Birthplace of the first ‘Village gai’ of Montréal, around rue Stanley, is the neighbourhood where the events of 1977 and 1990 took place. Both were dubbed Montréal’s Stonewall and both resulted from police raids on GLBT meeting places. 2027 will mark the 50th anniversary of a raid that would change the course of the struggle for our rights by setting in motion the ban on discrimination based on sexual orientation.
On October 22, 1977, after a raid on a gay bar on rue Stanley, the Truxx, accused of running a ‘house of debauchery’ where more than 140 gay men were brutally arrested. A nighttime protest organized at the initiative of the Association pour la défense des droits des gai(e)s gathered 2,000 angry gay men at the corner of Stanley and Sainte-Catherine. In the 1970s, raids on gay bars had multiplied in Montréal to ‘clean up’ the city ahead of the 1976 Olympics, and these practices had continued after the Games. This new abusive raid would prompt the Québec government, then led by René Lévesque’s Parti Québécois, to follow through on its 1976 election promise by adding sexual orientation to the prohibited grounds of discrimination in the Québec Charter of Rights on December 15, 1977, a first in the Americas.
In July 1990, another raid followed, this time at a private party, the Sex Garage, held in a vast loft in an industrial building on rue de la Gauchetière. On July 14, 1990, a group of police officers from the Communauté urbaine de Montréal, after removing their badges, decided to raid the party, citing noise as the reason. The roughly 400 participants were forced to leave the premises, then attacked by police when some of them tried to return for their personal belongings.
On July 16, after the police chief failed to keep his promise to meet, several hundred people turned up at the police station at the corner of De Maisonneuve and Saint-Mathieu for a peaceful kiss-in. While the protesters were all sitting on the ground, rows of police officers lined up in front of them to charge the crowd and force it to move on.
The brutality of the repression prompted several participants to get involved in the fight against violence toward gays and lesbians, which led in 1992 to the creation of the Table de concertation des lesbiennes et gais du Grand Montréal. In 1993, the Table secured public hearings held by the Commission des droits de la personne du Québec on violence and discrimination against gays and lesbians. The Commission’s report in 1994 From illegality to equality marked a new milestone in advancing LGBT rights in Québec, notably by paving the way for the recognition of same-sex couples. Several also got involved in setting up Divers/Cité which organized and rapidly expanded Montréal’s LGBT Pride parade from 1993 to 2008.