Why queer spaces matter in HamOnt

When the lights went out at The Embassy, The Werx, M Bar, Crush and Steel Lounge, Hamilton lost more than a few dance floors. It lost the rooms where queer folks could exhale — the places you could walk into and stop bracing yourself.

A stubborn idea

House of Adam and Steve started in 2015 with a stubborn idea: if the bars were gone, we would make the city itself queerer. Not by opening one more venue that could close, but by turning the rooms we already love — bars, theatres, restaurants — into safer spaces, one fabulous night at a time.

Safer spaces, on purpose

"Queer spaces have to exist, because we need places where we feel like we can be ourselves without persecution and without fear of violence," says founder Steven Hilliard. That is the whole mission in a sentence. Every HOAS night is designed around it: welcoming and inclusive to all, explicitly safer by intention rather than by accident, and — crucially — a genuinely great time.

Joy as the strategy

The secret is that the joy is the point and the politics. A packed drag brunch where a grandmother, a nervous first-timer and a table of queer teens are all screaming for the same number is, quietly, a statement about who Hamilton is for. You do not have to call it activism. You can just call it Sunday.

Read more

Hamilton's storytellers have followed the mission closely. Start with Hamilton City Magazine's All Hail the Queens and The Hamilton Spectator's Queer Joy.