Montreal writer Jay Quint has always wanted to be a popular author, but also a writer’s writer. He succeeds with the publication of his new memoir Village Dreams: a critical view from the ’60s and ‘70s (Guernica Editions), a work he describes as “creative cultural criticism.”
Village Dreams is about the famous Gay Villages—but it is not a history of them. Quint merges his own existential crisis and writer’s block into a chronicle of the evolution of counterculture and the emergence of the world’s famous Gay Villages, including Montreal.
Critic Paul Wilner of San Francisco’s Bay Area Reporter newspaper observes that Village Dreams “provides a historical and poetic overview of the rise of Gay Villages in West Hollywood, San Francisco and Montreal, the author’s home town, after the demise of the largely straight communal gatherings of the 1960s … Quint’s remarkably ambitious work ranges far beyond mere sociology. It’s somewhere between a monograph, a history and a prose poem.”
After graduating from Concordia University with a BComm degree in 2005, Quint spent his twenties living and partying in Sydney, Paris, Miami, Los Angeles, and Toronto. He returned to Montreal after self-publishing his name-dropping self-published memoir Tides of Vanity, a project he now calls one of his “grand failures.”
Over the past decade he read voraciously, laying the foundation for Village Dreams which namechecks and quotes everybody from Susan Sontag and Joan Didion to Edmund White and Armistead Maupin.
Jay and I recently sat down for a candid Q&A.
You did a lot of soul searching before writing Village Dreams in which you briefly mention your “ill-fated first book of mine” called Tides of Vanity. Who were you back then, and what happened that changed the course of your life?
Jay Quint: I was a party boy. I moved from Montreal to South Beach where I lived a block away from Lincoln Road which at the time was still happening. I opened my book Tides of Vanity by saying all the old-timers on the scene there thought of South Beach as having been passé by that point. Versace was already dead, his murder was a turning point. But I and people my age still found South Beach special. And I became friends with Madonna’s brother Christopher Ciccone who became an older brother-type of figure.
Did self-publishing Tides of Vanity in 2015 close that chapter of your life?
Jay Quint: Yes it did. I had moved from Miami to L.A. where I still did the party thing, mixing with Bryan Singer and those types of people. I felt I was repeating the same things: sex, drugs, rock and roll. Wake up tired, go to the gym. And I was tired of it. But that book was a failure. It was not a success. But it marks an era for me.
You got a Bachelor of Commerce degree from Concordia in 2005. What did you originally want to do with your life?
Jay Quint: I completed my degree and moved to Australia. But I was lost and sexually confused.
You were not out?
Jay Quint: No. I wasn’t out. I was very confused. I was following the straight and narrow for lack of anything better. A career in writing did not seem realistic for me at the time. So I went back to Concordia when I returned to Montreal in 2015 and took a writing class. Typical of me, I didn’t finish the class but it motivated me to start writing and reading. The next five or six years of pure reading lead me to discover Montreal’s Village on a sunny Saturday afternoon, which became the inspiration for Village Dreams.
You found your voice with Village Dreams.
Jay Quint: Yes, but I went through more than 15 drafts by the time I began submitting my manuscript to publishers.
You are incredibly well-read and name-check and quote many fine authors in Village Dreams –– among them Susan Sontag, Proust, Edmund White – a list I suspect you’d be at ease being a part of. How do you see yourself?
Jay Quint: I think it’s weird when people start calling themselves a poet or writer. I find it a little pretentious. If I’m anything, I’m a reader first.
Today you live in Shaughnessy Village where so many gays lived when Montreal’s gay West Village thrived downtown in the 1960s, 70s and early 80s.
Jay Quint: I really like Shaughnessy Village. I don’t know where else in the city I would prefer to live.
Do you still go to the Shaughnessy Café?
Jay Quint: Daily!
Village Dreams explores the path that lead to the creation of Montreal’s current Village in the East, and ends on a mostly positive note.
Jay Quint: The interesting thing about Village Dreams is that it’s about the Village during the daytime, whereas before the Village had always been a nighttime spot for me. I stumbled upon Rue Saint-Rose in the Village during the day, during COVID when the streets were particularly quiet. The daytime Village was not something I expected to enjoy, but I did, and it inspired me to write my book.
INFOS | Village Dreams: a critical view from the’60s and ‘70s by Jay Quint is published by Guernica Editions.
