In March 2020, many McGill students unwittingly set off on what would be their last night out for a very long time. Students currently sequestered at home often long for nights spent in dimly lit, sweaty spaces. Even for those who abandoned the Saint-Laurent club scene after their first year at McGill, the loss of Montreal’s 2SLGBTQIA+ and alternative nightlife spaces, along with the unique sense of community fostered within, has been deeply felt.
As lockdowns swept across the globe, most will remember where they were when restrictions first affected them directly. Drag queen Uma Gahd was midway through a drag brunch.
“During the brunch, the staff had to get up and lock the doors because […] the lockdown was put in place in the middle of our show,” Gahd said. “So we basically looked at the audience and we were like, ‘You’re allowed to leave if you want, but we can’t let anyone in. And this is the last thing you’re going to be doing for a while.’”
The beating heart of Montreal’s nightlife was quickly quieted as fears mounted about the spread of the virus. Everything appealing about nights out—the anonymity of crowds, the promise of encounters with strangers—was antithetical to the measures now required to curb viral spread.
Will Straw, a professor in McGill’s Department of Art History and Communication Studies, is researching the urban night and the structures that govern it. He recounted the near-instant impact of the pandemic on nighttime culture across the world.
“Between […] March 7 and March 15, 2020, you had this massive shutdown of nightlife around much of the world,” Straw said. “So we can really say the culture of the night was one of the first non-human victims of the pandemic, because it was believed [that you had to] begin by controlling what people do at night.”
Montreal has long been known for its nighttime thrills. During the prohibition era, the city’s proximity to east coast cities in the U.S. earned it a reputation as a party haven for parched Americans. This reputation persisted throughout the 20th century, as Montreal became internationally recognized for its jazz and nightclub scene even as organized crime and police corruption rendered the city’s nights uncontrolled and dangerous.
More recently, some feel that Montreal’s nights have become overly controlled through increased police presence and prohibitive licensing restrictions, stifling some of the freedom that previously defined it. Although attempts to monitor nightlife predated the pandemic, nighttime culture remains a significant—and somewhat unavoidable—casualty of the last year. This loss was well-documented across the internet, from Peter McCabe’s eerie Empty Montreal photo series to YouTube videos pronouncing the city’s nightlife dead and gone.