Every year, when Lucah Rosenberg-Lee goes to Toronto’s Church-Wellesley Village to celebrate LGBT pride, he wears a rainbow sticker on his chest that says “Trans.”

And every year, like clockwork, a stranger asks him why he is impersonating a transgender man.

The thing is, Rosenberg-Lee isn’t impersonating anybody. The 28-year-old Toronto man is transgender, a fact that some people, even pride revellers in the heart of the city’s gay village, find hard to believe.

Why? Rosenberg-Lee’s best guess is that he “passes” easily. In other words, he doesn’t “look” transgender. He looks cisgender: like a person whose sex assigned at birth lines up with his gender identity. He also comes off as stereotypically heterosexual, leading some to believe that he’s a tourist at Pride, not a card-carrying member of the club.

“Because I am a Black man,” he says, “people (in the gay village) sometimes think I am going to be homophobic or that I’m a voyeur looking at them. It’s tiring because I just want to fit in.”

Instead, he stays away. Like many young LGBT Torontonians, Rosenberg-Lee lives and works in the west end, and he travels to the gay village very rarely, either to attend social events during Pride month in June, or to access transgender specific resources at the 519 community centre or the Sherbourne Health Centre. If these opportunities ceased to exist, he’s fairly certain he wouldn’t visit the village at all.

This is the dissonant truth about Toronto’s gay village. For at least a decade, a lot of young queer life in Toronto has coalesced outside the village proper, in smaller bars along Queen St. W. and Dundas St. W., or in Kensington Market, Parkdale, and Leslieville.

Even though Church St. between Wellesley and Carlton — a colourful strip of bars and clubs offering drag performances and trivia nights — still remains the heart of the city’s gay village and a popular address of LGBT tourism in Canada, it is not necessarily the heart of LGBT activity in the city.

Hence the paradox: this weekend marks Toronto’s 37th annual Pride parade, the largest public display of LGBT unity in the nation. But the space in which that celebration takes place is anything but united.

“The village,” says Jane Farrow, co-editor of Any Other Way, a new anthology chronicling queer life and history in Toronto, “is not coherent. It’s never been that way and it’s not that way now.” LGBT people have “sought out mixing and mingling outside the village for decades,” she says, but gentrification, real estate speculation and the popular misconception that gay people are a moneyed set have added to this incoherence in recent years.

“Mostly people are not going to the village in the numbers that they were but there hasn’t been a change in the rental rates to reflect that.”

According to Jade Pichette, community outreach co-ordinator at the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives, LGBT people — a large number of them gay men — flocked to Church St. in the 1950s and ’60s because rents were cheaper than they were on Yonge St., but it was still close to popular gay hangouts at the time, such as the King Edward Hotel. In fact, says Pichette, the village and its surrounding area (particularly Allen Gardens) have been a gay destination since the early 1800s. Alexander Wood, the Scottish merchant and Toronto magistrate from whom the village’s Alexander St. and Wood St. get their names, is considered a gay icon himself. The story goes that in the early 1800s a young woman claimed to have scratched her attacker’s genitals during a sexual assault. Wood inspected the genitals of several suspects in the neighbourhood looking for signs of such an injury.

Today, LGBT people don’t need pretexts in order to get intimate with each other. Their rights are more or less accepted throughout the city, a factor that in addition to gentrification and real-estate speculation has contributed to LGBT people going elsewhere.

But where exactly are they going?

Catherine Jean Nash, a professor at Brock University who studies geographies of sexualities, points out that today Toronto’s LGBT population is “stretching out across the city,” in what appears to be a western migration. Nash’s take is necessarily vague; it’s difficult to determine precisely where Toronto’s LGBT people reside because to date the federal census has not asked about sexual orientation. But Nash says that while doing research about seven or eight years ago, she began to notice queer women migrating west. New destination neighbourhoods included Queen West — a.k.a. “Queer West” — and Parkdale. These are neighbourhoods with a vibrant LBGT presence and, most notably, a female presence; something the village — overwhelmingly a home to bars and clubs that serve gay men — sorely lacks. (Slacks, Church St.’s flagship lesbian bar, closed in 2013).

Cultural events have begun moving in the same direction: the Drake and Gladstone hotels, on Queen West are now major hubs of Pride activity come June.

“I think it’s a generational thing,” says Enza Anderson, of the westward migration. Anderson is a 53-year-old transgender woman who has lived in and around the gay village for several years. She ran for mayor in 2000, and today she works as an administrative assistant for the Bank of Montreal. I interviewed her on a warm May evening at a bar in the village called Woody’s, famous home to the infamous “best ass contest” — a beauty pageant for a single rarefied piece of male anatomy.

Anderson says one of the leading factors in the thinning out of village life is social media. Pre-Internet, she says, “in order to connect you had to come down and hang out at the bars and cruise . . . now, with online dating, and hookup apps, it’s kind of demystified everything.” Today she thinks of Toronto as a city of “sub-villages” — the original Church-Wellesley Village being a place a lot of younger people visit but don’t live in.

This raises the ominous question: is the outcome net-positive or net-negative when a minority group leaves its safety net for good? Is the gay village becoming to LGBT Torontonians what Little Italy is to Italian Torontonians, or Chinatown is to Chinese Torontonians? In other words, a place where members of a minority group meet one another for drinks and dinner but seldom stay to put down roots? Are we headed into a future where there are more rainbow flags hanging on buildings in the village than actual queer people living inside them? A term Rosenberg-Lee used to describe the village? “Theme parky.”

But Michael Erickson, owner of Glad Day, an LGBT bookstore, café and bar on Church St., believes speculation about the village’s decent into Disney World status is premature.

“I think people forget that some of the most marginalized LGBT people who face the most risks and barriers still see this neighbourhood as their home base,” he says. According to Michael Schneider, program co-ordinator at the AIDS Committee of Toronto, the village remains vital for the more than 20,000 people in Toronto living with HIV because it’s home to pharmacies that specialize in HIV medication. It’s also vital to people who are newly out and new to Toronto. And especially to newcomers to Canada, like Yvonne Jele, a lesbian refugee from Uganda, who made her way to Church and Wellesley only a few days after stepping on Canadian soil last year. “I was surprised to notice that there was a whole street where people of the LGBTQ community were free to express themselves,” Jele told me. “I noticed the little shops, bars, hangouts and even rainbow colours on the roads. Rainbow flags flying high, it was all intensely exciting and scary as well, because it was a new culture to me. The village is of great importance to the LGBTQ refugees.”

In fact, people like Jele may be the tip of a movement that’s extremely rare for any minority group that has felt the siren call of assimilation: a return to ground zero. It’s possible the village is experiencing the first stirrings of a renaissance. Michael Erickson thinks so. The fastest-growing demographic at Glad Day, he says, are people under 30. He also believes the bookstore “must have the highest ratio of queer women at a bar on Church St.” Glad Day, previously a bookstore accessible up a flight of stairs on Yonge St., relocated last year to a ground level space on Church, a move that many in the neighbourhood have heralded as a game-changer. “More people are out (on the street), even in the winter,” says Pichette, since the store relocated.

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And the hybrid nature of Glad Day, from booze to baristas to books, may be the key to the village reclaiming its prodigal children — and seniors.

People have abandoned the village in the past because it’s not in enough, or because it’s too in. But true assimilation is true normalization, a regression toward the mean of variation. Some people like to party; some people like to read; some people like to be able to be who they were meant to be for the first time in their lives, without fearing for their lives.

Even Lucah Rosenberg-Lee, who has reason to be skeptical, sees a chance for redemption of the place. “It’s a little theme parky. But I’d be sad if it was gone.”