The Videofag Book

By Jordan Tannahill, William Ellis, Chandler Levack and Greg MacArthur

Longlisted for the 2018 Toronto Book Awards

In October 2012, lovers William Ellis and Jordan Tannahill moved into a former barbershop in Toronto's Kensington Market neighbourhood and turned it into an art space called Videofag. Over the next four years Videofag became a hub for counterculture in the city, playing host to a litany of performances, screenings, parties, exhibitions, and all manner of queer fuckery. But hosting a city in their house took its toll and eventually William and Jordan broke up, closing the space for good in June 2016.

The Videofag Book is a chronicle of those four years told through multiple voices and mediums: a personal history by William and Jordan; a love letter by Jon Davies; a communal oral history compiled by Chandler Levack; a play by Greg MacArthur; a poem by Aisha Sasha John; a chronological history of Videofag's programming; and a photo archive curated by William and Jordan in full colour.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bookhug Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2017
• ISBN: 9781771663632

Jordan Tannahill

Jordan Tannahill is a playwright, theatre director and filmmaker. His plays and short films have been presented in theatres, festivals and galleries across Canada and internationally. He received the 2014 Governor General’s Literary Award for Drama for his book Age of Minority: Three Solo Plays. In collaboration with William Ellis, Jordan runs the alternative art-space Videofag, out of a defunct barbershop in Toronto's Kensington Market.

Book preview

cover.jpg

first edition

Copyright © 2017 by the contributors

The production of this book was made possible through the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. BookThug also acknowledges the support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Ontario Book Fund.

BookThug acknowledges the land on which it operates. For thousands of years it has been the traditional land of the Huron-Wendat, the Seneca, and most recently, the Mississaugas of the Credit River. Today, this meeting place is still the home to many Indigenous people from across Turtle Island, and we are grateful to have the opportunity to work on this land.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

library and archives canada cataloguing in publication

      The Videofag book / edited by William Ellis and Jordan Tannahill.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

Softcover: ISBN 978-1-77166-362-5

HTML: ISBN 978-1-77166-363-2

PDF: ISBN 978-1-77166-364-9

Kindle: ISBN 978-1-77166-365-6

1. Arts, Canadian—Ontario—Toronto—21st century. 2. Artists—Ontario—Toronto. 3. Kensington Market (Toronto, Ont.). I. Tannahill, Jordan, editor II. Ellis, William, 1982–, editor

NX513.T67V53 2017 700.9713’541 C2017-906756-7 C2017-906757-5

Contents

Videofags, an introduction . . . 7

William Ellis and Jordan Tannahill

A Love Letter to Videofag . . . 21

Jon Davies

House of the Cool Parents: An Oral History . . . 31

Chandler Levack

A Man Vanishes . . . 63

a play by Greg MacArthur

C.C.

a poem by Aisha Sasha John . . . 145

Videofag: The Complete Programming . . . 149

Videofags

William Ellis and Jordan Tannahill

Perhaps you once partied at Videofag. 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, you’ve 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 Toronto’s Kensington Market that became whatever it needed to become—a 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. In its previous life it had been a barbershop run by a husband and wife, Mr. 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 Park—a 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 wasn’t 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 Toronto’s 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 Toronto—Will from rural Prince Edward Island, Jordan from suburban Ottawa—in 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 world’s 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 one’s own home? And to live with it—and within it—day and night?

We started Videofag without knowing if we’d 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 month’s 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 play’s 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.

It’s 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. It started to feel like we were living in a polyamorous relationship with the whole city of Toronto.

We didn’t need privacy because we had one another. In the midst of the ever-raging sea that was Videofag, we found a quiet, resolute island for two. And each night, after we locked the door and turned off the lights, we crawled onto that island and held each other. But in time, the sea found ways to encroach on it. The hours we used to spend lying in bed watching Twin Peaks became replaced with late nights repainting the gallery and mopping up puddles of spilt beer and helping artists install a hundred pounds of granulated cork on our floor. Gradually, over four years, the water rose without us even realizing it. It rose until whatever we had been as a couple independent of Videofag was drowned.

When we finally moved out, the Laus told us that we were good boys. They had witnessed every crazy thing that had happened over the years. When a forest of twenty-three saplings was installed in the gallery, or when the floor was covered in a foot of sand and a beach boardwalk built overtop, or when paint and various bodily fluids would be hurled against the walls. They watched us practically destroy and rebuild their ground floor over and over again. As we