Sex Garage
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Sex Garage was an after-hours venue located in
Montreal Montreal ( ; officially Montréal, ) is the List of the largest municipalities in Canada by population, second-most populous city in Canada and List of towns in Quebec, most populous city in the Provinces and territories of Canada, Canadian ...
's
Old Montreal Old Montreal (French: ''Vieux-Montréal'') is a historic neighbourhood within the municipality of Montreal in the province of Quebec, Canada. Home to the Old Port of Montreal, the neighbourhood is bordered on the west by McGill Street, on th ...
district that catered to
LGBT ' is an initialism that stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender. In use since the 1990s, the initialism, as well as some of its common variants, functions as an umbrella term for sexuality and gender identity. The LGBT term is a ...
patrons in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The venue is most known for a 1990 police raid that has since been referred to as "Montreal's
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".


Police raid

In the early morning of July 16, 1990, police officers raided the venue under the premise that it was illegally selling alcohol, a tactic that professors Jason B. Crawford and Karen Herland stated was frequently used by officers to harass Montreal gay and lesbian businesses during this time period. The police would later assert that they had also been responding to an anonymous
noise complaint Noise regulation includes statutes or guidelines relating to sound transmission established by national, state or provincial and municipal levels of government. After the watershed passage of the United States Noise Control Act of 1972,U.S. Nois ...
and that the organizers had requested help, claims that photographer and Sex Club patron Linda Dawn Hammond has stated were false. Officers were initially unable to find any alcohol and left the premises but returned about 15 minutes later, at which point they forced Sex Garage's 400 patrons to evacuate. Sex Garage's patrons began leaving the venue, only to find a large police presence facing the venue's only exit door. Hammond stated that there were an estimated 32 to 40 officers and 16 police vehicles, some of which were from a police station outside of the area. Some of the patrons fled upon seeing the police while others watched the officers start to regroup into a battalion formation. Patrons were not allowed to return to Sex Garage to retrieve their possessions or look for friends. Once in formation the police began to heckle the patrons by shouting homophobic insults and making suggestive gestures, which the patrons responded to by chanting slogans such as "We're here, we're queer, we're proud of it!" At this point the officers began removing or covering their name tags and badge IDs and started trying to steer patrons towards Beaver Hall Hill, where more officers were waiting. It is believed that one partygoer, Bruce Buck, was the first person to be assaulted after he tried to go back into the venue to retrieve his leather jacket. He was severely beaten and arrested for "assaulting a police officer". After this point the officers began beating the other patrons. During this entire process Hammond shot photographs of everything, a process that was somewhat hampered as she was only carrying a camera with a 28 mm wide angle lens, which required her to be in close proximity to take detailed photographs. She stated that the police did not initially stop her from taking photographs, which she believed was done because "the police may have speculated that I could be taken at any time, and I may as well provide THEM with the documentation." However eventually the police began pursuing Hammond, at which point she managed to throw her camera to another patron as they were fleeing the scene. The following day Hammond's pictures were published in ''
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'' and '' La Presse''. Video footage of the raid was also found and released, which showed officers using homophobic and derogatory language while physically assaulting members of the crowd, which has since been used to deem the raid as a targeted assault against Montreal's LGBT community. By the assault's end eight people were arrested.


Protests

Hours after the raid victims of the assault, along with other citizens of Montreal, held a
sit-in A sit-in or sit-down is a form of direct action that involves one or more people occupying an area for a protest, often to promote political, social, or economic change. The protestors gather conspicuously in a space or building, refusing to mo ...
at
Saint Catherine Street Sainte-Catherine Street (french: rue Sainte-Catherine) () is the primary commercial artery of Downtown Montreal, Quebec, Canada. It crosses the central business district from west to east, beginning at the corner of Claremont Avenue and de M ...
to protest the night's events. The group demanded several things, including a
public inquiry A tribunal of inquiry is an official review of events or actions ordered by a government body. In many common law countries, such as the United Kingdom, Republic of Ireland, Ireland, Australia and Canada, such a public inquiry differs from a royal ...
and the removal of any charges against the patrons. The protesters disbanded after they were promised that police chief Alain St-Germain would meet them the following day at downtown Station 25. When St-Germain did not appear the following day protesters held a sit-in demonstration, only for about 70 police officers to attack the protesters. Forty-eight protesters were arrested with most assaulted by the police both on the streets and when they were taken into the police station, one of which, was hospitalized after paramedics argued with police to let them attend his injuries.


Legacy

Due to the violence inflicted during the raid and during the resulting protests, the civil rights group Lesbians and Gays Against Violence was formed and several members became part of the Montreal police's minority relations committee. The brutality of the assault against the Sex Garage patrons and protesters is also credited with bringing the Montreal LGBT community together and with alerting other citizens of the unfair treatment of gays and lesbians. The event led to the creation of
Divers/Cité Divers/Cité was an LGBT multidisciplinary arts and music festival taking place each year in the heart of Montreal, since 1993. A week-long avant-garde event in the heart of downtown Montreal and in Montreal's Gay Village area held usually on the e ...
in 1993."Raid united city's LGBT community". ''
Montreal Gazette The ''Montreal Gazette'', formerly titled ''The Gazette'', is the only English-language daily newspaper published in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Three other daily English-language newspapers shuttered at various times during the second half of th ...
'', June 27, 2015.
Divers/Cité served as the city's primary
LGBT pride LGBT pride (also known as gay pride or simply pride) is the promotion of the self-affirmation, dignity, equality, and increased visibility of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people as a social group. Pride, as opposed to sham ...
festival until repositioning itself as a general arts and music festival in 2006 before filing for bankruptcy in 2015. The yearly Pervers/Cité, an
alternative culture Alternative culture is a type of culture that exists outside or on the fringes of mainstream or popular culture, usually under the domain of one or more subcultures. These subcultures may have little or nothing in common besides their relative ...
event organized as a reaction to Divers/Cité, has named one of their stages the Sex Garage stage after the venue.


References


External links


Photographs
of the protest at
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Linda Dawn Hammond's account of the raid
{{LGBT in Canada 1990 in LGBT history 1990 in Quebec LGBT culture in Montreal LGBT history in Canada Nightclubs in Montreal Old Montreal Police raids to LGBT venues