Tuesday 28 June 2011

ELLIOT TIBER: FLIPPED COP CAR AT STONEWALL, SAVED WOODSTOCK & HAD JIM MORRISON



I have wanted to interview Elliot Tiber for years because I have loved everything about Woodstock – especially the world’s first woman rock star, Janis Joplin – since I was an ugly-duckling teenager in high school.

“Richard Burnett is a faggot!” someone once scrawled in huge black-marker letters on my locker door at Montreal's south-shore MacDonald Cartier Memorial High School in 1982 when the sprawling complex had over 4,500 students.

Bugs : Class of 82
The schoolyard was a war zone. But Janis – who’d been nominated for “The Ugliest Man on Campus Contest” at the University of Texas 20 years earlier, back in 1962 – was queer too. So I felt better.

And it turns out Elliot Tiber, the man who made Woodstock happen, is a fabulous gay man too.

“Just before I came out [in the early 1960s] there wasn’t even the word ‘gay’ and you were alone in the world, a freak of nature,” Tiber, now 76, recalls. “In New York I used to go to Lenny’s Hideaway, which was a speakeasy in a basement, and The Stonewall [Inn], and they were mobbed up. It was all very scary."

Not only did Tiber – born Elliot Tiechberg (“My parents hated when I changed my name. My mom said, “Good riddance – I’m renting your room!”) – go to the Stonewall, but he was there when the Stonewall Riots broke out in the early morning hours of June 28, 1969.

Stonewall 1969 (Photo from Wikipedia)

“We barricaded the doors to keep the cops out, but when we realized we outnumbered them, we unblocked the exits and ran out onto the street,” Tiber writes in his 2007 memoir Taking Woodstock: A True Story of a Riot, a Concert and a Life. “A group of us started yelling, ‘Gay power!’ Within seconds, the Stonewall Riot was underway...A bunch of us rocked a cop car back and forth, then overturned it. More people, gay men and lesbians, showed up to join us.”

“It gave me some feeling of power,” Tiber tells me. “I had never felt power.”

Ang Lee based his 2009 movie Taking Woodstock on Tiber’s memoirs. The film picks up where Tiber (wonderfully played by comic Demetri Martin) moves back home to help his parents run their dilapidated Catskills motel, The El Monaco.

Tiber thought he could drum up business by introducing Woodstock’s producers to Max Yasgur, and offers the organizers the El Monaco as festival headquarters. When the festival’s permit is revoked, he gives them his own permit for his White Lake Music and Arts Festival.

The rest, as they say, is history.

“The whole town hated Woodstock and they hated me,” Tiber says. “They still do.”

While we don’t see any of the era’s iconic rock stars in Lee’s movie, Tiber met many of them backstage, including Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin.

Tiber in 2009 (Photo from Wikipedia)

“I went backstage one night and there was Janis,” Tiber says. “She was an idol. Her her music played in gay bars all the time. She was falling-down drunk and stoned. So I helped her up. I also saw Hendrix and Joan Baez. All of them came to the El Monaco to shower and eat food.”

Incidentally, festival organizers invited The Doors to perform at Woodstock, but the band turned them down. Robby Kreiger would later say, “We never played at Woodstock because we were stupid. We thought it would be a second-class repeat of Monterey Pop Festival.”

Jim Morrison, meanwhile, was busy making many enemies, including Joplin: One night at a party in NYC, he kept yanking her hair, bringing Janis to tears until finally she left. He followed her outside, stuck his head into the car and yelled at her. So Janis pinned him in the door with the window and broke a whiskey bottle over his head.

Tiber also met Morrison – who, like Joplin, was bisexual – at another NYC party. “Morrison was stoned and he and I messed around a bit,” Tiber says. “He definitely strayed.”

In that summer of Stonewall Tiber says there was also a visible gay presence at Woodstock which, of course, the mainstream media has ignored right up until today.

“There were [tens of thousands of] gay kids there,” Tiber says. “You could see them. There was no housing, there was nudity and lots of sex going on. There was no homophobia that I was aware of.”

In fact, in Ang Lee’s movie, Tiber’s character kisses “Paul” (played by Darren Pettie), a hunky carpenter helping build the Woodstock stage. The kiss happens inside the packed El Monaco bar and is one of the hottest on-screen smooches in Hollywood history. “That really happened!” Elliot says.

Culturally, the sixties didn’t really end until 1972 and by that time Hendrix, Joplin and Morrison were all dead. But that era’s generational war has morphed into today’s cultural war, one that the Woodstock Nation – anti-war and pro-abortion, and supportive of women’s rights, black civil rights and gay civil rights – has more or less won.

Bugs at the Stonewall
(Photo by Jamie O'Meara)
So I thank Tiber. He was there for both Stonewall and Woodstock.

“I didn’t put the two [events] together until years later when they became iconic,” Tiber says. “Both Stonewall and Woodstock gave me self-esteem and self respect. Before I was just a freak of nature.”

Elliot sighs. “When my dad died a year later, he held my hand and gripped it and told me, ‘You go on and lead your own life.’ It was amazing to hear that. Woodstock had also changed my father.”

Thursday 23 June 2011

KD LANG HEADLINES MONTREAL'S JAZZ FEST, SAYS "BEING QUEER WAS AN ASSET"

kd lang headlines Salle Wilfred-Pelletier on June 27 at the Montreal International Jazz Festival  (Photo courtesy FIJM)


 
(June 23) It's true that one photo can change everything. Take Vanity Fair’s historic August 1993 cover shot of bathing-suit beauty Cindy Crawford giving the suit-clad kd lang a shave. That one snapshot launched the 1990s lesbian-chic era that climaxed with the public coming out of Ellen DeGeneres.

"I’m very proud of that picture," kd lang told me a couple years ago. "It stands the test of time."

These days lang is back in the news, cross-promoting her new album Sing It Loud on a tour that brings the Canadian crooner back to the Montreal International Jazz Festival on June 27 (she last performed at the fest in 2005 with the Orchestre Symphonique de Montreal). Lang gives few interviews today, though when she performed two nights at Montreal’s Olympia Theatre back in 2008, she told me, “I love that I’m still a Canadian citizen [and] I still try to travel to Canada as much as possible."



 
Lang – who performed at the inaugural 2006 World Outgames opening ceremony in Montreal, as well as at the opening ceremony of the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver – is also proud she was part of the pop culture that led Canada to become the gay-positive nation it is today. After all, Canadians still remember that the butch lang accepted her 1985 Juno Award for Most Promising Female Vocalist wearing a wedding dress!


"I think being queer was an asset," lang says. "Being very alternative was my secret weapon prior to coming out."

Over in America, Nashville wanted little to do with lang or her cow-punk ways until Owen Bradley, the producer of lang’s idol Patsy Cline, produced lang’s 1988 breakthrough album Shadowland. "I was going into unfriendly waters. But at the same time I truly respect country. When you try to fuck something up, it’s an aggressive policy that doesn’t work."

Then came lang’s historic August 1993 Vanity Fair cover. Says lang, "The Vanity Fair cover is one of my proudest moments. I didn’t suffer as much as Cindy did. Vanity Fair is an icon of pop culture, and to be on it at that time is an indelible mark in the evolution of gay culture. But at the time of the shoot, [photographer] Herb Ritts was a friend of mine, and we had a very gay life in LA. We were having fun and we didn’t think about [that photo] having a lasting impact."

Today lang bemoans the violence against LGBT people at Pride marches in Eastern Europe, in cities like Moscow. “I can remember some early Pride marches in Edmonton and they weren’t much different," lang recalls. "It’s really just a matter of education and integration.”

As for the digital revolution that has up-ended the music business, lang – whose lead single from Sing It Loud is the song I Confess (you can watch music video above) –  she tells me, “You know, I’m all for downloading. I love not having to go to a record store anymore. But you definitely have to pay the musicians. The way the music industry is today, I tell you what it all boils down to: It’s all about how good you are live in concert. If you can’t do that, you have no career. At least not a long one. So I’m happy I’m still going strong."

Monday 20 June 2011

MONTREAL'S LEGENDARY CLEOPATRA STRIP & DRAG CLUB SURVIVES THE WRECKING BALL

Cantelli - headlining here at Cleo's on The Main - does the fiercest Tina Turner impersonation east of Vegas (Photo by Richard Burnett)

(June 20)  When Prince Charles pitstopped at the Black Watch on Montreal's Bleury St. during his December 2009 visit to Canada, local burlesque dancers greeted His Royal Highness with posters that screamed "Save our Queen, Cleopatra!" and "Save the Queen of the Main!"

The Queen of the Main is, of course, Café Cleopatra, the last remnant of Montreal’s mythical red-light district that was slated to be expropriated and bulldozed to make way for new Montreal city council-approved Hydro-Québec offices.

While Café Cleopatra owner Johnny Zoumboulakis challenged the city expropriation in court, the strippers continued to gyrate downstairs. And the drag queens continued to ply their trade upstairs, which has been a showbar since 1895.


"When I first arrived in Montreal, I witnessed some legendary drag queens perform here," Brazilian drag queen Cantelli – who does the fiercest Tina Turner impersonation east of Vegas – told me in a 2009 Hour magazine cover story.

Cantelli follows in the footsteps of such Montreal drag legends as Vicki Lane, Lady Brenda, Vicki Richard, Twilight, Farrah, Black Emmanuel, Gerry Cyr and Michel Dorion. "Just look at this place, at these dressing rooms – it would be terribly sad to see this living history disappear."

Cantelli also told me, "I challenge [Montreal] Mayor Gérald Tremblay and his team to visit Cleo’s on any night he wants and I’ll perform a command performance to show him why Montreal must save Café Cleopatra."

Tremblay never took Cantelli up on her offer but, as my colleague Marty Patriquin reports in the June 20 issue of Maclean's magazine, "That Cleopatra’s sign still advertises strip-teaseuses and spectacles continuels between glimmering lights (along with two stark naked lasses beckoning patrons to come inside) is a testament to Zoumboulakis, who recently fought off a two-year expropriation campaign on behalf of developer Société de développement Angus. Already, SDA has bought out all the businesses (save for an electronics store and a Chinese restaurant) on the west side of what is known as the Lower Main, and plans to turn the area into condos, office towers and an entertainment complex where strippers and drag queens won’t likely be on the marquee."

Johnny & Bugs
More importantly, Patriquin points out, is Cleopatra's "was something of a saving grace, and the idea of appealing to both a straight and gay clientele is revolutionary, says queer issues columnist Richard Burnett. 'Having both clienteles is pretty unique,” says Burnett, who writes the blog Three Dollar Bill. “Even today, venues in the gay village aren’t that open. It was also an important venue for transsexuals, who weren’t made to feel welcome, even in the gay community.'"

It’s clear Cleopatra’s has seen better days, but owner Johnny Zoumboulakis – a fabulous guy who buys me a shot every time I walk into the joint – refused to let Montreal Mayor Gérald Tremblay do to the Main what NYC mayor Rudy Giuliani did to Times Square.

But even by the 1970s, it was already the end of an era. The legendary Casa Loma, a popular hangout for the Montreal mafia that stood on the corner of St-Laurent and Ste-Catherine, was closing. As early as 1959 the Casa Loma presented legendary drag queen Guilda (she’s now 87), who was billed on the marquee, "Guilda & Sa Troupe – La Reine Des Immerdeuses."

Meanwhile, no author has done more to spread the Main’s grimy, no-holds-barred reputation to all four corners of the globe than the late bestselling American spy novelist Trevanian, whose 1976 novel The Main has sold millions worldwide.

"The Main – a honky-tonk world of pimps and hookers, runaways, hustlers and thieves!" the paperback cover screams. "A world where violence and brutality are a way of life – and death."

Cleopatra’s is the last hold-out from that era. That building is living history.

"It was one of the first underground places I ever went to, and for [drag] extravaganzas it was the place," Montreal pop and drag icon Mado La Motte, whose Cabaret Mado in the Village is now this city’s undisputed drag emporium, told me back in 2009. "Cleo’s is a little quiet today, but it used to be the place to impress your straight friends!"

But now that Johnny Zoumboulakis has won his fight – with the very vocal support of such local groups as Save The Main, STELLA, Glam Glam Productions, Club Sin / Fetish Weekend organizers and such wonderful burlesque performers as Velma Candyass – another generation will get to experience the thrill of what Montreal's old red-light district used to be.

Friday 17 June 2011

MONTREAL'S ROYAL PHOENIX BAR CONTINUES GAY VILLAGE EXODUS

 Royal Phoenix GM Val Desjardins
(Photo courtesy Val Desjardins )

I wrote here last month that the term "post-gay" was coined to describe a world where Gay Pride and Gay Villages no longer matter. In a widely published 2007 Associated Press story headlined "Gay Villages disappearing," NYC author Don Reuter, researching a book on the rise and fall of a dozen U.S. gay neighbourhoods, rhetorically asks, "What makes these neighbourhoods gay? Not much."

Reuter predicts that outside large gay meccas like New York, San Francisco and Montreal, neighbourhoods with a significant gay presence will not survive - including, Reuter contends, gay communities in New Orleans, Philadelphia and Seattle.

But even in Montreal the times they-are-a-changing. The reason? Entire cities have finally become our playgrounds. Nowhere is that truer than Montreal which because of its enormous number of gay citizens, has both a healthy Gay Village and bustling gay scene outside the Village.


And as of today, Montreal can list The Royal Phoenix Bar (5788 St-Laurent, corner Bernard) as its first gay bar in the city's bohemian Mile End district.

"We felt the need for a queer venue in Mile End, a daily watering hole, a drop-in kind of place in a neighbourhood where there are a lot of gay parties," says Royal Phoenix GM Val Desjardins (she also co-ordinates the Faggity Ass Fridays night at nearby Playhouse). "We wanted to create a stable place for the community outside the Village."

This is how much the gay scene has changed and grown up. "We're opening up the definition of what queer means. We've also got plasma TVs for sports fans, we clear the tables for dance parties, we're teaming up with other neighbourhood [gay event] promoters to create new nights, not just at Royal Phoenix. This is not just for 'hip' people. We're here for everybody."

Royal Phoenix's grand opening is June 17 beginning at 5 p.m. They will then be open seven days a week from 5 pm to 3 am. They also have a terrasse that fits 30 that's open until 11 pm nightly.

Tonight's deejays are Montreal nightlife legend Plastik Patrik and Lynne T, beginning at 10 pm.

Email bookings@royalphonexibar.com to book events.

Thursday 16 June 2011

SCOOCH OVER RuPAUL -- MADO LA MOTTE IS THE WORLD'S REAL DRAG RACE QUEEN!

 
Mado La Motte hosts her annual Drag Race at Montreal Fringe Festival on June 18


(June 17) Few drag queens on Earth are in the same league as Montreal’s famed (and infamous) Mado La Motte, so-called because patrons at Poodles’ nightclub on The Main in Montreal in 1987 thought she was so ugly they dubbed her “The Mutt.” Thus, Mado ‘La Motte’ was born.

When that other great drag queen, Lady Bunny of New York (she co-founded Wigstock), attended the bastard child of Wigstock, Mascara (which Mado founded 14 years ago and which has since become the biggest drag show on the planet at Montreal’s Divers/Cite Festival), she told Mado backstage, “What a fabulous show, darling!"


Mado – a.k.a. Luc Provost – the marketing genius got her start as a shooter bitch and cigarette girl at Poodles and Club Lézard, but has (like me, bless her) written a column for the monthly gay glossy Fugues magazine for over 20 years, appeared on countless TV programs and morning shows and was colour commentator for live French TV coverage of Divers/Cité’s original Pride parade for several years; was a spokesmodel for a major potato chip company, sold out the much-lamented Spectrum five times ("It was sad to see that venue close"); and nine years ago opened her own nightclub, the phenomenally successful Cabaret Mado in Montreal’s Gay Village, where her statue doubles nicely as the nightclub’s marquee and is something of a beacon in a neighbourhood now hailed as one of the planet’s great gay meccas.

Then 11 years ago she began – scooch over RuPaul – the world’s first-ever Drag Race, hands-down the single most popular event at Montreal’s Fringe Festival.

So this bitch sat down with this city’s other bitch for the Drag Race low-down this weekend.

Are you excited about this year’s June 18 drag race?
Of course I’m excited! I’m excited every year because drag queens are the best runners in the city! And we prove to the world that [being] ridiculous never killed anyone!

Would our world be best off worshipping our drag queens?
Of course! Drag queens are the new religion! Praise drag!

Your career began on The Main and, 25 years later at the Fringe, it’s like you’ve come full circle!
La Main was the craziest street in town 25 years ago. This was where everything was happening, where every youth current was born, where the underground was located. You could find everything there. It’s not like that anymore. I don’t know if I bring anything back [here]. All I know after all these years is being normal is not good –  no way, honey! Don’t be a follower, don’t follow shit. Being different is superior.

You starred in the fabulously trashy play Saving Céline at the Mainline Theatre back in 2007. Have you got another play in the works?
I got the taste to do more theatre but then drag is also the biggest form of theatre. Personally, I’d like to do another really big Mado show at the Just For Laughs festival for my 30th anniversary [in 2017]. But I’d also like a real play about the creation and evolution of Mado. Unless someone offers me a bigger role!

What can we expect at Mado’s Drag Race this weekend?
Irreverence! Don’t expect Mado to be nice to anyone – even to you! [This reporter will be a judge at Mado’s Drag Race this weekend.] Besides, we already have an alcoholic judge!

Mado La Motte hosts her 11th annual Drag Race at the Montreal Fringe Festival starring a who’s who of Montreal’s all-star drag constellation versus a bevy of Fringe fest beauties in a knock-down Battle Royale of skill-testing obstacles! Saturday, June 18 beginning at 4 pm at Parc des Ameriques (corner Rachel and St-Laurent). Free admission.

Mado La Motte also  hosts and performs most nights at Cabaret Mado (1115 Ste-Catherine St. E.). Surf to http://www.mado.qc.ca/.

Monday 6 June 2011

TO HELL WITH THE BOSTON BRUINS – BEAN TOWN IS STILL THE "ATHENS OF AMERICA"

 Drag queen hostess Kris Kneivel works the crowd at Jacque's Cabaret in Boston 
(All photos by Seb Oran)

(June 6) "Look at all the vagina here tonight!" big, blonde and buxom hostess Kris Kneivel said from the sparkling stage of Jacque’s Cabaret, a fabulously trashy drag bar in the heart of Boston’s downtown district.

On this night the seedy gay nightclub is packed wall-to-wall with all kinds of straight women – young and old, white and black – celebrating the raucous hen nights of their best girlfriends. And I’m here with my old buddy Seb because we were simply looking for a fun night out in a city that’s better known for its sports teams and museums than it is for its loudmouth drag queens.

Kris Kneivel and Bugs
"We get a lot of hen night parties!" Jacque’s manager Kristin Turillo explained to me as she stood behind the bar slinging drinks (and poured me another double-vodka soda). "This place can get real crazy!"

So – in my best strip-bar imitation – I stuck a whole lotta dollars in the cleavage of Jacque’s finest drag divas, like the big, black and beautiful Mizery, Destiny (the Asian Beyoncé) and Katia, who looks like a dishevelled, dizzy Lady Gaga.

I don’t think this is quite what one of Boston’s leading citizens, the late William Tudor – co-founder of the 195-year-old North American Review (New England’s pre-eminent magazine until The Atlantic came along) – meant when in 1819 he dubbed Boston "The Athens of America."

But Tudor would have approved of the amazing John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, a gorgeous building designed by I.M. Pei, the famous master of modernist architecture who also designed Montreal’s Place Ville Marie in 1962. You’ll discover everything – from documents to gifts and treasures given to JFK by foreign leaders and dignitaries – at this museum.

At the JFK museum
But while Kennedy is one of the most studied and written-about presidents of the 20th century, few knew that his best friend of 30 years – Lem Billings – was a gay man until my esteemed colleague Charles Kaiser revealed the truth in his critically hailed 1997 New York Times bestseller The Gay Metropolis: 1940-1996 (now a Grove Press softcover).

I explored much of Boston on foot when I visited the city recently, but a couple of my personal highlights were visiting the Paul Revere House on the Freedom Trail that snakes through Boston, and a Saturday night dinner at one of the finest Italian restaurants I’ve ever dined at, the trendsetting BiNA Osteria (581 Washington Street).

Boston harbour cruise
And when it comes to hot tickets, there is also more to this city than the NHL's Boston Bruins who are playing the Vancouver Canucks in the Stanley Cup finals this week. Like Bean Town's pretty good theatre scene. Seb and I ducked into the Charles Playhouse (on Warrenton Street, just a couple blocks away from Jacque’s Cabaret) to see the very gay murder mystery Shear Madness, the longest running non-musical play in the history of American theatre.

There is crowd Q&A participation with the homicide cops on stage in this two-hour play, so the audience decides who the murderer is. Meaning the ending can change every night of the week. If you’ve never seen it, don’t miss it.
Salem's Old Port

On our drive home, Seb and I skipped the gay resort Provincetown but stopped for breakfast in Salem, Massachusetts, then checked out the Salem Witch Museum. Very creepy. Also, while in Salem, check out the small town’s famed Peabody Essex Museum which is currently hosting the blockbuster exhibition Golden Evenings: Dutch and Flemish Masterworks from the Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo Collection, which closes on June 19.

 

Saturday 4 June 2011

'GARDENIA IS A FUCKING MASTERPIECE"

Do not miss the final Montreal performance of Gardenia at the Festival TransAmériques
(All photos byLuk Monsaert, courtesy Festival TransAmériques)

(June 4) After blowing away audiences and critics across Europe, the Belgian stage sensation Gardenia made it's much-anticipated North American debut at Montreal’s Festival TransAmériques on June 1, has become the hit of the festival and taken the city by storm.

Theatre critic Pat Donnelly wrote in the Montreal daily The Gazette, "The pace is glacial, the progression symphonic. The quasi-classical soundtrack, by Steven Prengels, is brilliant... Because of its insistence on gravitas and careful measuring of gesture, Gardenia mesmerizes for most of its one hour, 45-minute duration."

Transsexual star Vanessa Van Durme is  a cross
between my friend, Montreal media legend  Francine
Grimaldi and Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard
 Aline Apostolska of La Presse wrote, "The audience is overwhelmed because this true story delivered without compromise by authentic [drag] artists is also about us all, about the fragility of humankind."

"There’s just no other way to describe it," I wrote in my review for The Charlebois Post. "Gardenia is a fucking masterpiece."

Even before Montreal audiences fell for Gardenia, Alain Platel of Belgium’s famed Les ballets C de la B (Les ballets contemporains de la Belgique) was already deliriously happy with the European reception of his smash stage musical Gardenia, about six middle-aged and elderly crossdressing men.

“All kinds of people everywhere have fallen head over heels for Gardenia, even fashion designer Jean-Paul Gaultier, who was so crazy about the performers that he came to see them three or four times,” director Alain Platel told me for a story in Toronto's Xtra newspaper. “He even made special gifts for each of the performers.”




In an essay on the evolution of drag on the stage that I wrote for French Canada's FUGUES magazine, I point out that Gardenia is no Walt Disney-esque Priscilla Queen of the Desert: The Musical, which I saw at Toronto’s Princess of Wales Theatre before it moved on to Broadway. "Priscilla is currently getting rave reviews [in NYC but] as a gay man who enjoys drag, I felt curiously neutered [by the musical]," I wrote. "Which is why Gardenia – while melancholic – is such a breath of fresh air." 

In my review for The Charlebois Post, I write, "The play finishes with the entire cast of aging queens performing one genuine showstopper in a chorus line of sorts, singing along with Judy Garland to a live recording of Somewhere Over the Rainbow. Those last minutes when they sing, “Somewhere over the rainbow / Skies are blue / And the dreams that you dare to dream / Really do come true” - knowing what they all had to endure in their own youth - were absolutely riveting. Here they were on a stage thousands of miles away from home where at their advanced ages they thought they had no right to be. It was so poignant and beautiful I cried. There’s just no other way to describe it: Gardenia is a fucking masterpiece."

If you have not yet seen Gardenia, do not miss their final performance in Montreal tonight, on June 4, at the Monument National.

AYO! BUGS REVISITS MAURITIUS IN SOUTHERN AFRICA FOR GAY PRIDE ON JUNE 4

  Today's Gay Pride Rainbow Parade in the town of Rose Hill in Mauritius is just the third such parade in all of Africa -- the other two are in South Africa

I knew I was in deep trouble when my travel buddy Vinnie and I were several shots into a bottle of absinthe hanging out with a couple friends in London for my birthday a couple years ago, in a nightclub that looked like the alien bar in the original Star Wars movie. We were in London town on our way to the southern African island-nation of Mauritius, where my family hails from.

Gay Pride contingent in Mauritius today (June 4, 2011)
(Photo from Facebook)
But London is still the pulse of Europe, though I couldn’t find mine when we stumbled from Detroit, the absinthe bar, to the Shadow Lounge on Old Compton Street in Soho, an expensive disco where Graham Norton and Rupert Everett like to hang out with the beautiful people.

I felt like I was the star of a musical, like Cabaret, which we saw the previous night at the Lyric Theatre in the West End.

"Life is a cabaret old chum," British actress Kim Medcalf sang in the role still owned by Liza Minelli..

Except this production, which I saw with Vinnie and my mom, outclassed the original, from the fabulous nudity to the closing gas chamber death scene in a Nazi concentration camp.
Gay Pride in Rose Hill, Mauritius, in 2007
(Photo by Nicolas Ritter)

"The most stunningly fresh and imaginative revival of a classic musical that I have ever seen," The Independent newspaper correctly opined.

London still bears the scars of WWII, a time when my British grandfather was a firefighter in London during The Blitz. My father grew from being a nine-year-old boy to a 16-year-old teen over the course of the war. One legendary true story had him and his best boyhood chum Ray carry home an unexploded German incendiary bomb. Miraculously, my grandfather – coming home from his firefighter shift – stopped them from pulling the pin as my dad and Ray curiously dismantled the bomb while playing.

Gay Pride in Rose Hill, Mauritius, in 2007
(Photo by Nicolas Ritter)
After the war my father served in the British military in Germany from 1947 to 1949 as part of a crew in a Sexton tank.

A world away, in the southern African island nation of Mauritius, my mom’s father, Felix Laventure (or "Monpère" as we all called him), was the mayor of the capital city of Port Louis.

"As our civilization agonizes through anarchy," Monpère said in a February 1950 speech to various dignitaries on the occasion of Port Louis’s 100th anniversary, "what will remain of human liberty?"

Following my über-gay weekend in London, I flew to Mauritius with my mother as we revisited her homeland, which reminded me of other former British colonies Jamaica and Barbados in the West Indies.

Political banquet in Port Louis (circa 1949)
hosted by Bugs' grandfather Felix Laventure (C).
Next to him, Governor-General of Mauritius Sir Hillary Blood
is sucking on his pipe.
"You gather the idea that Mauritius was made first, and then heaven, and that heaven was copied after Mauritius," Mark Twain once famously remarked. (He also said of Montreal that one couldn’t throw a rock without breaking a church window.)

Modern-day Mauritius is also one of just two African nations (the other being South Africa) to have a Gay Pride parade. Today (June 4), several hundred marchers are expected to take part in that country's sixth annual Gay Pride Rainbow Parade in Rose Hill. When I was there, over 350 brave persons courageously marched in the streets of Rose Hill. Afterwards, I tracked down the organizers at the Collectif arc-en-ciel.

Bugs, his brother Skye and his mother Liliane Laventure
visit the Town of Laventure built on the site of
the old Laventure family plantation
 "There is an underground network," parade organizer Nicholas Ritter told me. "Most gays here are married and live double lives."

Indeed, there are no gay bars in Mauritius ("You’d go at your own risk," Nicholas explains). In fact, there are just a couple that I know of in all of Africa, and they’re in Cape Town. But today, young gay Mauritians are standing up.

It reminded me of a NYC job with Human Rights Watch that I interviewed for some years ago, and think I lost because I said, "I believe we must protect our sources, but there also comes a time when individuals must stand up."

In fact, 50 years ago, my grandfather was so loved by the people the British appointed him as a government minister (better to have him on their side, they reasoned). But Monpère - after introducing a bill in parliament that would expropriate land from the rich plantation landowners, to create farming co-ops for the poor - was a political Robin Hood who was eventually forced into exile after he refused a diplomatic posting offered him through back channels by his island nemesis, Mauritius Governor-General Sir John Shaw Rennie.

Bugs (R) visits the Collectif Arc-en-Ciel
organizers of the Rainbow Parade
"In those days the [city] administration could truly administrate," then-Lord Mayor of Port Louis Mayor Reza Issack (now a member of the Legislative assembly) told my mother and I when we visited him. "It was a grand era back then."

My mother’s life would have been radically different had she not come to Montreal. But I am grateful my grandfather refused the overseas diplomatic posting, otherwise I would not be here today to write this column.

My trip to London and Mauritius – from Cabaret to the Blitz, from Sir John Shaw Rennie to Monpère defying his British political masters, to young incredible gay Mauritians organizing their Gay Pride in Rose Hill – reminded me that in the end we must all stand up and be counted for. After all, what else is there to do?