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Drag queens on Halloween

Broadcast Date: Oct. 30, 1973

Exuberant cross-dressers, gay-baiting hecklers and glamorous female impersonators: they're all part of the scene at Toronto's Club Manatee on Halloween night in the early 1970s. The unlicensed gay dance club hosts a popular drag show every Halloween, attracting both friendly and hostile crowds. In this CBC-TV film from 1973, vignettes from the street outside are interspersed with scenes of three men and a woman dressing up for the evening – the men in women's clothes and makeup, the woman with a man's hat and pencil moustache.

Warning: This item contains offensive language.

Drag queens on Halloween

• The St. Charles Tavern, a gay beer hall on Toronto's Yonge St., was also the site of Halloween drag shows in the 1960s and '70s. A Toronto Star article from Nov. 1, 1971 reported that an estimated 5,000 to 8,000 onlookers, many of them hostile, had turned out the night before to take in the spectacle. Police blocked off the street, and "only admitted and obvious homosexuals were allowed through police lines." Members of a gay-positive organization, the University of Toronto Homophile Association, were also present to hand out leaflets encouraging understanding of homosexuality.

• Crowds were still gathering eight years later, in 1979, when huge numbers lined the street and many of them heckled anyone seen entering the St. Charles. (Most patrons used an alternate entrance, avoiding the crowd altogether.) Some hecklers were armed with eggs to throw at anyone they suspected was gay.

• Inside the St. Charles Tavern on Halloween 1979, doorman Harold Graham told the Toronto Star that onlookers used to be more civilized: "You know, I can remember when the [customers] would arrive in their costumes and dresses in limousines. And people would line the street and applaud them and look at them. It was nice. Like Mardi Gras. But now? Insane."

Drag queens on Halloween

Medium: Television

Program: Weekend

Broadcast Date: Oct. 30, 1973

Duration: 8:24

Last updated:
Oct. 23, 2009