[URBAN NOTE] Xtra! on Church and Wellsley without the Fetish Fair

[rfmcdonald]

A queer neighbourhood needs overt sexuality. That's something illustrated by Andrea Houston's Xtra! article describing how, after slow decline and a somewhat ridiculous last year, the Church St Fetish Fair once held in the Church and Wellesley neighbourhood is no more.

Summer in the Church and Wellesley Village is about to get a little less kinky now that members of the local business association have decided they will no longer host the Church St Fetish Fair.

David Wootton, manager of the Church Wellesley Village Business Improvement Area (BIA), said the board has unanimously decided to instead host several family-friendly "partnership" events throughout the summer that will attract a wider range of people to the Village. If there are to be any street closures, it will be for events involving the area merchants, he says, like a sidewalk sale or patio extensions. The Fetish Fair, which ran for seven years, stopped drawing the crowds it used to, he says.

"Fetish Fair as we know it ended last year," Wootton tells Xtra. "Our concern this year is keeping doors open because, as you know, more and more businesses are leaving the street. We don't want to see the Village die. We figure our job here is to ensure that we do as much as we can to bring in traffic and return traffic into the area . . . Man can not live on queer dollars alone."

The BIA is making tough decisions because merchants are treading water financially. "Yes, Loblaws has been a huge disruption . . . It's a challenge with this BIA, working with its members, whether they are LGBT-positive or not. There is an assumption that we just serve to the LGBT community, but we have an obligation to ensure we remain a destination for queer people. So we have to play that balance really well."

[. . .]

In 2011, the BIA decided to rebrand the Fetish Fair into the Church St Village Fair: Leather to Lace. Not every business owner approved of the change. At the BIA's annual general meeting in November, Stephen Roy, of Flash, took issue with the BIA's attempt to entice families to the fair. As part of its changes, the BIA rented “adult toys,” including a Ferris wheel, a mechanical bull and large inflatable games. At the time, the BIA told Xtra it wanted the event to be “all-inclusive, all ages and all walks of life.”

“If families are so important, do a separate event for families," Roy says. “Families are a huge minority in our community. Those inflatable things they rented were ridiculous. The bottom line is fetish is part of our culture. Give us one day. It’s our community.”

Jeremy Feist's blog post annotates Houston's, starting by pointing out that many of the most prominent businesses in Church and Wellesley do cater directly to queer people looking for sex. Indeed, that's the raison d'être of Church and Wellesley.

The problem the CWVBIA has right now is that members are trying to create some sort of gay utopia where everyone is gay or lesbian or trans or bi, but they never have sex and they never talk about it. Horseshit. Pretending the LGBT community doesn't enjoy a good fuck is like pretending dogs don't lick their own balls. You can set up as many bouncy castles and deserted Ferris wheels as you want, but that's not going to remove the sex from the Village.

The idea that the gay village can integrate both family values and sexual impulses shouldn't be that difficult to grasp, yet for some reason people think it's impossible. For God's sake -- there's an elementary school right next to a strip club, a leather bar and a sex shop. I've said it before and I'll say it again: accepting the fact that members of your family are human, and therefore sexual, is a fundamental part of growing up. Stop trying to pretend that the two are so far removed that you have to choose one or another.

The Village is a place for both kink and family. There's a proper way to balance the two; you're just not doing it right.

Hear hear.