To put this in context, Quebec City has a metro population of just over 700,000, which makes it around the size of Syracuse, and smaller than Omaha. Plus, it's less than three hours away from the world-class gay scene in Montreal.
It doesn't really have a gay neighborhood: this stretch of rue St. Jean, just west of the old city, is alleged to be the closest thing to one, but aside from a few same-sex couples on the sidewalks, it was a pretty nondescript stretch:
But just off this street, we found a club called Le Drague:
It's the only gay club in town, as far as we could determine, but what a club it was.
Drag was, it turned out, about the only thing we didn't see there on Saturday night (though I'm told they do have such shows on other nights). Instead, it turned out to be the kind of multi-purpose entertainment complex I had seen years ago in Minneapolis. (Maybe being in a cold-weather climate has something to do with it.)
Depending on how you count, the club is a collection of as many as six different spaces, each a mini-club of its own with (except for the last) its own bar. There's a patio out front for sitting, smoking and chatting. There's a large, two-story, brick-lined dance bar on the ground floor. Behind it and to the right is an indoor bar area with tables and a long row of video poker and slot machines. (Quite amusing, that, as one of them was a slots game with hockey images: instead of whirling cherries and oranges, you had skates, goalie masks, Zambonis, and the Stanley Cup.)
Down two levels of stairs in the basement is one of the nicest small club spaces I've ever been in: immaculate, with excellent clear sound, a balcony ringing the entire room, and white leather walls and seats that gave the impression of being in a padded cell.
Up a half-flight of stairs from the ground floor is an odd little leather bar, weirdly tasteful, with statues of musclemen on the bar that have hollowed-out nooks to hold liquor bottles. (Including, in the case of one statue, several bottles of wine. Who the hell drinks wine in a leather bar? Quebeckers, apparently. They also listen to Latin-and-jazz-inflected lounge music there.) There are stairs leading up from the leather bar, but ... better not to go there.
It took awhile to get started, and as late as midnight we were dancing almost by ourselves in the downstairs club. And I was thinking, nice club; shame about that neutron bomb that clearly hit the place the week before last.
Then we went upstairs and found the dance bar room had filled with bouncing youngsters -- we were the oldest people in the room by at least 10 years -- and extremely interesting music. So it turned out to be fun after all. But if you go, don't expect much before midnight.
Aside from the college kids in the dance bar, the crowd was quite a mix, as you'd expect from a place that is the only gay bar in town. It draws significant numbers of lesbians, some straight people, and gay men of all ages (though for whatever reason, the older ones seem to avoid the dance bar room rather strictly). They appeared to be all locals, or at least Francophones.
I will go out on a limb and say that Le Drague is the nicest club space I have ever been to in Canada (though I haven't been to Toronto in 20 years, so that's not included in the comparison). It's certainly nicer, physically, than Stereo in Montreal; though Stereo has amazing lights and sound and DJs, the building itself is a horrid '70s concrete monstrosity. And it's much nicer than either of the places I went to last year in Vancouver, though the Vancouver crowd is friendlier and friskier than just about anywhere else on earth. But for physical space, Quebec has them all beat.
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