Quebec Revels In Its ‘Open' Sexual Culture

ST-HYACINTHE, QUE.—When out-of-towners ask a local in St-Hyacinthe where to go for a drink, or just to unwind, it's not uncommon they will be steered to a bar called Le Zipper.

That sounds pretty standard. It is one of the more popular spots in town.

Except that if you step foot into the neon-lit space, your gaze will surely be drawn to the naked young woman gyrating on the expansive oval stage that occupies the centre of the room, surrounded by chairs and tables, like a mini gladiator ring.

It's packed. But not just with men eyeballing the dancers. Half the patrons are women. And there are several couples. Older folks, too.

As surprising as it may seem, in St-Hyacinthe, a small city about 40 minutes east of Montreal, a no-holds-barred strip joint has been adopted by many in the community as a legitimate place to go for entertainment.

“When you're here, you almost forget it's a strip bar,” says Karine Tanguay, a local restaurant manager. It's a Thursday night, and she's helping celebrate the birthday of a friend, a father of twin girls who also brought along his wife.

Le Zipper is an evolving example of the uncommon nature of Quebecers' attitudes toward sex and sexuality. It's a society comprised of people who are proud of what they call their “open” sexual culture, lack of taboo and expressive desires.

This culture can be found in the history of Montreal as a place of sexual emancipation. It can be found in the legal battles over morality that have originated in Quebec. It can be found in the fact the province's biggest city is also Canada's capital of porn.

While Le Zipper may be all but mainstream, Quebec has also over the years become synonymous with strip bars.

Tourists come from all over for them. People went to the Supreme Court to defend them. There's even a yearly review of the top strip bars in the province (Le Zipper is currently at the top of the list.)

Fred Tremblay, Le Zipper's owner, says Quebecers love strippers, both male and female, because “people in Quebec are very open sexually. And they like to live out their fantasies.

“Maybe their lives are s—t,” he offers. “But they go to the strip bar to relax, to talk, maybe even to the dancers.”

And, quite simply, there are lots of them. “Catholic though Montreal may be on many levels,” writes Bill Brownstein in his book Sex Carnival, “it has to have more strip clubs per capita than any other city in the solar system.”

They are all over. In neighbourhoods across Montreal. In towns across the province.

Mostly they're female strip clubs. Some are famous, like Wanda's, or Supersexe. But there's also a very busy all-male revue for women in Montreal, Le 281.

Montreal's gay village similarly has four risqué peeler bars, where the dancers, the bulk of them straight men who do it for the money, are expected to sport full erections on stage.

By comparison, Toronto, a city twice the size of Montreal, has just one.

Montreal, of course, benefits from a large inflow of tourists from the U.S., especially New York, where the city's strip bars are legendary among both straight and gay men, mostly because you can touch the dancers.

“A lot of people who come to Montreal want to see what the strip clubs are all about,” said Marc Tadros, president of Montreal VIP, a luxury concierge service that assures travellers celebrity-like treatment at restaurants, clubs, and, yes, strip clubs.

Tadros says strip clubs are an integral part of Montreal's landscape. “I can tell you they're accepted. People don't see them as separate. It's just a strip club, not that big of a deal.”

Another difference, Tadros offered, is that the dancers working at Montreal strip bars tend to be locals. “In Niagara Falls and Toronto, not everybody working there lives in the city. Maybe they're there for the wrong reasons. But a lot of girls that work at strip clubs here are native Montrealers, French Canadians. It's not frowned upon.”

Tadros' company also caters to women who come to Montreal for bachelorette parties. And guess where Grace Kindness, who takes care of this aspect of the business, takes the women? Le 281.

“The place is packed with girls,” Kindness says. “The guys are hot, they really put on a show. It's a great atmosphere.”

Americans have played a historic role in turning Montreal into a “sexy” destination, and exotic dancing is woven into Montreal's fibre.

Starting in the 1920s waves of Americans came north, seeking pleasure and escape from Prohibition-era puritanism south of the border.

Though the seediest of xxx-bars have all but disappeared in modern times, the intensity of sex can still be found deep in the back of the slick strip clubs, where “contact” private dances — at $10 to $15 per song — are the norm.

Touching, as long as it's above the belt, is theoretically allowed. Quebecers fought for this right all the way to the Supreme Court.

In December 1999, in the case that began with a strip bar in Joliette, the court ruled that contact is permissible in private areas as long as it stops short of explicit sexual activity.

This rule is often broken, no matter how tight the enforcement.

Eric Paradis, the producer of Montreal's internationally famous annual “Fetish Weekend,” has a more reflective view as to why Quebecers and Montrealers have come to embrace exotic dancing.

It has to do with the fact that Quebec is a poorer province. People on average earn less money.

“We're not talking about dancers. We're talking about the perception of freedom,” Paradis says.

“Montrealers? That's all they have. Sixty-five per cent don't own their own dwelling. We don't own the wealth under our soil or rivers. Quebecers are a simple, festive people and all they have is their passion and beliefs, their spirit of freedom, not something that belongs to them physically.

“So all we own is the pride that Montreal is a free and welcoming city,” he continues, “and any time someone comes from another city, they sense this.”

Back at Le Zipper one of the bartenders, 31-year-old Michelle Dallier, a Kitchener native who came to Quebec eight years ago, says the way of life is completely different from back home.

“Back home, it's more about work, less on family, go, go, go,” Dallier explains. “Here it's more family oriented. And people say, ‘We're going to go out and enjoy our company and when we leave, we leave.'

“And people are more open to talk about sex. I'm used to it now.”

In the middle of the bar, a dozen young men are banging on their tables surrounding the dance floor, hooting at the dancer who is doing the splits in the air.

Dallier says it's now not unusual for half the patrons to be women.

“Actually I was surprised, the ambience is different, calmer than a regular club,” says Isabelle Addison, 28, who came with her friend from Montreal. “The servers and even the dancers are very nice.”

Kayla, a well-tanned dancer at Le Zipper who hails from New Brunswick, describes how a couple regularly requests private dances. “She loves to touch me, he watches,” she says.

“It's like a dream for people,” Tremblay, the owner, ventures.

Dreams that Quebecers have no trouble fulfilling.

Courts create lap-dance grey zone

It's primarily the “contact” lap dances that make the strip bars in Quebec so particularly attractive to tourists.

Yet they now sit in a kind of legal purgatory, approved by the courts on the one hand, yet condemned by the courts on the other.

In January the Supreme Court of Canada refused to take on a Quebec appeals court case that upheld the conviction of several dancers, a doorman and a client of the Lavalois Bar Salon in Laval.

In 2007 the group was charged with being in a common bawdy house, and the Crown argued that what they were involved in was prostitution.

The Supreme Court, however, had already decided in a 1999 case involving a Joliette strip bar that contact dancing was not “indecent” and therefore legal.

“The situation is completely bizarre,” said Lucie Lemonde, a professor at the Université du Québec à Montréal and a specialist in sexuality and the law.

According to the Criminal Code, a common bawdy house is used for “the purpose of prostitution or the practice of acts of indecency.”

The municipal trial judge emphasized that prostitution does not have to involve actual sex, but rather simply to stimulate another person sexually for payment. The judge said it's by definition dehumanizing and degrading. The judgment was supported on appeal.

“So tomorrow the police could close all the strip bars in Montreal, and all the massage parlours too,” Lemonde says, though she predicted they wouldn't do that.

The grey zone will likely remain until the Supreme Court pronounces on Canada's prostitution laws, she added.

Andrew Chung

Quebec Undercovers: The series

Saturday: St-Hyacinthe's neighbourhood pub is also a strip bar and a symbol of Quebec's “open culture.”

Sunday: Quebec's distinct attitude toward sexuality includes a thriving porn industry, new twists on swingers clubs — and better sex.

Monday: Web camming, fetish weekends and online porn all pour money into Quebec's economy.

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