On a sunny Saturday morning in May, on the fifth floor of the Dragon City Mall in Toronto’s Chinatown, drag queen Phoenix Black was strutting, navigating between plastic-covered tables and dim sum carts in a sparkly purple leotard and knee-high boots while a medley of Rihanna songs blasted through the speakers.

Since 2022, drag performances have become a regular occurrence at Sky Dragon Dim Sum. A rainbow balloon arch was erected at the entrance of what usually operates as a traditional dim sum restaurant. Gold streamers and a “Queens of Dim Sum” sign were stuck on the wall next to ornaments that read “happiness” and “longevity” in traditional Chinese characters, while circular tables were rearranged to make room for a makeshift stage on the red and yellow carpeted floor.

Over the next two hours, the drag queens lip-synched and danced to Top 40 hits, along with music in Tagalog, Cantonese, and Korean. The music blended with the cheers of restaurant patrons, mostly members of Toronto’s Asian queer community, alongside some older Chinese regulars eating fried squid. Between songs, the performers paused to make jokes about the Asian experience, and express gratitude for being able to perform at culturally specific events that platformed Asian artists.

Next to the makeshift stage, behind a giant siu mai plushie, stood Sum Wong, stage name DJ Sumation.

Wong launched Queens of Dim Sum along with his co-founder Ryan Tran in 2022. It was a twist on the classic drag brunch, created in part because of their frustration with how Asian performers were treated in Toronto’s queer community. When Wong first started DJing on Church St. in the early 2000s, he says he was one of just two Asian DJs in the village. From the outset, it was clear to him that he was getting fewer gigs than his white counterparts. “That’s the way Church street is going,” says Wong. “They usually book more caucasian artists.”

His former stage name, the tongue-in-cheek “DJ SumAsian,” sometimes felt like a too accurate representation of how club promoters saw him—some Asian, one whose very presence on a bill might drive customers away. After a broadcaster misspelled his name as DJ Sumation in an interview, Wong decided to stick with it. Miraculously, he says, he immediately began getting more bookings.

Wong and Tran aren’t the only queer people of colour who have felt themselves nudged out of the Church and Wellesley Village, the Toronto neighbourhood that has historically been an enclave for the LGBTQ+ community. For many queer performers, activists, and event organizers of colour, the Village is not a place they necessarily feel welcome or represented. This sense of exclusion can take many forms, from minor complaints about boring music in clubs, to more damaging forms, like losing out on opportunities to earn a living from performing, or needing to choose between feeling excluded on the basis of race or sexual orientation. It’s left people like Wong with questions about the future of queer Toronto. Does finding a community for queer people of colour mean moving outside of the Village? And what’s lost when community hubs splinter? Amid this uncertainty, many queer Torontonians of colour are carving out spaces that make them feel welcome—navigating a landscape with tensions that feel new, but at the same time, all too familiar.

In the early 19th century, when Canada was still a British colony, the tract of land now known as the Village was owned by a Scottish merchant and gay man named Alexander Wood. Over the decades, as the city grew, the area became one of several mixed commercial-residential neighbourhoods in downtown Toronto. By the 1960s and 70s, neighbourhood demographic changes, the presence of affordable housing, and the work of social and political activists pushing for LGBTQ+ rights laid the foundations for the creation of the Village—an enclave for queer people in the midst of a city, and a country, that had largely rejected them.

Today, as you walk south on Church Street from Bloor to Carlton, rainbow crosswalks mark the street. You can see places like the AIDS memorial and The 519—a community centre providing support to the LGBTQ+ community—that are legendary locations in the annals of Canadian queer history. At night, you can hear pop music and crowds cheering from Woody’s and Crews and Tangos, longstanding gay bars that hold frequent drag shows.

In 2005, the Church Street BIA erected a bronze statue of Wood at the corner of Church and Alexander. A white gay merchant who had played only a small part in Canada’s queer history suddenly had his story reframed and shaped by the City of Toronto to become a pioneer enshrined in bronze.

Turning a 19th century white settler into a kind of patron saint of the neighbourhood, and ignoring the messier history of activism and arrests that actually created the haven for queer Torontonians, promoted a specific image of queerness—one that omitted women, and racialized and trans people. In a mishap so fitting it was almost funny, the statue got hastily torn down in 2022 when the BIA discovered that Wood had connections to the residential school system.

The statue episode was emblematic of some of the issues that have long plagued the Village. Many Black queer Torontonians have a complex relationship with the culture of the neighbourhood. In the 1980’s, the centre of activity for much of Toronto’s Black LGBTQ+ organizing was at Dewson House, a home in the west end of the city far from Church and Wellesley. Zami, Canada’s first organization for the Black LGBTQ+ community, was conceived at the kitchen table there. To reach a queer audience, however, it was forced to advertise in white LGBTQ+ magazines, which at times published racist content.

For Jamea Zuberi, the Church and Wellesley neighbourhood has simultaneously been both a refuge and a place she doesn’t quite feel welcome. Growing up in the 90s as a Black lesbian, Zuberi came to the Village often because Jane and Finch, the neighbourhood where she lived, didn’t feel safe for queer people. For her, The 519 was a safe space that hosted inclusive events.

Her relationship with gay bars in the neighbourhood, however, was a different story. And the lack of diversity in the Toronto Pride parade was something that particularly bothered her. The televised parade felt incredibly important to Zuberi—a chance for queer people who lived outside the downtown core to see people who looked like themselves on screen. Back then, Zuberi says, many families in her community held the belief that “being queer was not for Black people.” If representation in the parade could make a difference in a single young person’s life, Zuberi believed, then that was reason enough to push for more representation.

Zuberi co-founded the organization Blackness Yes! which aimed to create a space in the parade for Black queer people. And in 1998, the first Blockorama was held at the Pride festival, inspired by the Caribbean block parties (blockos) that Zuberi experienced growing up. Now, over 20 years later, it’s an all-day dance party that celebrates Black, queer pride.

But according to Zuberi, making Blockorama happen was no easy task. Because the core tenets of Blockorama ran counter to how Pride Toronto operated, she says, “there was tension every step of the way.” Throughout its history, organizers say Blockorama has been moved to smaller and less accessible venues, and has received insufficient funding. These issues made headlines in 2016, when Black Lives Matter Toronto halted the Pride parade and presented a list of demands that asked for more funding, ASL interpretation, and headliner funding for Blockorama. Pride Toronto did not respond to The Local’s requests for comment.

“I think part of why Church street is so white is because white gay men essentially own that space,” says Dainty Smith, a burlesque dancer and founder of a dance troupe for women and femmes of colour, Les Femmes Fatales. “Black queers and queers of colour have never been able to establish a foothold.”

When Smith started performing in the Village, she says there was real resistance to talking about race or politics in performances. Smith often found herself the only person of colour in a group of performers at a venue. “I had found this liberating way to express myself in the world, and I was alone in my liberation,” she says.

Smith recalls hearing white performers ask why people of colour who were occupying these same spaces were being “so political.” “I think back then, a lot of people wanted to put a focus on queerness first, and Blackness and people of colour second,” she says. Creating Les Femmes Fatales in 2010 was a form of resistance to this kind of thinking—a way to platform queer femmes of colour in a way that allowed them to feel empowered in their bodies.

Smith believes that progress has been made in the Village and Toronto’s queer community as a whole, but this increase in representation covers up many issues that queer people of colour still face. “It’s much easier today to think that we do not have an issue in terms of diversity, representation and race. But that’s not true. […] It’s a convenient untruth, that there isn’t any more work to do around racism.”

Les Femmes Fatales’ falling out with Pride Toronto in 2023 illustrates the consequences of this surface-level representation. In early 2023, Pride Toronto named the group the festival’s “BIPOC Ambassador,” and included them in promotional materials. The honour, according to the group, came with the promise of inclusion in media interviews and a spot at the front of the Pride parade. In a June press release, however, they wrote that “these promises largely went unfulfilled. Despite countless efforts to get Pride to make good and to honour the troupe appropriately, Les Femmes Fatales have been ignored by Pride Toronto, shut out from performing on their stages this year as a troupe, repeatedly snubbed and left out of 2023 the Pride Programming.” The group said they were left with no choice but to renounce the honour. Pride Toronto did not respond to requests for comment.

“There is a problem around making any marginalized group so palatable that they’re easy to swallow,” says Smith. “And what the mainstream has done is, essentially, send the message back to us and say ‘If you are well behaved, if you speak well and act well, if you narrow down your sharp edges you can get in.’ And I think that’s what a lot of gay white men did.”