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The Lord Elgin turns 75 this year, and doesn’t the old doll hide a few polished pearls behind the ageless grey face and royal lineage?

The landmark hotel — Mackenzie King’s limestone aspiration — was for many years home to a gay bar, in an era when, officially, there were no gay bars because, legally, there were no gay men.

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But the nameless beer hall sure existed, so much so that historians — scholarly or first-hand — say the basement bar was part of the city’s gay tapestry during a period of tectonic social change in Ottawa, if not all of Canada.

The bar, after all, was thriving in a period when admitted homosexuality could get you fired, jailed, publicly shamed and even shunned by your own family.

In fact, authors Gary Kinsman and Patrizia Gentile open their book, The Canadian War on Queers: National Security as Sexual Regulation, with a story that today sounds hard to believe.

But a gay man named David is describing being in the bar — nicknamed “the LE” — in 1964. Downtown Ottawa is full of criss-crossing military men, based a block away, and the Cold War is on, all shadows and whispers.