Battling for turf in the Gay Village

   Montreal's Gay Village is a North America's most-sprawling gay neighbourhood, taking up about two linear kilometers of formerly-dilapidated downtown-adjacent real estate, putting it on what appears to be inevitable collision course with change, as demand for downtown real estate grows.
  The area is said to span from St. Hubert to De Lorimier, mostly along St.Catherine. That's a lot of turf to keep gay, although in practice, the area seems slightly smaller, from about Amherst to Papineau.
   The area has been a boon for Montreal, as a good number of the 14 million tourists who come here each year do so just to spend money and hang out there.
   Former Mayor Gerald Tremblay recognized the value of the gay tourist buck and even once sponsored a sort of Gay Olympics, called the Gay Games, to add to the other many local gay festivals.
   Yet there is no controlling real estate or consumer demand, or movement of populations within a city, so whether the area can sustain its gay identity at current levels is far from assured.
   If one or two bar owners in the area suddenly decided to serve a heterosexual clientele, the local gay chamber of commerce might not be thrilled but also might be legally powerless to stop it. An eventual erosion of the identity of the area would ensue.
   Some of these issues are addressed in Donald Hinrichs'Montreal's Gay Village: The Story of a Unique Urban Neighborhood Through the Sociological Lens (2012), as the author explores many issues concerning the area, including its future sustainability.
   Hinrichs makes the case for the merits of gay villages - which also exist in Vancouver, Toronto, New York, San Francisco and many other cities - as places that offer like-minded people a place to meet and feel secure.
   But he also notes that some within the gay community also see a downside to gay segregation in a dedicated area.
   One gay intellectual, in 1996, described Montreal's Village as an area, "tolerated as an expression of the needs of gay consumers within a capitalist economy; it is not a space of gay liberation or a queer utopia. At best it is a symbol of some gay men's ability to care out an accommodating space within a generally hostile culture, without significantly challenging that culture's basic structure and without suffering a loss of the economic privilege that comes with being male.”
  On the downside, a thriving Gay Village can encourage excesses, for example some gay youth who come to the city to attend university find themselves distracted by all of the partying opportunities and end up dropping out of school. Other gays in couples consider it a threat, as the opportunities to hook up are many.
  But perhaps the biggest issue with the area, based on media reports, is that gays are not  always entirely safe.
  Just yesterday it was reported that a young gay male bar-goer was beaten and robbed by two assailants who called him nasty homophobic epithets. Indeed in the 1990s many gays were robbed and murdered after pick-ups in the area.
  Gays aren't entirely helpless, however, and aren't afraid to push back. A heterosexual friend recounted to me that he was kissing his girlfriend on the street there a couple of years ago when gays started loudly pleading with him to desist, noting that that's the only part of town where gays can feel at home and heterosexuals kissing didn't help the vibe.
   The area will never be 100 percent gay and indeed nobody would want it to be. However a certain gay numerical dominance would appear necessary in order to maintain the safety and identity of the area and controlling that dominance over such a large space might be a tricky task.
   A developer friend told me that he had no trouble selling any the new condo units that he recently erected in the area, so there is an impression that the area is increasingly in demand.
   As Hinrichs notes, one major gay club recently set up shop outside the Gay Village at the Main and Bernard. If that proves to be a sign of a drift - even a minor one - it could be just a matter of time before straight clubs start setting up shop in the Village and if there's a demand for such a thing, it would seem of questionable legitimacy to try to block it and gay retrenchment could ensue.
   The Village grew spontaneously in the 1980s without government intervention, as the local gay population outgrew their old bar strip on Stanley and leaped on the cheaper real estate to the east. And while it appears farfetched to imagine that Montreal's Gay Village will ever completely disappear, there's no assurance that it will continue to be as sprawling or quite as gay as it is now.