compilation. This video included television coverage of Sex Garage, footage of ACT UP Montreal actions, AIDS conference coverage, and vari-ous cultural performances. In order to understand the context of the news reports in this video more fully, I talked to Karen about this footage when she told me that she had participated in the Sex Garage protests. Together, we spent about six hours (stop-ping-starting-rewinding) in our initial viewing of the tape while I took notes and asked questions. This shared viewing of the video was the beginning of our investigation into Plummer’s “community of stories.”


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Karen: This video archive captures the very public face of Montreal’s LGBT community between 1990 and 1993. Earl Pinchuk faithfully recorded any news reports involving people he knew. The result is a string of reports on demonstrations and nightlife, press conferences, and personality profiles. The whole thing ends with nearly an hour of random footage taken, and narrated, by Pinchuk himself at the demonstration com-memorating Sex Garage one year later. In short, this collection contains a mix of straightforward and sublime sources of documentation. On the one hand, it reflects a particular moment when a group of activists captured public attention and were regularly featured in news reports, remarkable in itself. On the other hand, it is the mediated face of this period, with-out the meeting notes, minutes, or other elements that illustrate context and conflict. These clips reflect what Mary L. Gray defines as the “frontstage” (2009, 217) of social movements—the public representation intended for a broad and diverse audience. Although we did eventually return to the archives seeking backstage information, our own starting point was one of extreme subjectivity. What follows is my reading of Pinchuk’s perspective, not just in his comments about the people captured in the final footage, but also in his choice of which reports to include, which events to record as evidence of a particular moment. The resource is at once invaluable and incomplete, offering subjective footage and objective media reports, all filtered through a singular selection process.

Jason: Pinchuk’s “invaluable and incomplete” video documents the events and indi-viduals that concerned him. The subjective lens through which the video was pro-duced is a testament to Pinchuk’s personal political and cultural concerns, but it is also an invaluable document of the context in which the events of Sex Garage took place. Included among other perspectives and deeper understanding of the political, geo-graphic, and cultural context of Montreal, this video can be used as a starting place for investigation, enquiry, and interpretation for building up the “community of stories.” Our critical engagement with this video focussed our conversations, raised research questions, and prompted further investigation into the police actions and the events that followed.

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Space and Place: Part 1

Karen: The video begins with news reports of a demonstration held in response to a police raid on an after-hours party on the night of Saturday, 14 July 1990. The party was held in an abandoned part of town, neither residential nor commercial. The urban office/financial district was generally deserted after the dinner hour. It was the ideal location for the drag queens, club kids, dykes, and queers scampering around in tons of glitter, and not much else, on that hot mid-July night. Sex Garage (named for Fred Halsted’s short porn film from the 1970s) was one of several parties that Nicholas Jenkins organized in Montreal. The idea was to create something fabulous by throwing together a mix of those deemed most likely to party. Other Jenkins-produced events involved fire-eaters and twin trapeze artists showing off what they had learned at Montreal’s circus school. A key feature of these events was the deliberate mixture of genders, sexualities, and communities. In 1990, there were an unusually high number of lesbian/women’s bars (geographer Julie Podmore identifies a minimum of five at any one time between 1989 and 1991 in a two-square- kilometre area of the lower Plateau Mont-Royal [2006, 610]), in addition to the regular complement of bars throughout the recently designated (gay) Village. That concentra-tion of businesses was primarily a male enclave. In 1990, women were not allowed entry in many of these bars and clubs. Even in restaurants, waiters routinely ignored tables of women customers. The bars that did cater to men maintained a strict dress/behaviour code. Men wearing women’s clothing or using feminine mannerisms were not welcome. In fact, some of the men’s bars had no drag/no queen door policies. Mixed clubs, notably the Station C Complex, were divided into smaller spaces, not based on music style or capacity, but on gender. Jenkins’s parties pushed these lim-ited binaries, but they were by invitation-only. With no Internet and no cell phones in 1990, details were passed by word of mouth or on flyers that he handed out personally. Jenkins’s programming was reflected in a small number of mixed LGBT-positive spaces opening up outside of the Village. Bars like Lézard, Standing, Stop, and Busi-ness welcomed a diverse clientele, with occasional theme nights. These bars were located on the Plateau, far from the Village and often just off the main streets featur-ing straight nightlife.

Jason: Equally important to our research was an exploration of the specific historical and cultural context of what we might now call queerness as it was performed in Mont-real in 1990. As Podmore has noted, the 1980s in Montreal were a time when les-bian and gay collectivities worked, played, and politically organized separately (2006, 601). She points out that in the 1990s emerging forms of organizing of politics and


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spaces in Montreal challenged some of these divided practices. Gays and lesbians were just beginning to organize across differences to resist police violence and to challenge government inaction and social isolation with regards to HIV/AIDS. The emphasis on difference, latitude with gender identity, and challenges to dominant gender and sexual norms—as represented by the Village—was part of similar practices in other urban centres. These concerns for justice, difference, and freedom challenged theories of sexual liberation from the 1970s and 1980s (see Butler 1990; Young 1990; Jakob-sen 1998). Sex Garage led to the development of political organizations and was also a key example of the creation of and struggle to maintain different types of space, an example that demonstrates how the political implications of cultural expression and social connections were at the forefront of early queer politics.


Karen: Despite how involved I was in the organizing around and commemoration of Sex Garage, I was not even at the party that July night. My “memory” of the event is based on hearing about it over and over and over again. I have heard this story so many times, at meetings, in jail, over drinks, on video, and in news reports, that I feel like I was there. Because it started exactly the same way as almost every other night out in Montreal that summer, it is easy to remember what I never saw. That night, the police showed up late, and started poking around behind the bar. Finding alcohol not licensed for resale was their preferred way to fine/harass gay and lesbian businesses at the time. Usually, this just meant a tense half-hour or so while they checked the labels on bottles and used any excuse to shine their flashlights “acci-dentally” into dark corners. Sometimes, they found the right combination of infrac-tions to close a club down for a week. It all seemed unremarkable, except for the zeal and regularity with which the police visited gay and lesbian establishments all across the city, while ignoring neighbouring straight clubs. After about 15 minutes, they left, empty-handed. A cheer spread through the crowd and Sex Garage resumed. Not long after, the officers were back, with their friends. This time, the lights were thrown on, the music was silenced, and everyone was ordered to leave. Once on the street, a co-ordinated phalanx of cops began herding everyone up towards downtown. Forgotten possessions, missing friends, or parked bicycles were not valid reasons to break ranks. Bruce Buck turned back to get his leather jacket, and ended up beaten by several police officers and charged with assaulting a police officer. That was the first of 56 arrests over the next 33 hours.

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Linda Dawn Hammond had her camera at the party. Outside, she took pictures of the police, no longer wearing their ID badges, wielding billy clubs in their latex-gloved, HIV-protected hands. Police stopped her, and she tossed her camera to someone else.3

The first call I got was at 4:00 a.m., 15 July 1990. Buck and some others had been arrested, and did I know any lawyers who would take this on? Twelve hours later, I was walking down Clark Street with friends, heading to Standing, on Ontario Street, for the first organizing meeting. The several dozen people at the meeting represented a slightly wider version of the cross-section of young, early-queer, anglophone party people whom Jenkins had personally invited to Sex Garage. Although word-of-mouth spread quickly over the day, and some partners, friends, co-workers, and roommates were also present, the group was (and would remain) fairly homogenous. The meeting served to articulate their demands. The police had to drop charges against the eight (including Buck) who had been arrested the night before and reserve a seat for one gay man and one lesbian on their minority relations committee. A demonstration in the Village was planned for that evening. Little came of that first demonstration. It was neither the location of the party, nor within the territory of the Station 25 police who had been responsible for the morning’s confrontation and arrests. While Sex Garage was conceived as a binary-blurring event in reaction to the gen-der-specific socializing mandated by the men’s clubs in the Village (and the women’s bars that multiplied outside of it), the group still opted to retreat to the Village for their first protest. A second demonstration/kiss-in was called for noon, the next day, outside of Station 25.

The kiss-in occurred, as planned, at the intersection of De Maisonneuve Bou-levard West and Saint-Mathieu Street, on 16 July. Word was spreading quickly. The television footage reveals a fairly young crowd in cargo pants and oversized tank tops.4

When officers were not open to negotiation, we sat down and linked arms in the inter-section. According to news reports, between 50 and 70 officers in riot gear (helmets, body armour, latex gloves), surrounded the 250 of us sitting on the pavement. Many of us were beaten, on the street or in the jail, where 48 protestors ended up with a half-dozen civil and criminal charges each, ranging from refusing to circulate to public mischief. The officer who pried my linked arm from Vi had grabbed me so forcibly that I had a bruise in the shape of his fingers on my upper arm for over a week. I joked that the police and I had traded fingerprints that day. I was one of the last to be arrested. I still do not know why. I was totally silent when the officer dragged me to a corner opposite the station. We both stood there, and then, never loosening his hold on me, he dragged me back across the street, and jammed me into a cell with the final 13


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arrested men and women. Among those in the cell was Edward Cook, who had blown kisses at the crowd as he was dragged away. He was now doubled over in pain from the billy club that had been smashed into his crotch inside the station’s doors (he later was taken to hospital). That cell is where I met activist Michael Hendricks. I was also with my recent ex’s current date. We were processed slowly and—divided by gender—moved into a set of four cells. Two people under 18 were among those arrested. In both cases, the police took their time processing them, making it clear not only how disappointed they were by the company these two minors were keeping, but also emphasizing how devastated their family members had been when police officers informed them of the charges and the circumstances that led to them.

Jason: Lucas Hilderbrand discusses how watching ACT UP activist videos made him feel that his nostalgia for the days of ACT UP activism is “tied less to the people lost than to how I imagine the queer community was united and politicized by AIDS” (2006, 311). This longing for the activism of the 1990s, while admittedly not based on his own personal experience, is triggered by his imagination or impression of the queer world at that time. He notes that the research on ACT UP and AIDS activism tends to focus on the trauma of loss (305-6). Rather than focus on trauma, he uses the term retroactivism to argue for a more complicated history of queer social activism—one that includes the parties, the fun, and the dancing (307)—and also to describe the ways that his nostalgia for 1990s ACT UP activism inspires and motivates his contemporary anti-war activism (312). Certainly, the kinds of queer community that I have imagined are similar to some of the images on Earl Pinchuk’s video: the dancing in the streets, the playful performances of gender identities, the political actions, the parties, the culture. I felt no desire to be part of those communities at that time, how-ever. Frankly, watching the videotape with the images of violence and police brutality made me squirm. I was indeed inspired by the anger-infused political responses, but the kind of police brutality against queers I saw in the video seemed at odds with my imagined/adopted community of Montreal. I knew something about the development of gay rights in Quebec, but I found it hard to believe that queers were still being jailed and beaten as late as 1990! Rather than nostalgia, I felt dissonance and shock, which led to an intense curiosity: What was going on here? Who are these people? Where are they now? Perhaps these feelings are more appropriately applied to what Pascal Emmer has called the “meta-generation” (Emmer 2012, 91). Emmer uses this term to describe the way that different people were involved in ACT UP Philadelphia at differ-ent stages of their own lives, rather than assuming this group was made of “the same generation” of people. In addition, Emmer notes that thinking of a metagenerational

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approach to activist history, rather than an intergenerational one, allows us to under-stand the transmission of history among ACT UP Philadelphia members as one where “the organization’s history is not simply ‘transmitted’—it is discussed, contested, and retold from different perspectives” (2012, 91). An approach to transmitting history that is intergenerational, assumes a received, uncontested body of knowledge that is passed on to a successive generation. Emmer’s metagenerational approach, then, is more interactive, allowing questioning and reformulation of the narratives of our past. I wanted to know more about who was involved in Sex Garage, and what impact those events had on the lives of the people involved, as well as how they organized events. The master narrative that repeatedly features in the gay press, usually around the anniversary of Sex Garage, did not seem to resemble the events I saw unfold in Pinchuk’s videotape. Compared to the videotape, the established narrative diminishes the rich and complex environment of queer culture and politics in Montreal in the 1990s. The videotape, for example, shows a series of interviews with numerous people who were arrested, features background into the nightlife culture of Montreal, and covers the stories of murdered gay man Joe Rose, the actions of Queer Nation and ACT UP Montreal, the latest scientific discoveries concerning HIV/AIDS, a series of murders of gay men in Montreal, and the creation of the Parc de l’Espoir in the Village. This videotape montage, with its rich tapestry of what I would retroactively describe as queer culture and politics in Montreal, is a more complex, diverse, and detailed account of the context of the events of Sex Garage. Because these were reports on then-current events, they no longer have wide circulation. This is central to why Pin-chuk’s video is so valuable—with all its conflicting images and ideas, and with all its Earl-Pinchuk-constructedness; this rich context is rarely reflected in gay media stories of Sex Garage.

Rethinking Collectivities: Part 1

Karen: While watching the footage, I was initially overwhelmed by seeing so many half-forgotten (and some still-forgotten) faces. I was also carried away by the enthusi-asm that captured us in the first place: our absolute, undeniable certainty that we were right. That people could not be treated that way. That the charges against us could not possibly stick. That we would be taken seriously. That this would change everything. That we had the right to make demands in the first place. The footage of us being dragged through Montreal streets was compelling enough for many to take notice, among them the police spokesperson, the mayor, and politicians from across provin-cial party lines, all of whom are featured in news footage in the video.

As I continue watching, more things become clear. I begin thinking about how many of these people have moved away, and how many have passed away. The material


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on those videos kept Jason and me on the couch for hours. I kept making him stop so I could explain who people were, and their relationships to each other. This becomes an important way to trace why certain coalitions formed, why certain directions were taken and choices made.

I found myself offering Jason a backstage to the backstage—not the documented process of decision-making found in meeting minutes or event flyers, but something else. Thinking about these relationships helps explain why certain people are spokes-people, while others remain peripheral. My memories are as singular and idiosyn-cratic as Pinchuk’s, however. My own emotions affect what I remember, and while Jason is an interested and curious audience, he is also going on total faith.

In describing her Enduring ACT UP project, a performance piece of watching video from the ACT UP Oral History Project, Debra Levine explains the importance of inviting others to create a communal memory: “I experienced an incredible urge to turn to someone, to debate many of the points made, to ask others to add information to the story, or just to get another person’s reaction” (2010, 441). Instead, I am telling my own version, uncontested.


The first batch of Hammond’s photos, made it to the media and were published the morning of Monday, 16 July, in La Presse and the Gazette. Those images attracted television and print reporters to the afternoon demonstration. An escalating dispute between provincial police and Natives in Oka and Kahnawake over Native land being expropriated for a golf course had saturated the media with violent confrontations between police and protestors. The situation in Oka was the major news story that summer, and Sex Garage was secondary. This was reflected in that morning’s news coverage in the largest French and English daily broadsheets. Sex Garage photos first broke on page 5 of La Presse (Lacroix 1990; see also Girerd 1990), after four full pages of pictures/news/reactions to things heating up in Oka. The Gazette had photos on page A3, with page A1 devoted to Oka. The tabloid Journal de Montréal put Sex Garage protests on page 1 on Tuesday, 17 July, the day after the kiss-in and a day later than the other local papers. Perhaps because it missed the first round of coverage, Journal de Montréal immediately took a mocking tone, dismissing the protestors as whining about having the police crash their party. The headline read: “La communautée gaie ‘attaque’ le poste 25” (The gay community “attacks” Station 25; Perron 1990). The paper added a photo-montage on page 44, with an Oka photo-montage facing it on page 45 (Lanctôt 1990; Durant, Taylor, and Belisle 1990). Most of the papers’ editorials about police over-zealousness drew connections between the two events.

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Journalists found themselves in unfamiliar territory. The bigger dailies fell over each other to escalate the already-present police violence frame from Oka and assign blame to the police officers for using unnecessary force; however, they were ill-equipped to understand or support the “victims” of these clashes. They repeatedly stumbled over language and imagery in their reports. La Presse’s 17 July cartoon under-scores their discomfort, ridiculing the targets along with the aggressors of the clashes.

Jason: This cartoon seems to want to lampoon the heavy-handed tactics of the police against queer protestors. The title of the cartoon is “Enfin, une victoire policière” (Finally, a victory for the police). The cartoon’s critique of police brutality is eclipsed, however, by the caricature of an effeminate gay man prancing away from goofy, billy-club-wielding police officers, as well as by their bubble comments: “C’est tellement plus facile de faire régner l’ordre et la paix, avec les pédés” (It’s so much easier to keep order and peace with faggots).

Karen: The news reports I watched with Jason on his couch, two decades later, cycled through these responses. Within the first five clips the story had already been framed and reframed by reporters. Initial reports that protestors “claimed” that things had gotten ugly on those deserted city blocks in the early morning hours of 15 July, or that demonstrators ignored police warnings to circulate outside of Station 25, were quickly dropped. Instead, reports featured footage of cops dragging Paula by one arm, over the crutches she had been using that summer. Another clip shows a pair of women, swearing and screaming at the cops who are dragging them, each by one leg, across the pavement. Bystanders are quoted as frankly astonished by the police’s behaviour, not by the unconventional, androgynous protestors.

The narrative was quickly established and the mainstream media, while occa-sionally clumsy,5 was supportive of us. Later, the queer media continued to polish what was left, creating a master narrative. Ultimately, the press began to cannibalize itself for information. Richard Burnett, who did not participate in the Sex Garage events, became the de facto journalist of record, exploiting his already-established presence as a queer voice in both alternative and queer publications. Eventually, he became the go-to source for the mainstream press. The pieces he published on the subject in Hour, Xtra, Fugues, and the Montreal Gazette (see, for example, Burnett 2003, 2009a, 2009b, 2010, 2011a, 2011b) were regularly reprinted in other media, and circulated widely.


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What follows is a sample of these texts from the past decade. In an article in Hour in 2003, Richard Burnett wrote,

Now, I’m of a much younger generation and have always believed Montreal’s “Stonewall”6 was actually the Sex Garage raid on the night of July 14, 1990. That night, cops busted an Old Montreal loft party attended by 400 partygo-ers, and the subsequent protests (where latex-gloved police beat the living crap out of activists in front of TV cameras) irrevocably shocked three million Montrealers out of their complacency.…

In Xtra, in October 2009a, Burnett wrote, “it took the shocking images of police brutal-ity during peaceful protests over the next two days, however, to finally and irrevocably shake three million Montrealers out of their complacency. Sex Garage also politicized an entire generation of queer activists who permanently changed the Quebec political landscape.” Nine months later, in Hour Community, Burnett stated, “Sex Garage—was Montreal’s Stonewall and forever changed the face of this city. In a nutshell, follow-ing the brutal police raid on Sex Garage, shocking images of police brutality during peaceful protests over the next two days finally and irrevocably shook three million Montrealers out of their complacency” (2010).

His perspective has morphed into fact. Look up the “Timeline of LGBT History in Canada” on Wikipedia, and you find

1990

July: Montreal’s Sex Garage after-hours party was raided, politicizing an entire generation of queer activists.

Rethinking Collectivities: Part 2

Jason: This specific narrative treatment, coupled with the limited documented evidence and oral histories of these events, effectively erases other experiences or interpreta-tions of Sex Garage. This poses significant problems for researchers who are seeking to expand our understanding of Canada’s queer history. By repeatedly using the phrase “Montreal’s Stonewall,” Burnett has developed a shorthand narrative device that simul-taneously monumentalizes, narrows, and squeezes Sex Garage into an already-exist-ing frame. With this established, the narrative has become the widely told story of Sex Garage. Given the limited circulation of the existing video footage and photos of the raid and police actions, there is little opportunity for the historical and social context-ualization of these images. The Stonewall raids and subsequent rioting in New York City in late June 1969 are usually taken as the watershed moment in gay and lesbian history (Carter 2004, 2).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreal

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Stonewall symbolizes the moment when gays and lesbians fought back and began the long struggle for civil rights. The “untenability” of this construction of Stonewall has been critically re-examined by scholars (Carter 2004, 256-60). In their examination of the process through which the Stonewall police raids came to embody the start of gay and lesbian liberation in the United States, sociologists Elizabeth A. Armstrong and Suzanna M. Crage concluded that the events of Stonewall were both historically and geographically ripe for widespread memorialization. Gay and lesbian activists were able to capitalize on the fervour of previous political actions that was then channelled into the ritualized parade format. Through political organization and public ritual, Stonewall took on new meaning as the explosion of a movement onto the public scene (2006, 739-40). Despite this, the monumentalization of Stonewall as the source of gay liberation politics was not, contrary to popular belief, easily assimilated into the imagination of gay activists across the US. Armstrong and Crage point out that in San Francisco there was significant resistance to the emerging hegemonic narrative that Stonewall ushered in gay politics:

Later in the 1970s, San Francisco parade organizers removed mention of Stonewall from parade materials, referring simply to “gay pride.” These efforts ultimately failed, and San Francisco, like other cities, ended up hosting cele-brations that explicitly referred to the Stonewall riots. The Stonewall riots, in and of themselves, meant little in San Francisco. The success of the parade was what forced San Francisco activists to contend with it. (2006, 742)

Not only did this monumentalization of Stonewall fit squarely within the liberal notion of the progressive movement towards full equal civil rights for individuals, but it also erased the complex interpretations and experiences of those events. Making Sex Gar-age analogous to Stonewall—as happens frequently in Montreal’s gay press—is, on the one hand, somewhat understandable, since Sex Garage was “commemorated” with kiss-ins and protests; on the other hand, this narrative structure, once employed, takes on a life of its own, becoming the thing that it claims to be. In other words, the structure that renders Sex Garage as Montreal’s Stonewall maps this liberal civil rights framework anachronistically onto a Canadian context.

What has this mapping of an American social movement narrative done to our queer Canadian (his-her-and-their) stories? While I do not want to argue for a kind of Canadian parochialism, here, this Stonewall device erases significant events in Can-adian history, especially since the legislation that partially decriminalized homosexual-ity in Canada (Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1968-69, popularly known as Bill C-150 or the Omnibus Bill, was introduced in the House of Commons in 1967 and passed on 14 May 1969 (Kimmel and Robinson 2001; Kinsman 1987). This continued reference


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to / preference for Stonewall also “forgets” the We Demand rally on Parliament Hill in 1971, which publicly demanded that the Canadian government ensure full rights for gay and lesbian people (Kinsman 1987, 291). While rhetorically the adoption of Stonewall as a marker of a revolutionary, no-turning-back moment may help identify instances of gay, lesbian, trans, and queer activisms and their place in an agenda for social and legal rights, it compresses both the events of 1969 in New York City and the events of any other moment in time and place into a narrow framework.7 It might make a good story—and this might be rhetorically necessary at times; however, it also dangerously squeezes out a multitude of events, bodies, realities, and experiences for the sake of making a good story and imposes (a particular) meaning on a (different) series of events, as well as a particular temporality onto the narrative, in that it assumes that the US is always leading the way globally for gay and lesbian rights. Since Stonewall, as a sign, works in this way whenever the phrase “x-event = y-city’s Stonewall,” should we not write, “Sex Garage = Montreal’s Stonewall”?8

Closer to home, Irène Demczuk and Frank W. Remiggi have articulated one inter-pretation of why Stonewall has come to be used as a semiotic feature of gay and lesbian political and historical discourse in Quebec. In the conclusion to the volume Sortir de l’ombre—an excellent study in the history of gay and lesbian activism in Quebec—they write,

Plus troublant encore, le phémonène de l’américanisation s’exprime par le recours de plus en plus usuel à des référents historiques étasuniens, notam-ment les émeutes du Stonewall Inn que plusieurs lesbiennes et gaies d’ici perçoivent maintenant comme la pierre angulaire de leurs propres mou-vements de liberation. Cet emprunt est attributable sans nul doute à une conjugaison de facteurs: le fait que les etudes gaies et lesbiennes se sont développées tardivement au Québec et que, entre-temps, les historiens américains, qui disposent d’excellents réseaux de publication et de diffusion, ont pu faire connaître leurs travaux bien au-delà des frontiers de leur pays.

(Even more troubling is the phenomenon of Americanization expressed by the use of more conventional American historical references, notably the Stonewall Inn riots that have come to be perceived by many lesbians and gays here [in Quebec] as the cornerstone of their own liberation movement. This borrowing is without a doubt a combination of factors: the fact that gay and lesbian studies developed rather late in Quebec and, at the same time, Amer-ican historians, who have excellent networks of publication and distribution, have been able to make their work known beyond the borders of their country. Demczuk and Remiggi 1998, 403; author’s translation)

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Demczuk and Remiggi’s analysis strongly suggests the need to interpret the historical events of activism in Montreal, such as Sex Garage, in light of the specific geographic, cultural, and political contexts in which they happen, without framing them through the lens of US gay and lesbian political movement history. The dominant media narrative places Sex Garage in a linear framework of increasingly “progressive” civil rights milestones along the way towards full equality/inclusion in society. Richard Burnett describes “the legacy” of Sex Garage as establish-ing political lobbying groups, which led to “Quebec’s historic Omnibus Bill 32, which extended benefits, pensions and social services to same-sex couples” (2009a). Fram-ing Sex Garage as the predecessor of recent legal and social rights reduces the possibil-ity of interpreting the events to being the catalyst for turning Montreal “into a choice gay tourism destination, pushing Tourisme Montréal to create a gay-tourism template since adopted by tourism authorities worldwide” (Burnett 2009a). As we have pointed out in this essay, Sex Garage, as a series of cultural and political experiments with identities, bodies, genders, sexualities, spaces, and state apparatuses, is a key episode in how the community defined itself in relation to each other and to broader publics/counterpublics. The master narrative of Sex Garage remains silent on these issues of diversity and complexity, however. Rather, it links Sex Garage to liberal civil rights ideologies, as well as to the progressive steps towards tolerance of lesbians and gays that readies the city for gay and lesbian-oriented commerce.9 Both of these reductive devices authoritatively mark Sex Garage as one step along the way to full social inclu-sion, and marginalize or erase altogether the diverse and differing experiences and interpretations of those events.

Space and Place: Part 2

Karen: Authority, power, and the making of the margins was a major theme of the summer of 1990, which featured identity politics and the shaping of queer (Queer Nation had formed a few months earlier in New York City). Many Quebec anglo-phones eagerly embraced the shared identity implicit in Queer, based on an inherent rejection of prevailing binaries, norms, and assumptions. The stories told about Sex Garage always present a unified/collective, powerful response, as if there was never any disagreement or division at the time. Beyond a rejection of some of what existed, however, we did not really have a plan or a project. This myth-making echoes the real-ity of how group actions involve and inscribe those present at the moment (or later, as certain pieces get repeated and turn rigidly into fact). At one point, during the kiss-in, as the police began tightening around the group of us on the pavement, a rumour flashed through the crowd. One of the female police officers in the east line-up was recognized as a regular at a bar I almost never went


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to—one that was women-only. Suddenly, the vast space between “us and them” and the right to occupy that intersection collapsed. The recognition turned into a chant “Number XXXX is one of us.” The chant was a variation on Queer Nation’s playful “we’re here, we’re queer, and so are some of you.” The difference was that the chant slipped from the general to the specific and flipped the subject position from inviting to accusatory. The truth is, we were outing a police officer, a proven Queer Nation strat-egy but not something I am particularly proud of. I am fairly sure that being a woman on the police force in 1990 was not much fun. I cannot imagine being an outed lesbian on the police force would vastly improve the situation. I have never understood the desire to claim kinship with someone who clearly does not want you to. That was one of the earliest compromises that that set of circumstances led me to. As I am watching the footage, irritation is building as I remember the cracks in the discussions. How different experiences clashed. Many of the men who had been arrested had always taken for granted the privilege afforded them and the ease with which they occupied, and were ceded, public space. Many of the women had differ-ent relationships to power and space. They were entirely unsurprised that men in uniforms, with guns, had used both to determine, and then put them in, their place. Barely seven months earlier, a man had roamed the halls of Montreal’s École Polytéch-nique, separating women from their male classmates and shooting them, claiming that he was fighting feminism. Most news reports immediately following the Montreal Massacre had ignored or downplayed the gendered focus of the violence that left 14 women dead.

Although Sex Garage had begun to provide gays and lesbians a way to interact across the increasingly imposed gender divide, the truth was that many of the men and women involved had little experience organizing with the opposite sex. Women I knew were furious when Bruce Buck dismissed a woman’s opinion at an early organizing meeting by insisting that the group not be overly influenced by “baby dykes.”

Many activists (primarily women) wanted to build coalitions with the Mohawks at Oka and Kahnawake. This desire to develop connections within the margins (daunting as it would have been) was met with absolute refusal from many men who wanted to create a specifically queer identity and legitimacy. Although individuals involved in Sex Garage organizing did march in solidarity at some of the earlier Oka demonstrations, there was no co-ordinated, intentional coalition-building (Bociurkiw 1990).

A lot of the tension in organizing and strategizing was due to being caught between what Joshua Gamson has identified as the old guard (LGBT) agendas of assimilation (emphasizing sameness) and separation (emphasizing difference) (1995, 395). Sex Garage is remembered as the rebirth of gay pride in Montreal. Pride celebrations were traditionally held across North America at the end of June to mark Stonewall. This

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had always been complicated by Quebec politics. The 28 June date falls right between Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day (24 June) and Canada Day (1 July). Through the 1980s, Le Saint-Jean Rose made nationalism gay or LGBT French, depending on your point of view. Towards the end of the decade, the association that organized pride activities, including the parade, had decreed that assimilation was the primary directive. Outra-geous costumes, leather folk, and anyone that might disprove the “we’re just like you” message to the majority were excluded from the parade and the festivities (Namaste 1992). A high school band had a better chance of participating than a drag troupe.

The first celebratory rally we held, two weeks after the Sex Garage arrests, did eventually become Divers/Cité, a pride celebration. That history is too complicated to trace here. It was often denied by some of the very organizers who started it, but later branded it as an apolitical cultural event. In 2007, they splintered the pride parade off from Divers/Cité, and it was taken up by a different organizing committee.

Gamson has argued that “fixed identity categories are both the basis for oppres-sion and the basis for political power” (1995, 390). Herein lies the stumbling block of essentialism—one that most third-wave feminists in 1990 had already rejected as dangerously limiting, but that the White men involved in Sex Garage—whose visibility required a conscious choice—were more comfortable embracing. Caught between old and new definitions of not-straight, and male and female experiences of public space and power, this emerging queer community was not equipped to challenge the fact that police officers, under the presumed authority of the state, had been the ones to start it. This confrontation was an intensely political one. The potential to talk about citizenship and the right to occupy space and civil society was eclipsed by negotia-tions with police around violence. Whereas Sex Garage was conceived in a context that celebrated diversity, it ultimately was employed to protect the rights deserved by a difference-denying “everybody.” Energy was spent on aligning with the centre, not on creating a coalition of margins. Instead of claiming space, as was being done at Oka, we cast ourselves as victims, in need of equal protection.

Jason: Sex Garage was a party, a dance, a performance of late 1980s / early 1990s queer culture and an intentional construction of queer space. At the protest the next day, the traffic outside of the police station ground to a halt, the everyday pattern of walking was disrupted, and the spaces of commerce and transit became the scene for queer political intervention. Above and beyond these Montreal-specific events, we learn that when queers take over space, such as they did to protest the arrests made at the party, they often not only challenge the violence of heterosexism and homophobia in public space, but also potentially (and temporarily) queer the space with their performances of gender and sexual politics (as in the “kiss-in” or “love-in” as it was described in some


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French-language reports). When state authorities assert the right of order over the right of dissent, however, experience teaches us that violence against the dissenters is often the standard operating procedure. Le retour à la normal is upheld as the pinnacle of stability and stability is assumed to be the normal state of things, with little regard for the effervescence of queer counterpublics.10 Challenging state authorities in public space and the violence the police frequently dole out reveals the different power rela-tions between the police and protestors, but, and we want to emphasize this point, it also reveals different expectations of the public sphere. To riff playfully on Foucault: is the public sphere the space for contestations or is it a sphere for maintaining the order of things?

Karen: I remember being frustrated by the focus on violence and working with the police versus working with other marginalized communities. The very chaos that Jen-kins used to create those parties was not a recipe for coalition politics. While many writers have written eloquently about community and bar culture, those communities generally emerged from local bars with a cohesive clientele.11 These warehouse par-ties did not even retain a fixed address. The cross-section of people at the party who responded to the arrests was justifiably outraged and very brave; but they did not share a common vision or purpose—their cohesion was reactive. As the dust settled, protestors formed Lesbians and Gays against Violence, the precursor of the Table de concertation des gaies et lesbiennes du Grand Montréal. Ini-tial concerns (reflected in Pinchuk’s collected news reports) focussed on those accused of the 1989 gay-bashing murder of Joe Rose. They were seeking recognition of their own fragility, a precursor to the eventual notion of hate crimes. The coverage reflects a growing distance between the members of Lesbians and Gays against Violence and Rose’s father, who was focussed on a traditional law-and-order agenda, seeking stiffer penalties for the minors who killed his son. Even after our initial viewing, the more I watched the footage the more I saw. People I had not seen in the corner of the frame that I recognized later. Years later, I met one of the cookie-cutter, overly made-up, fluffy-haired, shoulder-padded anchor-women at work, and now count her as a friend—a woman I would never have had two words to say to during that era. Remembering more each time led us to the archives and what had been forgotten.

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Un-Archived Memories and Un-Remembered Archives

Jason: Recently, scholars have been urging that, since queer histories have multiple entry-points, our archives ought to correspond to multiple personal narratives and to unrepresented and marginalized groups within our communities, and should take account of ephemeral artefacts, images, and other cultural items (Juhasz 2006; Cvetkovich 2008, 2011; Chenier 2009; Gutterman 2010; Juhasz 2011; Morris 2012; Reichard 2012; Steorn 2012). Furthermore, scholars have also argued that queer com-munity archives need to be made more accessible to a wider queer public, and that this accessibility ought to be accompanied not by a “here’s the official story” mentality, but by a “here’s what we have, now what do you know, what can you add, what are your archives?” approach (Boyd 2008; Gould 2009; Brockmeier 2010; Bastian 2012). In other words, the institutional and physical archives that are based on “what gets saved” and “whose stories get told” have to be supplemented with a cacophony of multiple, more, different, and “What you may not know is that this/that also took place” voices, as well as, often, silenced embodied archives. Many Canadian lesbian, gay, and trans community archives are working to make materials available online, including the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives in Toronto, the Archives gaies du Québec, and the Manitoba Gay and Lesbian Archives, while the Trans Archive at the University of Victoria continues to develop into one of the largest repositories of archival materi-als about trans people in Canada.12 There are also archival websites that disseminate queer first-person testimonies, like the ACT UP New York Oral History Project and the Archives of Lesbian Oral Testimony. An encouraging development is the way artists are energizing our community archives, making new and re-membered knowledge of queer stories visible in new and creative ways.13

Karen: Months later, I am going through Douglas Buckley-Couvrette’s papers at the Archives gaies du Québec with Jason. At first, it still felt removed: contact sheets of tiny images of people facing walls of police. It was the notes from meetings that were the strangest to sort through, though. I thought I had retained so much, so clearly, but I was suddenly confronted with evidence to the contrary. I remembered a couple of the lawyers we spoke with—Robert Saint-Louis and Katherine Lippel—but I had abso-lutely no memory that Juanita Westmoreland Traoré, who would go on to be Quebec’s first appointed black judge, was involved in our defence. The (lost) opportunity for coalition building that that represents completely overwhelms me. I was also struck by how present I was in the files. I knew I had been there, but most of what I remembered was the increasing distance between what I wanted from those events, and how those who took the spotlight wanted to play it. (At one point in


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the footage, I have a diva moment when Douglas puts his arm around me at a demo, and I immediately shake him off. I have no idea why.) In those boxes, however, was evidence that that I had been responsible for collecting information from each of those arrested, and that I had been active on one defence committee. There were minutes reporting me doing things I had no memory of doing, and notes in my handwriting, although I could remember neither context nor subject. If this was true of something I wanted to talk about, how much less reliable are memories of events people would prefer to forget? How much more murky is history based on accounts reported by those with agendas, pieced together from files that speak to what the subject wanted known or reported—be they media reports, court testimonies, or other sources filtered by power and intention.

Chasing Tales Karen: Was an impulse towards inclusion the shared vision among Sex Garage party-goers and the activists that emerged from the police actions? Were all the people involved unified by their desire for social inclusion? Is this what rallies queer activists now? Weaving the narrative of Sex Garage into a story about the path towards social inclusion in Quebec de/re-forms it to fit a grand narrative—a narrative that may vio-late or pervert the intentions of those who participated in Sex Garage. Much of the performative politics of the queer 1990s was about showcasing difference, diversity, and complexity (again, very much on display in Earl Pinchuk’s video footage), yet the narrative structure (re)works some of the most politically important aspects of differ-ence out of the picture.

Jason: If we value diversity and complexity, both between groups/individuals and among groups/individuals, as a critical part of queer history and politics, then we should not only think about how we do our political work, but also how we construct our histories. Our stories consist of a collection, an archive if you will, of embodied experiences, a repertoire of interpretations of these experiences. It includes a collec-tion of materials, often the items deposited in community archives (see Taylor 2003). The archival impulse among gays and lesbians has been acknowledged by David Román (1998) in relation to AIDS. From the experiences of the multiple losses and identity crises associated with AIDS, there is an intense desire to remember and be remembered. This remembering makes death take on new meaning: not final or for-gotten, but, through various acts of remembering, a source of consciousness-raising and political action for different people at different times in their lives.

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We ought, however, to be careful with this impulse as well when it comes to writ-ing about our histories of activism. The act of remembering is, as Karen has demon-strated, partial, limited, and made up of particular interpretations, often at odds with the “official” story. Working with memories, however constructed and partial, should mean that we treat them respectfully and place them within a polyphonic framework that makes up the uneven and diverse histories of lesbian, gay, and queer activism. Gathering the stories of our past, collecting them together, and presenting them to the public is not just about finding, keeping, and sharing our stories: the process is in itself an ethical commitment to community, one that requires deep reflection, and clarification of the norms, values, intentions, and limitations inherent in the process of gathering stories as well as writing them. With regards to our community archives, the diversity of our lives is obviously a large part of the content of the collections of materials and is often an exciting revela-tion for many who spend hours working and volunteering in the archives. There are, I would suggest, some underlying assumptions about our community archives that constrain the stories that do get told. First, we have made the case that there are num-erous memories and stories of any one political event or series of activities important to our history that are not remembered, but have been forgotten. There are also stories that are, either deliberately or not, excluded from our archives. There are names that do not get acknowledged in any public way. This is partly due to the ways that some individuals self-select their materials for inclusion in archives. This is also partly due to archivists actively seeking out the documents of particular individuals—leaders, for instance, of lesbian and gay organizations. We must remember that particular people select the elements contained in archives and we should critically investigate who does this selection, what the process of collection and organizing is and how that process overlooks or eliminates multiple elements of our community stories. We also need to be careful not to assume that that which is contained in our community archives is the entire collection of evidence of our lives—it is, and always will be, limited. The community archives, in this way, also points to a collection of forgettings, of loss, what might be called the ephemeral, or the un-archivable. Second, archives can also set up a hierarchy of knowledge: that which is contained in the archive is the most important or primary source of knowledge about our history. Writing about Sex Garage from these sources alone privileges only the stories that have been saved in the archives. This can lead to a prioritization of certain people’s experiences over others. We must humbly acknowledge in our research and in our writing that any narrative will be uneven, partial, and full of forgettings that emerge from the push-and-pull of any interpretive process. The archival impulse should not only be a desire to record and document our stories, but also to engage in a dialogue


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about meaning-making, identity, and community, all of which require listening for and to stories that are sometimes set aside and to engage with and explore that which is un-archived or which is un-archivable, such as emotions and feelings. The reduc-tive monumentalization of Sex Garage, as seen in the gay press, puts severe limits on the possibility of looking for and listening to different stories and experiences of Sex Garage. There is, then, a cost to assuming or expecting unity and solidarity as the pre-requisite for social action, for the formation of collectivities, or for telling/writing our lesbian, gay, and queer histories. Flattening out the bumps and shaving off the rough edges of the stories of Sex Garage does violence to the memories of people’s lives—people who lived, resisted, suffered, and loved. If we value our queer diversities and differences, then we should not assume that we have to be unified or have a unified story at the outset of our research or storytelling (Jakobsen 1998). In both our political organizing and in the telling of our histories, we have to acknowledge and work with and across our complexities, creating narratives that allow more stories to be heard and more memories to be unearthed.

NOTES

1. Earl Pinchuk recorded local English and French television coverage of the Sex Garage dem-

onstrations and other news events concerning gay and lesbian life in Montreal between 1990

and 1993. The result, labelled ACT UP/Sex Garage Video Compilation, is not a produced and

fully edited videotape, but 181 minutes of recorded-from-television footage. It is an archival

document that shows the signs of its times in rough format. As a medium, videotape often

records the jump cuts between recorded sections as blurred image and sound and Pinchuk’s

videotape contains these elements—in some instances, the sound disappears completely.

The decay of videotape over time makes watching Pinchuk’s video an interesting, almost

haptic, experience in itself. For posterity, the videotape was recently transferred to DVD, cap-

turing the videotape’s distortions of images and sound.

2. For more, see the Projet VIHSibilité website at www.vihsibilite.uqam.ca.

3. Linda Dawn Hammond’s website not only documents the events of the night of the police

raid, but also provides photographs of some of the Sex Garage parties. Along with the

images, Hammond provides her own eye-witness testimony of that night, the kiss-in, and

her subsequent public exhibition of her photographs.

4. In the Fonds Douglas Buckley-Couvrette, held by the Archives gaies du Quebec, there is a

photograph of a protestor at the kiss-in holding aloft one of Linda Dawn Hammond’s photo-

graphs taken during the police raid at Sex Garage. The palimpsest created by the photograph

of a protestor holding photographic evidence seems to announce “here’s proof of what hap-

pened.” The archival photo was taken by Martin Oamond.

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5. As revealed in Pinchuk’s video, television reports scrambled to find ways to report on the

situation. For weeks CFCF-TV 12’s Pulse used the somewhat confused graphic where the title

card above news anchor Lynn Desjardins’s left shoulder reads “Gays,” but uses two interlock-

ing “woman” symbols.

6. On 28 June 1969, the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York City’s Greenwich Village, was

invaded by police—a regular occurrence. This time the patrons fought back, after which a

riot ensued. Numerous online resources document the events of that Saturday and a var-

iety of academic texts investigate and interpret their meaning (see Carter 2004). Although

the Stonewall riots have been repeatedly cited as the most significant event in the modern

history of gay and lesbian politics, Stonewall was not the first bar raid in the US where queer

people resisted. In 1966, there was a raid on the Compton’s Cafeteria in San Francisco, dur-

ing which transgendered women and gay men fought against police brutality; see Victor

Silverman and Susan Stryker’s 2005 documentary Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton’s

Cafeteria.

7. For more complex interpretations of Stonewall, see Carter (2004), Armstrong and Crage

(2006), and Kinsman (2010).

8. This strike-through is playfully co-opted from Jacques Derrida (who also mimes Martin Hei-

degger’s use of it), as a way of putting signs under erasure and noting the “straining of

language” (Derrida 1997, xv).

9. The “progressive” increments are often reproduced in a timeline format in the popular gay

press such as Fugues, and also, most recently, by Montreal’s gay pride organization Fierté

Montréal Pride (2012). For more on the way that “progressive” steps fit within a liberal civil

rights agenda, see Jakobsen (1998).

10. For more on the queering of public spaces, see Browne, Lim and Brown (2008) and Oswin

(2008).

11. Notably, but not exclusively, in texts such as Chauncey (1994), Kennedy and Davis (1993),

and Newton (1993).

12. See the Transgender Archives website at http://transgenderarchives.uvic.ca.

13. For an overview of some of these recent projects, see the video of the keynote address by Ann

Cvetkovich given at the “‘We Demand’: History/Sex/Activism in Canada” Conference on the

history of LGBT activism in Canada in Vancouver (Cvetkovich 2011).

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Documents

Sex Garage: Unspooling Narratives, Rethinking Collectivities (2014)