What to know
- Hager grew up in 1960s Calgary, where violence and threats were a reality for people gathering at the city’s only Gay bar.
- In Vancouver, she became part of an emerging Lesbian and Queer community and performed as a drag king known as “Meatloaf.”
- Her activism extended into the contentious S&M debates of the 1980s, where she advocated for women’s autonomy and the right to choose.
- She later spent more than 25 years working in housing, including Toronto’s pioneering Street City supportive housing project.
- Her message to younger Queer people: know your history, talk about your struggles and don’t worry about labels.
Meeting for a coffee in The Village’s Understory Cafe, D Hager tells me that for her, there was never a moment of coming out.
“I’ve always known,” she tells Queer & Now with a smile. “I’ve never hidden it. I’m just me.”
Now 67, Hager has spent more than five decades living openly as Queer. Her story stretches from Calgary’s sole Gay bar, where gunshots and bomb scares were part of nightlife for Queer people in the 1960s, to Vancouver’s Lesbian club scene, where she performed drag as a king at a time when drag shows were anything but commonplace.
Today, settled in Toronto, she continues to see activism as something that happens wherever people are being denied dignity, whether that’s at Pride, BDSM, or supportive housing. But ask her about her history, and one thing becomes clear: it’s a snapshot of Queer activism in Canada from the 1970s to now.
Before drag kings had a name
In Vancouver in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Hager worked at the Quadra Club, a Lesbian bar that became part of the West Coast’s burgeoning Queer community. It was there, and later through friendships with drag performers, that she began performing.
“We didn’t call ourselves drag kings back then,” she recalls. “We just did it because it was fun.”
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While still fairly uncommon, women performing drag was even rarer in the 70s and 80s. The former king says it was mostly bar workers and their friends who joined the performances, which were simply about unwinding and having a good time.
Eventually, the shows became more elaborate. She found herself living with drag queens and in addition to shows at Quadra, she was also hitting the stage at the Nelson Hotel. She developed a particular affinity for Kenny Rogers and Meat Loaf, so much so that she became known as “Meatloaf” within the local community.
She remembers performing the late rock star’s songs alongside Vancouver’s drag queens, incorporating playful routines into the shows, and getting dressed up in makeup and costumes.
“It was fun,” she says. “We were young and just looking to have a good time.”
But those performances also existed within the political tensions of the time, serving as an act of protest and resistance for young Queer women. Hager says that some of the shows drew protests from feminist groups, who demonstrated outside of her events. Feminist groups of the time were often exclusionary towards Lesbians, with the infamous radical Lesbian group “Lavender Menace,” born as a protest of this exclusion.
For Hager, these protests were an early lesson in the complicated politics of Queer community, one that would follow her into another part of her life.
S&M as a feminist battleground
While her work as a drag queen drew the ire of local feminists, so did her other interest: sadism and masochism (S&M). Involved in Vancouver’s S&M community through the early 80s, Hager says that women’s involvement in this lifestyle was particularly controversial within many feminist circles at the time.
However, then and now, she identifies as a feminist. Hager explains that for her, feminism is inseparable from bodily autonomy and personal boundaries, key tenets of S&M and Queerness.
“I’m a free person. I can do what I want,” she explains. “I have my boundaries that people can’t cross. That’s S&M, but that’s feminism, that’s being Queer, too.”
She recalls that in the early 1980s, she and a friend were tasked with leading an S&M workshop as part of a British Columbia-wide kink event. Posters were made, the workshop was planned, but then feminist organizers protested until the women’s event was shut down.
“Sometimes, thinking of activists, you think of physical violence, but there is a lot of vocal violence that’s thrown at you,” she says, explaining that a lot of this violence is lateral, existing between activist groups that are fighting for the same thing: freedom for women.
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“It’s disappointing to see other women throw that at you when you’re just trying to teach women.”
Hager describes the experience as disappointing, particularly because the workshop was intended as an educational space. But the story did not end with the cancellation. At the kink event’s closing plenary, the subject was discussed. By the following year, she says, there was more openness to having women hold another workshop.
While she was already living in Toronto by the time the next event was held, she says that for her that shift mattered. That experience reflects something that runs throughout D’s story: her willingness to remain in difficult conversations rather than retreat from them.
Five or six blocks in nothing but leather
Her relationship with the S&M community also produced one of the more memorable stories of her time as a young person in Vancouver. This includes one night when a partner challenged her to a stunt that involved being handcuffed and walking several blocks to the Quadra Club wearing very little clothing.
She went. The walk was five or six blocks, she says, dressed in leather and handcuffed in public. But embarrassment didn’t stop her.
“I just didn’t think about it,” she says.
“I guess I’m brave; I had fun. People need to see that,” she continued, adding that she hopes people understand that under the stories of brave activism were Queer people trying to live their lives how they saw fit.
That attitude, a mixture of defiance, playfulness and a refusal to hide, appears repeatedly throughout D’s life, beginning in Calgary before attending Pride was safe.
Queer in 1960s Calgary
Hager grew up in 1960s Alberta, where being Queer could be frightening. At the Parkside Continental, the city’s only Queer bar at the time, she remembers gunshots being fired at the building.
She explained that people inside would sometimes spot men outside of the building through the windows and warn other party-goers to be careful, as assaults outside of the bar were common. But Hager says that despite gunshots and her friends being beaten up, she wasn’t particularly scared, as these threats to safety were more commonplace in the lives of 2SLGBTQIA+ people at the time.
“I didn’t even think about it,” she says. “I just lived it.”
The lack of community in Calgary eventually pushed her toward Vancouver. She travelled west with a friend to see what the Queer community was like and ended up staying for years. In Vancouver, she found work, friends and a community that felt more like home. She recalls participating in some of the city’s earliest Pride marches, which also faced adversity in the form of large-scale anti-2SLGBTQIA+ protests.
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“People are always demonstrating against the things that we’ve done,” she says, remembering the protests that surrounded Pride events, in addition to her drag shows and S&M workshops.
But in every facet, Hager kept showing up.
Activism was never just Pride
Hager is a lifelong activist. In addition to S&M and 2SLGBTQIA+ activism, she also spent more than 25 years working in housing. This work included innovative supportive housing initiatives such as Street City, a project that opened in Toronto in 1988 at Front and Cherry. The project housed six homes inside a warehouse, with spaces for men and women, and became an internationally recognized model.
She explained that to her, housing justice and Queer rights belong to the same broader commitment to community, a commitment that remains visible in her everyday life.
“I will stand up for anybody,” she says. “It doesn’t matter who you are or what you are.”
Her reasoning is simple.
“We’re humans. We deserve to be treated like human beings, and we deserve every right that everybody else has.”
“We did all the hard work”
After more than five decades of watching the 2SLGBTQIA+ rights movement evolve and change, Hager says progress is undeniable.
But she also worries about who gets remembered.
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“I don’t think older people get as recognized as they should,” she says. “We did all the hard work. We did demonstrations. We advocated for these things, and now we just get left behind.”
“The community needs to talk to each other more,” she says, adding that she isn’t particularly interested in labels or accolades. What she wants is conversation.
Hager believes one of the biggest problems facing Queer communities today is that younger people don’t often ask about the lives of those who came before them.
During our conversation, she talks about the many lives she’s lived: construction worker, landscaper, oil-field worker, drag performer, bar worker, housing advocate and activist. Those histories aren’t always visible, and sharing those stories allows younger generations to know where they come from, and that while they may feel isolated in their experiences, they aren’t alone.
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For Hager, asking is an act of connection. It’s how Queer history gets passed from one generation to the next, and that history is part of building community.
Her own advice to younger Queer people follows the same philosophy that has carried her through five decades of activism and living her truth.
“Make sure you talk to someone about your struggles,” she says. “You need to just be you, who you are. Don’t worry about labels.”
And then, as she has done throughout her life, she returns to the idea of continuing forward.
“You can be in the moment, be sad or whatever,” she says. “But you have to just carry on.”
