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feature - issue 275

When Maritza Yumbla opened the now famous Latin gay club El Convento Rico in 1993, her family disowned her. At first, drag queens called her a witch, but later she became “Mami.” She made Titanic director James Cameron wait in line and refuses to sell Corona because they pulled out of sponsoring a drag pageant.…

Mother Superior - by Todd Klinck

In the beginning, the tough Latina drag queens referred to Maritza Yumbla as “la bruja” – Spanish for “witch” – and left death threats on her answering machine. Yumbla was a beautiful 27-year-old Latina woman with big hair who loved makeup, stilettos and cleavage as much as the queens who tried to intimidate her. Nobody understood why Yumbla was always behind the bar in the gay Latin club they called home; they didn’t know that “la bruja” was actually the owner of what has become a Toronto institution.

El Convento Rico opened April 16, 1993, in the basement of 750 College Street. Now it is almost next door to the Mod Club, across the street from Revival and surrounded by dozens of trendy restaurants, but in 1993 the area consisted of dollar stores, paint stores and a couple of long-existing Italian venues like Cafe Diplomatico and the Sicilian Sidewalk Cafe. “This was ‘goonie land’; nobody wanted to come out here,” says Yumbla, the now 40-year-old owner of El Convento Rico.

The name means “the rich convent” in Spanish, and its company logo is a nun, known as “Mother Superior.” Yumbla, who has dressed up as Mother Superior to walk in the Pride Parade in the past, explains to me that when she opened the club, the Latina drag queens were all fascinated with dressing up as nuns, priests, nurses and maids. “So to me it was like, ‘OK, a convent, El Convento’ – that’s original and different… They will feel like, ‘OK, we’re going to go and sin at El Convento Rico.’”

When I walked into the club for the first time as a gay 19 year old, it felt like I was entering a fine dining establishment, not a gay disco. The staff (consisting largely of Yumbla’s sisters and brothers-in-law, who appeared to be straight) all wore white shirts, bow ties, and black vests. Yumbla’s tiny mother bustled up and down behind the bar, collecting and washing glasses. When the drag show started, the bouncers would help the hard-working glass-cleaner up onto the bar so she could see over the crowd. Knowing it was a gay bar, I remember it being refreshing to note the conspicuous absence of buff, shirtless bartenders. When I first started working as a bartender at El Convento Rico almost nine years ago, the clientele was more than 50% gay. I resented the bowtie uniform and fought for the right to dress skanky, but that was the image Yumbla insisted on – “it was [an] old-school Latin club; as new immigrants we thought we should project a clean image.” In retrospect, it was kind of charming.

For the first few years, straight people were actually forbidden from entering the club. Yumbla says: “It was like you either would come in really faggy-looking or very butchy-looking and then it was like, OK, yes, you were gay, you can come in.”

Times have changed. The bow ties are gone (the staff can wear whatever they want) and on some nights the crowd is 80-90% straight. But at El Convento Rico, labels are inconvenient and don’t accomplish much. Ever since straights started coming to the club, it has been known as the best bar to come out in, or the best place to explore bisexuality. I have seen it happen many times. A macho guy starts coming to the club, alone. He stands by himself, nursing a beer, every Friday and Saturday for a month. He quietly and awkwardly stares at the men kissing, meets a couple of drag queens, hangs out in the washroom, plays pool, watches the show, and a couple of months later, I see him leaving discreetly with a gay guy. A few months after that, he’s out on Church Street. Sometimes he ends up wearing a dress.

The evolution from totally gay to totally mixed was the key to El Convento Rico’s current success, but the mixing of the communities was not always a good business move. In fact, it almost killed the club entirely. In September 1992, Yumbla had opened Rico Club, which catered entirely to the straight Latin community. Most of the Latin clubs at the time were located in the Finch and Weston Road area, so the downtown Rico Club was an instant success. There were live bands and shows, and it was packed every Friday and Saturday, until Carolina Fabrega, one of the pioneering Latina drag queens, approached Yumbla about doing a gay night on Sundays. Yumbla decided to do it, but says, “When the [Latin] community found out, it was as if we put up a ‘Closed’ sign.” Business died almost overnight: “It was so weird; it was like, ‘Now what?’”

Yumbla closed the doors for a couple of weeks and hired Rubin Dario Villa, a notorious gay Latino club promoter. He was to run the new club, acting as owner, host and manager, and to this day Yumbla gives Villa much of the credit for the success of the club (he is sometimes referred to as “Father Superior”). She had almost no money left for renovations, but Villa insisted that a change room be built for the drag queens who were (and still are) the main act every weekend. The change room was built, the gay bar El Convento Rico opened and Villa’s famous high-pitched laugh could be heard echoing off the low ceilings. Since that first weekend, the club has been packed every Friday and Saturday evening.

Maritza Yumbla came from a poor Catholic family in Sigsig, Ecuador, where she lived in a dirt-floored house. She is one of seven children – one boy and six girls. Her mother came to Canada first, and then brought the rest of the family over. Yumbla was 11 when she arrived and found it difficult to adjust. “You come here, you don’t know the language, everyone looks at you like you’re illegal aliens, even though we had our papers, and this is when I was 11, developing my image… I think that made me the insecure person I was for the longest time.” Yumbla’s parents worked seven days a week, around the clock, something Yumbla as a little girl didn’t understand. She was rebellious and fought a lot with her mother, asking her, “Why did you bring us to this country? This is no life. You’re always talking about a better future. What future is this?” She remembers her mother saying, “What would you like to have been? Would you like to have been the servant of nuns? Because that is where all of you would have ended up.” Yumbla explains, “It was much more of a class system in Ecuador: if you were born poor, you would stay poor.”

Yumbla first met gay people when she was about 18. Her brother was dating a girl who had a bunch of gay friends, and the group hung out at Voces del Recuerdo, the first gay Latin club in Toronto (near College and Bathurst). Yumbla then went to Humber College to study business, and fell in love with a male model. “I thought he loved me; he took me everywhere. He was a model, I used to be his star, until one day he gave me an eight-page letter. I didn’t know he was gay, I didn’t even know what gay was, I mean, I knew what it was, but to me, he was too cute, and he loved me.” The man took her to a restaurant, gave her the letter and told her to open it at home. “Of course, I ran to the washroom and read it, and nothing made sense to me. [It said,] ‘I want you to know who I am. I’m gay.’ And I kept reading; it meant nothing to me. I said, ‘This guy doesn’t even know how to spell ‘guy.’ It was just confusing. ‘I’m a guy?’ ‘Yeah, I know you are a guy.’” She took the letter home to her sister, who read it and started laughing at her, telling her, “He’s gay, idiot. You know, he likes guys?” Yumbla couldn’t deal with it at the time and didn’t talk to the man for years, but he later became her closest confidant, and was part of the inspiration for making El Convento Rico a gay club. He still keeps in touch, and has even been a judge at one of the Miss El Convento Rico pageants.

Though the transition from straight to gay club was a good business move, Yumbla underwent great personal stress during the first few years. Besides receiving death threats, she lost her boyfriend and her family. When Rico Club opened, Yumbla was dating a wealthy man who was her buffer for the hard times that are part of opening a new business. “I had everything, and then when I started catering to the gay community, it was ‘Choose this or that,’ and I chose this, and then I had nothing. This was my home.” Her boyfriend left her, and then her family, who are staunchly Catholic, did the same. “My parents, they are very old-fashioned. This was not acceptable, you could not have a gay bar. Everyone walked away from my life – brother, sisters, Mom, Dad, boyfriend. I was on my own. With no money, with nothing.” She gestures to the tiny office in the club, and tells me: “This was my bedroom, this was my mansion. These four walls.” Yumbla secretly lived in the club office for eight months, and says it made her a stronger person. Within a couple of years, her family came back into her life and many of them are now actively involved in the club. And she is now close friends with her ex-boyfriend.

Only a handful of Toronto bars deserve to be called “institutions.” Woody’s is one and, before it closed, the Barn was another. Clubs that are institutions usually have one driving force behind them, someone who is the ringmaster, who keeps on top of the details and doesn’t simply delegate everything to others. Someone with passion. Yumbla is that someone. While she now spends more time in the office, or standing in front of the club greeting people, she always used to work behind the bar. I loved working with her as my co-bartender, seeing her race up and down with a new hair colour each week, with stilettos (she always wears stilettos) and cleavage. She has earned the respect of the drag queens. They now refer to her affectionately as “Mami.” One of my earliest memories of the club is walking in on a rehearsal for one of the drag pageants, which Yumbla still produces down to the last detail, and seeing her teaching a new flock of queens how to walk in heels. “Tits forward, ass out,” she barked to the group of young boys, who were not in drag except for their stiletto heels.

Yumbla is fiercely protective of her queens, and the club still comes across as a gay bar even when the crowd is overwhelmingly straight. The bouncers treat the queens like royalty, granting them line-bypass privileges. But a couple of years back, when Titanic director James Cameron sent his handler to the front of the line to ask for the same privilege, Yumbla refused. “I don’t care who he is. If Queen Elizabeth comes, she will get in line.” Cameron waited patiently, and ended up having a great time. Yumbla has achieved great financial success with what she calls her “little club on College Street,” but remains humble and true to her ideals. Living in her office with nothing for eight months taught her that she could go back to nothing and still be happy – if that is what God wants for her. She has an almost religious belief that if she does not give back to the community, her business will die. Countless fundraisers have been hosted by Yumbla for individuals lost in the system – a drag queen who was being deported to a country where she’d be persecuted, a popular customer who needed money for HIV medication. For these events, she has often single-handedly cooked a buffet of pork, rice and salad, sometimes wearing heels in the kitchen. She has helped many people (myself included) with emergency loans in times of need. She has never raised prices more than 50¢ (domestic beer costs $5), even though the club is popular enough that she could get away with tacking on another dollar or two per drink and would probably not lose customers. She rarely advertises the club, relying on word of mouth. “Whenever this place is meant to close down, it’s going to close down. I’m not going to stress myself over what else to do.”

Yumbla is also stubborn when it comes to discriminatory corporations – even if it affects her bottom line. I smugly tell customers at least 100 times per night, “Sorry, we don’t carry Corona,” but it’s too loud and too busy to tell them why. It’s because Corona pulled its sponsorship of a drag pageant 12 years ago when it discovered that the large and extra-large swimsuits it agreed to donate would be worn by men. Even though Corona is the most popular beer in Latin clubs, and even though Yumbla personally enjoys Corona when she goes out, she says, “I won’t call myself Maritza Yumbla the day Corona comes back to this place, because I know it’s not coming back.”

I’ve heard downtown gays refer snootily to El Convento Rico as a “tourist bar,” or say that El Convento Rico is “too straight,” but its evolution and its culture have never failed to fascinate me. I have never disliked going to work, and I have never tired of the people-watching. It is the kind of club to which you can take your grandmother. Tall cross-dressers with broad shoulders who would be laughed at even in gay clubs proudly walk through El Convento Rico without suffering any judgmental eyes. New immigrants from all countries make it their home – aside from the Latin presence, there is a huge group of Middle Eastern regulars. And there are always at least three bridal parties – women shunning the trend of watching oily male strippers, and instead becoming part of the theatre-in-the-round drag show that takes place in the middle of the dance floor every Friday and Saturday. I find that at downtown clubs, gays tolerate drag shows, but at El Convento, straight people actually appreciate them. For many, it is the first time they’ve ever seen a man dress up and lip-synch to “I Will Survive.” Even on nights when the crowd is 90% straight, the gay presence is visible because of certain characters. And Yumbla makes sure these characters are always made to feel welcome.

Almost every weekend, at the end of my bar, a thin androgynous man with a bleached-blond mullet gyrates in front of the mirror. He ties a knot in his T-shirt below his pecs, revealing his toned torso. His skin-tight jeans are unbuttoned all the way, and his pink thong is riding above the waistline. I have named this character “Thong Boy,” and my fellow bartender and I gauge how close it is to last call by how far his thong has risen above his waist. At the beginning of the evening, he appears to be wearing no underwear at all, but as the drinks flow and the crowd pours into the club, the dancing becoming more frenzied, the thong rises. Thong Boy’s provocative dancing would be enough to get him kicked out of other clubs, and at times newer bouncers have to be reminded about the roots of the club. Yumbla says: “I want to give my gay community the freedom to do anything. They think [Thong Boy] is disgusting. They say, ‘You can see his pubic hairs.’ And I say, ‘You know what? To him, that’s his fashion statement. Close your eyes. Why are you even looking there? How do you know there’s pubic hairs there?’ I never notice. All I see is the white thong with the white jeans, or a pink one. But you know what? People like this boy are what makes El Convento Rico the beautiful place that it is. He is part of the show.”

Todd Klinck is a Toronto-based writer and fab’s former Trade columnist.