Matthew and Peter Hays have made their dream come true: the brothers have filmed their award-winning documentary Flashback about Edmonton’s legendary Flashback disco, dubbed the “Studio 54 of the Prairies.” Located in a conservative Canadian city often hostile to queer folks, Flashback would be, its owner John Reid vowed, a safe space for “gay people and their friends.” Created by Matthew Hays and directed by Peter, the documentary tells the story of a defiant disco dance culture of sweat, sex, drugs and fashion.
Peter was a successful print reporter and TV news producer before becoming a filmmaker. A renowned queer journalist and author, Matthew teaches journalism and film studies at Concordia University in Montreal. I recently sat down with Matthew for a candid Q&A about the film and iconic dance club that changed the lives of both brothers.
What was Flashback like?
Matthew Hays: It actually depended on which night you went. It was fascinating during the tumultuous decade of the 1980s – when I graduated from high school, came out of the closet and started university – to go to this gay club which had very much been designed around hip gay clubs in San Francisco, L.A. and New York. So it had a superior sound system, incredible lighting system and great music. There were several bars wrapped around the dance floor. They would stop the dancing for drag shows, then the music would start again and people would dance. Playwright Brad Fraser has a wonderful line about Flashback: “It was like The Wizard of Oz. When you were in Edmonton, everything was in black and white, but when you went into Flashback, it was suddenly in colour.”
You and Peter both frequented Flashback.
MH: Peter’s straight but not narrow. That’s where he met his girlfriend who is also in the film. So Flashback was a place where straight people went. But with gay clubs people complain when there are too many straight people. So they combatted that by having a women’s night, and also had a men’s-only night on Thursdays for cruising. I first went when I was in high school. I lied about my age, which was ridiculous because I looked way younger than I was, a scrawny little thing!
Music plays a big role in this film. The opening track is a cover of Miquel Brown’s 1983 classic So Many Men, So Little Time.
MH: That was my suggestion. It has a double meaning because it was about sleeping with so many men and then losing so many men to the AIDS crisis. The music at Flashback was great, they played different kinds of music, such as Divine, Tears for Fears, Eurythmics, Cyndi Lauper, David Bowie.
You came up with the idea for this documentary. Why did you want to make this film?
MH: I think there’s an important universal story to be told about gay clubs and bars and the queer club scene. There have been a number of different books that have come out recently about this; Lucas Hilderbrand wrote really a brilliant one called The Bars Are Ours. Mainstream culture and journalism often erased who we were. Mainstream culture was often censoring and rendering us invisible. So the history of these clubs is often the history of an emerging gay culture and a resilient resistance to the mainstream.
How involved were you in the making of the film?
MH: I did some voiceover work and pre-interviews with a number of people. But my brother is the filmmaker. He directed the film and did the bulk of the writing. I was really more of a consultant and I appear in the film talking about Flashback.
What was it like to make this documentary with your brother?
MH: It was really a fun experience. When we had a screening at a theatre in
Edmonton for the cast and crew, I hadn’t yet seen it on the big screen, so I flew back for that. It was really surreal because many of the people who are in the film, and many people I knew from the club, were at the screening. It was great!
Patrick Monaghan was a club technician who filmed drag shows at Flashback. This archival footage appears in your doc, and also helped recreate Flashback in scenes filmed at queer nightclub Evolution Wonderlounge in Edmonton.
MH: The owner of Evolution Wonderlounge, Rob Browatzke, was really generous and allowed us to film there. We made Evolution look as much like Flashback as we could, then hired some club kids and dressed them up like they were in the ’80s!
How does queer life in Edmonton today compare to when you were growing up?
MH: I think the suburbs have become much more accepting of gay people.
The culture has changed, a lot of cruising has migrated to apps like Grindr, so that means it isn’t as crucial to have a village or gay clubs like it used to be.
In our digital age, do you think we have lost the art of cruising?
MH: Oh yeah, there was a lot more to cruising. But back in the day in Edmonton, if you looked at somebody twice, you were afraid you would get punched in the face. Cruising was something that didn’t happen as much in a place like Edmonton. When I arrived in Montreal, I really felt like, “Wow, this is the place to be a ho!”
But I want to stress that it’s important we not utopianize gay clubs. Because gay clubs were also the reason why a lot of gay men abused substances. They were getting drunk. And if your only place to cruise is a bar, that’s not really ideal. So while there was an upside, there was a downside too. And gay clubs were often quite exclusionary. I heard many racist comments made at bars. There was transphobia and femme phobia, racism and misogyny. A lot of people had internalized homophobia, so I found gay men were often not very nice to other gay men. I used to say, “You can check your coat at the door, but you can’t check your homophobia.”
The people who ran Flashback did their best to make their club inclusive, but the negative aspects of queer culture – how exclusionary and ageist it can be, and the body fascism – that they couldn’t stop. That was still part of what happened inside the club.
You left Alberta for New York before coming to Montreal.
MH: I went to New York to study at the School of Visual Arts. But it was very expensive living in New York, so I applied to film school at Concordia.
Before you became a film and journalism teacher, you were a writer and editor at the Montreal Mirror when the alt-weeklies profoundly shaped queer culture in Montreal. What was that era like for you?
MH: It was very exciting. The alternative newsweekly’s Mirror, ICI, VOIR and Hour played a really crucial role in shaping the cultural life of the city and, I would argue, the political life as well. We worked really hard, all of us and we didn’t do it for a lot of money. But I was very lucky to have had access to a lot of people. I interviewed everyone from Quentin Crisp to Gore Vidal.
You and I had a torrid affair during the late 90s when our papers – Mirror and Hour – were engaged in a classic newspaper war.
MH: It was a sometimes nasty but healthy rivalry. We always tried to cover things in a way that The Gazette or La Presse would not. That was the point of an alternative paper, and we got to ask a lot of uncomfortable questions. Whenever a newspaper dies, the city loses something. I was devastated to see each of those weeklies go because all of those papers, all of those people, did crucial work for the city.
Flashback will screen at Montreal’s Image + Nation, the oldest queer film festival in Canada.
MH: I’m excited to watch our film in a dark cinema at Image + Nation before it becomes available on a streaming service. My brother really deserves all the credit. Peter worked really hard on it. Flashback was a nightclub ahead of its time. It was a place that welcomed everybody. There was a sign up in the foyer that said, “Flashback is a club for gay people and their friends.” Flashback is about finding a place where you can explore your identity and be who you really are.
INFOS | Flashback screens at the 37th edition of the image+nation queer
film festival which runs from November 20 to 30.
-> NOVEMBER 23, 3 PM at Sir George Williams Alumni Auditorium (H110) Université Concordia
