Gentrification, grunge and public fear all had a part to play in pushing goths deeper into the shadows.
It’s the 1990s. The air is electric as you walk along a darkened Toronto street, Queen St. W. To your left and right you see pale faces not unlike the moon shining through wispy clouds and clothes as black as the night itself. Your makeup is perfect and your outfit sends chills down the spine of anyone sneaking a glance at you. The night life is your life and hundreds around you feel exactly the same. Floating into a dingy club, you take your spot on the dance floor as the guitars whine and the singers belt out hypnotic melodies. It’s dark. It’s depressing. You are amongst the dead, but have never felt more alive.
Suddenly, it’s 2024. Your favourite haunts are closed, all the painted faces have disappeared and Queen St. W feels like just another street in the concrete jungle. You don’t think you can stand to look at one more overpriced, branded pair of pants. You ask yourself: Where the hell has the Toronto goth scene gone?
What was once a thriving subculture lurking around Queen St. W has seemingly faded into obscurity. All the old gothic venues and macabre shops have disappeared completely. The stretch of street is now completely unrecognizable from the way it used to be back in the nineties. What factors caused the disappearance of the Toronto goths? Is the scene really dead? Like all serious inquiries, the investigation begins with Google.
Starting with a Wikipedia page creatively titled Toronto Goth Scene, and diving head first into ancient blog posts, dusty old articles, Reddit threads and Facebook groups leads readers deep into stories from ye goths of olde about bar fights, dank catacombs and sex coffins.
The Facebook groups in particular are still fairly active. The most popular group currently being ‘Toronto Goths’, having 6,000 current members. It is a spiritual successor to the scenes old webpage, archived here.
Sean Beesley, better known as Live Evil, is one of these members. He was a DJ at an incredibly popular 90’s goth venue named Sanctuary: The Vampire Sex Bar. His band, Die Blind, would play shows there on the regular and he was the house DJ every weekend for seven years.
Sean Beesley (center) and his band, Die Blind, performing a high energy show draped in black clothes and white face paint (Courtesy of Sean Beesley)
“Sanctuary was like home for all of these misfits that didn’t fit anywhere else, and after it started to fade, you realized just how important it was. You realized you were living in an era.” says Beesley.
He took a drag of his cigarette and looked absently into the camera for a moment, reliving the best times of his life. Beesley had tons to share from his time as the house DJ. He remembered that one of the most persistent issues at the bar was the use of the lobby coffin by the clubbers to have sex. People would be caught inside of it performing a sort of ‘monster mash’ and were subsequently kicked out every single weekend.
Others shared the same sentiment. Particularly, a man named Kevin Roper who would go clubbing three days a week at minimum during the early to mid-nineties. His first experience with the scene was in 1992 when he was 16 years old, when he snuck into Sanctuary underaged.
Roper shares these experiences enthusiastically as he showed me pictures of flyers and his old Sanctuary VIP pass. He spoke of dank, dark clubs illuminated by candlelight. Young kids draped in black, smoking and drinking in the catacombs of Sanctuary. He looks back fondly at the creatures of the night who used to roam Queen St. W.
A Sanctuary VIP card (Both images courtesy of Kevin Roper)
Tara Salt, a fellow creature of the night, was also a regular clubber and Goth from 1996 until 2010. She was around at the height of the subculture here in Toronto and partied around in Germany. She hung out in creepy old castles and air hangers ravaged in World War II, which were staples of the scene over in Europe. The most decrepit and abandoned of buildings simply scream Goth to her and many others, and that included the venues in Toronto. She vividly remembers how charmingly decrepit Queen St. W was at the time.
“I was a regular at Sanctuary, Savage Garden and Velvet Underground at that time […] Sanctuary used to be in a really crappy part of town where everything was falling apart. The bathrooms in there looked like something out of Trainspotting,” Salt tells me. “We used to have to go across the street to 241 Pizza to ask for toilet paper.”
Despite its blemishes, the bar itself was important for the scene. According to Beesley, It was one of the only exclusively alternative clubs available during the entirety of the week at the time. But with Sanctuary’s success other Gothic venues along the street began to open, like Savage Garden and Death in the Underground. This concentration of gothic venues wound up earning the street the nickname of ‘Little Gotham’ to some folks.
“The nineties for the alternative scene was like the [sixties] for hippies, but you really didn’t realize that in the moment. You were just out there having a great time,” says Beesley.
Things took a nosedive at the turn of the century. The Columbine High School shooting in 1999 brought an incredibly negative image of the Goths to the public eye causing distrust and paranoia. The shooters themselves had been wrongfully assumed by the media to be goths themselves and popular gothic figures of the time like Marilyn Manson were accused of spreading ideologies that caused the tragedy. This, coupled with the gentrification of Queen St West bringing skyrocketing rent and insurance prices, caused venues to slowly close their doors one by one. A fate that Sanctuary, just like its brethren, couldn’t escape.
“I started clubbing in 1996, right through until about 2010 when a lot of the bars started to close because the cost of insurance was too high. By that point, Queen St. W. started to gentrify, and then the cost of rent went through the roof. Back then nobody charged entrance fees; they were only making money off of alcohol,” Salt explains.
“Life changed. Music changed. I’m sure everything got more expensive downtown. They all closed one by one. Music, I would say, affected life. End of the 1990s grunge music was huge. Goth/punk and 1980s culture was over,” says Roper.
It was as simple as that. Money and combating trends wiped the scene out. Queen St West as a gothic hub was almost completely snubbed out by 2015 when The Velvet Underground closed its doors and reopened as a simple live show venue. But these people were still here, active online. Beesley still DJs under the name of Live Evil to this day. Where are our goths now?
“Most of the crowd I knew still wanted the music. We followed the DJs!” Roper answers.
And so they did, attending special events held by these DJs at newer venues like SeeScape and The Cat on Q. Then Ground Control opened, a bar run by a man named DJ Lazarus.
Toted as “holding the goth mantle” by Salt, Lazarus and his David Bowie-themed venue is the first alternative club to be open 7 days a week here in Toronto since Sanctuary.
Opening its doors last year, the bar hosts events almost every weekend that caters to goths, as well as any other type of alternative genres you can think of. With a statue of Bowie’s character Ziggy Stardust on display as well as memorabilia from the late twentieth century, the venue serves as a blast from the past and the perfect place for today’s goths to have a ‘Sanctuary’ of their own.
Beesley reminisced about working with Lazarus back at Sanctuary, and how he has yet to lose his steam or go inactive within the community over the years.
“What Lazarus has done is quite remarkable,” Beesley says, smiling. “You gotta give him an awful lot of props. Right now Ground Control is a big thing. People have been waiting twenty to twenty five years to have a place to just go and have a drink; have it be your scene.”
Ground Control, mixed with the incredibly active and lively online presence the Toronto Goths have, is a testament to the relationships and community built 30 years ago within Little Gotham. While it may not look the same, the scene was NEVER dead. The creatures of the night continue to thrive in the delightfully macabre, the intoxicating melancholy and the beautiful acceptance found within their dark world.
