Uncover - S15: "The Village 3" E0: Return to The Village

Episode Date: May 31, 2022

Justin hands over the season to Francis at Parc de L’Espoir, the memorial to people who died from HIV/AIDS in Montreal’s gay village. We’re going back 30 years. The world was a different place. What we learned about how to live through a pandemic and how to solve a murder.

This is a CBC Podcast. and demanded change in the shadow of the HIV AIDS crisis. I'm sitting right here in... What's it called again? Parc de l'Espoir. Parc de l'Espoir. I'm sitting here with the host of season three, Francis Plourde. I'm really looking forward to this season of the show. It's going to be a bit different. It's not going to be me hosting.

It's going to be someone who's actually a little more plugged in to the Quebec community, to the Montreal queer community. Tell me what your approach is going to be here. You know, we're going to go back into the 80s, into the 90s. The world was a different place 30 years ago, if you were gay or if you were a lesbian. And that's part of the story that we're going to tell. So, you know, over this period, you had sort of the failure to deal with the HIV AIDS crisis

on a national and provincial level. Exactly. Back in the day, we didn't know much about this disease that was, you know, described as a cancer targeting gay men mostly. People didn't know, you know, what was safe, what was not safe. There was a stigma attached to it and that affected the gay community here in Montreal. So we're bringing those issues as well, because if you're from a younger generation, some of those things might be harder to understand.

Right, so the village originally happened initially in an investigation into the Bruce MacArthur case, an explanation of why the Toronto Police Service failed so miserably to solve eight disappearances over the course of less than a decade. As we started working through that, we discovered a raft of other unsolved cases that looked really similar and sort of a pattern of failure that had gone back nearly a half century.

And as we were doing that, it was like peeling away layers of an onion. Suddenly, there were other cities. There was Detroit, there was LA, there was New York, and notably, there was Montreal that seemed to experience exactly the same problem. And we dealt with a little bit in season one, you know, all of the similarities, all of the patterns that happen in Toronto repeating themselves in Montreal just a couple decades later. Yeah, and that's the story we're going to tell this season. Why did you decide that, you know, you wanted to take a backseat this season. Why did you decide that you wanted to take a backseat this season? Yeah, so I think a big part of the show is about having communities tell their own stories. And

I'm not from Montreal. I really thought it was important to have a more on-the-ground, plugged-in perspective. And really, a big part of The Village was to sort of create a format that other people could sort of adapt themselves. Like I said, a big part of the problem is that these failures happen in city after city after city. And at a certain point, I can't just be traveling around the world telling everyone their own stories. I really want queer communities in cities around North America, if not around the world, to be doing this work themselves, this archival work, this historical work, this sort of investigative work to figure out what went wrong

and how we can avoid it happening in the future. And that's what we'll be doing this season. We'll keep you posted. Can't wait. Neither can I. I'm Francis Plourde, and this is The Village, The Montreal Murders. Coming soon. Get early access to episodes at cbc.ca slash listen

or by subscribing to the CBC True Crime Premium channel on Apple Podcasts. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.