“I introduced a new policy: gay customers served by gay staff,” Monroe remembers. “And men were first allowed to dance together [in a Montreal club] on my birthday, Aug 27, in 1958.”

Gay bars remained segregated along gender lines after the Village moved east in the early 1980s. But all that changed the night of July 15, 1990, when Montreal police raided the infamous Sex Garage loft party in Old Montreal, a night now widely considered to be Montreal’s Stonewall. Four hundred partygoers – mostly gay men, lesbians and drag queens not welcome in the city’s gay bars – filed outside while other drag queens climbed out windows and crawled across treacherous century-old rooftops to avoid the cops. Police brutality that night and at a demonstration outside Precinct 25 the next day finally and irrevocably shocked three million Montrealers out of their complacency. Sex Garage also helped desegregate Montreal’s gay scene, and clubs then hired drag queens who became “overnight” superstars.

Today Montreal’s enormous and exciting gay scene rivals that of every other great gay mecca in the world. Over 450,000 gays and lesbians live in Greater Montreal and over one million gay and lesbian tourists visit the city every year. As my friend and PlanetOut.com columnist Rex Wockner noted, “Montreal men are a little foufier and quite a bit randier than elsewhere in North America. I think Montreal has more gay bathhouses per capita than any other city in the world. It also has a huge gay village that puts The Castro [in San Francisco] to shame – 15 blocks like that two-block stretch of Castro, crowded with people seven nights a week. Some of the bars are even well-lit. Imagine.”

Montrealers’ trademark joie de vivre, along with the BBCM’s world-renowned Black & Blue circuit party at Olympic Stadium and Divers/Cité’s one million-strong Gay Pride parade – clearly the most exciting cocktail parties the city has seen since Expo 67 – have made Montreal one of the world’s top gay destinations.