Bottoms Up brings back dedicated Queer space to Downtown Kingston | Canada News Media

A 17-year-long gap in Kingston’s community has finally been filled.

Bottoms Up, Kingston’s newest queer bar, opened its doors to the public on January 3^rd. Located in the renovated lower level of Renaissance, the venue now joins other LGBTQ spaces in Kingston as a new hub for Kingston’s queer community.

Bottoms Up opens on Friday and Saturday evenings. It offers both a casual lounge option for guests looking for a quieter environment and a lively dancefloor and DJ for those looking for an energetic evening. A tasty array of hot and cold appetizers is available to visitors until closing.

In a statement to Canada News Media, Paul Fortier, Co-owner of Bottoms Up, spoke on the importance of queer bars, stating that such spaces helped him find community when he was younger. “Now we can offer the same opportunity for young people in Kingston to explore their sexuality. The bar is not just for youth but for all members of the community to participate,” Fortier said.

The bar joins other venues in Kingston’s lively social scene as a fun, modern place for queer Kingstonians to gather. However, Bottoms Up stands out from its peers as the first queer-focused bar to open in Kingston since 2009.

From the 1980s to 2009, Kingston was home to spaces like Club 477, Wally’s, and Shay Foo Foo’s. These spaces were hubs of music, dancing, and drinking. These spaces allowed the queer community to emerge from the margins of Kingston society to socialize.

2009 marked the end of Kingston’s thriving queer bar scene, as the last queer club in Kingston, Shay Foo Foo’s, closed. Once that venue closed, the queer community in Kingston had to find other spaces to convene, leading to a return to Kingston’s pre-1980 status quo.

In the absence of a dedicated space, the LGBTQ community gathered in queer-friendly venues such as the Toucan, Daft pub and Tir Nan Og. 

Grassroots organizations, such as Transfamily Kingston and Beyond the Binary, also filled gaps in the community by organizing events and support networks. While Queen’s organizations such as the Yellow House work to bridge the gap between queer Queen’s students and queer Kingstonians.

More recently, community members have come together on social media to bring awareness about the need for a queer lounge in Kingston. The Facebook group “Kingston Needs a Gay Bar” has become a space where residents share ideas for and advocate for new queer spaces in.

Such pushes resulted in plans for Club 338, a much-anticipated gay club slated to open in 2023. However, Club 338 was unable to open at its originally planned location. Three years after Club 338’s unsuccessful opening, Paul Fortier and his partner, Denis, are seeking to fill the gap Club 338 sought to address.

As a long-time Kingston business owner, Fortier expressed confidence in the longevity of Bottoms Up, as he and his partner have been running businesses such as Renaissance and Jessup food and heritage since 1994. “While the bar and venue will experience limited prejudice by certain sectors of the community, I am confident that as long as we can sustain a reasonable clientele, the bar will continue.”

As long as the Kingston community wants it, Bottoms Up promises to round out the queer space offerings to the LGBTQ+ community. So, after 17 years of queer groups trying to organize for a space like Bottoms Up, the club is a welcome change of pace, satisfying some of Kingston’s lively queer community’s needs.