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The Last Gays of Toolbox
Aug. 30th, 2004 12:15 amIt's only setting in now as I've returned home and look at Bill's pictures of the Toolbox patrons. Those are pictures lots of the people I've come to know (biblically and otherwise) in the last four years. At times like these when you can only think of the good times. The Toolbox was a gay bar where I felt relaxed, accepted and able to just be.
I started going there when I was just about 19 years old and probably could have got the owners in a lot of trouble. I met one of my best friends there. I've seen some edgy crazy sex in public there. I explored my sexuality and kissed more men than I am willing to admit in public.
It's a unique place really. A non-smoking gay leather bar outside of the gay ghetto. The rag-tag patrons as diverse as people at large can be. In the wake of it's closing I know we're all unsure as to what is to become of the kinky, geeky, busty, skinny, nerdy and burly men who dared to enter it's keep.
Will we further ghetto-ize ourselves on Church Street? That's what bugs me most really. That covert spirit of retro gay male sexuality is continuing to wane. The only place left for fags to be in Toronto is out on display in the ghetto exposed to the crassness of rampant targeted marketing and social segregation. I don't want advertising for Botox, Mini Coopers and the ever-ascending glass artifices of the elite looming over my every romantic encounter. It makes me feel like a kept specimen that is being studied and exploited.
And now in the city of Toronto that is my only alternative. Most people are probably glad to homogenize themselves in one space. A sense of acceptance what with gay marriage and all. It just makes me feel repressed. The spirit of diversity and difference usurping the gays in exchange for the same old motherfucking middle class dream.
But I'll remember the good times. Trying to find the door, the "parties" upstairs and checking out the debautchery in "The Maze" for the first time. Realizing in that place that people there found me attractive too. Kissing another man with a beard for the first time and reveling in just how good that felt. Rubbing bellies and pitchers of "Skip and Go Naked", which I now realize I should have asked for the recipe. The terrible progressive trance mix tape that played every night for the last four years.
That bar meant more to me than I ever could have imagined.
I started going there when I was just about 19 years old and probably could have got the owners in a lot of trouble. I met one of my best friends there. I've seen some edgy crazy sex in public there. I explored my sexuality and kissed more men than I am willing to admit in public.
It's a unique place really. A non-smoking gay leather bar outside of the gay ghetto. The rag-tag patrons as diverse as people at large can be. In the wake of it's closing I know we're all unsure as to what is to become of the kinky, geeky, busty, skinny, nerdy and burly men who dared to enter it's keep.
Will we further ghetto-ize ourselves on Church Street? That's what bugs me most really. That covert spirit of retro gay male sexuality is continuing to wane. The only place left for fags to be in Toronto is out on display in the ghetto exposed to the crassness of rampant targeted marketing and social segregation. I don't want advertising for Botox, Mini Coopers and the ever-ascending glass artifices of the elite looming over my every romantic encounter. It makes me feel like a kept specimen that is being studied and exploited.
And now in the city of Toronto that is my only alternative. Most people are probably glad to homogenize themselves in one space. A sense of acceptance what with gay marriage and all. It just makes me feel repressed. The spirit of diversity and difference usurping the gays in exchange for the same old motherfucking middle class dream.
But I'll remember the good times. Trying to find the door, the "parties" upstairs and checking out the debautchery in "The Maze" for the first time. Realizing in that place that people there found me attractive too. Kissing another man with a beard for the first time and reveling in just how good that felt. Rubbing bellies and pitchers of "Skip and Go Naked", which I now realize I should have asked for the recipe. The terrible progressive trance mix tape that played every night for the last four years.
That bar meant more to me than I ever could have imagined.
