Vazaleen dries up
After six years of pansy punk bands, raunchy rockers and bare-naked boogying, the grande dame of alt monthlies hangs up her heels

That’s the Dancing Naked Man,” explains a fauxhawked twink with jet-black eyeliner. It’s my first time checking out Vazaleen at Lee’s Palace, and I’ve just bumped into a husky, hairy, middle-aged man with an impressive beer gut who’s wearing nothing but white socks and black running shoes. I’m told he’s a regular patron of Will Munro’s queer rock monthly, Vazaleen – just another member of the alterna-queer crowd of indie kids, art fags, punks, rocker chicks, go-go dancers and burlesquers. I try desperately not to stare at the bobbing bare pee-pee.

“We’ve had entire nudist camps show up,” says Will Munro, DJ, producer and founder of Vazaleen, which is not only a queer rock party but also a queer rock concert. Indie groups like the Hidden Cameras, rock icons like Carol Pope, and electro-shocker Peaches are just a few of the names that have graced the stage. It’s been a wild show since it all started six years ago, and on January 27, its final curtain falls.

What’s to become of Toronto’s altqueer scene without Munro’s monthly drop of Vazaleen? Will it become chapped and dry up? Munro doesn’t think so. “[The scene] is more visible [today],” he says, citing the growing number of niches and subcultures that have popped up in Toronto’s gay community. “There’s monthlies for everyone these days,” continues Munro. “As the gay community grows, younger people begin to create their own independent cultures. You have the indie rock world, the gay rock world, the gay hip-hop world…”

In 1998, when Munro left Meadowvale, his suburban homeland in northwest Mississauga, and moved to downtown Toronto to study sculpture and contemporary art at the Ontario College of Art and Design, Toronto’s shoddy selection of queer rock events depressed him. “Someone would throw an event once a year, and all the queers who were interested in [alternative] music would go, wherever it was,” he recalls. Munro felt a disconnect between being queer and being a rocker in straight clubs like the 360 and the Bovine Sex Club. “There’d be rock clubs with queers, but the clubs were not queer spaces,” says Munro. “Rock ’n’ roll has always been sexual music. It’s rhythm and blues with sleazy lyrics.”

And so, using rock as a vehicle, Munro threw a sleazy party in January 2000. Fuelled by his love for punk rock and sick of hearing people bitch about the crappy queer rock scene, Munro premiered “Vaseline” at the venerable Toronto rock club El Mocambo. Joined by fellow cock-rocker DJ Miss Barbrafisch, Munro’s new night had alternative peeps pouncing. “People were flashing their tits and taking their clothes off,” recalls Munro. “One of the bathrooms at [El Mocambo] didn’t have any lights. It never got used for anything other than for messing around in.” And Munro never left his crowds hanging dry – he’d leave communal Vaseline containers in both bathrooms. Beyond El Mocambo’s dingy bathrooms, nobody expected Munro’s party to be a smooth ride. “Somebody would accidentally bump the DJ station while dancing, the record would skip and everyone would cheer,” laughs Munro.

In 2002, the ride became wilder when Munro moved his raunchy rock party to the grungy expanses of Bloor Street rock club Lee’s Palace. Slightly intimidated by the club’s high ceilings and open space, a contrast to the tight corners of El Mocambo, Munro magnified his party with porn. “We started projecting Super 8 vintage porn from the 1950s to 1970s all over the walls,” says Munro. A spacious stage gave sexy, strap-happy John Caffery, Vazaleen’s poster go-go boy, plenty of room to kick-box, gyrate with burlesque dancers and stroke himself. Crowd contests awarded prizes for deep-throating dildos, having the best tattoo, and having the biggest belly (the winner received a giant chocolate Easter bunny). The Vazaleen buzz has attracted celebrities like LA drag queen Vaginal Creme Davis, who made a Vazaleen pit stop immediately after opening for Margaret Cho’s Toronto show.

“I’d often hear [Vazaleen crowds] say, ‘This is so much fun, it’s practically criminal!’” says Munro. Despite the sexual connotations of Vaseline, queer criminality was also part of Munro’s inspiration in naming the event. “I once read an interview with Lou Reed [in which he] described his experiences of going to [sex clubs] called ‘Vaseline bars,’” says Munro, who was also inspired by French author Jean Genet’s The Thief’s Journal and Our Lady of the Flowers. “[Genet] wrote about homosexuals in the 1920s who were prosecuted for carrying Vaseline bottles in their back pockets,” says Munro. “[Carrying Vaseline] would be like flagging a red hanky. It was your card to homosexual identity.”

In 2002 the Vaseline Intensive Care company came across an ad Munro had been using for his raunchy rock party, and lawyers came a-knockin’. Alternative names and spelling were tossed back and forth and soon Vaseline had become Vazaleen, a moniker strictly limited to Munro’s own promotional material. Ads in the local media, such as NOW Magazine, use the more nondescript “Club V.” Amidst the name games, Munro was neutral. “It’s better than going to court,” he says.

These days, Munro is spinning “sex beats” for amateur strippers at peeler lounge Remington’s with comrade Luis Jacob. He’s also bought a bar on Queen West, just steps from the Gladstone Hotel. His bar, the name of which is still a secret, will incorporate predominantly queer alternative elements akin to Vazaleen or Munro’s now-defunct electro monthly Peroxide, previously held at Kensington Market’s Club 56. “It will be a permanent queer space,” says Munro. “We’re running out of those.”

Without a doubt, the queer spaces Munro lubricated will be missed. B u t will he pump his Vazaleen again? “It’ll be back for Halloween,” he says. The Dancing Naked Man will hold him to that promise.

Michael Pihach is an Associate Editor at fab. The final Vazaleen takes place at Lee’s Palace on Jan. 27. .

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