About The Village (Excerpts sourced from Wikipedia)

 

While the neighbourhood of the Gay Village is home to the 519 community centre, parks, bars, restaurants, and stores catering to the LGBTQ2S community (particularly along Church Street), it is also a historic community with Victorian houses and apartments dating back to the late 19th and early 20th century. Many LGBTQ2S people also live in the nearby residential neighbourhoods of The Annex, Cabbage town, St. James Town, St. Lawrence, Riverdale and the Garden District, and in smaller numbers throughout the city and its suburbs.

 

Church and Wellesley is home to the annual Pride Toronto celebrations, the largest event of its kind in Canada with over 90 floats and an enthusiastic crowd that numbers in the hundreds of thousands. The main Pride Toronto festival and parade is always on the last weekend in June, although a program of Pride-related events is held throughout the month of June. It runs southward along Yonge Street. The Dyke March is a women-only parade that runs on that Saturday afternoon and has a smaller parade route.

 

There is also a weekend-long community fair that closes off Wellesley between Yonge and Church and also goes into Church Street. The community fair includes tables from a wide variety of groups involved in or associated with queer culture. The 519 Church Street Community Centre is the meeting place for numerous social and political groups and became well known as a LGBTq2s friendly space. "The 519", as it is most often called, is a city-run recreation centre that has been adopted locally as the queer community centre, though its programming is not exclusive to LGBTQ2S groups and organizations. In 2007, a new wing was opened, and upgrades to the existing spaces were completed in 2009.

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Church and Wellesley is also home to the AIDS Memorial, located in Barbara Hall Park, where the names of members of the community who have been lost to AIDS are etched into bronze plaques. A memorial candlelight vigil is held each year at the AIDS Memorial, during Pride Week.

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Alternate Names

The neighbourhood goes by a number of names, though most refer to it as Church Street or the Village. A number of alternative names for Church and Wellesley exist in local vernacular, including the Gay Ghetto, the Village, the Gaybourhood or the Gay Village — however, many of these "nicknames" are generic to gay villages across the English-speaking world, and are therefore not descriptive of Church and Wellesley specifically, but of gay villages in general. Most people refer to it simply as Church Street or the Village, since most of the gay-related establishments in the area are located on that street.

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An Uncertain Future

As times have changed and the Toronto public has become more open to homosexuality, the role of Church and Wellesley as a "sanctuary" for LGBT2S people has been debated in recent years.[11] Many bars and clubs throughout Toronto are now gay-friendly; establishments such as Wayla, the Drake Hotel, the Gladstone Hotel and the Beaver, although outside Toronto's traditional gay village and not technically gay bars per se, are popular destinations for young gay and lesbian club-goers. Rental rates for both commercial and residential properties have also risen significantly.[12]

 

In the 2000s, many privately owned businesses, including This Ain't the Rosedale Library, have been forced to close down or move to other areas due to these rent increases, and much larger corporations, such as Starbucks, The Body Shop, David's Tea, Subway and the Bank of Montreal, have settled on the street in their place.[11] The Priape chain of gay porn and clothing stores closed its Church Street and other locations in October 2013 when it filed for bankruptcy;[13] as of June 2019, its former location is still vacant. Many smaller gay-owned businesses have moved to cheaper areas such as Cabbagetown, located east of Church and Wellesley.[12] The first decade of the 21st century saw a number of privately owned businesses close in Church and Wellesley, with larger corporations taking their place.