Summer gets hot, street gets steamy
Jenny Wagler, National Post
For romance writer Molly Fader, no place exudes sex like Toronto's Queen Street West on the first hot weekend of summer.
"Even the mannequins are naked," she said, pointing to a plastic figure in a racy camouflage one-piece swimsuit with large cut-outs on the sides and navel. "It's all over the place, you can't get rid of it, you can't run from it."
Ms. Fader is a Toronto based writer who makes a living conjuring up steamy heroes and heroines and romantic trysts for Harlequin under the pseudonym Molly O'Keefe. Her books include A Man Worth Keeping, Baby Makes Three, and her upcoming Worth Fighting For.
And while she often uses rural settings in her books -- the Catskill Mountains, for example -- she says that as authentically sexy settings go, it is hard to beat Queen West's urban sizzle.
The air on Queen Street, she said, is pungent with sun-warmed perfume and cologne, with sausages grilling at hot dog stands, and with restaurant smells wafting out of open doors. People head out in throngs into the street and crowd onto patios to drink beer and people watch. Jewellery vendors, busking guitarists and panhandlers line the streets. The vibe is raw, charged, gritty.
"It's a little bit dirty, it's really sexy, and everybody's got their shirts off and they're staring at each other out of the corner of their eye," she said.
"It's the physical manifestation of spring fever. Blood is pumping, people are just excited to be out and feeling the sun on their face."
And on the first warm weekend of the season -- sometimes as early as April, with an ice storm just around the corner -- cabin fever propels people onto the streets, stripped down to as few clothes as possible. "It's probably not warm enough, really, but we're all too crazy from the winter to pay attention to that," she said.
She describes a classic Queen West sensual encounter as it unfolds on a patio, perhaps at the Black Bull bar. A group of guys will have settled around a table to drink and watch, when a group of girls walks by. "And the girls sort of walk slow and cast a look over their shoulders, and somebody from that group of guys will leap up to go get them to ask them to come back to the table," she said. "It's a dangerous proposition."
Ms. Fader said she has not yet used Queen West as a setting in a novel, but if she did, she'd set the key "instant connection" scene on just such a patio. The hero, she said would be a pierced, tattooed rocker, having a cigarette outside.
"He's been on Queen Street for a long time, he's seen it all," she said. "Maybe he's got an apartment above the bar."
The heroine, on the other hand, would be a first-timer to Toronto, looking around pie-eyed, wondering what this city holds, she said.
"I think they'd make eye contact and the jaded guy would realize he's not as jaded as he thought and go after her -- perhaps offer to buy her a slice of pizza," she imagined, with a grin.
Encounters -- in fact or fiction-- proceed from patio to a food stop, such as the Rivoli, to a show at the Horseshoe Tavern, to dancing somewhere down in the Entertainment District, she said.
"I think at the beginning of any good infatuation-slash-lust-slash-love, the setting speeds it at the beginning, and then it does sort of fade away," she said.
"But I think the magic of Queen Street is that it totally speeds it."