Jordan Tannahill - The Videofag Book

Or sat watching a play there, cheek to jowl with other sweaty bodies. Or spent a night hanging out with us in our kitchen after coming to see a concert or a reading or an exhibition. Or, quite possibly, youve never heard of Videofag before in your life. For those of you for whom the latter is the case, Videofag was a storefront art space in Torontos Kensington Market that became whatever it needed to becomea gallery, a theatre, a cinema, a party space, a community centre, a safe haven. And, from October 2012 to June 2016, it was also our home. and Mrs. and Mrs.

Lau, who lived upstairs and had just retired. The front room was lit from the drop ceiling by harsh fluorescence and the floors were covered in grey-and-white-checkered vinyl. The shop window faced westward onto Bellevue Square Parka little oasis for beer-drinking sunbathers, fire spinners, and anarchists with dogs. Hidden behind the front room was our apartment: a bathroom, a kitchen, and two bedrooms, all down a long, narrow hallway leading to a small backyard of cement paving stones blanketed in yellow tree pollen. The whole space was barely eleven feet wide. It wasnt much to look at, but over four years it played host to a revolving door of artists and outcasts.

We had long been inspired by Torontos queer transgression; a glittering lineage stretching back through the Feminist Art Gallery, Kids on TV, Will Munro, Zsa Zsa Gallery, Bruce La Bruce, Fifth Column, Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, and General Idea. The two of us arrived in TorontoWill from rural Prince Edward Island, Jordan from suburban Ottawain the twilight of the legendary Vazaleen parties of Will Munro, not long before Munro was diagnosed with brain cancer at the age of thirty-three. The Vazaleen parties were temporary utopias where punks, anarchists, ravers, art fags, goths, bull dykes, and leather daddies sweated their asses off to the worlds brashest new music and cabaret acts. They were nights that showed Toronto it could be a bigger and bolder city than it had ever imagined itself to be before. The romping bathhouse concerts of Kids on TV and the now-mythic pageants of General Idea showed us how queerness could be expressed through collaboration, community-building, and the creation of temporal spaces for subversive potentiality. What would it be like, we tried to imagine, to bottle something of this fag magic inside ones own home? And to live with itand within itday and night? We started Videofag without knowing if wed make our rent or whether, if we threw an event, anyone would even show up.

We spent the first month staying up long past midnight in our long johns painting the walls and scrubbing thirty years of hair out the cracks in the tiles. Paying homage to our roots, we launched the space with an exhibition of the costumes, music videos, posters, and ephemera of Kids on TV. The day of opening we made three trips to the Beer Store on Bathurst, each time hauling back a five precariously balanced cases on a hand-pulled trolley. It turns out this would become something of a weekly ritual. We swept, we mopped, we helped the band put the finishing touches on the exhibition and, before we realized it, the space was full of people. Overfull.

People spilled out onto the front steps, the sidewalk, into the street. About fifty people could cram themselves into the space at a given moment in time, and hundreds stopped through over the course of the night. The two of us would flash back and forth between our kitchen and the bar, fumbling with bottle openers and beer caps, serving up lukewarm, foaming beers. It felt like an optical illusion, how such a small space, no bigger than a living room really, could suddenly feel so expansive. The queers came. We made our first months rent.

And then the next. And the next. We really did live month to month, always imagining Videofag as a fleeting gesture, there one minute and gone the next. But somehow there was always another strange project that needed a home, so we kept going. We began calling what we did feral curation in that it operated outside the bounds of any formal programming schedule, board of directors, or funding structures. Artists came to us with ideas, or we sought out people we were enamoured with, and found ways to support them.

All of it was incredibly informal. Usually it began with us cooking dinner for artists and chatting with them about their ideas. We then gifted them microresidencies to develop projects and, when it came time to share with an audience, the artists kept the proceeds from the door and we kept whatever money we could make from selling beer out of our kitchen. All we had to offer was a bit of time and space, but those were often the two essential ingredients. During shows it was common to hear karaoke wails coming from the bar next door, or the manic barks of our downstairs neighbours rheumy-eyed bichon frises, or nighttime altercations between cops and locals in the park across the street. And though these intrusions sometimes ruined a plays climax, or tripped up a singer halfway through a song, they also helped remind us that Videofag was part of a neighbourhood, a swatch in the quilt of a diverse community full of other people with concerns and interests altogether unrelated to that song or play.

Its hard to say at what point we became comfortable with arriving home to find our bedroom converted into a bustling dressing room, our mattress caked in mascara, bobby pins, and fake eyelashes. Or walking into the bathroom to find it transformed into a set and props workshop, the bathtub filled with used paint pans and rollers. Or finding strangers passed out on our couch in the mornings, and glitter fused into every seam of the house, as if in its DNA. But at some point we did. At some point we no longer craved personal space. We no longer needed to close a door behind ourselves.