Meet the Artists Keeping Queer Nightlife Alive in Toronto
The bass hits before the door fully opens. It bleeds into the street first, low and insistent, vibrating the sidewalk outside of Gay Rights, an event in the heart of Toronto’s village. Inside, bodies are already pressed closely together, slick with sweat, moving in the half-light. The room pulses red, then blue, then purple. Someone laughs. Someone yells. Someone lets the music take over completely.
Near the front, a DJ leans over the towering booth, one hand hovering over the flashing CDJ 3000s, the other steady. She’s reading the room in real time, holding the energy together with sound. On stage, a drag performer commands attention with every movement, their body sharp and deliberate. Unbeknownst to the pulsing audience, a photographer watches the crowd, his camera lifted just long enough to catch what might disappear by morning.
Spaces like this aren’t just about entertainment. They also function as sanctuaries and pressure valves for everything Toronto bottles up. As the city grows less forgiving to queer people by the year—from space closures to gentrification—nightlife holds what daylight often can’t; spaces built on community, experimentation, defiance and joy.
Gay Rights and other events like it don’t usually start as concrete business ventures with fancy brand decks; they start out of necessity. For Albert Hoang, the Toronto-based photographer who partnered with his friend and founder, Rae Abunahla, to start the party, it was about creating the kind of space his community was missing. Hoang knows all too well how quickly scenes appear and disappear in Toronto, sometimes feeling faster than the flash of his camera. Gay Rights was a way to interrupt that cycle.
Photography entered Hoang’s life as a coping mechanism during school, snapping shots as a way to manage stress and stay creatively engaged. The beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic forced him to choose between taking his art seriously or walking away from it entirely. Toronto doesn’t make that choice easy.
“I don't think Toronto is a city that both infrastructurally and culturally really values artists,” says Hoang. “I feel like in Toronto, you really have to make it happen. You have to invest a lot more of your money into creating shoots and building culture. There is a sense of ease that isn't here.”
This precarity informs what he chooses to document. Hoang is drawn to early moments: emerging scenes, first iterations, the feeling of something just beginning. His work is less about spectacle than preservation. For him, photography is a way of saying this mattered—even if it doesn’t last.
If Hoang documents the space, Ms. Myles animates it. Behind the DJ booth, her role extends far beyond selecting tracks. “I believe, as a DJ, my ethos is to be fluent in healing others via the music that I play and the sets that I curate,” she says.
As a Black, trans woman born and raised in the Malvern neighbourhood of Toronto, Ms. Myles understands sound as a form of infrastructure. In a city fractured by rising costs and shrinking cultural spaces, she says that music creates temporary bridges between communities that might otherwise never meet. But lately, this work has become increasingly precarious. Gentrification has reshaped Toronto’s nightlife landscape, pushing parties into less stable venues and making long-term sustainability difficult.
“It has very much dampened how vibrant our city has been in the past,” she says. “Hopefully we can see a turnaround in the culture, and people will be open again at this end of [the age of] conservatism that we’re in.”
In her eyes, DJing is an act of resistance. Creating joy in a city that feels increasingly hostile to marginalised communities is not passive. Each set becomes a way of intentionally asserting presence.
While Hoang preserves the moment and Ms. Myles shapes it, Zi lives inside of it. As a drag and ballroom performer who moved to Toronto from Vancouver, Zi’s body is both the medium and the message. She moves between multiple scenes, each with its own rules and expectations. Like Hoang, she explains that Toronto demands constant proof—proof of talent, of relevance, and of worth.
“It's definitely like a pressure cooker,” she says. “It just pushes you to show why you're the one constantly.”
Their body becomes the site where that pressure converges. On stage, Zi commands attention, using movement to tell stories that aren’t always welcomed elsewhere. Nightlife in Toronto offers a rare space where queerness is not just tolerated, but centred. Yet, that freedom comes with contradiction.
Performers are asked to give more (energy, money, time), even as resources shrink and expectations rise. Gentrification doesn’t just erase spaces; it reshapes what performers are asked to endure to stay visible. Despite this, keeping these spaces alive in Toronto is vital to the survival of the communities they protect.
“I try to remember that what we’re doing is not just partying sometimes; it’s also a form of resistance,” says Zi.
For the artists carving out these spaces, resisting the pressure to abandon their values for profit isn’t easy. While the city’s nightlife does offer a sanctuary away from the extractive nature of living under capitalism, it’s constantly under attack. Toronto is often heralded for its creativity and passion, but it does little to support the very artists who are keeping it alive. The commodification of queer club life threatens to dismantle all of the work done by these artists and organisers. It pushes out the people who deserve to be protected and transforms safe spaces into exhibits for outsiders.
Through this system, oppressed people are used as a scapegoat for their cultural worth while the system gatekeeps opportunities from the very communities it claims to represent. It’s challenging to combat downsizing as it unfolds in real time. Although this limits the scope within which artists can operate, they’re still able to adapt alongside it.
By leaning on the community around her, Ms. Myles preserves the inimitable energy of Toronto through intimate collaboration. Rather than working in isolation, she creates spaces for escape alongside other performers and organisers who understand that survival in this city can only be accomplished as a collective.
“It's about finding like-minded people and building horizontally rather than seeking opportunities vertically,” she says.
Maintaining these connections is just as powerful, especially in a city where venues close overnight and communities are displaced with little to no warning. Lavender Menace, Club 120, Peaches Sports Bar, and The Henhouse are just a small number of LGBTQ+ nightlife venues that have shut down in the past decade. Documenting queer nightlife gradually becomes an act of care—a means to hold onto what the city lets slip through its fingers. In Toronto, scenes are often built around the knowledge that permanence is unlikely. A captured moment on a crowded dancefloor becomes evidence that something lived here, albeit briefly.
“There's a lot of dreaming that happens here. As a photographer, you get to see the start of so many new movements in Toronto. To capture it is really special,” says Hoang.
For him, documentation is about building on existing memories. His camera moves through the room alongside the people it captures. Hoang’s work rejects the impulse to polish queer nightlife for outside audiences. He leans into blurred motion, overlapping figures and moments of release after budding tension; the kinds of details that rarely make it into mainstream archives.
This work is crucial to protect against misrepresentation. When queer spaces are only remembered through shallow headlines or promotional imagery, true complexity is erased. By preserving nightlife culture as it unfolds, Hoang resists the flattening of queer culture into something purely digestible. His art insists on understanding the context surrounding the labour, care and intimacy that sustains these rooms.
Zi’s work exhibits the same sense of urgency. Each of her performances carries a memory through movement. Even while spaces shift and scenes fracture, their body feels the demands of the room and delivers seamlessly. She’s able to translate the pressures of the city and offer solace. Her presence onstage offers a point of recognition for those watching—especially young queer people arriving in the city and looking for proof that they belong.
“There's this sort of liberation that comes with just being out in the scene and dancing,” says Zi.
Together, these responses reveal how artists adapt within the same constraints—not through a single solution, but through interconnected strategies. Collaboration allows scenes to survive when institutions fall. Documentation preserves what the city neglects. Endurance keeps bodies visible in spaces that are constantly under threat. These approaches rely on each other to sustain the ecosystem that is Toronto’s queer and trans nightlife.
By the end of the night at Gay Rights, the bass softens. The lights come up just enough to reveal the room in its aftermath. Damp, slick floors, smeared makeup and half-empty cups filled with lime wedges and unidentified liquids cover the room. It feels different with the overhead lights on. The DJ packs away her gear. The performer steps off stage, sweat glistening on their skin. The photographer lowers his camera. People linger, reluctant to break the spell completely. Outside, the city resumes its usual rhythm; The constant hum of familiar Toronto construction, of something being built, destroyed or replaced.
What emerges is not just a mosaic of nightlife culture, but of collective perseverance. Artists do not simply occupy these spaces, they maintain, adapt and honour them. In a city like ours, there’s nothing more radical than resilience.
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Maddison Hoyt
CREATIVE DIRECTION Stecy Helena Franck
ART DIRECTION Hannah Clifton, Sanya Sharma
COVER STORY Lucy Kebirungi, Cris Nippard
PHOTOGRAPHY Dickson Ntiamoah, Elca Manglal-lan, Kyber Ballantyne
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