“Just last month, my husband was knocked over by a group of drunk straight women who were 10 minutes late to the drag show and wanted to be up front,” he tells Logo. This was not the first or even the most recent time he or his husband were harassed. Mikhail, 34, remembers being out dancing with his husband when a woman from a bachelorette party pushed her finger through his shorts and touched his asshole on the dance floor. The more I spoke with other queer nightlife professionals and enthusiasts, the more stories like this I heard. I eventually had her kicked out of the bar when she tried to get even more violent with me.” “She then tried to justify that because I’m gay, I shouldn’t care, and I had no idea what she meant by that. “If it isn’t okay for me to do this to you without consent, what makes you think you can do that to me?’” he asked. To prove a point, Kero grabbed her chest. Taking his kindness as a green light to push further, she grabbed his chest and started rubbing his crotch while laughing. He and a group of friends were watching a drag show when a young woman approached and complimented him. Over the phone, Kero recalls a particularly harrowing experience in a popular drag bar.
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“There are two types of straight people that typically come to queer spaces: the ones who come in large numbers and have no respect of how to behave in a queer space and try to take over, and there are the allies, who are well-educated and understand that they are guests in our space,” Toronto-based drag performer Kero Saleib tells Logo. It’s just part of the job.” I quit after two months. She responded by winking and mouthing the words, “You’re welcome.”Ī veteran co-worker later assured me, “You’ll get used to it. On one particular occasion, I looked back at a drunken ass-grabber to scold her. I received an offer 24 hours later to work at one of the city’s most popular bars, which hosted drag shows every night of the week and was particularly popular among queer students and straight women.ĭuring my stint as a bartender and bar-back, comments like, “It’s a shame that you’re gay,” and unsolicited ass- and crotch-grabbing, were nightly occurrences almost exclusively from straight women clientele. In a desperate attempt to make friends and money, I created a Grindr profile looking for a job as a bartender since I lived one street away from the city’s gay village.
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When I moved to Toronto from my hometown of Hamilton, once mortifyingly crowned the city with the most hate crimes in Canada, it was 2018, and I only had one friend.