When the production release for Arsenal landed, I read it with more than passing interest. The film, written by Pier-Philippe Chevigny and Chloé Robichaud, describes itself as a work of fiction freely inspired by a significant event in Montreal’s 2SLGBTQIA+ history. Its central character is Jess, a young anglophone photographer who attends a queer warehouse party, witnesses the ensuing police violence and turns her camera toward the police.
The release also proudly announces that the film will be shot in roughly 15 long takes (aka a oner). For the uninitiated, a oner is a long, continuous film take that captures an entire scene or sequence from start to finish without any visible edits or cuts.
Great. I like a good oner as much as the next film geek.
But that wasn’t the thing that stopped me.
Jess did.
Because I know this story. I was there.
For readers who do not, Nicolas Jenkins organized a series of underground afterhours queer parties in Montreal. In July 1990, police raided one of those parties which was held in a downtown loft and called Sex Garage after the 1972 porn film directed by Fred Halsted. Officers without identification violently forced people from the space; partygoers were beaten and arrested. Demonstrations followed, including a protest outside police Station 25 that ended with riot police attacking protesters and making dozens of arrests.
What followed was bigger than one terrible night.
Sex Garage helped politicize a generation of Montreal queers. Journalist and LGBTQ+ activist Richard Burnett has called it an event “widely considered to be Montreal’s Stonewall,” one that helped bring anglophones and francophones together and altered the city’s queer political landscape.
Michael Hendricks, one of the architects of Montréal’s gay-rights movement, told Burnett that Sex Garage “created community and brought us together in a common front.”
I too have called it Montreal’s Stonewall.
But even that shorthand requires care.
Burnett, who has documented these events for decades, recently observed that the mythology of Sex Garage may have overshadowed Truxx, the massive 1977 police raid on a Montreal gay bar.
And academics Karen Herland and Jason Crawford have made an even more important point. Looking back at video, news reports and their own different experiences, they argue that the multiple stories surrounding Sex Garage have gradually been spooled into one unified narrative. Their work deliberately tries to unspool it again.
That seems particularly worth remembering when someone turns the history into fiction.
Historical trauma changes the equation.
A filmmaker is not simply borrowing a period, a setting or an interesting night in Montreal history. They are entering a wound that still belongs to living people. And collective trauma has an inconvenient habit of refusing to behave like a screenplay.
Cinema likes a protagonist. Trauma often doesn’t have one.
I first met Pier-Philippe Chevigny at his request in June 2020, in a park just off Mozart Street.
Before we met, he shared his short film Recrue, about a six-year-old boy being drawn into the world of his father’s far-right group.
There is an image in the film that stayed with me: children holding flags. One holds a Quebec flag. Another holds a Pride flag.
I asked Pier-Philippe why.
As I remember the conversation, he told me somebody in the art department thought it would be a good idea and he went with it.
That may sound like an absurdly small thing to get hung up on.
I come from communications and film studies.
Flags are loaded.
A Quebec flag and a Pride flag placed in the hands of children inside a film about political extremism are not decorative objects. They bring nationalism, identity, belonging, exclusion and history into the frame whether the filmmaker intends them to or not.
That answer bothered me.
Then we talked about Sex Garage.
Pier-Philippe told me his personal connection to LGBTQ+ life was his lesbian sister. Based on our conversation, he knew relatively little about the queer community of that period, its politics or its culture.
He talked about photographer Linda Dawn Hammond and what he understood to be her central importance to the Sex Garage story.
I had questions. A lot of them.
By the end of a long and otherwise very pleasant conversation, I told him something that was probably not what he had invited me to a park to hear.
I told him I didn’t think he was the writer or director for this story. I didn’t think he yet had the cultural fluency, finesse or sensitivity that this particular history demanded.
He asked if that was because he is straight.
No.
Jean-Marc Vallée’s C.R.A.Z.Y. is one of my favourite Quebec films. I return to it almost every Christmas.
That film grew partly from the life of François Boulay. Vallée himself said Boulay entrusted him with his memories and that they developed the screenplay from them; Boulay has described first giving Vallée roughly a hundred pages of autobiographical recollections.
The point is not that straight people can’t tell queer stories.
God help literature if that becomes the rule.
The more interesting question is whose consciousness structures the story.
Andrew Haigh, whose work includes Weekend and Looking, has described deliberately seeking LGBTQ+ actors and crew while rejecting a rigid rule that only LGBTQ+ performers can play LGBTQ+ characters. His larger point is about authenticity: identity alone cannot rescue writing that doesn’t understand the psychology or world of its characters.
Russell T Davies approached It’s a Sin differently, deliberately seeking gay actors and describing that decision partly as correcting a longstanding imbalance in who gets opportunities to portray gay lives on screen.
Neither position requires a purity test.
They require thought.
Pose offers another model. Ryan Murphy did not simply put trans performers in front of the camera. Steven Canals was a co-creator, writer, director and executive producer; Janet Mock was an executive producer, writer and director; Our Lady J was a writer and co-executive producer. Trans experience therefore existed within the machinery making decisions about the story, not merely among the people being depicted by it.
That distinction is important. Authorship does not have to be identity-exclusive. Creative authority matters. And this is where the word consultation starts making me itchy.
Pier-Philippe asked me that afternoon whether I would consult on Arsenal.
I told him my days of being “un gay de service” were long behind me.
For a film about Sex Garage, I said, queer people should have more than consultant credits.
It made for a somewhat awkward ending to what had otherwise been a pleasant meeting.
I liked him. I still do. He seemed sweet, determined and very sincere about making this film. I simply did not think he was the person for it.
And by the end of our conversation, something else was troubling me: he seemed already to know what story he wanted to tell.
So what exactly would I or any queer person have been consulting on?
That is where consultation becomes an ethical question rather than simply another production credit.
Does community knowledge actually shape the work? Can it change the protagonist? The structure? The interpretation of history?
Or are members of the community invited in after those decisions have essentially been made, to tell the filmmaker whether the wallpaper looks authentic?
Consultation can be genuine collaboration.
It can also become cultural due diligence.
A box checked.
A name in the credits.
Evidence, should anyone complain later, that queer people were “in the room.”
Recent researchers examining LGBTQ+ experiences of violence have wrestled with a remarkably similar problem. Their response has been to advocate queer-led methods in which queer voices are not simply research subjects but help shape how stories and experiences are interpreted.
Film is not academic research. But the ethical principle travels rather well.
Who has the power to determine what another community’s pain means?
Six years after that conversation in the park, Arsenal is going before the cameras. And now we know where the camera points: Jess, the young anglophone photographer.
Anyone familiar with Sex Garage will understand immediately why the character evokes photographer Linda Dawn Hammond.
Linda was there. Her photographs matter enormously. At a time before everyone carried a camera in their pocket, she documented police violence, and those images entered the newspapers and became part of the historical record.
That is important.
But documenting a movement and being the centre of that movement are not necessarily the same thing.
I ran into Linda years later at Zilon’s funeral. Our conversation was brief and, shall we say, not particularly warm. We clearly have different understandings of her place in the Sex Garage story.
So I should declare that bias too. I am not pretending to be a neutral historian hovering elegantly above all this.
I have my memories.
Linda has hers.
Karen Herland has hers.
Richard Burnett has documented others.
And that may be exactly the point. There was no single Sex Garage story. There were hundreds.
People were beaten.
People were terrified.
People organized.
People who had never considered themselves activists became activists.
People argued.
People fell in love.
People built organizations.
People changed laws and institutions.
Some became leaders.
Others went home carrying something they probably never imagined would become the subject of a feature film 36 years later.
That is why centering this history through one photographer raises questions for me.
Not because she shouldn’t be there. Of course she should. But why her? Why does a collective queer trauma need to be filtered through that particular consciousness?
Who becomes supporting cast in their own history once that choice is made?
There is another complication: language.
The Sex Garage world crossed Montreal’s linguistic divide, but much of the alternative queer culture around it was anglophone. The politics that followed repeatedly brought anglophone and francophone activists together. Burnett has specifically emphasized that bridging of the two communities as part of Sex Garage’s importance.
The Arsenal synopsis itself identifies Jess as anglophone.
So I am genuinely curious. How will that world sound? Where are its anglophone voices? Who gets to speak rather than simply populate the background?
These are not accusations. They are questions. Important ones.
And I learned something about asking them from another film: I worked as a unit publicist on Roland Emmerich’s Stonewall.
That movie later faced enormous criticism because it placed a fictional white young man at the centre of a history involving homeless queer youth, drag queens, gender-nonconforming people, trans people and people of colour.
I had concerns while we were making it. I expressed some of them. I was also the unit publicist. I have a running joke that nobody listens to the on-set publicist. Like most decent jokes, there is enough truth in it to sting.
I say that carefully. I am fond of Roland, respect him enormously and would happily work with him again tomorrow.
I am not appointing myself the Cassandra of Stonewall.
My point is almost the opposite:
A gay director can still choose the wrong centre of gravity for a gay historical story.
A straight director can make extraordinary queer work.
Identity alone neither grants understanding nor prevents it.
But historical trauma raises the stakes.
The greater the cultural specificity, the collective pain and the imbalance of power involved, the greater the storyteller’s obligation to ask:
Whose perspective structures the narrative?
Whose knowledge shaped it?
Who had meaningful creative authority?
Who gets pushed to the edges?
And who benefits from its telling?
Those are the questions I am asking about Arsenal.
Not whether Pier-Philippe Chevigny has permission to make it.
Not whether Linda Dawn Hammond has permission to be a character.
Not whether a French-language filmmaker can tell a story largely rooted in anglophone queer Montreal.
Of course they can.
The question is what happens when a community’s trauma becomes somebody else’s narrative architecture.
The Arsenal production release tells us the film will be made in approximately 15 plans-séquences. Pier-Philippe calls it a major technical challenge.
I believe him.
But the challenge that interests me is considerably harder to storyboard.
Who gets to hold the camera when a community’s trauma becomes cinema?
Who decides where that camera points?
And who gets to stand at the centre of the frame?
I haven’t seen Arsenal. None of us has.
I’m not reviewing a film that doesn’t yet exist, and I’m certainly not interested in launching a pre-emptive attack on it.
I hope it’s terrific.
I hope Pier-Philippe, Chloé Robichaud and everyone involved prove every one of my concerns misplaced. I will happily applaud them if they do.
I would much rather write that column than the one that begins:
I told you so.
Puelo Deir is a veteran LGBTQ+ advocate, producer and film publicist.