From an Underground Club to a Place in the Sun
For Lois Szabo, the most important thing about having her name attached to a Calgary park is not the name - it's the fact that the park is above ground. “There’s sunlight, it’s wind, it’s snow, it’s rain,” Szabo says. “It’s not down in a hole with rats.” That distinction tells you a lot about the life she has lived and the changes she has witnessed in Calgary’s LGBTQ community.
Lois Szabo was 34 when she helped establish Club Carousel, a private social club that became a gathering place for Calgary’s gay community in the 1970s. At a time the 2SLGBTQI+ community faced discrimination, police scrutiny, social isolation and the threat of violence, Club Carousel offered something that was in desperately short supply: a place where people could find one another. Today, the club is recognized as part of Calgary’s Queer history, and Szabo’s name lives on at the Lois Szabo Commons at 16th Avenue and 9th Street S.W.
Szabo is quick to point out that the story was never hers alone. “I’ve been interviewed so many times and given so much credit, but I was only a little piece of it,” she says. “The others were unknown.” Those others included Jack Loenen Roger Perkins, Gord Hilsher and Ken McBane – the men who helped build Club Carousel alongside her. “They’re all dead now,” she says. “That’s why I’m here doing the interviews,” she laughs.
Finding each other
Szabo came out in 1964. In those early years, she says, she and her partner, Betty, felt as though they were the only gay women in Calgary. Finding other LGBTQ people meant going where they knew LGBTQ people might be: the bars.
In 1967, Betty wanted to celebrate Canada’s Centennial by visiting a different bar every weekend. In September, they ended up at the Cecil Hotel. It was not an easy place to break into. The women sat quietly, largely ignored by everyone around them. Eventually, one woman stuck out her foot and challenged Szabo. “Where the hell do you think you’re going?” Szabo responded in typical fashion: “Who the hell wants to know?” The woman stood up. She was almost six feet tall and Szabo sat down. But that encounter eventually led them into Calgary’s gay community.
The bars were more than places to drink. They were informal meeting places in a city where there were few alternatives. But even those spaces could be hostile, humiliating or dangerous. At one location at 1207 1st Street S.W., a space that was supposed to be for gay people became a spectacle when the owner began selling tickets to straight people who wanted to come and look at “the queers.” The gay community boycotted the place and eventually, the owner went bankrupt. That created an opportunity. Szabo, Jack, Roger, Gord and others took over the space and began building something of their own.
Club Carousel Szabo’s contribution was practical as well as personal. She was a stay-at-home mother, which meant that once her children were at school, she had time during the day to deal with inspectors and officials. Meanwhile, she went from hotel to hotel selling memberships and trying to raise enough money to get the club started.
She raised $200 by selling $10 memberships to 20 people. Another friend loaned them $100. What they lacked in finances, they had in enthusiasm.
The walls were painted with colourful stripes, and the club began to take shape. The idea was simple: create a place where gay people could socialize without having to hide.
Membership grew rapidly, largely through word of mouth. Eventually, Club Carousel had more than 700 members and operated for almost a decade. But the club’s existence was anything but straightforward.
On opening night, police arrived and charged the organizers with operating a dance hall without a licence. The club was essentially an after-hours speakeasy. Members brought their own liquor, while the club supplied pop. The police were not amused. One officer, however, quietly gave Jack and Szabo some advice as they were leaving. “You guys need a good lawyer.” The organizers went to Ghitter’s office the following Monday and were advised to apply for a provincial charter as a private social club, which they did.
When the case eventually went to court, the police described men dancing with men and women dancing with women. The judge asked the obvious question: what did that have to do with licensing? Szabo knew then that they had essentially won.
Club Carousel was not simply a social club. For some people, it was a lifeline. Szabo remembers young people coming to the club because they had nowhere else to go, and no one to talk to. For a short time, younger people could come before the club began serving alcohol, and they had to exit the premises at 9 p.m. Szabo and Jack knew there was a need for something more. “We always hoped there would be something for the young people because Jack and I weren’t qualified to do counselling.”
The need was painfully real. Szabo remembers eight men and one woman she knew who died by suicide. Two others, who held positions on her board of directors, were murdered in gay-bashing attacks. Violence was a constant threat.
At the Westwood Hotel, Szabo recalls, groups of people would drive around looking for gay men to attack. They would cruise the streets in trucks carrying baseball bats. She developed a rapport with police officers, who eventually told her to look around outside the club before closing and call if she saw anyone suspicious. “They did,” she says of the police response. But it was still dangerous. “People’s lives were at stake,” she says, “either from outside or from within.”
The dream
For Szabo, Club Carousel was never just about dancing, but about creating something that Calgary’s LGBTQ community desperately needed: a place to gather, to talk, to find friends and, sometimes, simply to survive. Club Carousel eventually closed, but the dream Szabo and Jack talked about late at night never disappeared. They imagined a place where young people could find support, where someone could be directed to a counsellor, where there would be resources for people struggling with their identity, or their lives. They could imagine what was needed. They just couldn’t provide it.
Decades later, Szabo looks at Calgary’s 2SLGBTQI+ and sees some of that dream realized. She is especially moved by the existence of a place like the Lois Szabo Commons because it is public and visible, not buried somewhere hidden underground, like the Queer movement had to be when she started advocating for them. “I couldn’t have imagined it,” she says. “But I did pray for it.” And perhaps that is the most fitting legacy for a woman who spent years helping create a safe place for people who had nowhere else to go. Club Carousel gave Calgary’s Queer community a place to be themselves, when much of society wanted them hidden.
Szabo helped build that place and now, generations later, her name stands in an open public space, in the sunlight, wind, snow and rain. A place that belongs to everyone and for Szabo, that is the dream fulfilled.
