[FORUM] What neighbourhood meant a lot to you?

[rfmcdonald]

Now that Toronto's Pride Week is set to culminate in tomorrow's parade--more than a million people expected--it seems worthwhile to take a look at the vitality of the Church and Wellesley neighbourhood, the traditional geographic nucleus of Toronto's GLBT community. Pride this year has taken on a bit of a political edge thanks to things like the It Gets Better campaign and Mayor Ford's non-attendance, as Shawn Micallef noted in a Spacing Toronto post well worth reading. Pride, and the neighbourhood, matter.

It's been an interesting few weeks for Pride and Church Street. An article in The Grid that used a small and isolated hipster perspective to declare Church Street and Pride irrelevant and unnecessary was nearly universally condemned as being dead wrong. Coming after a year where the biggest gay-related stories were bullying and suicides, it was certainly an odd and sweeping claim. Yet like a lot of things happening in Toronto right now, it caused people to think about what really does matter to them, and stand up and say why (and boy howdy, they certainly did). Then, last week, when Mayor Rob Ford said he wasn't going to be attending Pride, it set off another riot of controversy (if Pride was indeed irrelevant and unnecessary, nobody would care if Ford was there or not). Here on Spacing our John Lorinc explained why this snub matters, as does Ivor Tossell over at the Toronto Standard. And yesterday in the Globe, Marcus Gee showed the darkest part of all this: the hate that still bubbles just below the surface of our tolerant and peaceful Toronto.

Micallef goes on to offer documentary proof of the neighbourhood's importance, pointing to the local expansion of the murmur project that I blogged about back in 2006.

In 2008 and 2009 we installed two iterations of the [murmur] mobile phone oral history project in and around Church Street with a whole bunch of stories told by Torontonians with attachments to the place. This weekend you can walk around and call the numbers on the signs, or listen right now online by clicking the red dots on the map (which you can purchase from artist Marlena Zuber if you want a copy of your own).

You'll hear people like Helen Rykens at the 519 Community Centre talk passionately about how the AIDS memorial in Cawthra Park came about during the epidemic in the 1990s. They're still adding names, over 2700 now. Then at the intersection of Church and Wellesley there's Suhail Abual Sameed explaining how the street was a refuge for him as a gay Muslim immigrant, and how quickly that safety can disappear, as it did during 9/11. At Yonge and Wellesley, Toronto journalist Gerald Hannon talks about the 1981 bathhouse raids and the response. Then outside Maple Leaf Gardens the Reverend Brent Hawkes — the guy who wore a bullet proof vest when he performed the first same-sex marriages in Canada — talks about holding Pride-day services at the arena and the death threats they got in 1994. Bomb sniffing dogs, body guards — all the things we don't think are Toronto. There's lots more, keep listening.

Church and Wellesley right now isn't that important for me: my life revolves around other neighbourhoods now, and things like the flight then closure of the great indie bookstore This Ain't the Rosedale Library haven't made the neighbourhood dearer to me. Still, it does continue to matter for me. When I visited Toronto for the first time back in July 2002, Church and Wellesley was the first neighbourhood I went to see. It was nice to see a territory where I could be myself. Relaxing matters.

And you? What neighbourhood matters to you, or mattered?