John
Woolfrey 1233 words
1729
Rue de la Visitation
Montreal,
Quebec, Canada
H2L
3C3
(514)
597-2189
La Queue Dorée
Copyright 2005 by Raymond John Woolfrey
From East of the Big Q,
a collection of gay short stories about Montreal
My favourite bar
is hidden in big, old garage
down a seedy side street in the village. Michael calls it p.e.n.i.s.s.e.s, as a synonym for the made-up
acronym the owners gave it to rhyme with “cocks.” But because the real name is
owned by lawyers, I’ll call it La Queue Dorée (The Golden Cock), which, I
think, is an appropriate name for the bar in which so many of the stories that
happened to Michael and me take place.
La Queue Dorée is a clubhouse for
boys—like Tubby and Iggy’s tree house in the Little Lulu comic strip (Iggy is
the small, mean-looking one with the brush cut—he’d fit perfectly into Village
life, Tubby’s probably a bear, and remember Annie? The tough little tomboy?)
But on the door of their tree house, Iggy and Tubby had written No
girls allowed. La Queue Dorée is like that: a private boys’ club that
women cannot enter but once a year on “Ladie’s [sic] Night,” when both
dykes and fag-hags line up around the block as early as ten in the evening
(which is very early for Montreal). The boys love Ladie’s Night. That’s when
they have a whole new audience to show off their sexy bodies to.
You enter La Queue Dorée through an
unmarked door, pass through a hall lined with murals of leather men oozing
sperm from oversized, veiny erections, and check your coat (unless you’re
wearing leather, of course) opposite a five-foot neon sculpture of an
uncircumcised, dripping penis. Like the skull and crossbones on a tree-house
door, these icons of leatherdom are meant to discourage squeamish queens and
uptight SAGs (straight-acting gays).
After that, the space opens up to the long
main bar on one side and on the other two pool tables separated by a smaller
bar. Battered black oil drums stacked up haphazardly between these two areas
serve as dividers and surfaces to set your beer upon. They wobble when you lean
against them, so plenty of beer gets spilled (well, especially when I lean on
them), and the bottles make a big bang when they fall over on a drum.
A small area behind the washrooms
comprises a third bar, a couple of pinball machines, and a ’forties-styled
phone booth that you can sit in and close the door. Once, when Michael was
making a call in it, a guy stood in front of him and showed him his erection.
“And I was on the phone to my sister,” Michael wailed.
I like to perch on the railing outside the
washrooms. Both have doors at either end, so I get to see the whole crowd as it
eventually files by. That’s how I run into old friends and make new ones. And
as it’s up a few steps, it gives me a good view over the crowd.
Leather bars are not supposed to have a
dance floor: it’s not macho to dance. But in a city where walking and talking
is performance art, the owners grudgingly hid a dance floor in a far corner
behind some more oil drums. Its view is further hidden from a pool table by a
trophy case for various leather and biker clubs. But every kind of person
dances on this dance floor, and only the most self-conscious stand back. Some
of the weirdest dancing goes on there, not to mention the most erotic, and
everybody says it’s the best music in the city. Between the dance floor and a
wall are two rows of restaurant booths where joints are rolled and smoked, and
where cocks are groped and jerked off.
The decor is all boy/man queer fantasy: A
real motorcycle is mounted at eye level, its lights flashing on and off; on a
wall hangs a metal Black Cat cigarette sign that says, They taste better; a couple of chairs that came out of a
war-time fighter plane get moved around from one crowd-watching vantage point
to another, as does a shoe-shine seat mounted high up on a platform where a
white guy named Buckwheat blacks your boots. There’s even a wood stove with a
railing around it—on cold winter afternoons I like to teeter on it to warm my
bum. It’s especially practical on long-underwear night.
Overhead hang fishnets concealing the DJ’s
tree house way up high; a spot-lit Quebec flag is blown to attention by a fan;
and neon penis-and-testicle sculptures dangle here and there (at first glance
they look like those forms made of thick coat-hanger wire your grandmother used
for drying wool socks).
Coloured lights ripped off from service
vehicles flash on and off at various times to announce specials: fire-truck red
for beer, cop-car blue for soft drinks and liquor, and snowplow yellow for
schnapps.
Everywhere is theatre. The crowd is a
cross-section of all gay cultures, from bikers and labourers to preppies and
guppies; students and artists to lawyers and accountants; Quebec country boys
and European sophisticates; fervent nationalists and unilingual English
Canadians; drunks and tea-totallers, druggies and midnight tokers. It’s mixed,
it’s weird, it’s Montreal. Tourists love it—they can’t comprehend it.
It’s the home of Monsieur Cuir contests,
or “Monsieur Queer,” as we anglos pronounce it. The warmer months have (short)
underwear night; twice a year there’s uniform night; and of course there’s
Halloween. Everybody gets dressed up for any theme that’s going on, or for any
excuse to take it off.
It must be the only bar of its size to be
packed for twelve solid hours each Sunday, from three o’clock in the afternoon
to three the next morning. You can arrive there at eight or nine in the evening
and run into a friend who’d been there since four in the afternoon. He might
still be there at eleven, still on his feet—but barely. “I can’t believe how
late it is already,” slurred Michael one Sunday. “I got here at four, and I only
meant to stay a couple of hours.” Then he disappeared into the throng. I saw
him much later, still partying strong.
Sunday nights are just too much fun. You
can even meet someone at five o’clock, go home with him, snooze after, get a bite
to eat, and be back by nine or ten to pick up someone else. It’s the night the
students go: While tattooed bears in chaps shoot pool with cigarettes stuck in
their mouths, titillated preppies huddle together near the dance floor like a
flock of nervous sheep.
You get free tickets for draft beer if you
arrive before four pm. When, on
the way there, I hear the bells of Saint-Pierre-Apôtre church announcing its
four-o’clock mass, I know I have to hurry. And then, coming in from daylight,
it’s so dark inside that I often stumble into the invisible black barrels (more
banging and spilled beer!).
Though many guys laugh at me when I say
the place is romantic, I can’t help feeling it is. Not Venice or Valentine’s
Day kind of romantic, but the kind that so many gay men constantly crave:
attraction, lust, something that feels like love, seduction (and being
seduced), going to his house, sex, sleeping and cuddling, conversation over
breakfast, and maybe an intention to see each other again. A whole love affair
that takes place over one night—no boring part, no fighting, none of the stuff
that fucks up “relationships.”
Now that’s romance.