Will Munro

Will Munro was born in Sydney, Australia in 1975. Later that year his family moved to Canada, just outside Montreal, and then lived in Mississauga, Ontario from 1980 onwards. Despite his involvement in nightclub events, Munro did not consume alcohol or recreational drugs. Munro was diagnosed with brain cancer and underwent surgery to remove a tumour in 2008. == Art career ==

Munro moved from Mississauga to Toronto after high school, to attend OCAD University. From early on in his career, his signature medium was pastiche work with men's underwear. The origins of this work date back to his Intro to Sculpture class at OCAD, where his professor asked the students to "bring a special object to class that isn't really functional, but is special to you." Munro went on to have many showings of his underwear art, mostly "rescued" from second-hand Goodwill clothing outlets, including at Who's Emma, Munro's influences included the work of General Idea, and the queercore movement. Speaking about the confluence of his music events and his art, Munro said in 2004, "This is where the music scene and gay underground come together. We're at a time when all kinds of shifts are happening. The structure of artists' galleries are changing. Magazines are changing. There's more different kinds of artist activity that's happening. All this is having an impact on my visual work. And my visual work is more and more going into performance." Galleries exhibiting his work have included Art in General, in New York City, Confederation Centre Art Gallery in Charlottetown, and Toronto galleries Zsa Zsa, Mercer Union, YYZ Artists' Outlet, Paul Petro Contemporary Art, and the Art Gallery of York University. Munro was named on the longlist of finalists for the Sobey Art Award in 2010. A posthumous exhibit of his work, "Total Eclipse", was presented at the Art Gallery of Ontario in 2010. Works included collages, made from underwear, that depict Klaus Nomi and Leigh Bowery, both of whom Munro admired. Reviewing the show in Canadian Art, critic Sholem Krishtalka wrote that Munro's work is "insistent on the necessity of self-made culture and buttressed by an encyclopedic knowledge of queer underground cultural history." == Club promoter and community builder ==

, the location of Munro's monthly Vazaleen parties from 2001–06 Munro started the monthly party Vaseline (later renamed Vazaleen) in Toronto at a time when most gay clubs featured house music or other types of dance music. His hope was to draw a more diverse crowd: he said at the time, "I'd like to do something that'll encompass all the freaks out there, myself included." It was atypical as well for having about 50 percent women attending the event. Munro said, "I was determined to get women to attend and I did it in a really simple way. I put lots of images of women and dyke icons on the posters and flyers—groups like The Runaways or singers like Nina Hagen and Carole Pope. I wanted women to know instantly that this was their space as much as anybody else's." moved to the upstairs space in January 2000, and in late 2001, when El Mocambo was threatening to close, to Lee's Palace, where it continued as a monthly event until 2006; In a lengthy article about Vazaleen in Toronto Life, critic R. M. Vaughan wrote, "In its lewd, spontaneous, hysterical and glamorous way, Vazaleen defined a new Toronto aesthetic, a playful and endlessly inventive mode of presentation that encompassed everything from lesbian prog- rock to tranny camp to vintage punk revival to good old-fashioned loud-mouthed drag." In an editorial in C magazine, Amish Morrell wrote, "At [Vazaleen] it was not only okay to be gay, but it was okay to be other than gay. One could be just about anything. The effect was that it completely destabilized all preconceptions of gender and sexual identity, in a hyperlibidinous environment where everyone became a performer." Benjamin Boles of Now wrote, "These days it's normal in Toronto for hip gay scenes to flourish outside of the queer ghetto and to attract a wide spectrum of genders and orientations, but that didn't really happen until Vazaleen took off and became a veritable community for everyone who didn't fit into the mainstream homo world. For too long, it was too rare to see dykes, fags, trans people, and breeders hanging out together, and Munro changed that." At the height of the event's popularity, Munro appeared on the cover of Now magazine (made up to look similar to David Bowie's Aladdin Sane album cover), and Vazaleen appeared on "best-of" nightclub lists internationally. In 2006, Munro and his friend Lynn MacNeil bought The Beaver Café, in the West Queen West neighbourhood. Arts columnist Murray Whyte of the Toronto Star wrote, "Will's virtual status as hub took bricks-and-mortar form: The Beaver quickly became that cozy, everyone-in-the-pool house party, a sort of community hall/mini dance club, and an alt-culture oasis". In 2013, Toronto-based writer Sarah Liss published Army of Lovers: A Community History of Will Munro, a book which collected reminiscences about Munro from his family, friends and colleagues. The book's launch party, dubbed Vaza-Launch, featured performances by both Peaches and Light Fires. == References ==