It’s the Last Dance, Folks

Saturday, October 31, 1992
The Concert Hall

“Things always have a beginning and an end, they can't last forever."

- Ed Jackson, GCDC participant

The GCDC lasted for more than a decade and raised over $250,000 for lesbian and gay community organizations in Toronto and surrounding areas. To put it bluntly: the GCDC funded lesbian and gay liberation in Toronto during the 1980s. What is particularly remarkable about this group is that their social and political impact cannot be reduced to financial terms. The GCDC was a coalition-building, dance-oriented, liberation collective. Their events created space in which pleasure and more traditional forms of political organising merged. 

“In the back of my head, after all these years, I still relive the events in my head, in my dreams. The whole thing, the whole pace of it. For years, it was just run-run-run, push-push-push. Things would be [at] such a pace to get the things started and then get it finished and close it down successfully and not have huge problems over the course of it.”

- Rob Stout, GCDC Organiser

For many of the people we spoke with during our research into the GCDC, the dances served as an easy entry into other forms of political activism. Moreover,  the sense of community and agency that individuals felt at GCDC dances made further activism seem both possible and attractive. As we learned through this research, the intense feelings of belonging that occured on the dance floor continued to have an effect long after the music stopped. 

“Something beautiful happens when you’re on a dance floor…there’s a possibility to express both desire and freedom. To me, that is always the possibility and probability of bringing people together with music, particularly oppressed people, where we could intersperse women with queer, with Black, with Indigenous people, like any oppressed group coming together to celebrate themselves and each other is a political moment.”

- Deb Parent, GCDC DJ