(Re)materializing Ephemera from Toronto’s Queer Nightlife

QueerSoftOrange in Conversation with Craig Jennex

Queer Soft Orange, *bad 2 the bone*, 2023. Photo: Alison Postma. Courtesy of the plumb.

QueerSoftOrange (QSO) is a collective of queer artist-practitioners radiating outward from south-western Ontario and beyond dedicated to fostering community through an acute engagement with the Internet. The members of QSO came together out of an urgent need to build and maintain connective infrastructure within queer communities as physical spaces for such communities are increasingly threatened and shrinking. QSO shares resources, creates reading lists, collaborates on art and curatorial projects, and hosts peer-based online studio visits and community mentorship programs — all in the service of emergent queer art and visual culture past, present, and future.Sharing their work and research beyond the collective builds reciprocity, extending community resources and connections to other generations of queer artists. Finding shared terrain across generations and archiving the Queer-now are vital to QSO’s goals.

In June 2023, QSO members Adrien Crossman, Maddie Alexander, Luke Maddaford, Tyler Matheson, Morris Fox, and Dana Buzzee organized bad 2 the bone at the plumb in Toronto. They spoke with Craig Jennex, Assistant Professor of English at Toronto Metropolitan University and scholar of LGBTQ2+ nightlife, about the event.

Craig Jennex On June 23, 2023, for one night only, QSO transformed the plumb into a gay bar that doubled as an immersive archive of queer nightlife in Toronto and beyond. I was fortunate to see this exhibition develop, but when I arrived for the party, I was struck by how incredible it felt to be surrounded by evidence of queer histories, your contemporary artwork, and a temporary collective made possible through your bringing together of different eras of queer sociality. As someone who studies queer nightlife and the shared feelings of bliss it can elicit, I was really moved by this exhibition. Let’s start with this: why’d you call the exhibition bad 2 the bone?

Morris Fox We were thinking about hauntings, having a bone to pick, what’s bred in the bones, skeletons in closets, and more. Maddie landed on bad 2 the bone, which also points toward the way queers are “bad” in relation to heterosexuality. I think about being a care-taker of bones as well: We work to preserve and love our queer bones, the dead, our ancestors, etc.

Tyler Matheson There’s an obvious double entendre here, too, in terms of boning and sexuality. But we also wanted to reference a fracture in history and time. In this project, we sought to conjure the skeletons and unearth fragments of queer Toronto nightlife. We wanted to memorialize the past while also appreciating and creating the future.

CJ Your reference to a fracture in time is interesting. Is that why the bone in the logo you created for the exhibition is broken? What does this breakage signify? Do we want to repair it, or is there something generativein the break?

Luke Maddaford The broken bone symbolizes a disruption. A breakage, a slippage, an opportunity to restart, to heal. A break can be a turning point.

CJ You paired this broken bone with text exclaimingthat “this space does not exist.” What space are you referring to here? And why did you want to foreground its non-existence?

TM As a gay bar in an art gallery, this space exists only as an idea or a dream of what the gay bar has been, should be, or could be. To reference José Esteban Muñoz, the space is an ideal — a possibility visible on the horizon. It was important to us that the reception doubled as a one-night-only party. It functions as it's happening, and its fleeting potentiality is only tangible in the moment. Then it’s gone.

Queer Soft Orange, *bad 2 the bone*, 2023. Photo: Tyler Matheson. Courtesy of Queer Soft Orange.

Adrien Crossman We also wanted to foreground how so many queer and dyke bars have closed in this region: the Henhouse, the Beaver, the Holy Oak — all integral queer social spaces in Toronto from the mid-2000s through the 2010s. We wanted to pay homage to the bar owners, DJs, poster designers, and clientele who made those spaces what they were. Part of the impetus for this project was to recreate some of the magic that those of us in QSO experienced in these spaces, together and independently. Even though many of these bars are now closed, their memories and energies live on, and we hope to carry that through this project and into the future.

CJ This sense of being “haunted by the past” was palpable as I moved through the exhibition: Posters and printed ephemera of queer parties from the 1960s onward filled the space, physique mags from the mid-twentieth century were piled alongside copies of The Body Politic as reading materials next to the toilet. But this haunting doesn’t strike me as something simple like gay nostalgia — as a longing for another time, another place, or the regressive call for the so-called “good ol’ days.” As you say in your manifesto, you want to resist gay nostalgia. What’s the difference between gay nostalgia and being open to being haunted by the past?

LM Nostalgia is rooted in longing and desire: wanting to relive or recreate a time, place, or feeling. Being haunted is more about using the past to contextualize the present.

MF Haunting, for me, is different from nostalgia because it insists on its being heard and felt — it’s more about how the matter of the past intrudes and interrupts our present. Nostalgia is often understood as a yearning for something in the past that perhaps never existed, whereas haunting, like trauma, is a time and memory loop. Even if we’ve forgotten, the past doesn’t lie still in the past. Right now, with extreme right-wing Christian nationalist violence, haunting feels urgent: We resist nostalgia.

AC I’ve yet to come across anyone who has communicated this affect better than Jon Davies in his 2011–12 curatorial project for The Power Plant, Coming After. He says that we can’t escape our pasts and that so much of the queer collective trauma that our generation didn’t experience firsthand (the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis, the bathhouse raids, etc.) lives on intergenerationally. We’re haunted in the sense that so many of our would- be queer elders have passed, whether by disease or by suicide, or they were failed by the systems that are supposed to protect us. If we don’t learn from the past, how are we meant to survive and thrive in the future?

CJ I bought a hanky at the party, which I love and have worn a few times when I’ve gone out dancing in the weeks since your show. Tell me about the hankies and their design.

TM The hanky is an example of the haunting we just described: a more or less defunct means of queer communication and signaling. The hankies we designed for the show reference histories of queer communication, community, and visual culture and also serve as material evidence of the exhibition itself.

AC One of the questions motivating some of our independent and collective practices is what makes an object queer? The images on the hanky feel like a fun and playful response to that question.

LM Yes — and the images provide a loose narrative of who we are as queer people in this specific time and place.

MF Crocs are an inside joke within QSO. There’s one bottle of poppers and a bottle of Delatestryl, which is part of gender-affirming care. I came up with the disco ball and chains as a kind of metaphor for how queer clubbing is both an escape and something that binds and grounds me in queer community. There’s something so evocative about the hanky code and its visual significance in queer nightlife spaces and cultures: It’s a gay object that I think many queers can recognize, even if the practice of flagging is not as well-known outside of fetish and cruising communities. Plus, some of us are textile artists; Luke did a beautiful mail art project recently with a hanky.

CJ Why’d you go with orange? Traditionally, an orange hanky in the back left pocket indicates that the wearer is “up for anything.” On the right it means “nothing now.” This is a bit unique in the broader hanky code system, in which colors usually signify desires for a particular sex act (golden showers, fisting, cock sucking, etc.) or something specific about the wearer (has an eight-plus-inch dick, works as a hustler, is a drag queen, etc.).

LM Orange signals an aesthetic that emerged from the intersection of working-class and queer cultures. It’s a complicated connection: Masc-presenting queers have historically used blue-collar aesthetics, like leather and workwear, as a form of gender camouflage — a way to butch up their appearance. Safety orange, a more contemporary addition to the working-class uniform, is being adopted by queers not to assimilate but to subvert— it is a public notice, an announcement, a warning.

AC In hanky code, orange says a lot about boundaries, or lack thereof. Safety orange has always been a thread of commonality that unites our group; it references safety — but for whom? There is ample talk about safe(r) spaces for queer and trans folks, but how do we navigate the tensions between safety and visibility? There is safety and relief in finally being seen, but visibility in the wrong contexts can also lead to material danger. Safety orange feels like an appropriate vessel to spark this kind of dialogue.

TM “Anything anytime” or “nothing now (just cruising)” is sort of symbolic of QSO’s ethos and functions as an inner- and outer-circle artist collaboration. At any point members may choose to join and mingle with us, taking up the labor of working on projects together within the inner circle as they wish. In this way, there is a lack of hierarchy among the collective members, and we are obligated only to contribute what we can, when we can, if we want to.

CJ Speaking of collaboration and shifting collectives, it seems to me that what you created for this show was a material manifestation of queer togetherness across time, generation, location, markers of difference, and more. This was most clear for me on the bar, which you covered in wheat-pasted reproductions of queer event posters from the past five decades. You layered historical materials — some ripped and partial, some covered by other posters — to build something new, something that has never before existed. How did you decide which posters to include on the bar (and elsewhere in the show)? How’d you get all these posters — did the process of curating and creating also spark a sense of collectivity?

TM I think that I really started to feel the external collectivity for this project when we made the public call through Instagram, seeking queer party organizers and illustrators to submit flyers to us. We started to receive not only images of past parties from people but also positive affirmation and excitement for highlighting their contributions and queer Toronto nightlife in general. All of the artists and organizers that we cold-called were more than happy to let us use their work in this project. It was also the first time a couple of us in QSO had met in person after working virtually together for so long none of us live in Toronto — so being physically present and working together on this was overwhelmingly rewarding.

MF During the reception, my favorite moment was chatting with my friends Eric and Mitch, who both contributed flyers, getting to reminisce about queer nightlife events we had gone to. It was fun switching the context of those flyers; having them in a gallery space felt important. I think queer practice is often citational in a way that differs from other lines of affinity: Because we have these ruptures in our histories and spaces, we make unlikely friends with not only the living but also the dead. Citation feels like a way of reading and dancing with friends to me, a way of honoring those who’ve paved the way as part of a conversation or collaboration.

CJ The bar design fused together posters from different events and different eras into a messy, beautiful composite of queer history. I thought this was so fucking cool, like a queer act that binds together destruction and innovation. Am I correct in thinking that the bar was, originally, the entire show? How did the exhibition go from being about reimagining the facade of the bar to repurposing the entire gallery space?

LM When you navigate the world with an orange hanky in your pocket, you become aware of and ready for anything, anywhere, anytime. When an opportunity arises, you take it. And in a world where queer space is shrinking, it's important to expand it even if only for a night.

AC We only applied for the bar but dreamed of a party— an ephemeral event that would bring to life the energy of the gay bars and queer dance parties that have been so meaningful to our communities. There weren’t any other exhibitions installed for the first month of our bar installation, and we were very fortunate that the plumb members were open to having the space activated in that way. That’s the beauty of working with a DIY art space.

TM That's also why we focused on the ephemerality of the space so much when conceptualizing the exhibition. The opening reception was a one-night-only program. The bar — adorned with buttons, fliers, poppers, sexual health resources, handkerchiefs, and bowls of condoms— will extend on as the exhibition until September. For the party, we filled the plumb’s bookshelves with books, essays, and community resources; having this kind of content in the exhibition made sense not just to contextualize QSO and how we function in our community but also to frame the show with certain examples of queer theory and literature.

CJ You end your manifesto with the claim that “QSO speculates a collaboration that could be like a goldi- locks of cubs, an orchestra of butches, an ostentation of peafowl, a herd of twinks, a symposia of sapphics, a parliament of owls, a basket of fruit, an army of lovers, a school of swishes, a legion of limp wrists, a lavender menace 3.0.” What’s next for QSO?

TM Anything anytime, or nothing now (just cruising).

(Re)materializing Ephemera from Toronto’s Queer Nightlife

QueerSoftOrange in Conversation with Craig Jennex

Letter from the Editor – Issue 14

Hidden Territories