AT THE MANOR Adult Entertainment Complex, the only strip club in Guelph, Ontario, you can feel the end coming. Some nights, the dancers outnumber the customers. The women perform pole dance moves with evocative names — the Genie, the Hot Cherry, the Boomerang, the Hello Boys, the Static Chopper — to thin, scattered applause. The top forty that blasts from the speakers becomes a soundtrack of almost unfathomable loneliness: “Nothing lasts forever / but wouldn’t it be nice to stay together for the night?” The ceiling is low and black, the lighting a gloomy throb of oranges and blues. There are no windows. Maybe you think strip clubs are fun; maybe you believe they’re degrading; maybe you see them as just another workplace. The Manor doesn’t feel like any of those things. Instead, the mood is mostly funereal.
Guelph, population 150,000, is a suburban university town about an hour’s drive from Toronto. I grew up here, and the Manor is a local landmark, a source of both notoriety and wry civic pride. The club, once a stately Queen Anne–style mansion, is stranded in a bleak expanse of parking lot, bordered by the slash of the highway, on one side, and a residential neighbourhood, on the other. Above the front door looms a giant, glowing M, gripped by a suggestively silhouetted woman in high heels. Ugly concrete additions extend around the old house like the reclining corpus of a sphinx; neo-Gothic towers erupt in congruously heavenward. Attached to the club is a complex of apartments called the Manor Motel, whose tenants tend to be precariously employed, receiving government assistance, or struggling with addiction.
This story is from the June 2021 edition of The Walrus.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber ? Sign In
This story is from the June 2021 edition of The Walrus.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber? Sign In
Invisible Lives
Without immigration status, Canada's undocumented youth stay in the shadows
My Guilty Pleasure
"The late nights are mine alone, and I'll spend them however I damn well please"
Vaclav Smil Is Fed Up
The acclaimed environmental scientist is criticizing climate activists, shunning media, and stepping back just when we need him most
It's Time for a Birth Control Revolution
What the pill teaches us about the failure - and future - of women's health care
Would You Watch a Play about Hydro Electricity?
How documentary theatre struck a chord in Quebec
Still Spinning
One record chain has bet big on a new appetite for physical media
Just So You Know, I Love My Mother
In many ways, multi-generational living makes sense. But that doesn't make it easy
Art of the Steal
Why are plundered African artifacts still in Western museums?
Canada in the Middle
What role can we play in easing the war in Gaza?
Canadian Multiculturalism: A Work in Progress
As we mark fifty years since the adoption of Canada’s federal multiculturalism policy, human rights advocate AMIRA ELGHAWABY celebrates its merits and reflects on the work that is yet to be done when it comes to inclusion, acceptance, and fighting systemic racism in our country.