Community in every key

Music, dance and joy flourish at Queer Karaoke events

Fringe ArtsGeneviève Sylvestre — Published September 16, 2025 5 minutes

Co-op Bar Milton-Parc, or BMP for those in the know, is a solidarity cooperative that hosts a number of community events, including the bi-weekly Queer Karaoke. 

Always free and always fun, Queer Karaoke offers members of the community a space to gather, belt their hearts out and order a late-night vegan poutine. 

Not tied down to one genre, the night bounces from pop divas to guilty-pleasure 2000s soundtracks, with every song met by a rush to the mic. 

According to Avery Haley-Lock, co-host and founder of Queer Karaoke, the project came from a desire to have more inclusive queer spaces in the city. 

“There's a lot of physical spaces […] and places in the village where when you go it's very dominated by cis men, and specifically cis gay men,” Haley-Lock said. “But, we wanted to see more spaces that were kind of just a mix of queer people, and not really specifically for any one person.” 

Out of this desire, Haley-Lock and some friends organized an “off-the-cuff” queer open mic event at the at-the-time brand new BMP, which drew a decent crowd. 

“It didn't even have taps yet, like beer taps. They were serving stuff out of cans, so it was really new, and it was looking for events to bring people in, so that made it really easy,” Haley-Lock said.

Following the event’s success, they turned their open-mic into a series, this time with a karaoke segment. Two years later, people still gather at that same bar under the same garland of fairy lights to sing and be in community with other queer people.

Silas Dixon, a member of BMP’s board of directors, says having queer karaoke as a fixture at the bar has been nothing but a positive experience.

“These are people who were involved with the bar from the beginning of it, so we have very intimate personal relationships with them,” Dixon said. “They're great friends, and it's just kind of nice that they choose to keep coming back to our space.”

Dixon adds that growing in symbiosis with Queer Karaoke has been a great experience for BMP, with bigger and bigger crowds drawing more people to both the event and the bar. 

“In tandem, I think that it feels important to have this event be in a space that feels safe for people to come to, that feels like home, that feels, you know, inclusive,” Dixon said. “Because I don't think you can have an event like this at any venue.”

Gabriel Gaston, an organizer and co-host for Queer Karaoke, found out about the organization after a friend invited them to Haley-Lock’s first open mic.

Intrigued, they later received an invitation to the first official Queer Karaoke event, and from there, he was hooked. 

“It felt very serendipitous […] having friends dragging me to this event and to connect with Avery,” Gaston said. “I got involved with it shortly after because Avery saw my potential. As they like to say, they're like, ‘I scouted you.’”

Avery agreed.

“He's putting his whole soul into this performance,” Avery said, “and I'm like: ‘OK, theatre kid, I see you.’"

Jonah Doniewski, the Concordia University Fine Arts Student Alliance (FASA) student life coordinator, regularly attends Queer Karaoke events. First dragged to an event by a friend, they now try to attend as many as possible. 

“On that [first] night I had a really good time, and I met some really cool people,” Doniewski said. “So then I sort of kept going repeatedly every second weekend and became familiar with the people organizing it because I was there so often.”

Wanting to share the experience, Doniewski helped organize a free event between Queer Karaoke and FASA for the Concordia student body at the start of September.

For Gaston and Haley-Lock, keeping the events free and accessible to everyone is part of the core values of Queer Karaoke, especially as queer and trans people have an increased chance to earn lower incomes, experience job discrimination, and face barriers in advancing employment.

“There's not really a lot of spaces anymore that you can go to that are specifically queer, not just queer friendly but queer forward and trans forward, where you can just exist and that's not gated by money or a cover charge,” Haley-Lock said.

Gaston notes they can keep costs low thanks to BMP letting them host the event for free, which allows them to pour their own money into the little extras.

“For little things that we want to add to the event, like the film photos that I started taking back in the day and continue to take, that's money coming out of my own pocket,” Gaston said, “and that's just me and my own choice to put that money back into my community.”

Given the rise in hate crimes targeting sexual orientation in Canada and the growing intolerance towards the LGBTQIA2S+ community in Montreal’s youth, Gaston thinks it's important to foster safe spaces in the current political climate. 

Dixon agrees, saying that collaboration with queer organizations remains a priority for BMP, which is staffed entirely by queer workers. 

“As workers, we want the space to be shaped around, you know, an idea of community,” Dixon said. “Obviously, we bring in all kinds of different communities into the space, but it's really nice that we're able to have inclusive events for everyone.”

For Haley-Lock, it's especially important for the event to be not only trans inclusive but also “trans forward.”

“It's more important now than ever that trans people can find each other and can find community and solidarity while our very existences are under attack,” Haley-Lock said. “I'm trans and society does not want me to exist, you know, and that's scary.”

BMP holds Queer Karaoke events every other Saturday, with the occasional open mic or collaborative event thrown in the mix. Information for all upcoming events can be found on the organization’s Instagram page. 

This article originally appeared in Volume 46, Issue 2, published September 16, 2025.