click to enlarge
© Paul Mckinnon | Dreamstime Super Sexe strip club in Montréal, 2015
Three years ago, a trio of Montréal superheroes went up in smoke. The women of the Super Sexe strip club sign — clad in high heels, black bikinis and red capes — had brazenly soared over rue Sainte-Catherine for decades, flickering symbols of Montréal’s libertine spirit. That is, until meeting their demise in October 2021 at the hands of a suspected arsonist.
Super Sexe opened in 1978. In the four years between its 2017 closure and the fire, some asked whether the club’s landmark beacon should be conserved. Instead, it was left to its fate. To the Montréalers who mourned its loss, the sign’s demise was a sign of the times.
Since the early 20th century, when Prohibition dried out cities across the U.S. and, briefly, Canada, Montréal’s red-light district beckoned those seeking pleasure and vice. Americans — including many Vermonters — flocked to places where alcohol flowed and nightlife sparkled.
That era has long passed, ushered out in part by the internet and websites such as Pornhub, which is headquartered in Montréal. But the city’s tourism industry still leans on its sexy spirit, even as today’s sex workers have been pushed to the margins of the city. Yet there are signs that how this history is told, and by whom, is changing — from a new walking tour to an upcoming museum exhibit exploring Montréal’s scandalous past.
Alex Tigchelaar met plenty of Vermonters during her time working in Montréal strip clubs throughout the 1980s and ’90s, she said. Those included the “best and worst” establishments, from glitzy gentlemen’s clubs to a dive bar with a boarded-up window and sheet-metal stage.
click to enlarge
Bibliothèque Nationale Du Québec Théâtre Gayety, circa 1946
“The clubs were famous,” she told me. “Men came [to Montréal] to see us.” They traveled from Vermont, Boston and beyond to shower the strippers with attention — and money — she recalled, “thinking you were so exotic: You were this Montréal girl.”
Sex work has long been connected to the city’s tourism economy, argues Tigchelaar, now a PhD candidate at Concordia University, whose doctoral thesis focuses on how sex work has shaped Montréal’s urban spaces and infrastructure. “In the early 1800s, who was showing the sailors around?” she asked. “Who was bringing them to the taverns? Who was telling them where the hotels were?”
Had the Super Sexe sign signaled a different kind of heritage, it likely would have been protected, she suggested. But sex worker history is seen differently. “That sign should have been saved,” Tigchelaar said. “We are so useful and important to a city,” she said of sex workers, “but at the same time we can’t be acknowledged properly.”
Curious to see for myself how Montréal presents that history, I browsed the handful of walking tours of the red-light district. I landed on MTL Detours’ Montréal’s Sin City Golden Age Era & The Red Light District (CA$39), launched last summer. A portion of tour proceeds goes to Stella a community-based organization that advocates for sex workers’ rights.
My guide, Isabelle, began by tracing the red-light district’s rise, from its proximity to the port to the impact of Prohibition, which triggered Montréal’s so-called Golden Age. “You could get plastered with impunity” in Montréal, she explained, “so the whole United States [showed] up to party.”
Our small group giggled as she showed us copies of tourism advertisements encouraging Americans over the border to drink, but Isabelle got serious when her spiel turned to sex work. “I will talk about sex workers,” she said. “This is not to glorify sex workers or the conditions in which they were living [but] to talk about a big part of our past that was erased.”
The district — a roughly 10-block downtown stretch known as “the Main” — began its decline in 1954, she explained, when mayor Jean Drapeau’s morality squad “cleaned it up.” It hung on, much diminished but still shimmying, until 2007, when, with the expropriation of a building that housed a peep show at the corner of Boulevard Saint-Laurent and rue Sainte-Catherine, what was left of the red-light district was transformed into the festival- and tourism-focused Quartier des Spectacles.
click to enlarge
© Michel Bussieres | Dreamstime Café Cléopâtre
Next, we stopped outside Café Cléopâtre (1230 Boulevard Saint-Laurent), one of just a handful remaining of the dozens of strip clubs that peppered the area in the ’90s. Its cartoonish sign’s topless ladies and promise of “spectacles continuels” still tempts in the now-gentrified neighborhood. Open since 1976, Cléopâtre is a “David-against-Goliath story,” Isabelle said, referring to its resistance to real estate developers’ efforts to take over its 1899 building, which has nearly always been home to erotic entertainment.
Contrary to a developer’s opinion that it is “just a nude dance club,” Cléopâtre is an unapologetically unique Montréal establishment where you can watch female strippers in the first-floor gentleman’s club, then head upstairs to the cabaret for an evening of drag, burlesque, comedy and “bareoke.”
Not to be confused with “stripparaoke,” where strippers undress — you should go to Portland, Ore., for that — bareoke involves customers stripping down while belting out songs. That all bodies are welcomed and celebrated at bareoke is a reflection of Cléo’s inclusivity and its reputation as an LGBTQ+ sanctuary.
Mostly, though, my tour focused on the more polished and glamorous establishments of the midcentury era, such as the Théâtre du Nouveau Monde (84 rue Sainte-Catherine Ouest). Back when it housed the Gayety Theatre, this was where burlesque artist Lili St. Cyr made a big splash in the city with her inventive use of props such as chastity belts and bubble baths.
“Yes, it was undressing on stage,” Isabelle said, “but it’s not like the strip joints [of] today.” Her comment stung slightly, reminding me of Tigchelaar’s explanation for why only the midcentury era of Montréal’s red-light district is celebrated: aesthetics. People “can imagine themselves at a cocktail lounge watching Lili St. Cyr,” she told me. “It’s very glamorous, and that is not necessarily the case [for] their vision of other areas of sex work.”
My tour passed lightly over Lili St. Cyr’s modern-day counterparts. While Isabelle mentioned the impact of the pandemic on sex workers — who were left without financial support — and highlighted the efforts of Stella, the sex-worker advocacy group, to protect their “health and safety,” she did so cautiously.
click to enlarge
Archives Nationales Du Canada Lili St. Cyr
Perhaps this was part of her effort not to “glorify” sex work. But it felt like an overcorrection when she repeated the dubious claim that Montréal’s annual Formula One weekend increases human trafficking to the city. (Ironically, Stella has rebuked this claim, arguing that increased surveillance during F1 puts sex workers in greater danger.)
Isabelle was at her best when furiously describing the morality squad’s sanitation of the district in the 1950s. They “not only cleaned it,” she said, “they disinfected it and destroyed everything that was good and everything that was bad.”
I found more inclusiveness next door to Café Cléopâtre at the MEM – Centre des Mémoires Montréalaises (some exhibits free, ticketed exhibits CA$6.70-15.50), whose exhibits explore the city’s history through the lens of Montréalers themselves. In 2016, in its former incarnation as the Centre d’histoire de Montréal in Old Montréal, the museum hosted the exhibition “Scandal! Vice, Crime and Morality in Montréal, 1940-1960.” Now housed in a building at the very center of the former red-light district, it’s telling a more comprehensive story about sex work in the city.
Prior to opening the new museum, a representative from Stella “gave their input and we listened to them,” MEM curator Catherine Charlebois said. “We thought it was very important to have their voice, since we are in this neighborhood.” This year, to mark Stella’s 30-year anniversary, the MEM will open an exhibition in collaboration with Stella (opening date TBD).
“They told us that ‘It’s really important that our voices are heard because it was our part of the city and now we’ve been chased away,'” Charlebois said of her discussions with Stella. “As an institution, it’s important that we recognize the people … for whom the neighborhood was and still is important,” she added.
Another sign the MEM is listening: In 2023 it hosted the launch of Tigchelaar’s podcast, “Nous Sommes Toujours Là” (episodes in French and English at noussommestoujoursla.com), which she created in collaboration with Stella. Tigchelaar tapped into her community to collect firsthand stories of sex work in the city, from 1960s strippers to contemporary cam girls.
Over 12 episodes, the podcast recounts life in the clubs, streets and homes where women have sold sexual services. Because most of these women’s workspaces no longer exist, Tigchelaar invited her guests to share vivid descriptions of the stages, décor and dressing rooms. The podcast argues convincingly that sex workers have deep knowledge of the city’s hidden corners.
A visitor to Montréal today would struggle to reconcile the colorful downtown of those women’s memories with what it looks like today. The destruction of Super Sexe is just one example of the gentrification that has squeezed the salty charm out of Montréal’s downtown, where after-dark decadence has given way to the homogeneity of glass condos and chain stores.
Despite this, the history of sex work has proved useful as a winking marketing tool. Walking through the Quartier des Spectacles, it’s impossible to miss the red dots that denote the area’s brand, from those that form a “red carpet” on the sidewalks after dark to those decorating the façades of countless construction sites. This branding, Tigchelaar wrote in an article for the architecture publication Party Planner, “relies on a longstanding signifier sex workers use to indicate our presence and availability, one that is also a metonym denoting our work sites: the red light.”
Podcast guest Carmen described the “insult” of the Quartier’s red-light branding. At the very spot where she was arrested for selling sex, tourists are today invited to snap selfies under the glow of a red light. “They value our signifiers, but they do not value us,” Tigchelaar said.
Back at the MEM, under the glow of a light bulb that is half red and half white — out of respect to sex workers who dislike the red-light branding, Charlebois said — a video titled “A Changing Neighbourhood” tells the history of the red-light district. In it, Concordia teacher Francine Tremblay described the “relentless drive to get rid of this neighborhood.”
But it ends with Johnny Zoumboulakis, the formidable owner of Café Cléopâtre. When developers came, he fought them and won. In what is surely a signal of changing times, Zoumboulakis described receiving a letter from the city: Cléopâtre’s saucy sign meets the definition of heritage, it said, and so it will be protected and preserved.