[URBAN NOTE] "Reimagining our gay village"

[rfmcdonald]

Xtra! editor Danny Glenwright introduced what looks like a potentially interesting series at his weekly talking about the regeneration of a somewhat tired Church and Wellesley neighbourhood.

We’ve come a long way. A few decades later and we’re asking if gay people in Toronto even need their own neighbourhood. Yet as Xtra readers know, homophobia and transphobia remain prevalent in our schools, in our families, on social media and in the ranks of Toronto’s city council.

And while many of the city’s “postmodern homos” maintain no great connection to Church Street, the Village remains the place where queer refugees and immigrants from less welcoming countries figure out they’re going to be okay. It is also still the first stop for the majority of gay tourists, as well as those looking for sex. It is for these reasons and others that we keep a close watch over it.

There is no question that Toronto’s gaybourhood needs a serious makeover. It has wallowed in mediocrity for too many years, the owners of many of its landmark institutions content to get by on a recipe for success that made sense in the 1990s. As Oscar Wilde once said, “Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.”

Meanwhile, as Toronto prepares for WorldPride in 2014, those community members responsible for taking the lead in reviving and refurbishing the Village have often seemed to be going in umpteen different directions, their solutions amounting to a bricolage of incompatible ideas.

[. . . O]ur Village series will put forward some new ideas by examining the ways stakeholders in other places are helping rejuvenate their gay neighbourhooods. This can be as simple as updating websites (yes, I know, people in glass houses; dailyxtra.com is coming), incorporating more public artwork, restoring heritage properties or creating partnerships between municipal governments and civil society. I hope it will get Torontonians talking and thinking. From New York City’s Greenwich Village to Sydney’s Taylor Square or even Toronto’s Roncesvalles Village neighbourhood, the problems facing the Church-Wellesley Village are not unique. With a little imagination, our solutions can be.