Excerpt from Rick Bebout's Promiscuous Affections:
1971: On August 26, Bill and I went to The Quest, at 665 Yonge -- once The Famous Door Tavern. Four upscale gay men, a dentist and jeweller among them, had bought the place and done it up in hope that others like them might like it.
In time those four were just one. He sold the business to Phil Stein, a straight Forest Hill neighbour of Norm Bolter, who told him the place would make pots of money. It did. "I look at the facts and figures, nothing else," Stein once said; he was soon and aptly known as "Philistine." But he did manage to make a gay bar quite unlike the two down the street.
The front was entirely refaced in light brown stucco, beige very in at the time, the door, the bar's name and a big "Q" the only things visible from the street. There was a dress code: no jeans.
On the main floor was a pleasant bar. Upstairs was a dance club, painted a rich blue when I first saw it, lit by an orange neon swirl curving across the ceiling from one end to the other. (That fixture would later be dead, as I recall; the place painted black.) There was a smaller bar upstairs, a stand up one.
The Quest was the first place I ever saw anyone -- in fact everyone -- standing up and walking around with a drink.
