In 2025, Canada is scheduled to inaugurate its first 2SLGBTQI+ National Monument in the country’s capital of Ottawa. When it’s opened, it will be a powerful reminder of the stories of those who have been persecuted, abused, dismissed and marginalized because of who they desire and how they identify.
But Canada has other LGBTQ2S+ landmarks that you can visit now—though my choices are a bit whimsical. Drawing from pop culture and the arts, here are some queer shrines worth making a pilgrimage to.
Goodwood, Ontario
Location for exteriors of Schitt’s Creek
The riches-to-rags Rose family lived in the delightfully named Rosebud Motel, which is located in Orangeville, Ontario, a town with a pleasant historic main street and some nice galleries and restaurants. But that disconsolate abode of irksome tarriance is, unfortunately, closed. Ew, David! So instead head to the village of Goodwood, about an hour from Toronto, where the TV comedy’s exteriors were filmed. The facades of Cafe Tropical, Bob’s Garage and the Rose Apothecary are all here. At last year’s Goodwood Festival of Speed, the Ford Motor Company presented its special edition Very Gay Raptor truck, painted in rainbow colours. Great intentions, but you can be sure David Rose would never be seen in it.
Halifax, Nova Scotia
Neptune Theatre, where Elliot Page studied acting
Before he was even a teenager, Elliot Page enrolled at the theatre school of what is probably the most important theatre in Atlantic Canada. They must have done something right. Page started out in Canadian productions like the TV show Trailer Park Boys and films like Marion Bridge and Wilby Wonderful before going on to act in bigger-budget productions like Inception, the X-Men films and The Umbrella Academy.
Located less than a 10-minute walk from Halifax’s Citadel National Historic Site, Neptune Theatre stages a wide range of plays and shows; the 2023/2024 season includes runs of Wannabe: The Return of the Spice Girls and The Full Monty: The Broadway Musical. Last year the company joined a consortium of Canadian theatres in launching Canada’s first-ever queer and trans playwriting unit.
Fisher River Cree Nation, Manitoba
Nation of artist Kent Monkman
Internationally acclaimed artist and sometimes enfant terrible Kent Monkman was born in Ontario, raised primarily in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and on reserves in northern Manitoba including Fisher River Cree Nation, of which he is a member. (The term “two-spirit” was, in fact, introduced by Fisher River Cree Nation Elder Myra Laramee.) Monkman’s art often plays with the colonial stereotypes of 19th-century romantic art, juxtaposing nature with the formally dressed buffoonery of European colonizers, challenging “received notions of history and Indigenous peoples,” according to his website.
Fisher River Cree Nation, which is a two-and-a-half-hour drive north of Winnipeg, hosts an annual National Cree Gathering, this year August 3 to 6, and an annual community celebration, this year on July 30. The community is a hub for fishing and hunting expeditions and is a short drive from Fisher Bay Provincial Park, which was inaugurated in 2011.
New Waterford, Nova Scotia
Location for the 1996 novel Fall On Your Knees by Ann-Marie MacDonald
“A small mining town near cutaway cliffs that curve over narrow rock beaches below, where the silver sea rolls and rolls, flattering the moon. Not many trees, thin grass. The silhouette of a colliery, iron tower against a slim pewter sky with cables and supports sloping at forty-five-degree angles to the ground. Railway tracks that stretch only a short distance from the base of a gorgeous high slant of glinting coal, towards an archway in the earth where the tracks slope in and down and disappear. And spreading away from the collieries and coal heaps are the peaked roofs of the miners’ houses built row on row by the coal company. Company houses. Company town,” are the opening lines of Ann-Marie MacDonald’s bestseller from 1996, which was turned into a play that opened earlier this year.
If that doesn’t sell the Cape Breton community to you, consider that it’s not far from the Cabot Trail and the North Sydney ferry to Newfoundland.
St. John’s and Fogo Island, Newfoundland
Location for the film Closet Monster
Newfoundland native Stephen Dunn’s debut film follows a teenager desperate to escape his constrictive hometown and home life. Dunn went on to direct episodes of the TV show Little America and develop the short-lived Peacock reboot of Queer as Folk.
Meanwhile, Newfoundland is still as charming and pretty as it ever was. Get a taste of the humour and the accent on the streets of the capital before driving almost six hours to the ferry to Fogo Island for a taste of the spectacular landscapes. Fogo Island Inn has, of course, become a pilgrimage destination of another kind—for architecture lovers.
Davie Street, Vancouver, British Columbia
Home of Little Sister’s bookshop
Not a work of imagination nor an artist itself, this legendary bookstore was, for 20 years, a battleground between the LGBTQ2S+ community and the authorities who tried to censor expressions of our sexuality. The bookstore was targeted by Canadian Customs officials for importing sexually explicit material that was no more graphic than imported straight materials that were given a pass.
The owners fought the government all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada—and won in a 2000 ruling. If that doesn’t make you want to place a flower on their front step, then at least you should buy something from their selection of LGBTQ2S+ books, magazines and sex toys. The store is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year.
St. Laurent Boulevard, Montreal
Home of Café Cléopâtre
Montreal has long been famous for its strip clubs, saunas and cabarets. Opening in 1976 in the city’s now diluted red-light district, Café Cléopâtre still carries the flag for the days when such businesses were scandalous—it’s famous and infamous. Billing itself as a “unisex disco,” there are women downstairs stripping for the male gaze, while the upstairs cabaret hosts an array of queer and mixed events from naked karaoke to the neo-burlesque of Candyass Cabaret. For those who know all the nooks and crannies of Montreal’s Gay Village, just take a 15-minute walk here to really have your mind blown.
