Filmmaker recounts time at underground lesbian bar in Cambridge amid research for documentary

Chris Vautour remembers the first time she stepped foot inside Robin's Nest, an underground lesbian bar that had a 33 year run in Cambridge. 

"As soon as the door opened, it was a big, wide open space, like two thousand, three thousand square feet of open space," Vautour told Craig Norris, host of CBC Kitchener-Waterloo's The Morning Edition.

"It looked like your cousin's bad wedding. Long trestle tables, banquet style tables in a big open area."

There was an eclectic array of music played by the DJ, from pop to country and polka music, too. 

"The decor was, you know, kind of posters on the wall, yet in a beautiful old brick building with creaky wooden floors and a huge dance floor in the middle, but it had a sense of being temporary."

Robin's Nest has been closed for years, but now, the British Columbia-based filmmaker has received a Canada Council for the Arts research grant for a new film about it.

In a recent trip back to the region, she spoke about that first visit to the bar — which was located at 26 Hobson Street — in 1987. She was 19 years old at the time.

"It was terrifying because if you're living a life of secrecy in a world where everywhere you look, the world is straight," she said.

"Your parents are straight, your friends' parents are straight," she added.

"Everything you see on TV, people are straight. The world is straight and you know you're not … So for me it was a total like crossing the threshold to meet myself and to have a big part of myself validated in a space where everybody else is the same as me and you didn't have to explain anything."

Vautour decided that she wanted to spotlight Robin's Nest in her upcoming film after she found that the bar's legacy wasn't well documented online. She wanted to commemorate it in honour of the "people who provided this service" while "documenting queer history." 

'Nobody would know that we were there'

She explained that it wasn't a bar per se. The people who ran Robin's Nest rented the venue for Saturday nights. There were no signs outside and they didn't formally promote it as an LGBTQ bar, but she said that they kept it the down-low by design, creating a safe space for patrons. 

"Nobody would know that we were there," she said. "Nobody needed to know that we were there, but the space that was created was just for us."

Although the bar was mainly there for lesbian women, it was an inclusive space for gay, straight and transgender folks. 

"I even brought my mother there one time and she had a blast," Vautour said, laughing. 

LISTEN | Why this independent filmmaker is working on a documentary about this Cambridge lesbian bar: