If you came out in Toronto during the last two decades, chances are Patricia Wilson witnessed the whole dazzling fiasco. The rock ’n’ roll transsexual with the Fassbinder cheekbones has been working at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre in various capacities for 15 years, initially in publicity and most recently as the assistant bar manager at Tallulah’s Cabaret. She is also widely known for serving drinks and withering glances at Vazaleen, Will Munro’s legendary event at Lee’s Palace. Munro, knowing the singular allure she possesses, wouldn’t dream of doing the night without her. “Patricia Wilson is Vazaleen,” he says.

Patricia’s first public foray into gender bending took place in the ’70s and involved leaving her job as a welder in Windsor, Ontario on Friday and showing up to work on Monday in a wig and a dress. “I’ll take the worst you can give me,” she told her flabbergasted co-workers. “Kick my fuckin’ ass, the rest is a breeze.” They did, but as she says, “I’m the one who survived.” Meaning she lived her fuckin’ truth.

At 17, Patricia began visiting the Clarke Institute’s gender clinic for reassignment, a place she is “a big believer in, they really make a difference.” She stayed in Windsor as she transitioned, working for Gina Lori Riley Dance Enterprises in resource development then as GM, moving to Toronto in ’93, where she began working as Buddies’ publicist. Toronto PR maven Daniel Paquette got his start under her and remembers her fondly. “My very first day on the job after showing me around the office, she pulls up her skirt. She wasn’t wearing panties and says, ‘I just want to get this over with and for you to see my twat for yourself so there’s no confusion, as I don’t want this to be a problem.’”

Patricia’s breezy, foul wit is renowned. Surprising a straight couple in flagrante delicto in an enclosed art installation at Buddies at the end of one night, she said coolly, “Time to close up kids.” As she was turning to leave, she glanced down at the boy’s member and said, “Oh and by the way, I cut off more than that.”

Patricia is also the lead guitarist for the rock band Crackpuppy and her apartment is crammed with ’70s era Gibsons and Marshall amps, taking up as much pride of place as her beloved pets. Wouldn’t you know it, underneath that tough-chick shell beats the heart of a den mother and Patricia, you will note, is kindest to the kids who, as she describes, “get beat up at breakfast by their dad for being so queer they can’t hide it. I treat those fuckers like gold.” When they come to Buddies, she says, she wants them to feel like they have a home there no matter what.
How can you resist a woman who issues statements like “I saw Bob Seger for 99 cents” and “Rock ’n’ roll is a religion that never lets you down” and who, like all those who live fast and die hard, considers her tombstone with serene inevitability? What will it say? “She tried everything and it finally killed her” and “God bless queers and rock ’n’ roll” are the two current forerunners. No doubt when the time comes, the community will erect her a monument large enough to fit that and much more.
 

Lynn McNeill
Lynn McNeill is a jewel of a conversationalist, at one moment talking Gertrude Stein, John Rechy and Rimbaud, the next addressing his former heroin addiction with a lighthearted, “What do you want me to say? It was the cheapest drug in London in 1976.” Nick Cave’s dark lyrics roll off his tongue with as much ease as riotous stories of working in some of New York City’s most legendary clubs — Danceteria, Area — in the early ’80s. And if you ever find yourself staring at a long and bewildering wine list, consider yourself lucky to have his cell number.

Lynn was born 51 years ago to working class intellectuals — his father was one of the founding members of the NDP and Labour Council — and grew up in East York and Scarborough. You know him: he’s the nice-looking gent with the Leviticus 20:13 tattoo you’ve seen for so many years tending bar at Lee’s Palace. Though Lynn now owns the Beaver, Queen West’s “queer community centre,” as he aptly calls it (on any given day you’ll see Zoe Whittall at a table working on her MA as Reg Vermue serves; at night the place lights up with Toronto’s most diverse queer dance parties), he still keeps a hand in Lee’s a few times a week. 
“A friend walked into Lee’s the other night and said, ‘When does the owner of a highly successful restaurant and bar finally stop slinging drinks here?’ I replied, ‘When I stop liking it.’” It’s auspicious that such a man should own a place like the Beaver, watching over this latest generation of inspired bon vivants.

Amanda Mills
You don’t need to be queer to be an artist and you don’t need to be an artist to be shit with money. But if you are either, both, or all three, chances are you know Amanda Mills of ArtBooks and Loose Change. Amanda (who is none of the above) is a tax accountant who holds many of Toronto’s top gay artists as clients. Because money is so private, “even more so than sex,” she says, she won’t name names but the list of people she’s helped squire from deliberately careless bohemian to award-winning literature/music/theatre creator is impressive. As Margaret Cho says, “Fag hags are the backbone of the gay community” and Amanda proudly identifies as one, as well as an honourary lesbian.

Amanda began her professional life in the theatre, managing companies. With her knack for understanding the artistic temperament and her ability to imbue it with financial conscientiousness, she quickly developed a roster of clients thrilled to write off things like gym memberships. (Of one client, she says,“We proved she wouldn’t get the role if she didn’t lose two sizes — it’s instrument maintenance.”)

Very early on in her career as a tax accountant, long before same-sex marriage and even before same-sex common law was recognized, Amanda took these relationships seriously, advising queer couples to start thinking about money as a couple. This socially conscious attitude makes Amanda ideal for her other role as a financial therapist, one of only five in the world. She offers some priceless wisdom, turning the popular “make money so you can do what you want” theory on its head: “Kurt Vonnegut said we’re here to fart around and I think that’s true. Do what you want first and your needs will be met. This is much more rewarding than just chasing the buck.”

Sydney Tam
Sydney Tam is erudite and articulate. According to a psychiatric stereotype, these qualities made her sexual reassignment easier. “If you believe in scales for masculinity and femininity,” she says, “educated males tend to be a bit more feminine.”

Sydney has been a doctor since she was 24. (“I was a parent pleaser,” she admits.) She has been living openly as a woman for five years. She has been married to a biological woman for 15. She has three children aged 4, 8 and 10. If you read the feature on her in Chatelaine last year (pulpishly titled “My Husband Became a Woman”), you would certainly imagine that her transition had been quite the unmitigated tragedy for her wife.

“Please don’t take this personally,” says Sydney before explaining that she finds the media tend to focus on certain issues when it comes to transgendered people. Suddenly I realize I’ve asked her the same question that always irks me when discussing my sex work with journalists: basically, “How does your family feel?” She doesn’t care how much deft concern you use to word it; what she hears is that somehow being transgendered is not an identity, but a lifestyle.
“You don’t wake up one day and decide you’re going to transition,” she says. “There’s a long process of self-exploration. Even if you don’t have any surgical procedures, once you’ve declared yourself, it’s pretty hard to go back. You risk certain things and you give up certain things. Certainly you give up your privacy around that issue.”

Though her decision to live openly has clearly been challenging, Sydney refers to herself as privileged.

“Many people take for granted that things are a certain way and I think for people who can’t think that way, that’s a privilege. It’s an awakening to the fact that, ‘Hey, the rules don’t have to be the rules.’ If you awaken and you realize that you shouldn’t take what you have for granted, that’s a privilege. And, yes, while it’s distressing to actually be different, it’s an education.” 
Sydney, who openly acknowledges that she didn’t become a doctor for herself, has grown to love it. In addition to her work as an ER doctor at the Markham Stouffville Hospital, she has been employed as a family physician by the Sherbourne Health Centre for three and a half years and her patient roster includes people who are homeless or who have been, women both biological and bodied and “the typical urban dwellers from South Rosedale.” Last year she won the Gay and Lesbian Medical Association’s Provider of the Year for, as she puts it, “showing an unorthodox approach when helping a patient in an uncomfortable situation.” It was the subtlest, yet incredibly telling, act of compassion: she changed the screensaver on her office computer to an image that was more soothing to the person.