Montreal police raided Sex Garage in the early morning hours of Sunday, July 15, 1990
All Sex Garage photos © Linda Dawn Hammond / IndyFoto.com
UPDATE: Montreal Mayor Denis Coderre and Montreal Police Chief Philippe Pichet officially apologized at an August 18, 2017, press conference at Montreal City Hall, for historical anti-LGBTQ police raids. Pichet said he "regrets the events that were produced during police raids on gay bars during the 1960s to the 1990s. The actions attacked the dignity of the people concerned."
Coderre said "we have a tainted past and the best way to cure it is to recognize it and the best way to reconcile is to recognize what happened. There were some bad moments with the police force and the city administration and I would like to, on behalf of the municipal administration of the City of Montreal, offer my apology."
I have been
publicly screaming for an official apology for years: Projet Montréal city
councillor Richard Ryan this week said he too wants the City of Montreal and
the SPVM to
apologize for their violent police raids of LGBTQ establishments over
the course of decades that resulted in “more than 800 people” being arrested —
at Truxx in 1977, at Bud’s bar in 1984, the Sex Garage loft party in
1990 (now widely considered to be Montreal’s Stonewall), and at the Katacombes
bar in 1994.
This does
not include, among other raids, the 36 people arrested at Montreal’s Sauna
Aquarius on Crescent Street in February 1975 (the bathhouse was later
firebombed and two unclaimed corpses were buried in "Pauper's Field"
in Notre-Dame-des-Neiges cemetery atop Mount Royal); the 13 people charged as
found-ins after police raided Montreal’s Club Baths in January 1975 (another 26
were arrested there in May 1975); the 61 men arrested at Sauna David in April
1980; and the October 1975 raids on 7 queer bars, including Baby Face, the
legendary lesbian bar.
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Violent Montreal
police raid on Sex Garage
© Linda Dawn Hammond / IndyFoto.com
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Then there
is the Neptune Sauna, opened in 1973 by Andre Laflamme and Lorne Holiday. At
the time Laflamme and Holiday also owned the Aquarius Sauna when Montreal’s Gay
Village was still downtown, before the exodus east after the 1976 Montreal
summer Olympic games — an exodus precipitated by the systemic police raids.
The Neptune
was raided by Montreal police on May 14, 1976. A friend of mine, Henri Labelle,
was working as the cashier at the Neptune that night. Henri told me, “They
yanked off people’s towels and threw everybody together and took pictures and
charged them all with being in a common bawdy house.”
Henri noted,
“There was a former mayor’s son there, a government minister, a secretary to
the Catholic Archbishop and a couple of cops, but they were ushered out the
back door while everyone else was thrown in paddy wagons.”