Montreal’s Gay Village will change name to the Village to be more “inclusive”

Gay Village, Montreal
Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Montreal’s famous Gay Village is getting a new name and it has some locals angry and hurt. The queer enclave known worldwide will drop the word “gay” from the name in an effort to be “more inclusive.”

Instead, the area’s business owners say it will become “the Village of Montreal, the largest 2SLGBTQ+ village in the world.” The group then had to explain what the meaning behind the list of letters and numbers reminiscent of a license plate.

Related: Is the decline of the modern “gayborhood” a good thing?

2SLGBTQ+ adds 2S for Two Spirit and a plus sign at the end of the typical LGBTQ acronym for the community. “Two spirit” is a modern, pan-indigenous term for a person who fills a social role in their cultures that’s outside the gender binary. The plus sign is to indicate any other identity not already included in the tongue-twisting acronym.

The move hasn’t gone over well with some residents who have accused the group of erasing the area’s longstanding association with the queer community in favor of a generic name that will encourage gentrification and more commercialization.

“We’re not discriminating against anyone that associates themselves with gay,” Lee-Anne Millaire Lafleur, a Montreal Village Business Development Corporation board member, told CBC. “It’s for sure part of the community. We’re just trying to include the rest of the people that don’t feel that the word is associated with them.”

“The word gay represented a lot of people that today may not still find themselves represented by that one term,” Lafleur added.

“On the one hand, I understand why there’s a push not to call it the Gay Village because the word gay is now almost exclusively for gay men and it’s only one word in the LGBTQ acronym,” journalist and activist Richard Burnett told News 1130. “But on the flip side, I fear that…

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