Many of the photographs I am presenting to you here have been growing in a collection for nearly fifteen years. Some photographs printed in this book as well as a few selected for the first edition of The CITY After Dark, were originally shot over several years during Toronto’s Church Street Halloween street party. The huge festivity normally sees several blocks of Church Street in Toronto’s gay village opened as a pedestrian-only boulevard every Halloween night. It’s like drag pageantry with a cast of thousands parading in costume. It is as gay and queer as it gets. Which is why I love it. It is one of the best bashes hosted by the LGBTQ+ scene and has become one of the largest outdoor Halloween parties of its kind anywhere in the world. The tradition dates back to the early 80’s, and even before that. I relish photographing it every year, rain or shine. I have photo-documented the gay community for many years, and this particular series of photographs was always meant to be a book. Here it is.

When a global pandemic called COVID-19 hit us, I knew Halloween 2020 would be cancelled. And it was. So I started going through the archives and re-living the scenes. Soon enough I began selecting images I thought were fun, humorous, edgy, gritty, and wild. My intention is to present this final sequencing like a movie reel. Which is why I choose to publish this series of The CITY After Dark in a small square format, so you can easily flip through the pages like little visual vignettes. This edition is meant to be viewed as one-frame narratives, as if they were snippets from a collection of cheesy black and white horror B films. I hope you enjoy looking at them as much as I did photographing them.