Army Of Lovers

A Community History of Will Munro

Will Munro was a legendary artist, DJ, activist and impresario, as renowned for his transgressive, irreverent art as he was for reinventing Toronto's nightlife culture. His installations and prints co-opted rock 'n' roll imagery and raunchy gay iconography — you couldn't look at men's underwear the same way after a Munro show — and his outre Vazaleen dance parties brought to the city's stages some of the most notorious performers of the last forty years: Nina Hagen, Jayne County and Vaginal Davis, among them. When Munro died of brain cancer in 2010, at the unfathomably young age of thirty-five, Toronto was robbed of one of its most significant civic heroes.

Army of Lovers collects stories from and about the people who knew and loved Munro — including Gossip singer Beth Ditto, filmmaker Bruce LaBruce and artist Luis Jacob — to movingly capture an incandescent moment when Toronto's queer community, art scene and independent music universe came of age and collided with one another.