Erella Ganon believes she has said “yes” more than any other word.
This approach to life has taken her to places ranging from a lunch with Picasso to hosting the Talking Heads’s David Byrne whenever he’s in town. It has also made her one of the city’s most active volunteers — a pursuit she maintains while living with her fourth brain tumour.
Seated in the Arabesque Café, a neighbourhood spot on College Street whose GoFundMe campaign she helped spread after it was vandalized in 2023, Ganon discusses her latest projects between sips of a cardamom latte and reapplications of ruby lipstick.
Ganon is a foundational figure in Toronto’s cultural history — the woman who produced one of Canada’s first AIDS benefits and helped set the stage for Casey House. Now, as the city grapples with a modern affordability crisis, she is once again at the centre of the fray. As part of our Toronto the Better series, we look at how Ganon is helping shape the city’s future through housing and arts advocacy, refusing to let her diagnosis get in the way.
“Looking at my schedule — for someone who doesn’t earn any money — I’m really busy,” she laughed.
That schedule is always split between immediate neighbourhood needs and long-term systemic change. At the time, on the local level, the program in which she mentors young urban planners on building spaces that cultivate community was about to wrap up. She also managed social media for the city-programmed $7 multi-course “park dinners” which wrapped up before the holidays. However, the community-run potluck dinners for which she cooks both meat-inclusive and vegetarian meals will continue filling neighbourhood bellies year-round.
But Ganon’s influence also extends into the city’s permanent landscape. She has been steadfast in attending town hall meetings for the future of the historic former post office building at 1117 Queen St. W., and sits on the board as a founding member of Build a Better Bloor Dufferin (BBBD), a group of area residents and businesses who mobilize to enact change.
One such initiative to come from the BBBD was their battle against the real estate investment trust, Primaris, managing the proposed Dufferin Mall redevelopment. Announced in 2019, the plan included luxury condo towers. After over a year of town halls, petitions, and protests — including one demonstration at the mall’s entrance that involved a towering, gaping-mouthed puppet with a dollar-signed top hat — BBBD reached an agreement with Primaris to reserve over 10% of the building’s residences for affordable housing in 2021.
That win set a precedent she is now carrying into the arts scene. Ganon is also a founding member of the Community Cultural Spaces Trust, a volunteer organization that aims to combat the affordability crisis in the arts by acquiring property to lease to artists for cheap. Last January, the organization purchased two units in the multi-use Youngplace building in the city’s west end, the first ever community space purchase by a cultural land trust in the country.
These groundbreaking initiatives follow a long history of trailblazing. On Oct. 21, 1986, at the Theatre Passe Murraille — as AIDS entered the general public consciousness and even before the iconic group ACT UP was founded — Ganon (who then went by the name Erella “Vent”) produced one of Canada’s first AIDS benefits.
The fundraising event was for her dear friend afflicted with the disease, textile artist and designer Tim Jocelyn. Ganon, with her extensive circle of friends cultivated as a cultural figurehead during Queen Street West’s heyday as Toronto’s artistic heartbeat, helped to curate the benefit’s lineup of performers including the Clichettes, the Toronto-based pioneering trio of punk feminist performance art.
Ganon’s nearly life-long friend, Micah Barnes, singer-songwriter formerly of the a cappella quartet The Nylons, was also included in the benefit’s lineup. He remembers the buzz between the artists up in the theatre’s balcony, engulfed with the potent love in the air, chomping at the bit to get on stage and do their part.
“It was a very deep experience for me,” he said. “There was an overwhelming sense of support at a time when society was still blaming the victims for having contracted a disease.”
Ganon would be recognized for the Ooga Booga benefit, named after one of Jocelyn’s prominent collections, at the 2023 POZ-TO awards, an annual event highlighting prominent figures and their work around the illness. However, the idea of being first and any accolades that may follow had no place in Ganon’s motivation. In fact, she didn’t even know that she was a trailblazer until six years later. Ganon simply saw her friend struggling to cope both physically and financially and did what she could to try and alleviate some of his burden.
“When I tell people that I was the producer of Canada’s first AIDS benefit, they don’t believe me, but at the time, no one had even heard of AIDS,” Ganon said.
The Ooga Booga Benefit raised $31,000 (roughly equivalent to $92,000 today). Some of that money was put towards the creation of Canada’s first-ever medical facility to specialize in AIDS care, Casey House. Jocelyn is understood in the community to be the first person in the scene to have their life taken by the disease. The creation of Casey House would care for all of the beautiful minds lost to AIDS that came after him, care that continues to this day on Isabella Street.
Barnes spent his last week with his partner, Rene Highway, who was an Indigenous dancer, choreographer, and brother to playwright Tomson Highway, at Casey House. Barnes recalls the “extraordinary” care Highway received in his last days — care that was set into motion that one evening in 1986 when Ganon filled the Theatre Passe Murraille with Toronto’s finest.
“Erella has incredible taste in music,” Barnes said. “She really truly curated an evening that made us all feel proud and honored to be there.”
Ganon’s ability to locate solutions is a force that not even a brain tumour could halt — four of them have tried. Over the years, Ganon has undergone several surgeries to remove atypical masses of tissue, one of which resided on her jugular vein. The current accumulation of abnormal cells sits within the sella turcica at the base of the skull, causing Cushing’s Disease.
Though she schedules her life around a strict medication schedule, forced to endure serious daily pain due to a fatal opioid allergy, she’s glad that her condition befell her and not someone who couldn’t cope with it. In fact, she says that since the growth is housed within bone, stunting its ability to spread further, she believes she’s won “the lottery” of brain tumours.
“If you’re going to get a brain tumour, get one of mine,” she chuckled.
Her condition makes her day-to-day more physically difficult, but it hasn’t touched her spirit. She’s still finding ways to serve her community with her time, culinary skills, or her Midas touch for fostering community — often all three simultaneously. For Ganon, it’s “much easier to do something than to do nothing.” She lets the momentum of her projects and friendships propel her forward.
Andy Fabo, a Toronto-based activist and acclaimed artist, said that he admires Ganon’s energy and her ability to fit multiple day’s worth of work into just 24 hours. “She deserves a spotlight on her,” he said.
In a time of increased isolation, Ganon tries to bring people together as much as she can. She doesn’t second-guess herself; she just “does.” Her advice to folks feeling lonely, dreaming about how their lives could be better, or wondering how to get their own ball rolling towards change?
“Start. Just start.”
