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Church-Wellesley Village

yyzfa said:
I haven't been in the area in ages, but was told that Zelda's closed? Is that true? What is going to open up in it's place?
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This was discussed a few pages back. Zelda's moved back to it's original roots at Yonge & Isabella where it started up as The Living Well Cafe in the early '80's. Zelda's former space on Church Street is empty and up for lease, no word on any takers yet.

I noticed that Carmen's on Alexander Street (between to Buddy's & 40 Alexander St. apartments) has closed. This was a pricey but terrific restaurant that's been around for as long as I can remember. I've many warm memories there, it's sad to see it gone.
 
Does anyone know what the future of Crews/Tango holds?? There's been a wide range of rumours swerving around this place. It was my favourite places to club when it was still open! I've heard it's gonna be turned into condos, to the possibility that it's reopening soon. Who's got some insider knowledge here? It's been such a mystery!
 
bigtony22127 said:
Does anyone know what the future of Crews/Tango holds?? There's been a wide range of rumours swerving around this place. It was my favourite places to club when it was still open! I've heard it's gonna be turned into condos, to the possibility that it's reopening soon. Who's got some insider knowledge here? It's been such a mystery!
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The latest news is that the new management of Crews are hoping to have a lease worked out in the next few weeks. Once they have secured a lease agreement they have to apply for the liquor license, rebuild the inside (I understand it's pretty much stripped down inside) complete some renovations and then re-open.
 
dt_toronto_geek said:
The latest news is that the new management of Crews are hoping to have a lease worked out in the next few weeks. Once they have secured a lease agreement they have to apply for the liquor license, rebuild the inside (I understand it's pretty much stripped down inside) complete some renovations and then re-open.
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I now know the Crews scoop but really shouldn't repeat it.
 
AlvinofDiaspar said:
Not exactly about C&W, but certainly of potential interest:

http://www.xtra.ca/public/National/Recalling_Torontos_forgotten_gay_bars-8046.aspx

AoD
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One of my best and longest friends is a few decades my senior. He and his partner have told me stories over the years about how things used to be in Toronto "way back when" and all the people they knew, much older who are now gone and can't tell the stories anymore. Not so long ago I suggested that they should document their memories (one is a talented, popular Canadian writer) for the archives as sadly one day their memories will be lost too. I think my friend is considering it, I sure hope so. There are so many fascinating stories of really interesting people, places, fancy parties by gay men with lots of money, sailing around the Toronto Harbour with Liberace in the 60's... just amazing stories.
 
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John Grube ( 1930-2008 ), who was one of my art school teachers, taped interviews with older gay Toronto men in the 1980's for the Foolscap Oral History Project, which I assume is at the Gay Archives.

Jim Dubro remembers him in Xtra:

" This month poet and artist John Grube passed away at the age of 77 of Parkinson's-related causes after a year of being seriously ill. He was perhaps best known within the Toronto queer scene as one of the members of gay art collective JAC — along with Alex Liros and Clarence Barnes — which documented gay events, demonstrations and early Pride marches in Toronto in the 1980s.

Born in Toronto to father George G Grube, a professor of classics at U of T's Trinity College, and mother Gwenyth Grube, John followed in his father's footsteps to become a career academic, teaching English at the University of Windsor and later creative writing at the Ontario College of Art (now the Ontario College of Art and Design), where he worked for more than 20 years.

I first met Grube in 1970 and we remained good friends until his death. We spoke almost daily for more than 30 years. He was a passionate and opinionated individual who inspired mixed feelings in many, but there's no doubt that he cared deeply about our community and its institutions.

Grube first became an activist in the late 1960s when he helped to organize a protest in support of a Jewish professor fired from the University of Windsor. But it wasn't until the Toronto bathhouse raids in the 1980s that Grube came out publicly as a gay activist.

I recall being with him at a protest against antigay crusader Anita Bryant in 1979. There were some high-profile speakers, including Margaret Atwood, and a fair number of reporters. Grube was nervous about being there; at that time he didn't want to be recognized as an OCA professor nor identified by the media as a gay man.

The raids in 1981 changed all that. From that time on Grube was quite outspoken as a gay activist, becoming the unofficial spokesperson for the JAC collective and publishing the essay "No More Shit," which dealt with the troubled relationship between gay men and the police force.

Grube's experiences and obsessions found their way into his poetry and fiction. In his 1997 book of short fiction, I'm Supposed to Be Crazy and Other Stories, there are echoes of his own life including stories set around the bathhouse raids and a prof fired from the University of Windsor. Similarly in his 2002 book of poetry God, Sex and Poetry he explored situations and subjects from his own life and the lives of those close to him. One of his poems — in which a young man is shamed by his father in front of his grandmother for being a hustler — was included in the anthology Seminal, the first collection of Canadian gay poetry, published last year by Arsenal Pulp Press. A devout Anglican, Grube's poetry often combined eroticism and theology, as in the poem "Finale."

Grube advocated for mentorship between older and younger gay men not for sex, though attraction was certainly a part of it. He enjoyed the challenge of dealing with young people and was invigorated by their energy. When he retired in the early '90s he soon found he missed that dynamic and spent a few years volunteering with the Toronto District School Board's Triangle Program.

He was also an advocate for older homos, participating in Gays and Lesbians Aging in the '90s and leading an oral history project called Foolscap which interviewed scores of older gay activists. Some of his findings were published in the Journal of Homosexuality in 1991 under the title "Natives and Settlers: An Ethnographic Note on Early Interaction of Older Homosexual Men with Younger Gay Liberationists."

Grube was an avid conspiracy theorist who often interpreted world events, from the FLQ crisis in Quebec in 1970 to the 2001 World Trade Center disaster, through a conspiracy theory model, often with the CIA emerging as one of the principal sinister forces. But for all that he could get carried away with his theories Grube had a brilliant, inquiring intellect. As lifelong friend Malcom Ferrier put it, "He'd never let a subject go until he examined it, wrung it out and illuminated it for all of us."

Although Grube could be quite exasperating he could also be very supportive, encouraging many to be true to themselves, particularly where their work was concerned. He was the one to encourage me to give up a career in academia and become a journalist in the 1970s.

"John was an early and encouraging advisor on some of my very first forays into fiction writing, aside from our various social encounters over the years," states novelist and Xtra book reviewer Jim Bartley. "[He was] a lovely man with a ready dry wit barbed when needed that was sometimes easy to miss."

"It saddens me greatly to think we have lost John," states activist and politico Bob Gallagher, who was one of the founders of the Foundation for Equal Families. "While I had not kept up with him in recent years, I often thought of him. He made a very profound impact on me probably much more than he realized. Our conversation on the concept of community and identity and political action were seminal events in my thinking and development."

Grube is survived by two sisters — Jenny Podlecki of Vancouver and Toni Swalgen of Long Island, NY — as well as many freinds, nephews and neices, and by his friend and mentoree Mark Hart. At his request, Grube's remains were cremated and will be scattered about one of Toronto's gay landmarks."
 
The author of that article is one of whom I mention above. It's a small world.
 
Haven't seen Jim in ages - I met him, through John Grube, in the late '70s when he lived on Palmerston. He phoned me when John died but I wasn't able to go to the memorial service. As the article notes - with some understatement - John "could be quite exasperating" at times, and I kept out of touch with him in his final years ... which I now rather regret, because he wanted us to get together. In fact he phoned me ( at six in the morning ) a few weeks before he died, and I was quite alarmed by his decline. He was a political animal by nature, we worked closely on various 'campaigns' at OCA when I was a student there, and later in the politicized gay community. He ran his fiction past me when he wanted an honest critique of the writing and I helped motivate him with some of it. A very complex man, impossible for many people to like ... and missed.
 
OMG Grube died??! How sad!! I wrote an essay last year focused on queers and urban space for my geography and politics classes, and I referenced his "No More Shit" article several times. How saddening to hear he's passed on. It's always unfortunate to see gay activists leave us. I'm only 21, so I have the utmost appreciation for people like him, and Harvey Milk, and the like.
 
He would have been delighted to hear that. Any reasonably attractive male who could pass for 21 gained his immediate attention.

Not sad, really. He was in declining health for a number of years with Parkinsons, and his time had come. He lived at 40 Homewood ( penthouse 7 ) when I first knew him, and then in a co-op at 31 Rosedale Road. Earlier, his parents George ( who chaired the founding convention of the CCF, and was the authority on Plato ) and Gwenneth lived in another co-op in Rosedale ( I forget where ) and I met them in the late '70s.

And he certainly wasn't a mainstream 'homintern' activist, and knew all kinds of people - gay and straight. When I was a student, he took me to meet Gilbert and Stewart Bagnani at their "baronial hall" in the country, for instance, where we had a nice lunch. Stuart was, essentially, a member of the Family Compact.

http://www.trentu.ca/admin/library/archives/97-003.htm

John was nutty as a fruitcake and told the most wonderful stories - how he was locked up in a "psycho ward" after the brouhaha at the University of Windsor ( before he started teaching at OCA in '71, when I met him ... ), for instance. About growing up in a CCF household with family friends such as Red Emma Goldman. About Quebec politics, which obsessed him and generated a couple of books. You name it, he knew it.

When we weren't much older than you, an art school friend and I helped him start on the novel he'd been trying to write. We decided he'd redo 'Little Red Riding Hood' - though didn't tell him that. We'd mail off instructions about how many words he was to write, and gave him a list of characters to include. He'd mail the chapter back, we'd read it and decide how closely he was to the original story - and mail back more instructions ( which included killing characters off ). Perhaps 'Southern Exposure' still exists in his papers, which he left to the University ( Trinity College, I think ). The whole role reversal aspect of students disciplining teacher appealed to him, and he did want to write that book, and he took it very seriously - more so than we did.

I could go on ... but won't.
 
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