Montreal's Plateau Mont-Royal borough was once a haven for lesbians, where Kim Brien remembers nights feeling "like being in a movie" as women danced, made eyes at each other and flirted. "We felt alive. We truly had the freedom to be ourselves," said Brien, now in her 40s, while reminiscing about her youth spent in bars where she could live her lesbianism without strange looks thrown her way.
She said the staff knew its clientele and there was a real community connection. Brien is part of a handful of generations of women who have known Montreal's lesbian bars — a bygone era, much to the dismay of many young sapphic women. The 1990s saw the beginning of the end of such spaces, and in 2013 the Drugstore — Montreal's very last lesbian bar — shut down for good.
The Drugstore, the last of Montreal's lesbian bars, shut down in 2013. (Ivanoh Demers/Radio-Canada) Its iconic sign is still up on Ste-Catherine Street in the Village, but its front is boarded up and decrepit. Brien remembers the space as bustling and lively, with its terrasses always full.
Tara Chanady, head of the Réseau des lesbiennes du Québec, says to understand why lesbian bars disappeared, it's important to understand their origins. Sanctuary amid criminalization Passersby might notice a seemingly innocuous pizza place on Ste-Catherine Street without knowing its locale was once home to one of Montreal's very first lesbian bars in the 1950s called Le Zanzibar. Just a block away, on St-André Street, was .