It’s 2:30 a.m. and the dance floor is packed. Strobes silhouette two performers grinding on scaffolding surrounded by a seething mass dancing to the high-BPM tracks the DJ is pumping out. It’s Saturday night at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre in Toronto’s Gay Village, and the party is raging.
After years marked by club closures and the pandemic’s disruption of nightlife, a new wave of dance parties and club activity is energizing Toronto’s Church-Wellesley Village. But this is not simply a return of the old scene — it reflects a new generation of queer promoters and performers creating spaces they say better reflect who they are, including some who say the Village did not always feel like a place for them.
It wasn’t long ago that the dominant story in the Village was of bars and clubs closing: The Barn (2012), Zipperz (2016), Statler’s (2019), Fly 2.0 (2019). Rising rents and development reshaped the neighbourhood, as condos replaced spaces where queer nightlife once thrived.
“It definitely feels like we weren’t protected (from development forces),” said Phil Villeneuve. A DJ and party promoter, Villeneuve is a longtime chronicler of Toronto’s queer scene, including as an editor at Fab Magazine and co-founder in 2016 of queer nightlife website Yohomo.
While Village nightlife mainstays like the Black Eagle, Flash, Woody’s and Crews & Tangos remained, many events migrated west where promoters like Villeneuve hosted pop-ups in bars and warehouses.
The closures of the 2010s and the pandemic left the Village starved for dedicated dance clubs, said Russell Palloo, a veteran of Village nightlife. Palloo was a manager at Fly 2.0 and now co-owns the new Village club Bunker with Shawn Riker, one of the previous owners of Fly 2.0.
Located in an old adult video shop, Bunker opened in August 2025 as the first new Village club in years and has quickly become a popular late-night dance spot.
Palloo is positive about the return of choice in new parties: “It provides some revitalization to the Village to have more spaces available for people to go out and enjoy.”
The new Church Street pedestrianization pilot that runs until Aug. 21 could further expand that sense of space by allowing clubgoers to spill onto the street.
Another is Complex 19, a newly opened multilevel club from Bradley Blaylock, Marc Bou-Fadel and Mitch Gibson that hosts parties until 5 a.m. — and often later. Blaylock said having clubs “that are tried and true for us to be able to go out and feel safe regardless of who we are is so important.”
Built from their popular party Yum Yum, Blaylock said Complex 19 aims to create “a new space for queers and allies” to dance and build connections.
Part of the return to more traditional clubs is the expense for both promoters and partygoers of far-flung warehouse parties. Even charging $45 or $65 a ticket, promoters are often barely breaking even, Blaylock said. “Not everyone can afford to pay this every single weekend” so having cheaper transit-accessible spaces is “crucial.”
Blaylock and Villeneuve said the decline of Village nightlife also created room for younger promoters to step forward.
“This upswing now is very curious,” Villeneuve said. Emerging from the pandemic years, the younger generation is fascinated by the Gay Village, but many have been unable to find their place. “They’re excited by it, but it’s not for them,” he said. So many of them have now decided to “take (the Village) back, very dramatically.”
That’s what Rae Abunahla (DJ Booty Cornfed) did. Unable to find the music and vibe he wanted in the Village, he created his own party, Gay Rights, in 2025. It quickly expanded from Boutique Bar’s third floor to full takeovers at Buddies, where Abunahla was hired in January as nightlife programmer.
Since then, Buddies has seen weekend crowds of more than 1,000 and bar sales up 150 per cent, according to the venue.
Abunahla hopes Buddies can welcome back those who felt similarly to him by creating space for diversity in gender expression, sound and “inclusion of BIPOC folks.”
That idea is behind the new $10 weekly party Slur, which Abunahla describes as “cheap grimy energy for these young kids who want to go feral.” Buddies’ programming has also featured all-trans and all-women DJ nights and parties centring queer people of colour.
One DJ regularly playing in the Village is Sara Nazeman (DJ THIRDEYE). When she moved to Toronto, she settled in the Village but didn’t go out much because she didn’t feel “like there was a space for me as a queer woman of colour.”
“I never thought as a DJ that I would be able to work in the Village,” she said.
Now she plays almost every weekend at Buddies and at her Haus Party residency at Crews & Tangos. While queer parties thriving across the city are “a sign of growth,” she said, having a Village “where queer life is concentrated creates a sense of history and accessibility.”
“It feels like the underground scene is coming back to the Village, which is exciting,” she said.
André Henry-Cotnam (DJ Delicious) is also tapping into that excitement. “As a queer Black trans guy, I see some parties that feel a little more homogeneous than others,” he said. So he started his own Village events, including TRANSlation and Bodies Bodies Bodies, which he runs with his partner Kayden Anderson.
Henry-Cotnam is also proud to DJ at the Black Eagle, because leather bars have historically been cis white gay spaces. The work many Village venues are doing to diversify talent means “we’re seeing better representation in the Village,” he said.
For many queer people, the importance of the dance floor remains central, which is what makes the current activity in the Village feel significant to those involved.
“It’s political,” Henry-Cotnam said. “There’s so much going on in the world and it’s very easy to be depressed and upset about the things we can’t control. Finding your people, letting go together, is so powerful.”
