Nowadays, the streets are the best place for cruising. And the easiest. The meat’s there, up for grabs and obvious, showing plenty of skin, even in winter. It rules over Sainte-Catherine and Saint-Denis, day and night, though it’s ­seldom very happy. On the contrary: cruising’s become quite a ­serious business, one to be undertaken with ­furrowed brow. Now that the butch look is back, you just have to deck yourself out in workers’ drag and a snarl, then watch the heads turn, even if, like me, you aren’t all that pretty. So I take advantage of it. The French prof that I really am has a good laugh, though, at what’s really pretty silly dressing-up: in my tight jeans, shirt open down to here and scuffed sandals I don’t bear the slightest resemblance to myself, but look more like an extra on a street where everybody’s playing a role that’s not his real one either. It’s a communal game played by a community that’s always attracted by fun-house mirrors and fantasy come-ons.

But in this dank August heat that sticks to your skin and drains your energy, the street was out of the question. It was too hot to walk and I kept looking for any place with air-­conditioning, especially late at night when I should have been home, asleep, but when the mere thought of my bed made me gasp. I sleep with the window open, winter and summer, and the arrival of Montreal’s annual heatwaves always makes me slightly sick. Those nights of tossing and turning, throwing off the sheets and punching the pillow, wear me out.

So I kept going back to the Paradise, a bar that’s unchanged because it’s unchangeable, but I just sank ­deeper and earlier into the blues, so then I started asking around about the new hot spots, emphasizing that I wasn’t interested in any discos that were too “young.” The ­bartenders at the Paradise mentioned what they’d heard was a civilized spot, where the young university crowd that wanted to avoid the sound and fury of the gay mad nights of Montreal had been going for a few months now.

I went to Saint-Laurent just north of Prince-Arthur, a neighbourhood, where I seldom stop, except for the really good bookstore, and I was amazed to find a gay bar there.