Toronto Memories: The Bijou

(I'm on the road in Toronto this week, but I wrote this memory of one of my favorite Toronto haunts, so that you won't forget about me while I'm gone.)





At the end of a dreary sidewalk running down the side of an industrial building lay a red door illuminated by a stark, single lightbulb hanging unadorned overhead. The door led to a steep staircase leading into the building’s cellar, where behind an old-fashioned ticket-taker’s booth lay at the foot. A couple of toonies and a loonie, and he’d buzz you through the black door beyond. And once you stepped through through that door, everything changed.

The Bijou in Toronto—now sadly closed—was one of my favorite nighttime haunts in that city in days past. It was seedy, and scandalous, and catered to a crowd too impatient to play the cruising game at the nearby bars on Church Street, or men who didn’t want to invest the energy in disrobing at one of the local bathhouses. When I discovered it in the nineties, it actually was a bar; a well-lit central area hosted bartenders and television screens playing ancient gay porn, where men would sit and drink before vanishing into the darkness around the cellar’s perimeter and getting dirty with other guys. Police raids at the end of the decade forced the owners to close the bar and declare themselves a bathhouse.

It didn’t matter to me. I wasn’t there for the drinks.

The Bijou had a lot of sprawling spaces for men to play. There was an obligatory steam room that I never saw saw anyone use; one had to stoop down low and crawl under a partition to get to it—and for a bathhouse in which no one ever removed his clothes, a steam room was a silly proposition at best. Late in its career, the establishment expanded to the first floor and featured a dark maze of glory holes and gloomy corners, where men wandered and would reach out to touch the men who seemed attractive in the perpetual dusk, hoping to draw them closer. There were chains of booths where men who had coupled off would withdraw and fuck, to be watched through by curious eyes through holes in every door and wall. There were a couple of movie rooms where guys would watch porn and relax with a pop, or make eye contact and discreetly stand up and move to a more private, darker section.

There were two areas I usually hung out. One was the slurp ramp, and the other was the dark room.

The slurp ramp occupied the largest of the basement rooms. The only light came from a television monitor playing porn next to the entrance, which in later years was a hanging of military camouflage draping. In the room’s center was the slurp ramp, a platform a few feet from the ground with stairs in its middle and two booths at its front. If you stepped up on the platform, you’d find a partition that ran slightly taller than waist-high, with holes drilled at crotch level. The platform was constructed so that there was a tight, dark corridor along the three sides at the room’s farthest end.

When the Bijou was busy, that little corridor would fill up with men jostling and fighting for position at one of the holes, which were at mouth level for those at the floor. Anyone who wanted his dick sucked would step up on the platform survey the seething masses of men below, and stick his cock through the hole and almost immediately into a warm, waiting mouth. I played both sides of the slurp ramp, many times, but it was standing up on the platform I liked best—being on display, being argued over, even fought for. If one mouth was too toothy, or the guy was a lousy suck, or even if I just felt bored and wanted to try something different, I could walk to the ramp’s other side and find a new, wet anonymous mouth for my meat. The variety was never-ending.

The dark room was even more to my liking. Around a corner, through a series of hallways and rooms with no lights that grew progressively darker, was an old cement room that was pitch black by the time you reached it. Only by feel could you tell it was perhaps fifteen by fifteen feet square; a wooden rail was hammered into the floor around the perimeter, on which it was possible to perch one’s heels. The only light that ever entered that room was when someone brought a lit cigarette in, or struck a match; the brightness from those tiny sources of illumination, after a while, seemed blinding.

There’s nothing I didn’t do in that back room. I’d stand there with my dick hard and running down the leg of my jeans, or pulled out of my shorts and hard in my hands, and wait. I’d hear footsteps and see the vague shadow of someone approaching through the antechamber. They’d enter, and feel their way around to an empty spot on the wall. Then I’d feel a hand grope me, or a mouth on my neck, searching for my own. Sometimes I’d feel a hand on my ass, turning me around and parting my ass cheeks. Sometimes the hand would pull me down and beneath, pulling me into a greased and sloppy hole.

Often I had multiple men on me. I remember one occasion in which I was making out with a tall man with a beard, while two other men each sucked at one of my nipples, a fourth man slobbered on my dick, and a spectator had two of his fingers up my ass. If men entered and heard the grunting sounds of copulation in one of the corners, they’d sidle up, linger, and gradually try to work themselves in on the action. Even on the coldest of Toronto nights, sometimes I’d emerge from the dark room covered with sweat and cum, trying to find a place to cool down. It was strange, how I learned to recognize the men in that dark room, blind as we all were. A man might have played with me and left for an hour or more, but when he returned I could tell who he was by the way he kissed, or the way he stroked my face to learn more about me. Sometimes I could tell by his scent—the cologne he’d worn or the soap he’d used.

I remember one night returning to my hotel room on a hot June evening, at three in the morning, and looking at myself in the mirror before collapsing in bed. My shirt was covered with cum. Countless loads, dripping down the front in a dried deluge, as if someone had thrown a paint can of the stuff at my face.

Proudest night of my life. I miss that place.