This past weekend, Toronto was alive throughout the night for Nuit Blanche, an annual night-time arts festival. The city was transformed by four large-scale exhibitions installed across the city that brought together contemporary art reflecting on revolution, activism, indigeneity and futurity. Carried out as a part of the “Taking to the Streets” exhibition for Nuit Blanche Toronto 2017, interdisciplinary artist (and CLGA volunteer!) Hazel Meyer dropped banners throughout the night from the stop of a scaffold on Queen’s Park Circle. Marked with different “lists and quotes, single words and wordplay, and stories,” Meyers explains that the banners represent “a conversation rather than a demand, the pulse of the horizontal text evokes the multiple, desiring political bodies working inside or on the periphery of Queen’s Park.” It is a work that places the complex histories of Queen’s Park–from the statues and bandstands to the protests and cruising–into conversation with urban renewal and gentrification, symbolized by the scaffolding.

Photograph of Where Once Stood a Bandstand for Cruising & Shelter for Nuit Blanche, 30 September 2017. (Credit: Elspeth Brown)

Titled Where Once Stood a Bandstand for Cruising & Shelter, the installation draws on archival information that was uncovered from the Foolscap Oral History Project during our scholars-in-residence program. The community-driven oral history project, led by John Grube and Lionel Collier in the early 1980s, produced nearly 100 interviews with Canadian gay men in their social circles who were born in the first half of the 20th century. Digitizing the countless cassette tapes, Zohar Freeman–one of the students scholars–recounted how the interviewees talked about the bandstand previously located at Queen’s Park as one of the city’s key spaces for gay cruising and public sex. It was working with the Desh Pardesh archive and thinking through the overlapping histories of British imperialism in Canada and India that we reflected on the five-ton equestrian statue of King Edward VII (donated by the Indian government through its own decolonization program) that led to the dismantling of the bandstand in 1969. It now makes us wonder: what archival material might let us glean beyond the built environment of settlers and re-think “Queen’s Park”? As the CLGA transitions into an active collecting institution, there is a desire to think outside settler time, infrastructure and queerness. Meyer’s work leads us to the bandstand, compelling us to think about how our queer shelters from the storm of state violence have been taken down and providing us with the impetus to think queer politics and activism afresh.