Photo Courtesy Studio ZX

The graffiti-covered Van Horne skatepark on the edge of Montreal’s Mile End is usually dotted with boys in beanies and sneakers, launching themselves into the rink with the cracking sound of skateboard wheels hitting concrete. But, every Thursday night for a brief stint during the summer of 2021, they were replaced with a different crowd: femme, queer, and trans people, speeding by on skateboards or rollerskates as their friends cheered them on.

As the sky darkened, more people arrived. They came dressed to impress and eager to be with others who understood queer joy. When Vicky B. Ouellette, a trans woman and community activist, looked down into the skatepark the first time she attended “Tran Horne Take-Over,” she couldn’t hold back tears. “I’d never seen something quite like [it]. It was so precious and so exclusively queer, and it was really important.”

“There’s a lack of understanding that we create these spaces out of necessity, not out of entertainment,” Ouellette explains as she recalls the weekly event, which was intended to unite femme, queer, and trans people during Montreal’s COVID-19 lockdown. However, with each passing week, Ouellette noticed a shift: slowly, more straight, cisgender people who seemed like observers rather than participants started to attend, recording videos and taking photos. By August, the event was shut down. She believes that the police discovered it as a result of these people broadcasting the event online.

Despite knowing that the events broke the city’s stringent rules against gathering at the time, Ouellette also knows they were deeply necessary. She cites this saga as an example of how there is a widespread absence of awareness around the importance of nightlife for queer Montrealers. For many, coming together with their community is more than just a hangout; it’s seeing their self-made family.

Ouellette is the founder of Studio ZX and the president of MTL 24/24’s advisory council, two organizations driving nightlife activism for marginalized communities. To her and many others, the act of nighttime entertainment and gathering is sacred. If an event or venue is expressly queer-friendly, it becomes a haven for people to let loose without the fear of being misgendered, harassed, or othered. However, as city officials place greater scrutiny on the nightlife sector, the underground scenes that the community has built may be pushed further to the fringes.

In April 2024, Montreal’s Commission on Economic and Urban Development and Housing presented its final nightlife policy recommendations in a public assembly meeting. It was a step toward the city’s intention to spend $2.1 million to create a 24-hour nightlife zone, likely in the Latin Quarter, as well as “nocturnal vitality zoning” throughout the city. The details of the latter are still vague, with a sense that this zoning would permit alcohol sales after 3 a.m. (the city’s current cutoff). These developments may pad the city’s bottom line, but the policy lacks clear details on how it will include or protect the main drivers of Montreal’s local nightlife scenes and its most vulnerable populations: queer and racialized artists, patrons, and workers.

For those who are not within these minority groups, it can be difficult to understand the constant feeling of unease and danger in nightlife. When asked if she feels unwelcome in nightlife spaces that are not expressly queer-friendly, Ouellette was quick to answer: “Absolutely. It’s just so easy to be objectified, or fetishized, or harassed, or screamed at, or [looked at] cross-eyed. Stuff like that is so common.”

Maintaining physical safety is also a factor. For racialized people and those who are both queer and racialized, some of the peril in nightlife is not overtly violent, but stems from a sense of otherness in some of the city’s scenes. “Being hit on by cishet men not knowing that I’m trans is a situation that is extremely uncomfortable, and can be dangerous,” Amai Doucet, Studio ZX’s media relations and communities manager, explains.

For too many people, discomfort, and sometimes violence, is the status quo in nightlife. Canada’s Survey of Safety in Public and Private Spaces found that sexual minorities are nearly three times more likely to experience violent victimization and more than twice as likely to experience inappropriate sexual behaviours than heterosexual people. Studies have also shown that racialized women who report violence are often taken less seriously than white women, leaving them at further risk.

The document outlining the city’s most recent recommendations for the nightlife policy includes a section titled Safety & Security, which emphasizes a need to increase funding for NGOs that work to decrease night-based sexual violence and collaboration between these groups, the city, and Quebec’s Ministry of Labour, Employment and Social Solidarity. Although these recommendations are a starting point, they are so general that it is difficult to glean any concrete plans.

Queer and racialized groups, and the threat of danger they face, are mentioned in the published recommendations, but the details are scant. One recommendation is to “support the creation and maintenance of inclusive nighttime community spaces for marginalized communities, such as LGBTQ2+ people, racialized communities, and people with disabilities.” Although marginalized communities and safety issues are both mentioned broadly, the document does not link the two. (This Magazine contacted several city officials who were part of the policy’s creation for comment, but none were willing to speak about the policy directly.)

As Montreal prepares to invest millions into nightlife, there is no better time for the city to improve its relationship with some of its more important players. Montreal cannot continue to undervalue the voices of marginalized groups as it enacts policies that directly affect these communities.

Last year, FANTOM, a non-profit that serves as a voice for queer and racialized people in Montreal nightlife, conducted a survey to assess its community’s needs. By far, the top concerns were safety and security, with 61 percent of queer and 58 percent of racialized surveyees mentioning it in their responses. FANTOM’s co-founder, Oliver Philbin-Briscoe, was pleasantly surprised to see that the new recommendations mentioned safety for marginalized groups at all—it’s the first time the city has done so in writing, as far as he remembers.

FANTOM envisions several projects that may help address queer and racialized people’s safety concerns, like an app to search for, review, and share venue information and the creation of more local, community-owned and operated event spaces. Still, many activists have more expansive ideas that require significant funding, resources, and collaboration with local officials.

For example, Philbin-Briscoe says it’s important to expand public transit hours to match the proposed 24-hour zones, ensuring that after-hours patrons and workers would have affordable and reliable methods to return home safely. This idea is proposed in the document, but Philbin-Briscoe is reluctant to celebrate it as a win before further steps are taken. Ouellette suggests a more qualitative path forward: a widespread education campaign illustrating the realities of marginalized communities.

Another key solution that activists emphasize is well-trained security personnel. Doucet believes that good security must hold a deep understanding of the needs of marginalized communities and be sensitive to the existing tensions between these groups and law enforcement. Several of FANTOM’s survey respondents felt that overly aggressive and poorly trained security are a central problem for marginalized communities in the underground and after-hours nightlife scene. Doucet suggests mandatory training that focuses on harm reduction and de-escalation rather than the use of violence.

Ouellette says that she believes the city’s lack of consideration for marginalized communities is not ill-intentioned, but rather, stems from a lack of knowledge and resources. However, Doucet thinks there is a relatively simple way to address this problem: to put more marginalized people in decision-making roles. “This would make sure we don’t get to a point where we’re asked our opinion after 95 percent of the work is done and most of it can’t even be changed,” she says.

Doucet suggests a council of queer and racialized people that can advocate for themselves in the city’s policymaking, in nightlife and beyond. Sometimes, she says, policymakers may not consider what Black and Brown folks, women, and queer people need because they don’t know their life experiences. That’s why Montreal needs these groups to be involved in making decisions about this city’s future.

Queer and racialized nightlife activists are cautiously optimistic, but wary of what is to come. To ensure that their hope is not misplaced, marginalized people’s concerns, solutions, and voices must be a central and meaningful part of Montreal’s nightlife policy.

Photo by Patrick Sicotte

A late summer day in 2008 changed everything for the community of Montréal-Nord, a multicultural suburban borough in the city’s north end. Fredy Villanueva, an 18-year-old Honduran refugee, was shot and killed by a police officer in a park. The shock of his death rippled through the tight-knit neighbourhood, sparking immediate outrage, rioting, and protests.

Cassandra Exumé, currently the General Coordinator at Hoodstock, was the same age as Villanueva at the time. She remembers watching the borough she associated with childhood summers on the news, erupting in pain. Montréal-Nord was at a breaking point.

“The same day that there was the demonstration here in Montréal-Nord, Guillaume Hébert, Nargess Mustapha, and Will Prosper [Hoodstock’s co-founders] were just like, okay, we’re talking, we’re sad—but let’s build something from that sadness,” says Exumé. “We’re in pain right now. Just to make sure that this never happens again, what can we do?”

Out of those urgent conversations, Hoodstock, the grassroots neighbourhood collective, was born. It was first called Montréal-Nord Républik, Exumé explains, raising a little fist with a smile on “Républik.” The current name proudly puts “hood” at the front, riffing off the collective and the musical association of Woodstock for the rhyme.

Montréal-Nord, the neighbourhood Hoodstock calls home, has long been stigmatized, overlooked, and underestimated. Many residents are low-income and/or people of colour, with 42 percent of the community identifying as immigrants, according to the 2016 census. While the borough is strongly francophone, many members of the community are multilingual.

The organization runs on a “for us, by us” philosophy, with a BIPOC and immigrant-led team. Hoodstock organizes community meetings, consultations, and projects, often does workshops in schools, and organizes social events. They’ve recently moved into an open-door neighbourhood office, responding to their neighbours’ needs (such as helping them register to get a provincial healthcare card, enroll in government French classes, or resolve conflicts) as they arise or as they stop by. In the past year and a half, those needs have shifted dramatically.

Over the course of the pandemic, Montréal-Nord has experienced the highest concentration of COVID-19 cases in the city, with 12,199 cumulative cases per 100,000 people. In spring 2020, Hoodstock saw that many community members were being left behind by the federal and provincial government’s pandemic response, so they sprung into action.

“Could you imagine [experiencing the pandemic as] someone who doesn’t speak French or English, who is new to the country?” says Exumé.

The team went door-to-door distributing PPE and talking with people cooped up in their apartments. They organized a grocery delivery program for elders and the vulnerable, as well as connecting families with tablets and laptops for online schooling. “If we’d stuck to our original plan for 2020, we wouldn’t have helped so many people,” she says. “We have our vision, but we really are flexible with the changes of the world.”

Hoodstock works to fill in the gaps left by a systemic lack of resources and support for the borough. Current projects include Le Hood Stop, which will engage local youth in conversations around sexual assault and consent, a similar effort to talk to teens about gun- and gang-related violence, workshops to maintain momentum in the wake of George Floyd’s death, and connecting low-income households with affordable Wi-Fi plans.

It’s difficult for an organization like Hoodstock to plan too far into the future, as their work is determined by the ever-changing needs of their community, but Exumé sees this as the grassroots collective’s strength. “There are a lot of things we are not responsible for, but the systems are not taking care of us,” says Exumé. “How come a young, small organization has to do the work of a big government?”

Taking to the ice with smooth transitions and ever-changing focal points, contemporary ice skating company Le Patin Libre uses minimalistic choreography to create a performance that founder Alexandre Hamel calls “magical.” The Montreal-based troupe, founded by Hamel in 2005, focuses on providing a skating experience for its audience that’s free from competition and scores.

“It’s a little revolt,” says Hamel, explaining how contemporary skating is another way of looking at skating as an art. “Contemporary arts are made for poetic reasons, not for commercial reasons. There’s a desire of expression, of viewing art as a way to analyze the world, to analyze one’s self. This is what we’re interested in doing, and skating is not our end, but our means of doing so.”

After quitting the figure skating circuit and, later, Disney On Ice, Hamel created Le Patin Libre to preserve his love for skating. Starting on frozen ponds in Quebec, the group has grown into an international act that sets the bar for contemporary skating. Gradually, the members of the present company joined, and a more defined idea of contemporary skating was developed.

At the beginning of the troupe’s journey, the skating artists performed choreography that was heavy with acrobatic stunts set to rock tunes. The group soon broke from their “teenage-like” rebellion of the traditional world of figure skating and became what they are today. “We concentrated on the glide. This is the ultimate identity of skating. This is contemporary ice skating.”

Rediscovering the art of the glide and integrating it into their performances has led Le Patin Libre to the popularity they needed to be able to share their shows with audiences on rinks around the world. Le Patin Libre’s outlook on skating restructures the rink, calling on the spirit of community rather than competition. Hamel says, “Our art not only questions skating, it questions the ice rink in Canadian culture—it’s a big project.”

Photo by the Canadian Press/Ryan Remiorz.

On a sunny Friday afternoon this past August, families—many of Haitian descent—began crossing through the Canadian border from Champlain, New York. Suitcases in hand, they started their trek to Canada in search of asylum—and a new home. Early this year, President Donald Trump threatened to end a program that granted Haitians temporary protection after their country’s devastating earthquake in 2010. The result was the mass arrival of hundreds into Canada, and in August alone, an estimated 6,000 asylum seekers crossed into Quebec. Hotels were not enough; Montreal’s Olympic Stadium became a temporary home for many. And while the number of border crossers appears to be slowing, the Canadian government still has plenty of work ahead.

Photo courtesy of L’Euguélionne.

On a Thursday evening in May, about a dozen women gather around a large wooden table at L’Euguélionne, Canada’s only feminist bookstore. The Montreal shop is filled with chatter as the crew, participants in a zine-making workshop, sift through piles of paper. Since it opened in December 2016, L’Euguélionne has become a hub, hosting public events like this one, along with launches, discussion groups, panels, and intimate concerts nearly every night—and Montrealers have been quick to embrace it, says Stéphanie Dufresne, one of the store’s six co-owners. “I think it’s magical in that we’ve received a positive reaction from so many communities,” she says.

Located in the city’s gay village, L’Euguélionne carries about 4,000 titles—from sci-fi and graphic novels, to poetry, critical essays, and zines. While most material is in French, the staff hopes to expand their English inventory this summer.

Still, for the owners, launching a feminist bookstore was about more than just literature. While they’re aiming to elevate feminist writers and voices—particularly those who tend to go unrecognized like queer writers and writers of colour—they’re also hoping to fill a void.

Dufresne says that starts with the neighbourhood. “The discourse that surrounds the village is that it’s for LGBTQ+ people but when you look at who uses the space, who owns the businesses, it’s mostly gay men,” she explains. “We thought it was a somewhat political move to… create a space for women, feminine-identified, and gender non-conforming people.”

Lack of space is something she also sees throughout the city. While there’s been an increasing focus on feminist issues in recent years, Dufresne points out that there are still few designated spaces where communities can learn about and share feminist ideas. To her, having a building where others can reliably meet and access information is key. “Media discussions are temporary. A story breaks and disappears,” she says. “But books are more permanent and can provide context.”

So far, L’Euguélionne has allowed many types of feminists to interact, Dufresne says. Parents arrive looking for books for their kids. Students come to purchase course material. A recent panel discussion between a number of academics was attended by a group of older women from a nearby women’s shelter, some of whom had participated in Montreal’s feminist movements in the 1960s and ’70s.

Moving forward, Dufresne says she and her fellow co-owners hope to continue to see patrons using the space to elevate and educate one another.

“My definition of feminism is, if it’s not intersectional what’s the point?” she says. “If you exclude people you’re just reproducing what you’re trying to fight.”

Montreal’s Lachine Canal. Photo courtesy of MTLBlog.

The Lachine Canal is emblematic of Montreal’s revival. Tourists write about it. Modern condos sprout up next to it. A bike path running along the waterway is rated among the world’s best rides.

But alongside the canal’s booming recreational offerings are the remnants of its industrial history.

A review of a national database of federal industrial cleanup found that three notable contaminated areas in Canada sit within a kilometre of large population clusters (20,000 or more people), and all three of those sites are along the Lachine Canal.

“For more than a century, the Lachine Canal has been ground zero for Canadian debates over industrialization, urban poverty… and gentrification,” says Concordia University historian Steven High.

Now, as the area densifies at a steady clip, concerns over environmental contamination are bubbling to the surface. While Parks Canada assures the canal and surrounding area aren’t a public health concern, not everyone is convinced. In the summer of 2015 alone, the canal was closed to boaters more than a half-dozen times after sewage leaks posed health hazards. Even activist Erin Brockovich chimed in on the 2015 sewage issues, posting on Facebook that the leaks were “pure TNT (turds ‘n’ tampons).”

One of the three contaminated sites has been mostly cleaned up, but the two others have a long way to go. One site hosts more than 3,000 tons of petroleum hydrocarbons (PHCs), polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), metal/metalloid/metallic contaminants, and “other organic” contaminants. A cleanup plan for the site was only completed after seven years of stagnation. The site’s cleanup, according to Parks Canada representative Audrey Godin-Champagne, “will be managed during the construction phase of the new bicycle path project in 2018-19.” The other contaminated area has just over 500 tons of the same toxins, and there’s no clear plan for cleaning it.

Meanwhile, some local politicians are angling to slow development in the area they say isn’t prepared for more population density. “As of today, the open bar for developers is over,” councillor Craig Sauvé told media last year. “From now on it will be we who decide, with the input of citizens, through the development of a good planning strategy.”

Read the author’s interviews from the story on GitHub.

Photo by Pascha Marrow

Asking Kama La Mackerel what her art practice consists of is not an easy question to answer, but one she reacts to with a smile and a warm, inviting laugh. From poet to photographer, curator to performance artist, the simple response, she says, is that she has never restricted herself. “It’s about letting my body and my heart speak and create what it wants to create,” she says.

Regardless of the medium, she says her relationship to her art is closely tied to her relationship to her femininity. “As someone who was assigned male at birth and had to reclaim my femininity through the years and repress my femininity when I was a child, I had to repress that artistic and creative side of me. It allowed me to find myself and who I am.”

In 2013, La Mackerel added founder to her roster, with the creation of her queer open stage mic project, Gender B(l)ender. The collective came out of a personal need: La Mackerel says she found it difficult to find a stage she felt comfortable sharing her art on when she moved to Montreal in 2011. “There are so many open mics in Montreal, but open mics are not [always] safe for queer and trans people,” she says. Her goal was to create an experimental environment where “anybody from the LGBTQ community could come in and perform whatever they wanted”—whether someone wants to try drag for the first time, do a poetry reading, or try their hand at comedy. La Mackerel says about 50 percent of current performers are people of colour, while 9 out of 10 are women or femmes and trans. “They are the people who need it the most,” she says. Now, each monthly event reaches capacity, and she has to cap the number of performances; otherwise, “it could go on forever.”

Both Gender B(l)ender’s audience and performers are diverse, coming from a range of backgrounds and lived experiences. “What I really love about it is that it’s an intergenerational space,” La Mackerel says. “My favourite moments are when trans women come who are in their sixties, and I’m like, ‘You’re my elders! I can’t believe you’re here!’ I get really excited when that happens.”

La Mackerel grew up in Mauritius, a plantation island off the Indian Ocean that was a British colony until 1968, which has led to intergenerational and colonial violence on her family. “I don’t think I understood this when I was younger, but colonial violence expresses itself in so many ways. I don’t think you can talk about race separately from gender,” she says.

That’s why La Mackerel designed the Gender B(l)ender stage as a place for performers to discuss identity through art. “It’s about the conversations, and creating that space where we can find each other,” she says. “Some people go on stage for the first time in their lives, and that’s something I don’t take for granted; that people are so willing to share their ownness. The audience really wants to hold that space and allow that vulnerability to grieve and exist.”

And La Mackerel is no stranger to being vulnerable in her own work, regularly grappling with the idea of her own healing, with subject matter spanning gender, race, sexuality, and anti-colonial resistance.

Besides preparing for Gender B(l)ender’s return after its short hiatus over the summer, La Mackerel is keeping busy with two ongoing projects: From Thick Skin to Femme Armour, a multimedia, multi-dimensional research project about femme of colour resistance across history, and Breaking the Promise of Tropical Emptiness, a postcard photography project about Mauritian transwomanhood. She is also starting an eight-month artist residency in the Faculty of Education at McGill University.

“There’s the art, and the final performances, but really, my art is about the process. The process is where I grow, where I learn, where I heal,” she says. “Those are my stories, that’s my lived experience, and I know other people connect to that story.”

Growing up in a low-income household in a small Quebec town, Starchild Stela passed the time drawing. “It was one of the few things I felt I received validation for,” they say. As a teen they started to graffiti and moved to Montreal where they have been working since. Within the last five years the artist says they have become more dedicated to their art, a mix of soft and bright colours—with feminist messaging. The artist often refers to it as “radical cute culture” or “radical softness.” Feminist messaging is incorporated in their artwork with mottoes such as, “I believe you,” and “unapologetically feminist.”

The mix of art and feminism in their work is organic and can’t be disassociated, they say. “My work comes from my heart and guts,” they add. “I started to explore feminism and anti-oppression politics while I was processing traumatic gender experiences. It helped me understand trauma in a larger context.” As their understanding of feminism evolves, so does their work. Stela’s earlier work was a nod to how much they loved 1980s and ’90s manga as a teen. Now, they say their work—with its soft, luminous imagery—reflects their personality as an adult.

“I also want to dedicate myself a bit more to radical softness,” they say. “I would love to co-organize a radical softness art show, and maybe a pop-up gallery for a month.” They have a strong interest in community building and are excited to collaborate more with friends and other artists. Like with hosting art-making workshops as therapy for survivors of sexual violence: “I’m interested in focusing on my experiences with coping with trauma and art-making as survival.”

A former This intern, Hillary Di Menna is in her second year of the gender and women’s studies program at York University. She also maintains an online feminist resource directory, FIRE- Feminist Internet Resource Exchange.

UPDATE (SEPTEMBER 5, 2017): The subject of the story’s pronouns have been updated from the original point of publication.

Photo by Mark J Chalifoux Photography

Montreal choreographer confronts street life, addiction, and the Canadian aboriginal experience

As calls for a public inquiry into the many cases of missing and murdered aboriginal women in Canada go unheard by the federal government, Montreal choreographer Lara Kramer’s most recent piece, titled NGS (“Native Girl Syndrome”), could not be more timely.

“Native Girl Syndrome” references a term Kramer came across as she researched her first dance piece on residential schools (a compulsory education system notorious for its abuse and assimilation of aboriginal children in Canada). The term refers to the likelihood of aboriginal girls who, upon leaving residential school, enter abusive relationships or prostitution. Too often,  these women also end up on the streets or in jail. “I thought the name was really potent,” says Kramer, “so I held on to it. It really helped shape the piece.”

NGS explores themes of addiction, cultural disorientation, and alienation, all in relation to the Canadian aboriginal experience. Performed by Karina Iraola and Angie Cheng, it unfolds against a backdrop of street and urban culture. Kramer says the initial inspiration for the work was her grandmother, who moved  from her remote community of Lac Seul in northwestern Ontario to live on the city streets in Winnipeg.

The piece is not, however, a depiction of the one specific story of her grandmother, adds Kramer. Rather, NGS offers comment on street life, the addiction of two women—and something larger.  Kramer’s characters have a history. “NGS looks at the aftermath of cultural genocide in Canada, the whitewashing of native people in this country and its effects,” Kramer says, “When I see the vicious cycle of addiction and prostitution of First Nations women, I feel it’s part of something bigger.”

Since it was first performed last year, NGS has toured to Montreal, Vancouver, and Edmonton, among other cities. Kramer has designed the piece to be accessible to an audience beyond contemporary dance enthusiasts—she straddles the line between dance and theatre to be as realistic as possible. No background in dance is required to understand the themes and messages.

In this regard, NGS is characteristic of Kramer’s approach to movement and the body. She didn’t want to use the body as an abstract form, says Kramer. “I wanted to go from a realistic approach,” she adds, “so a lot of my approach to the body is giving the performer time to investigate the environment.”

Although Kramer’s roots, ancestors and much of her family are from the Lac Seul First Nation community, she was born in London, Ont. She has been dancing since she was three years old, eventually moving to Montreal, Que., to study dance creation at Concordia University, graduating in 2008. In 2012, she founded her company, Lara Kramer Danse, to support the research, creation and production of her work and community projects, such as offering school-age children an opportunity to connect with theatre and dance. Her work has become more politically charged with time and now focuses around human rights issues affecting aboriginals in Canada, which earned her recognition as a human rights advocate from the Montreal Holocaust Memorial Centre.

Next spring, Kramer will start on the creation of a piece titled Tame, which deals with the themes of restraint on self-expression and the boundaries between normalcy and creative expression, which she expects to be ready for fall 2015. Although no performances of NGS are scheduled at the moment, Kramer is planning some for the coming months, notably in the U.S.

Illustration by Dave Donald

Thoughts on the creative value of taking a break

“MY LIFE IN MONTREAL WAS SO GOOD,” said the songwriter Sean Nicholas Savage in a recent interview for Bad Day magazine. “We did so many projects. We made tons of albums and we were making movies and just doing tons of shit all the time.” Savage worked at a call centre a couple of days a week between playing music and, like Grimes and Mac DeMarco and any number of Montrealers now doing good in the world, creating a body of work.

Montreal, or rather Anglo Montreal as seen by outsiders, is a Bum City. And Bum Cities are incredibly important: places where you can go and live cheaply and do your work (like, your “Work”), ideally well enough that you’ll get to schlep it to a bigger, more expensive city if you choose to. From what I gather, Savage now lives in Brooklyn.

In Toronto and, I imagine, New York, devoting yourself to art is a form of idleness, and idleness is not a virtue. This is largely because of the cost of living, but also, Toronto and New York are places where, in theory, you could get a paying job in a creative field—you just have to work really hard to get it, and once you get it you have to work twice as hard not to lose it, because there will always be people who haven’t gotten it yet and are willing to work harder than you. In Toronto and cities like it, indolence is a vice. All the best people are busy.

I was born and raised in Toronto, which is probably why I so admire and mythologize the Bum Life. I’m also tired of hearing people boast about how busy they are, tired of hearing myself boast about how busy I am, tired of being busy. So early this spring, I stopped hustling for freelance work on top of my full-time gig and gave myself a month or two to “do my thing.”

I started a new skin care regimen. I planned outfits and took long walks just to “air” them. I worked eight-hour days, started drinking at 5:30 p.m., read music biographies for kicks and bad short fiction for the hell of it. I relaxed. And I was lonely, very lonely, because my friends all have jobs and freelance gigs on top of their jobs. And I was miserable, so very miserable, because for the first time in years I considered my personal life, and the kind of person I wanted to be, and saw that I was coming up real short.

Mostly, I felt guilty. I had a sense of wastefulness: leisure seemed like a frivolous indulgence, especially in a city where no one else could afford it. Also worthless, because the thing about being at leisure among the busy is that it’s not a good look. Being busy is as much a privilege as being not busy, so I don’t say any of this to complain. Only to praise Bum Cities, those little pockets in which leisure is valued.

Then again, “bum” is a misnomer. And maybe I’ve internalized the hard-work ideology more than my Jimmy Buffett/Kevin Ayers fantasies suggest. Being a bum, in the Montreal-musician-as-seen-by-Torontonian sense, is actually very labour intensive. The success of a Savage or a Grimes abides the 10,000 hours rule: they worked really, really hard on their own stuff, stuff no one valued outside of a like minded community, stuff that the world is now starting to appraise. Meanwhile, 10,000 ad copywriters and magazine hacks and radio producers are chipping away idly at the novels they’d have finished if they weren’t paying for condos or Brockton Village apartments.

These days I am busy again, and feeling all the time like something is wrong: there is something I forgot to do, something I have to do that I don’t know whether I’m capable of, something I have to do that I’m capable of and dreading severely. These are good, familiar feelings compared to the one that marked my not-busy time. There is something wrong with me. There is. But I don’t have time to think about that now.

Alexandra Molotkow has written for the Walrus, the Globe and Mail, Toronto Life, Maisonneuve, and the New York Times Magazine.