Uncover - S15: "The Village 3" E2: Sex Garage

Episode Date: June 14, 2022

Scores of police remove their badges and slip on rubber gloves before beating and arresting queer partygoers in downtown Montreal. The violence escalates in the coming days, and many more are beaten and jailed. A stronger front emerges. For transcripts of this series, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/podcastnews/the-village-the-montreal-murders-transcripts-listen-1.6479960

I'm Dan Pierce, and this is Pressure Cooker. I said I will never wear the e-job or give up my mini skirts. Never. It's the outrageous story of two misfits living on the fringes, and how they became the central players in a sprawling terror investigation. We just hung out and played video games and smoked weed and did what we do, you know. Pressure Cooker is available on the CBC Listen app or wherever you get your favourite podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast.

Queer life in Montreal in the early 80s was wild. Absolutely wild. You go out onto Peel Street, and there'd be guys, like, dangling out of the doors of these bars, and then Stanley Street with limelight, and there's all day, and buds, and Cali Dominion Square was the stroll.

That's where sex workers applied their trade. So it was just this eye-opening fantasy land of like, you know, go out of the bars at 3 a.m. And there's all these guys hitchhiking rides down St. Catherine Street, running without your coat in the middle of winter from one bar to the other. And, you know, it was clandestine, but it was also very out there. So yeah, Montreal was a wild place back then. It was also dangerous. Gay life was underground, and to understand how a number of men went missing without much attention, we have to understand the community and the community's relationship with the police.

In the 80s, Montreal was a very open community compared to the United States. And gay people in Montreal go out Friday, Saturday and Sunday. And they did then. It was a very social place. And we knew hundreds of people. That's Michael Hendricks. He's 18 now. Michael moved to Montreal in his 20s as a draft dodger.

He quickly found love and never looked back. The bars got started rolling around 11 o'clock at night, went on until 3 in the morning, and they were packed. Michael and his longtime partner, Rene, loved Montreal. But they knew things were not as perfect as they seemed. Gay life was exciting here, but it certainly was not free. You would be in a bar when suddenly the lights went on at around one o'clock in the morning and then all of a sudden all of the hashish all the pot was on the floor and then you were up against the wall hands up on

the wall back to the police and they searched you and then one by one they released you checking if there were outstanding warrants and whatnot so you could be there for hours. There had been some sensational raids in Montreal. How many times were you there for a raid? Well, about five, six times. It was scary because you don't know what they were doing. They were with guns and things. You don't know what to do. Are they going to arrest us?

And are we going to have our repetition destroyed in newspapers? Because not everybody was out in the bars. Two raids stand out. One of them was called Trucks. René was there. And the police came armed with machine guns and in camouflage clothing. And there were like, how many cops were there?

Like about 50. About 50 cops to raid a little bar. We had had another one in a place called Bud's. They were rough. They rounded up hundreds of people and took them in and then held them overnight in jail. And many of them were charged with being found in a bawdy house. But there was a kind of party

that seemed to be immune to police attention. We called them warehouse parties, but in fact they would be called raves today. And it had super lighting, super sound system, and great music. music. But on that night, in July of 1990, Michael and René had decided to stay home, get a good night's sleep. That sleep would be short. It was after midnight around maybe 3 a.m. I got a call at home,

get some lawyers down to station 25 because eight people were arrested at Nicholas Place tonight. When Michael gets that call at 3 a.m., there's a sense of déjà vu. New York had Stonewall, Toronto had its bathhouse raids, and 12 years after the trucks raid, Montreal's queer youth were now getting their own dose of homophobic police brutality. I'm Francis Plourde. This is The Village. The Montreal Murders.

Episode 2. Sex Garage. You know, that was all, it was the summer of 90. Like, there was a shitload of stuff happening then. The galvanized communities. The kind of solidarity people dreamed about.

I don't think it's been seen since, but the events of that summer kind of forced it to happen. I think the people who came to my party, it was the type of people who were involved in politics, in ACT UP, Queer Nation. Those type of people who were defiantly out. Nicholas Jenkins had recently moved to the city. He wanted to bring the vibe he'd experienced in New York, and soon he became a key figure in Montreal's underground scene. That scene played out in lofts and warehouse spaces at the edges of the city. Sex Garage was named after that famous Joe Gage porno from the 70s.

And I love the name. This was very early AIDS. And, you know, we started having a little bit of shame attached to sex, especially gay sex, and fear. And I wanted to make sex sexy again, and fun again, but just be careful. I mean, first of all, it was a really good party. It's a night that activist Peter Boulata cannot forget. It wasn't just a warehouse party. It wasn't just a rave. It's hard to describe.

There was something very queer about the Sex Garage Party and its whole aesthetic in terms of, like, performers, performance art, the art that was being projected on the wall, and, of course, the patrons, right? Like, the party-goers were ourselves, you know, works of art in terms of how we presented ourselves and how we dressed and what we did with our hair and what we had pierced.

Like that was the gestalt of Sex Garage. They were insane. They were so much fun. In some ways it was a renaissance, a heyday of gay and lesbian nightlife in Montreal. I was so happy to get in that you just danced the night away. And it was just like a small little version of how we'd like to see the world one day, where everyone comes together and celebrates each other, respects each other.

Blaine Charles, drag name Mocaccino. respects each other. Blaine Charles, drag name Mocaccino. Their friend and fellow activist, John Custodio, remembers young Blaine. I don't know, 6'8", it feels like, maybe only in those shoes, and could rock the coolest drag outfits. It wasn't your old-school female impersonation drag.

It was a new kind of drag performance that emphasized in-your-face queerness and take-no-crap kind of fierceness. It was very inspiring. Blaine had moved from New York to help build the Montreal chapter of ACT UP. Michael and Renée were among the first to sign up. They were also regulars at these parties.

Once ACT UP was formed, it was a really good place to find our clientele and to be associated with our fellow members. But ACT UP had a table at Sex Garage, where we distributed condoms and information about HIV. ACT UP was a clan, and you wanted to be out with them. And so it was a great deal of fun. To avoid unwanted attention, Nicholas was careful to move his parties around

and to never use the same space twice. But on July 14, 1990, he pushed his luck. And that's kind of where I messed things up, was doing Sex Garage at the same amazing space in old Montreal. That's when I learned I had just done a huge mistake because I lost control of the amount of people who could show up. because I lost control of the amount of people who could show up. That Saturday night, the safety of Sex Garage was crushed.

Oh, see, there's that girl running. She looks like a little fairy running away from them. She's so cute with her arms out, you know. Photographer Linda Dawn Hammond seemed to be everywhere in those days. This is a picture of the go-go dancers at Sex Garage. You know her by her short, spiky hair and her Nikon camera dangling around her neck. Nicholas had asked me if I wanted to photograph the party, and I thought, well, I really want to photograph voguing. And so it's, you know, something that's not going to be around for much longer. And I, before we go further,

like what is voguing? Oh, wait a second. Hang on. It's totally unknown to me. You must've heard that song. No, never. Oh, okay. Well, everybody else has heard it. I'm sorry. It was a big song in the gay scene, Vogue, you know. Oh, posing, striking a pose, you know, that's, it was like, I mean, she didn't invent it, but a lot of the people that were involved in it were gay and, and some of them, you know, well, they would wear outrageous costumes and people from all different races were involved in it, you know. It was very open compared to some other scenes, I suppose, you know. So, voguing, eh? Let's just say I'm terrible at pop culture references.

A result of growing up in Quebec before the internet, I guess. But yeah, Madonna had just brought it into the mainstream. Voguing, though, had a deeper history. It was born in Harlem decades earlier, as part of the ballroom scene, when queer people of color sought a way to express themselves in their own spaces. Nicholas's vulgars spread around the room to fill out the space, but the crowd was still pretty thin by midnight.

Nicholas had a sense something was off that night. There were suddenly too many people arriving at the same time. Word of mouth had gotten out and so it wasn't just the people who were arriving, just weren't the people I had selected. They had heard from other people. So from the start you knew that this sex barrage could be trouble? Yeah, yeah. For some reason, everyone decided to show up late. And when I started getting all this traffic on the street, I knew I was kind of in for trouble.

So there's someone at the door. Her name was Sylvie. She was like six feet tall, broad shoulders, brush cut. She was hot, but she was like, there was a reason she was the bouncer, right? Like they had her at the door. And I remember her stepping into the space with this look on her face. And then these police officers were right behind her. It's like, oh shit, the cops. Oh, for Christ's sake, you know.

It was dread. It was like immediately dread. I would have probably been about to leave and rumours started spreading about what was going on. We heard that the police were closing down the party. Cops showed up with flashlights, went to the bar. I had the good fortune not to be in the party at Sex Garage, but I was rather, how do I say this, engaged on the steps of St. Patrick's Basilica

across the street and saw it all go down. You know, because we were seeing everything from windows on the third or fourth floor from a distance, we kind of didn't really have a sense of what was going on. I mean, this is before cell phones, so we just saw the crowd being pushed away, and then we had no idea what was going on. I saw exactly what they were up to before anyone came out.

When, out of the corner of my eye, I see the flashing lights, but significantly no sirens, just the flashing lights, and at least five, six cars at first. to the loft, which is right beside a well-known gay sauna called the Sauna 456. And they exit. They have, for whatever reason, yellow gloves on. And they are wielding batons, and then reinforcements come, and they assemble in a line. Six or seven of them actually go into the building

and when they come out, they are preceded by people who were at the party. They were taunting the people in the crowd. They were stroking their, what's called a matrak. Matrak, a police billy club. They were stroking them and saying, oh, you want this, don't you? You want this, you know, things like that. Of course they started, like, taunting us

and calling us names and doing that kind of stuff because it was the middle of the night, right? And there was no one around. There would be no witnesses to what they were doing. They, like, lined up, they made this like formation, for those of us who were not dispersing and going quietly home, but which was almost none of us, because we were kind of hanging around to see what would happen. Like what, like maybe they'll leave and we'll just go back into the party, right? It was about three in the morning, I think. And

there was a guy and he had forgotten his coat in the party. He was leaving, tried to go back in and the police had stopped him. And then they had dragged him between two cars that were parked nearby the entrance and started beating the shit out of him, like terribly. I looked up and I saw

that they were removing their badges. And that was a moment when you realize that something is going to happen. Whatever is about to happen, we're not going to be able to identify them. And that's on purpose. Like, that's intentional on their part. Once we saw that they were being hostile, we didn't want to leave our friends. And so we protested outside against them. One person threw a punch and all hell broke loose.

And those police officers in the lineup approached the crowd and just went crazy with the batons, beating people down. Wagons arrive for them to be hauled off in, and this is all happening in a matter of under 20, 30 minutes. If this had happened at a time that iPhones existed, how different the outcome might have been, I wish I had been the kind of person that carried around a camcorder, but I wasn't. But Linda Dawn Hammond had that covered. Yes. I haven't thought of that name in a very long time, but yes.

Linda Dawn Hammond had a camera for photos and had the presence of mind to get out there and just start snapping. No, I knew it was incredibly important. I knew it was like an abuse of human rights, right? People were afraid for me because I had to get right up in front of these cops to photograph them because I had a wide-angle lens, a 28mm, which is pretty wide, and so that meant that I had to really be

within like six feet of them to get the shots, so I had to run directly in front of them. People knew also that I was taking risks because they were saying, you're going to get killed, you're going to get the shots. So I had to run directly in front of them. People knew also that I was taking risks because they were saying, you're going to get killed, you're going to get killed. You know, so people in the crowd started realizing that this was basically an attack because they were gay. So they started saying, we're here, we're queer.

We're queer! We're queer! Get yellow, do it! We're queer! We're queer! I could hear people screaming. I could see people's feet running past me. Everything was dark. I could see up the hill, and I just took the camera and I threw it along the ground up the hill.

And I did it as carefully as I could because the back could have opened and that would have been the end of the film, right? Then suddenly my friend arrived and he said, I'll take it. And I handed it to him. I was so glad he showed up. He took my camera and he took off and he said, I'll meet you back home. Police arrested eight people that night. Linda was not among them.

And I made my way back there, and he gave me back my films and my camera, and then I was thinking, okay, we should go to the news media. In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news. So I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner, and I'm back with Season 3 of On Drugs.

And this time, it's going to get personal. I don't know who Sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy. On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. I was woken up at 4 a.m., my phone ringing, my landline ringing. I was terrified. I did not live a life where my phone rang at 4 a.m. It was not a usual occurrence.

So I was like, something terrible has happened. And effectively, something terrible had happened, yeah. When Karen Herland first hears about the raid, the whole story makes no sense. There was some question of it having been a noise complaint. It was never clear because where it happened, when it happened, there was no one living in that part of town. There would have been no one to make a complaint. This was really not, like, not even a lofty, gentrified residential place. There was no one there once business hours were over, ever.

No matter how it started, though, Karen and Michael and their networks of friends and activists know they need to set things in motion. This is a first for them. They might not know exactly what to do, but the members of ACT UP know they need lawyers and that eight brutal arrests at Saks Garage cannot go unnoticed. We had a phone tree that you could be notified immediately by phone if something was happening somewhere. You know, we didn't have all of the sophisticated technology that we have today, and I think that there was much more personal connection.

So if I got on the phone and I called five people, and then you called five people, people came together, they came out. All you had to do was make a phone call. While ACT UP members team up over the phone lines, Linda rushes her film straight to the newspapers. A gay party leads to a police operation deemed to be violent. That's how La Presse, Montreal's French-language daily, frames it the next day. Some of Linda's pictures are published with the article. In one of them, two rows of cops are marching towards Linda, wielding their nightsticks.

In another one, a woman is sprawled on the street. Four cops in uniform tower over her, their badges removed. This is a cartoon that was in the press. We see a gay man wearing some very odd clothing, running fast as hell, being chased by four cops with big nightsticks, big black ones. And one of them is saying, oh, it's so much easier to enforce law and order with the pedophiles.

And of course these cops are drooling as they're running after the gay man. This is exactly what it was like. By the next day, a meeting had been called at 4 p.m. Again, word of mouth. I can't tell you how I heard this. I just, you know. But you decided to show up. Oh, I'm definitely showing up. And so we're all walking down and demand that the charges be dropped and that the police change their treatment of the community. Well, I don't know if you've heard, but cops raided a lesbian and gay party yesterday.

They beat up a lot of lesbians without any reason. They beat up a lot of lesbians without any reason. The protesters say they want all Montrealers to know that gays and lesbians won't be pushed around. One of their parties was broken up by police last night. The protesters say the police used excessive force. People responded with verbal chants. There was no physical attack on the police. We didn't menace them physically. Are you sure that the demonstrators didn't pose some threat to the police? Absolutely. Because this isn't the first time the police have showed up

at one of these things. They've come before. They've seen that the parties are lively, that people are having a good time, but there's no threat involved. Perhaps most revealing is the police lieutenant speaking for the arresting officers, who insisted that they had used the force that was necessary the night of the raid. But if you asked anyone in a crowd outside the police station,

that's not how they saw it. The demonstrators say this is just the first in a series of activities they are planning to protest what they call police violence. It was upbeat. It was like we were all there. We were going to do something. This was, you know, what had happened was bad, but we were going to handle it. I had to be there. It was just like some kind of calling, like they can't continue to beat us up like this. We were having fun. We thought we were about to have a victory

because we were going to meet the chief of police. He was going to apologize for what happened on Saturday night. That's not what happened at all. It's a busy Monday lunchtime on a cramped downtown corner near Concordia University. The sidewalks are thick with students as people arrive to claim their spot in front of Station 25. Space fills up fast. Some have brought sheets to spread out on the street and the sidewalk.

And a few people clamber up on benches and stand tall on the bases of lampposts, trying to get a clear view of the front door of the station. There were like two or three of us and we were up high and we, you know, made a few statements. And then I remember I was just being like flip and ridiculous and I threw out my arm and I shouted, let the games begin. And everyone started kissing each other. And it sort of seems okay. And Douglas and Michael are going up to speak to the police. We weren't hostile to them.

We had very specific demands. We wanted them to have public hearings into why they attacked this group of people and what they had done to us, the beatings. I mean, they've been masturbating their billy clubs in front of us, and we wanted them to explain to us why they felt that they could do that to us, humiliate us in that way. They also wanted the police to drop the charges against those arrested the night before.

Douglas Buckley-Gouret, our leader, was a giant of a man, went up and banged on the door of Station 25, a bit like Martin Luther going to the church. So the door opened a crack, and somebody told him to get out of here and get those people out of here, or I'm calling the cops on you. We wanted to make a complaint.

We've come in and filed a complaint. We can't get in the doors. There are three officers standing here, four officers standing here, blocking the way. Here you go, Montreal RV community, traveling on people's democratic rights once again. Police didn't meet with our representatives, didn't care that we were there,

had no interest in having any kind of conversation about the violence that had taken place. And when that came out to us outside of Station 25, we moved into the intersection and blocked traffic. And I should say it was nonviolent. We were just sitting there. Douglas said, okay, everybody lock arms. So they did, and they made chains of people,

lesbians and gays together. And we're sitting and we're sitting, and we realize that there are lines of riot police on all four sides of the intersection with, you know, the full gear and the big, clear shield thing and the latex gloves again. And we look up and there they've got sharpshooters on the roof with rifles, about 10 of them. The demonstrators waited for the police to take action this afternoon, daring the officers to move them off the street.

The officers repeatedly asked the crowd to clear the area. I do not remember anyone telling me to disperse. I don't think I would have dispersed, but I honestly do not. I never heard it. If it happened, I don't know who got told and how, but no, I have no memory of that. I don't think any of us were prepared for what the police did next. Which was to come out in full riot gear

and just start, like, cracking their billy clubs onto people's heads. And they all start closing in from all four sides, boxing us in, moving in formation. As they reached us, they pulled at their belly clubs and they started hitting us and physically pulling us apart. We all had our arms linked. I told these people I couldn't stay in the crowd. I was too old, I was over 50, to get hit by a nightstick again.

The pain is awful. It's a vicious, biting feeling. But it's worse afterwards. It leaves a terrible bruise and the muscle underneath hurts. Some people were appalled. Other people were heckling and, you know, like egging them on, basically. You know, so there was a combination. And they just started taking us down row by row. And the police used their sticks

to beat them apart. It was horrible. Within 15 minutes, the area was cleared. Police made about 50 arrests. One minute I'm there linking arms and the next minute I'm in one of their police wagons with all these people. And we were like jammed in there like sardines. And it was horrible because we could hear the screams outside the van. It was a terrible feeling to hear all the screaming. And they arrested a lot more people. It was more than 40 people, I think, they arrested that day, dragged them into Station 25, out of the sight of the news cameras,

and just beat the hell out of them. There were people who were bruised, black eyes, broken bones. There was a woman that had a boot print on her face from a police boot. The dirt from the boot, you know, was imprinted on her face. And she said that's because she had tried to protect her girlfriend and they had beaten her up inside the police station. Horrible things happened to those people. Once they were inside, the police decided to beat one young man. He was a Mohawk kid.

He was about 19 or something. And they ruptured his testicles. He was screaming in pain. He was obviously in pain. He was very, he was obviously very hurt, but he was also super, like, freaked out, like, upset. And we were all shouting at the cops to get him medical attention. You know, ambulance, get an ambulance, he needs a doctor. The public was on the street.

It was the middle of the afternoon, it was a sunny day. The public was screaming at the police, stop it, stop it. You know, but they didn't. They just kept beating and beating and dragging. It was the middle of the afternoon. It was a sunny day. The public was screaming at the police, stop it, stop it, you know, but they didn't. They just kept beating and beating and dragging. It was awful. The whole thing was just so Kafkaesque, right? Like, here were these nonviolent protesters protesting police brutality and anti-gay violence, police anti-gay violence. And they just performed homophobic police violence for the whole world to see.

And I think the difference was that unlike the night of the sex garage party, the media was all there and they were all recording what the police were doing. And I think that was a galvanizing moment for the gay community in Montreal and I think for the broader Montreal community. Like, how are they acting this way in front of news cameras? Is this population really that disposable that they can be treated this way in front of news cameras. Is this population really that disposable that they can be treated this way

and there would be no consequences for the Montreal police? Like, parents are watching their kids getting beaten up by cops in the middle of downtown Montreal. Before dinner hour, people woke up. People started to realize, oh, we have a problem. started to realize, oh, we have a problem. This time, the cameras had captured it all. The police had no choice but to come out with a statement.

The officers in Station 25 are not really, I won't say sensitive or ultra-sensitive, but don't have the sensitivity or haven't had the chance to develop the sensitivity that the officers of Station 33 have, who have interacted with this community now for several years. And he says the MUC is determined to improve relations with Montreal's gay community. For all the talk about improving relations with Montreal's gay community, no cop involved that night was punished. But Karen Herland, who was arrested, remembers the impact on her life. Refusing to circulate, refusing to follow orders, public mischief. I had six charges

against me. Three were civil, three were criminal. For her, as for others arrested at Sax Garage and the protests that followed, it took three years to clear her name. So what do you think was driving the cops? Is it ignorance, homophobia, boredom? Yeah, take your pick, you know. It was this particular moment where there was more recognition and understanding of homosexuality, but also that made it more threatening. And so there was like a real kind of impulse to distance and make sure that everyone understood that they were them were over there were not me.

So, yeah, harassing gays and lesbians made you more macho, made you more manly, made you more legit. And it was something that you could get away with. What happened before us was basically centered around the male gay community and it didn't accept or include the lesbians and it didn't accept or include this trans people so I think that maybe we just represent a progression in understanding and acceptance in the gay community towards difference You know, with Stonewall, the police didn't expect the attendees to be defiant and fight back. And that's kind of what happened at Sex Garage. They targeted the wrong group. People were already starting to be politically active because of ACT UP and because of Queer Nation and because of AIDS.

And they reacted in the way that the cops weren't expecting and then I think it just snowballed after that. In the same way that Stonewall, the police targeted the wrong people. You know there were multiple events that happened in Montreal over the years and so I think there was a build-up. And maybe Sex Garage was like the final tipping point. A tipping point for the community, but not for the cops. I really have zero recollection. What was it called? You said Sex something? The Sex Garage. Sex Garage. No.

It was a loft party. The sex garage. Sex garage. No. It was a loft party. John Dalzell was the public face of Montreal police following sex garage. Whereabouts was it located? And this was in, when was this, 1990? 1990, yeah. And it's funny because we found tape and you were the spokesperson for the police. It says a lot that the watershed moment in the city's gay rights movement

is just forgotten. Even the well-intentioned cops were guilty of a sin of omission. They tended to be disconnected from the community. And that disconnect was dangerous in an entirely different way. I remember the whole concern around a serial killer in a gay village. When men start disappearing, rumors spread around the community that a single murderer could be to blame.

Were gay men being targeted? Yes. Were we being targeted by the same person? That was unknown. But it felt like we had a target on our back. And that's when the fight against the police turns into a struggle to work with the police. That's coming next on The Village. on The Village. This series is produced by Kerry Haber, Michel Gagnon, and me, Francis Plourd.

Original concept by Justin Ling. I highly recommend that you check out the previous two seasons of The Village. You can also find Radio-Canada's French-language production of The Village on audio.ca. Our story editor is Chris Oak. Our digital producer is Esquire Robert.

Editing, mixing, and sound design by Kerry Haber and Julia Whitman. Special thanks to Alex Laplante, Mo Bradley, Gino Arel, and Dave Donnie. Our senior producer is Cecil Fernandez. The director of CBC Podcasts is Arif Noorani. Thanks for listening.