Lost Boys

November 12, 2013, 2:09pm

When you get off the elevator onto the 24th floor, inside one of the many condominium towers on Church Street in Toronto, reverberations from the bass ripple out from the penthouse’s doorway, leaving no question as to where the predrink is taking place. Walking down the short corridor to that doorway became my transition into a world of club kids navigating Toronto’s gay party scene.

“It was like a mini Neverland. Swear to god. You could fly; you could be whomever you wanted for five hours. That’s what I did. I played dress up. I played make-believe,” says Matt Barker, one of many who let me photograph their world for nearly two years.

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Inside the penthouse, a Rihanna techno remix blasts from a YouTube playlist. People are a little cold, a little stiff. Some discreetly make their way into a bedroom to do coke, others go to the balcony to smoke and play with their phones—while most people stay in the kitchen drinking strong vodka mixes.

People filter in over the next hour, exchanging hellos and hugs. The conversation is littered with compliments on shoes and clothes, and it’s often “not very masculine,” says Adam Jonathan, another one of the penthouse regulars. “With that, there is a certain image to fit… When you don’t fit that image, we’re not the nicest.”

“That’s the one thing I hate about being gay,” Matt says. “Everything you do has to be gay. Everything.” According to Matt, that includes substances: “Every club kid that’s in my club kid family has a problem. Mental, physical, addicted to stuff…that’s the glue. If you’re too perfect, you don’t fit in with us.”

As departure time for the club approaches, the energy level continues to climb. Timing for when to drop MDMA is discussed to ensure that the high hits while in the club, and not a moment before. The dustings left in tiny coke bags are rubbed into the club kids’gums and a final cigarette is power smoked before heading down to the cab.

“The negative is the drama. When everyone’s drunk they’re not thinking straight. Things happen more dramatically and if you are indulging in drugs, it’s even worse. You become [a different person],” says another club kid, Spencer V.

Yet this is apparently what they’ve all been looking forward to for the past two days—just after the last party ended.

“You feel on top of the world, at that point, because you are in the most popular club in Toronto, drinking for free with a bunch people who are famous for going out,” Spencer says.

For them, Church Street—the main street in the “gaybourhood” where most of these photos were taken—is no longer the community anchor it once was. “Now gays can live anywhere they want,” Matt says, and many are leaving the gaybourhood they consider a ghetto because “it’s safe for us to live anywhere else.”

Now the area is viewed as a less political, party-centric version of its former self, rather than the hard-earned cultural space it actually is. And for these club kids, at this moment in the gaybourhood’s history, it’s a place to escape.

To see more, go to Alex’s website and/or follow him on Twitter: @alexramadan

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