Lee’s Palace is nobody’s idea of a queer bar. Plunked in the middle of the frat boy–infested Annex and surrounded by fake Irish pubs catering to aging rugby players, the dance hall and live music venue, famously decorated with dated, primary-coloured monsters by ’80s graffiti artist Runt, is the rock and roll equivalent of Gretzky’s restaurant.

But Lee’s, perhaps because it was so thoroughly not a recognized queer space, proved to be the perfect place for Vazaleen, a monthly music and performance event that, in six years, forever changed the Friday nights of a generation of Toronto artists and freaks. In its lewd, spontaneous, hysterical and glamorous way, Vazaleen defined a new Toronto aesthetic, a playful and endlessly inventive mode of presentation that encompassed every­thing from lesbian prog-rock to tranny camp to vintage punk revival to good old-fashioned loud-mouthed drag.

I was one of those hags in drag. I wore hideous, mothball-reeking vintage dresses I found on the $5 rack at Courage My Love, accessorized with army boots and poorly applied, way-off-skin-tone foundation. I played a naughty Catholic schoolgirl, an aging north Toronto matron and a dollar store jewellery addict named Odessa Handlebar (a loving tribute to art patroness Ydessa Hendeles). I once dressed up as a shoplifting Russian hooker and coerced novelist Jared Mitchell, dressed in a cop uniform, to beat me with a heavy police gear belt onstage. The audience loved it, howling “Hit her harder!” with each swing. And he did. Luckily, my dress was well padded.

I am not a natural drag queen, if that’s not an oxymoron. Before Vazaleen, my only exposure to drag styling was the highly polished version typical of the Church Street lip-synch shows—drag that emphasizes “passing” as a woman. Vazaleen taught me that drag is not about $200 wigs and Vanna White dresses, not about being pretty. Drag is an act of self-declaration. You say your name is Svetlana and you work for Aeroflot, and whatever outfit you can toss together to match your new persona will enhance the illusion.

Another night, I dressed as Alannah Myles at 65 and hosted the prize contest. Will Munro, the mastermind promoter behind Vazaleen, passed the audience a bag of stilettos and encouraged the drunken horde to throw them into a basket I held up on the stage. The first one to land a shoe in the basket won a sex toy. Of course, the bastards aimed for my head instead. Thank God for wigs, the gay man’s helmet.

Once an event gets to the point at which ugly men in dresses are being pelted with shoes, it becomes hard to tell if the audience is there for the up-and-coming bands that are supposed to be the headliners, or for the freak show. The only thing anyone was sure of was the growing size of the crowd. On the last Friday of every month, hundreds of people lined the street in front of Lee’s, shrieking and smoking and picking off the crumbling plaster.

Everyone, from art school students to transgendered anarchists to aging middle-class gays, realized that something monumental was happening inside, something new, strange and wholly original.