Obituary: John Banks pioneered gay rights in Montreal (2024)

John Banks, an ardent defender of the LGBTQ2+ cause and of the community’s rights and freedoms, and the organizer of Montreal’s first Pride event 45 years ago, has died. He had been in declining health for some time.

The news was made public Monday by the Archives gaies du Québec (AGQ). Banks, who would have turned 81 on July 3, was a devoted and longtime volunteer with the organization, which works to document the history of the province’s LGBTQ2+ communities. “More than simply the memory of things, the archives are an object lesson in what was,” he said to explain his dedication.

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Born in Montreal in 1943, Banks affirmed his sexual identity early. “I was never in the closet, so never had a coming out,” Banks said in the 2018 AGQ documentary John Banks, une vie d’engagement.

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As Serge Fisette wrote in a 2022 tribute in Fugues, a publication focused on news related to LGBTQ2+ communities, Banks said he felt neither shame nor guilt but, rather, serenity. He started to hang out in gay bars when he was 15, “understood clearly his difference, his marginality — and the omnipresent climate of repression, which he would not stop battling throughout his life.”

Banks “was a pioneer in the recognition of our rights, but also in the quest for us to take our place in the social arena,” Fugues contributor Denis-Daniel Boullé said in a posthumous tribute in Fugues. “He assumed his hom*osexuality very young but, most importantly, he decided not to be quiet about it, not to hide. There were not many like him at the time — far from it.”

In 1979, Banks convinced some friends to demonstrate under the name La Brigade Rose in St-Louis Square. There were 52 of them, including several women. There was no rainbow flag yet, so they sewed together two sheets and fashioned a triangle they painted pink. “That was our parade and we were proud,” Banks would recall.

It was Montreal’s first Pride event.

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The year marked the 10th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, which began on June 28, 1969 when the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York City’s Greenwich Village, was raided by police. Rather than respond with the compliance police expected, patrons and a growing crowd decided to fight back. Six days of rioting marked a turning point in gay and lesbian life.

“When John organized the first march in 1979, 52 people turned out. A lot of people were still closeted,” recalled Richard Burnett, a Montreal journalist for mainstream and LGBTQ2+ publications and a longtime friend of Banks.

The LGBTQ2+ community was targeted in police crackdowns on Montreal gay bars in the 1970s and 1980s — and even later. Against a backdrop of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, which began in 1981, and a series of gay murders in Montreal in the late 1980s, the raids continued. In the early hours of July 15, 1990, police raided the after-hours venue in a downtown Montreal loft known as Sex Garage. “The queer community was under siege,” Burnett recalled.

Marches took place over the next decade, but the first Pride parade was in 1993, organized by Divers/Cité. It drew 5,000 people.

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“It was very powerful for John to see. He told me he wept,” said Burnett. “He never thought he would see a Pride parade in his lifetime. He was 15 when he started frequenting gay bars. Queer nightlife was very much underground then — a demimonde. Consensual gay sex was illegal. John was really out and proud. There was no closet for John.”

Banks did many different things during his lifetime. He was just 17 when he met then-59-year-old Marlene Dietrich in 1960 in Montreal, where she was giving a concert at Her Majesty’s Theatre. She was no longer acting in movies, but now producing cabaret shows. The encounter would lead to his being hired as her personal assistant, a job he held for 12 years. “She was my university,” Banks told Burnett of his time with Miss D, as he called her.

In the 1970s, he owned a Duluth Ave. restaurant called Au Jardin. He hosted a program on Radio Centre-Ville and established a short-lived magazine, Sortie, intended to describe the realities of life for the LGBTQ2+ community.

Banks was a voracious reader, said Burnett. “He always had a book; he would go to the library a lot.” For Christmas in 2023, Burnett gave him the 500-plus-page anthology Marlene Dietrich: Between the Covers — a collection of lost interviews and magazine profiles of Dietrich from 1930 to 1954.

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Divers/Cité organized Pride festivities in Montreal until 2006. Fierté Montréal/Montreal Pride was established in 2007 to organize the parade and related community events; today they make up the largest LGBTQ2+ festival in the francophone world, said Burnett. In 2019, total attendance at the Montreal Pride festival was 3.4 million.

To mark the 40th anniversary of Montreal’s original Pride march in 2019, Fierté Montréal/Montreal Pride established the John Banks Prize to honour those who have made an outstanding contribution to the creation and advancement of LGBTQ2+ communities. Banks was the first recipient.

As well that year, Banks and Burnett were among 15 recipients of lifetime achievement awards presented by the Chambre de commerce LGBT du Québec.

AGQ co-ordinator Pierre Pilotte said of Banks’s passing: “It’s a huge loss for our communities. We will miss his activism and unwavering commitment.”

Speaking with reporters on Wednesday in the Village, Mayor Valérie Plante described Banks as a pioneer. Montreal’s Pride event has grown so big that “we tend to forget that, when it started, those people had a lot of courage to be out there in the street … asking to be respected in their own identity” when there were few public conversations about gender or hom*osexuality.

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Said Burnett: “John was so out and proud. For him, it was a lifelong commitment. He felt this was something he had to do, which is why he started Pride. He felt a deep commitment, and it’s that deep commitment that everybody loved and respected him for. I have always said he was a role model and a personal hero.”

Even as his health declined, Banks remained connected and committed to the queer community. “A lot of writers and researchers would approach me and ask me questions about life for gay people, and John was a great resource,” Burnett said.

“Wehave now lost one of our last living connections to the history of gay Montreal. He made a difference. He helped change our city.”

Banks saw societal acceptance of the LGBTQ2+ community evolve considerably in his lifetime. “It still worries me that it’s not perfect,” he said in a CBC podcast this month. “But it’s a hell of a lot better than it was.”

The last time Burnett saw Banks in person was on Dec. 29, 2023, when he took him out for brunch.

“We did a lot of catching up over scrambled eggs and Bloody Caesars! He was quite frail by that time, but still charming as ever. He was a great storyteller and a fierce queer activist who helped change queer life in this city for the better. I loved him and we will all miss him.”

sschwartz@postmedia.com

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