Arts-Based Organizing in 2SQTBIPOC
Communities in Toronto
Aemilius “Milo” Ramirez
I first started performing as a drag king/gender performance artist in 2003. Two years later, at twenty years old, I moved out of my family home and moved to Church and Wellesley, the Village in Toronto. At the time, Church Street was one of the few, if not the only area of the city you could find drag kings, sprinkled among the popular regular drag queen shows you’d often catch on the strip. You had to be a particular kind of campy performer to perform at venues like Crews and Tangos, George’s Play, or Zelda’s, which have all since closed or been bought out by different management. It was very much my belief that if you were not white and you were performing on Church Street, chances were high that you were catering to the mainstream gay, predominantly white audience looking for a laugh, not to mention your performances needed to be able to sell drinks too. More often than not, performances at these shows represented white narratives along with messages of misogyny, transphobia, transmisogyny, ableism, classism, and of course racism for good measure. At that point, as a new performer to the scene, seeing the state of Church Street drag performance culture was painful and heartbreaking; I wanted something different, and I was sure others did too.
Over many years and still, I have seen the racism that happens in those venues: performers in blackface or stereotypical caricatures blatantly performing. In 2012 there was public criticism of a local drag queen that offensively performed a number portraying a terrorist wearing a burka at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, a fairly progressive queer theatre.1 The Art Director at the time, Brendan Healy, made a public apology on Facebook saying that her act was not screened prior to the evening. During Pride of 2013, another local drag queen participated in an event in blackface, and Pride Toronto retracted her contract as the official TD Drag Queen of Pride that year after public outcry spread throughout social media. It was actually quite surprising seeing as in the scene on Church Street, something like blackface is so commonplace, and normally nothing is done to rectify or be accountable to the communities these blatant acts of racism affect. Nonetheless, it seems as though, even for Pride Toronto, this performer had gone too far. As a trans person of colour, Church Street has always felt devastating to me in big ways. An analogy to describe what a night on Church Street feels like for me would be, if you had a backpack and you could physically collect all the oppressive experiences you encountered or went up against just in that one night in the village, you would leave with your back aching because you had to carry all of that home with you; and you did carry all of it home (see also Ahmad and Dadui, this book).
When you walk down Church Street, you’ll find some local businesses, a few community organizations, but mostly there are a lot of franchises, bars, and nightclubs. I’m not sure you can call it a “village” seeing as it really caters predominantly to gay white cis men, people with disposable incomes and respectability politics. Everyone else continues to fight erasure from various angles, from the municipal government to newer residents’ associations and local business owners. That’s one of the reasons why I began organizing with others, collectively building 2SQTBIPOC performance and cultural interventions, including Colour Me DRAGG and a 2SQTBIPOC walking tour of the village. In the process, I learned a whole lot about the rich and long 2SQTBIPOC history of Toronto.
Crews and Tangos was one of the first venues where I began performing as a drag king. It’s the neighbourhood’s largest venue, a two-storey gay and lesbian bar promoted as having “something for everyone.” At the time in 2005, the majority of their management and staff were white, and I was one of maybe less than a handful of people of colour performing there. My friend was the resident DJ, a person of colour herself, who DJ’ed the drag king nights. One day she called me, with urgency in her voice, saying there had been a staff meeting where management had told her that she was no longer allowed to play hip-hop, reggae, soca, and reggaeton. Upper management stated that these music genres had been bringing in the “wrong clientele.” They had, according to my friend, intentionally stayed away from using overtly racist language, and instead stated that “those people don’t have the money anyway, and our bar sales are down.” After this phone conversation, another friend soon contacted me to let me know that there was a notice on the walls throughout the venue announcing the new policy; that no hip-hop, reggae, soca and reggaeton would be permitted to be played at this club. At that point, I realized it was real, and I was furious; this bar was ready to exclude a large group of their clientele based on race and class. If they were queer or trans meant nothing to them. All they cared about was money and portraying a specific kind of whitewashed image.
A couple of my fellow drag kings and I already had a complicated relationship with Crews and Tangos, because we had wanted to do more politicized performances and were discouraged from doing so. There was tension with the other drag kings who performed there, who were all white. They would make fun of us, talk down to us, and were often incredibly misogynistic. After hearing of the enactment of this racist policy, we decided we would take action and organize a walkout in response. Facebook wasn’t as widely used at that time, and so we sent out emails to our networks, letting them know about the new policy and why we believed organizing a walkout was necessary. We also asked them to keep this information as tight within our circles and networks as possible, as we didn’t want the management to get wind of our action. The way the drag king nights worked at Crews and Tangos was that one drag king would host the night, and they would be in charge of hiring other drag kings to form a lineup for the show. By chance, I happened to be the host that week. The night came, and tensions were high. The management did end up finding out and yet mentioned nothing to me. Rather, they attempted to intimidate me by being overbearingly present, very security-like. I brought all my friends out, and we did a night of performances that were all choreographed to hip-hop, soca, and all the music they said would no longer be allowed in the venue; it was powerful. At the end of the night I got on the mic and I told the crowd exactly what enacting this new policy meant, banning genres of music that are connected to BIPOC communities is racist, pushing out clientele based on their income or lack thereof is classist, and we were not going to put up with it. At one point the staff shut off my mic, so I raised my voice to reach the whole room full of people, I jumped off the stage and led everyone out of the venue. There must have been about fifty to sixty of us; we all left with high energy.
That was my first entry into political activism or protest. The word had spread, and there was an article in the LGBT newspaper Xtra about the racist policy and the community walkout, and other venue owners had learned about the action. I was living in the Village at the time, and people would stare at me when I walked down the street, in some cases crossing the street to avoid me. Some people stopped speaking to me, under the pretext that I was “reverse racist” towards white people. I’m able to laugh about it now, but at the time it felt pretty scary. Being a twenty-year-old young trans person of colour, I was nervous about what I had just done, but I was also empowered by the fact that I was able to do it, to rise up for something I believed in. Looking back now after having participated in and witnessed other organizing tactics, there are some things I would have done differently, like I would have opened a conversation with the management, made specific demands and followed up on those directly. After the walkout, any evidence of the oppressive policy disappeared, and no public statement was ever made. Within weeks, a lot of the people who had participated in the walkout were back either performing or as an audience/patron. It had a big impact on me personally, though. Out of the energy and empowerment I gained from the walkout, I began organizing Colour Me DRAGG.
Colour Me DRAGG (CMD) started as I began to familiarize myself with 2SQTBIPOC community. Towards the end of 2005, I was performing at a regular queer variety/drag/burlesque show called GenderFukt, which involved predominantly white performers and organizers. It was a huge, often sold-out event, and people would come from out of town to attend. Again, I was one of a handful of people of colour who performed regularly in the show. It was during this time that I began exploring performance using music by Latinx musicians singing in Spanish, and it wasn’t too long after that I started feeling like I was being tokenized and exoticized, mostly by the audience but also by fellow performers. People would do things like touch me non-consensually or ask me to speak to them in Spanish. These experiences were far from pleasant, but they added to my already growing desires to find a 2SQTBIPOC community of performers and performance spaces.
I was at a house party one night talking with a new friend about how much I would like to connect with other performers of colour. He shared with me that through organizing with University of Toronto’s queer student group LGBTOUT he had developed a relationship with Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, a queer theatre doing a lot of work with youth, and he offered to connect me with Buddies if I ever wanted to organize a show. This got the ball rolling. Again, this was 2005, before Facebook was such a huge platform for communication, so I started a callout for 2SQTBIPOC performers over email and through word of mouth. I managed to find eight performers! At the time, I had decided that it would strictly be a drag show with drag queens and kings. I continued to ask this new friend for guidance because I was nervous, but I essentially produced the show myself working with the other 2SQTBIPOC performers I had recruited.
The show was on the twenty-sixth of February, 2006, a midwinter Sunday night, and it was freezing with snow on the ground. Despite that, we were sold out! I saw the crowd line up, waiting outside the venue to be let in, and I was in shock at how big it was. Again, this was for me the beginning of understanding what 2SQTBIPOC community even was and who was a part of it. I didn’t have the language, I just knew that I had this desire to connect with queer performers that weren’t white, and not feel isolated, misunderstood, and antagonized. I had never known about this 2SQTBIPOC community that existed in many different ways at different times in the city, its ebb and flow in celebrations and community groups, and discussion groups over the years. All of that was unknown to me until that night; none of it existed for me as a performer yet in 2006.
After the show, I slowly began to bring together a group of collaborators, and we produced CMD shows together for five years, and we progressively realized the importance of maintaining a 2SQTBIPOC space as it grew. We grew in numbers, both in audience and performers. We grew in terms of what we represented, our values around creating an anti-oppressive performance space, and what we aimed for each year. We had dreams of touring, of becoming a festival, lots of big dreams. We were growing together and growing as a community. It started off as a drag show, but it grew into a gender performance community showcase; people performed burlesque, dance, poetry and everything in between. It was a space where people could explore themselves, and complex ideas like racism, ableism, depression/anxiety, chronic illness, transition, and so much more. Many 2SQTBIPOC performers who perform locally now debuted on the stages of CMD; ILL NANA DiverseCity Dance Company, a now notorious troupe in the Toronto 2SQTBIPOC performance and dance scene in Toronto, often reference CMD as one of their starting points, one of the first stages that welcomed them and honoured what they brought as artists, creators, and dancers. We were able to create safer spaces, and that’s what will always remain in my memory and my heart as our biggest collective achievement.
A beautiful thing about CMD was the process of how we ran it among ourselves. The process was very intentional in terms of decision making and representation. It quickly became super important to us as organizers that the show opened up how we thought about representation. We had people presenting burlesque, poetry, singing, and so many other styles and practices of performance. We would spend an entire day just organizing the lineup. Another aspect that I brought to the show a couple of times was large-scale group numbers. It was always my dream to be a part of big elaborate numbers (think musicals!). I started building that, and for a few of our shows we did a callout specifically for those who hadn’t performed before and would be interested in collectively choreographing a number. I loved collaborating on these performances; collaborative creation added another element of community building we felt strongly about.
When I look back, I realize that CMD was a part of some very pivotal moments in the city for 2SQTBIPOC and community organizing. In 2010, for example, there were very public arguments in local media about politicizing Pride, and CMD played an active role in that dialogue. That year, both Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (QuAIA) and Blockorama (Blackness Yes!) were organizing in resistance to Pride Toronto. QuAIA had been banned from marching in the parade for being supposedly anti-Semitic, and Blocko was being moved to an insultingly tiny lot despite being an enormous and well-attended Black block party. The majority of our shows were sold out towards the end, and at every show we would raise funds for different community groups locally and abroad. That year we decided that the funds CMD raised would be for both QuAIA and Blocko, in a highly politicized show called “Silence This!” with the running themes being censorship, displacement, and what radical rising up could look like. It also happened to be the year of the G20 Summit in Toronto. The show was to take place on the Saturday of the G20. At the time we didn’t understand what that was going to mean. The city was a ghost of itself, over a thousand people arrested that week, whole blocks shut down. I remember making my way to Buddies on the morning of the show for soundcheck, and the whole area was a ghost town. I had turned the corner, and there was a SWAT team marching; the sound of police marching was a truly frightening experience that froze me in my tracks. And yet somehow, in the middle of downtown during all of this, our show was packed. People found ways to make it out, even though it was difficult to get there. Many said they were grateful that CMD was on that day, so that, despite the hatred, police violence, and rampant white supremacy in the street, they could be somewhere with their people, with community, where they felt represented, because we needed each other.
CMD was never just a showcase. In its final year, it was a full-production show. We won $5,000 from a local arts organization, the ArtReach Pitch Contest, which recognized us as outstanding youth community arts group. Buddies had finally offered us their largest performance space in the theatre and honoured us as the headliners for the Queer Pride programming that year. CMD ended in June 2011—I think because we weren’t able to create sustainability. It was a huge responsibility and with growth came growing pains; we didn’t have the supports in place to process through and salvage what we had, how far we had come. Having been a part of building community in this way for a while, I wanted to know more about 2SQTBIPOC history; soon I would have the chance to do that.
In early 2012, I got together with one of my dearest friends Rio Rodriguez and four other young 2SQTBIPOC to talk about the potential of connecting with 2SQTBIPOC elders and people who have been around for a while to learn about local queer and trans history. Some of us had experience with organizing work; some of us were just getting familiar with community organizing and had met through community events like CMD and youth arts groups. Learning about the decades of 2SQTBIPOC history of Toronto began as a personal project that seemed really exciting to all of us. Rio had found out that someone was doing an LGBT history walking tour of Toronto, so a couple of us checked it out. We all had our scepticism, and for the most part, rightfully so. A lot of the history was white, mainstream things that we already knew. It mostly praised the neighbourhood, mentioning how the 519 is enormous and admirable, and that Alexander Wood (a merchant who owned much of the land that now forms the Village and who is now immortalized by a statue in the area) was the forefather of the gay neighbourhood. Meanwhile, we wanted to create our own 2SQTBIPOC walking tour because we knew that gentrification in the Village is a big force, and that there were more complicated things happening in the neighbourhood than that. That’s how our research started. We watched a few documentaries together and made research day trips to the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives. We connected with some elders and then the walking tour came to be that summer of 2012. We have been hosting tours for youth groups and interested community members ever since.2
I feel there is a disconnect between 2SQTBIPOC elders and younger 2SQTBIPOC, a missing gap of 2SQTBIPOC history. When I think of ancestry that I can relate to, I imagine drag kings of colour in the 1980s, 2SQTBIPOC book clubs and discussion groups in the 1990s, large-scale community arts events like Blockorama or Desh Pardesh, and people organizing ethno-specific AIDS support during the AIDS crisis. That’s the kind of organizing that I’ve always been drawn to: organizing that combined community building, advocacy—things that literally save our lives—with arts and culture, a proven effective combination in 2SQTBIPOC communities.
Without being too nostalgic or implying that things were once “better” in the Village (I’m not sure they ever were great for 2SQTBIPOC), there are some important changes that have happened in the Village to make it even more hostile towards queer folks who are poor, racialized or disabled today, and that’s what we wanted to uncover: physical changes and cultural changes, some of which seem deliberate. For example, there used to be a set of outdoor stairs in the Village which were locally known as “The Steps” that was a popular hangout spot. A lot of queer youth connected there; I would meet up with friends there as a teenager. It was removed in 2005, supposedly to limit public space because of loitering and drug use. There is now another Second Cup, not too far from where the original stood, with a patio and very minimal seating; the first Second Cup was wide open, with space for everyone, and it was right on Church and Wellesley. Having a space like that is part of what a village should be. A place where people know they can find each other, and that will support the inclusion and support of everyone. Now only certain kinds of gay people find each other inside Village venues, mostly white gay people with a disposable income that can afford to buy coffee or meals or pricey products, and it’s definitely not an accident that it’s been built this way. I’ve heard a lot about the Christopher Street piers in New York, which was a space where Black, brown, and Latinx queer youth could meet and celebrate themselves and each other and the ballroom scene. Since it was a public space, they weren’t required to buy, consume, or conform. Though “The Steps” were not specifically or exclusively used by 2SQTBIPOC, I think a great loss was felt once they were removed.
Something important to mention too is that the Village is heavily policed; I’m not sure if it’s always been this way, but it’s especially evident around the 519 Church Street Community Centre. It’s not uncommon to see people harassed for loitering—if they can even find a spot to settle in now that there’s less space to sit on at all. There’s a set of cement stairs out front said to have been built intentionally during renovations to honour “The Steps”; however, that too has quickly become a heavily patrolled area of the building. The cleaning up of the neighbourhood has always meant the removal of street-involved folks. In 2008, residents in the area of Homewood and Maitland, just east of Church Street, organized a terrible residents’ association, whose main goal was to protest the trans women who were working on the street as sex workers. They were calling the police every day and holding resident “protests” against these women, some of whom had been working in this area for years. Around this time, three trans women had been murdered in that neighbourhood, which prompted the growth of trans activism, such as the Meal Trans program at the 519. People who understood that this residents’ association was transphobic and discriminatory held a big counter-protest, and people would regularly take shifts in the area to make sure the women working there were ok, and to be there to intervene if the cops got involved. I became aware of all of this and was involved as a performer for a couple of fundraisers that were organized during this time.
In many ways, my work through the walking tours, performing, and curating performance is rooted in trying to create a legacy for 2SQTBIPOC stories. A keynote speaker at a conference I attended once asked the audience: “What kind of ancestor do you want to be?” This resonated in that it made me question what will I be remembered for, and what do I want to build for future generations. I want to pass on 2SQTBIPOC stories and create platforms for them because I believe such stories have liberatory potential. There is important 2SQTBIPOC history here, and we can’t let the corporatization of Pride or of the Village fool us into thinking that things are ok now, or that we can easily forget about our history and how it shapes our present in such significant ways.
When I began coming out as trans, the trans people who were closest to me were all white. I knew that I desired and still do in ways I have yet to experience, a BIPOC trans and nonbinary community in Toronto. I observe these kinds of communities in New York or the Bay Area, and I’ve connected with some of these folks like Bklyn Boihood and Brown Boi Project. At the beginning of my career as a performer, Buddies in Bad Times Theatre seemed like the only venue that staged culturally meaningful or political performances. It has its own fair share of problematic baggage, but with the tireless work put in by many 2SQTBIPOC (staff, artists, curators, organizers) over the years and presently, it remains a place where performers feel empowered to be political and radical within performance art and theatre. Since Colour Me DRAGG, other performance spaces have emerged, including Asian Arts Freedom School’s Drag Musical and Les Femmes Fatales, a Black-led burlesque troupe and showcase founded by Dainty Smith, a former collaborator and producer of CMD, just to name a couple among many. One venue close to my heart is Unit 2, a space started by Rosina Kazi and Nicholas Murray of LAL. A DIT (do it together) space for and run by radical 2SQTBIPOC, it has become a mainstay in the community—for artists and performers, for facilitators, a place for community dinners, for fundraisers and so much more. As these intentional and beautiful alternative spaces and initiatives develop, grow, and begin to thrive, I do find myself asking from time to time, pondering: What about the Village? Who belongs in the Village? Specifically for those of us who are non-Black, non-Indigenous to this part of Turtle Island, do we say abandon it altogether and build throughout other areas of the city, and possibly end up recreating the same dynamics, not to mention participating in gentrification?
Fundamentally the question is this: how will we create sustainable alternatives? Folks in politicized queer and trans community often organize around creating anti-oppressive alternatives to spaces/systems, fighting against heterocissexism and racism and the carceral state. But then, you have a situation that comes about such as the organizer of the Trans March in 2013 inviting a police contingent to march, while police violence is enacted on BIPOC trans community so intensely worldwide. These moments remind me of the work to be done. The Trans March, for instance, has never felt like a progressive place to me, and it won’t be until it recognizes its white hierarchies in leadership and honours those who have actively been erased from being represented, specifically Black trans and Indigenous Two-Spirit nonbinary, women, and feminized people. At the same time, I still recognize that I am a part of this trans community and I need to continually ask myself what I can do to be a part of shifting and transitioning this community in ways that represent and heal us all.
The truth is, I see 2SQTBIPOC at the forefront of a lot of street-based organizing projects, like Black Lives Matter. I also see us responding when violent things happen, showing up to a protest for someone like Sammy Yatim, who was killed on the streetcar by the Toronto police in 2013, or walking out of a venue with racist policies like we did years ago, or fighting against residents’ associations and gentrifying forces that want us pushed out of neighbourhoods where we live, gather, and work. But how do we keep from breaking underneath all this urgency? And, what happens then? How do we build a different kind of world? In some ways, I’ve seen how 2SQTBIPOC organizing can break open the possibilities. After fighting back, after building our own cultural spaces, what we need still is to create traces for these legacies we are leaving; sustainability and new worlds can come from having these stories to feed us, from having names and places to call upon to sustain us. Creating our own cultural spaces and leaving our own legacies is an important starting point.