The elevator doors closed.
We lurched up ten more floors.
“Dad, what’s a drag queen?”
“Oh, that’s a man who enjoys dressing up as a woman,” Dad answered cheerfully, as though the question had been What’s a cheerleader? and his answer had been Oh, that’s someone who roots for your team!
I began to worry. Did he think it was okay for men to dress up like women? Why had he explained it so chirpily?
The smell of stale feet greeted us as the elevator doors opened again. We walked down the hallway to Dad’s apartment and he opened the door with a flourish, singing “Ta-da!” He had just painted the kitchen a strange beige-orange and hoped I would like it.
Dad made dinner while I picked my teeth and lounged awkwardly at the table. Then we got out the cards and played a game of cribbage, Dad all plucky with enthusiasm and me suddenly scared by all his pluckiness. It took me ages to work up the courage, but I wasn’t sure I’d be able to get through the night if I didn’t ask.
“So, Dad?”
He was busy counting and shifting his cards around. “Yes?” he said without looking up.
“So, I was just wondering …” I continued, sounding as blasé as I could, “if maybe you’re a drag queen.”
Dad laughed. Sort of whooped. Put down his cards and fluttered his hands around as though they were little sparrows, which I did not take as a very good sign. “No, don’t worry. I’m not a drag queen. Not all gay men are drag queens.”
I could have inflated an air mattress with the breath I exhaled. “So why do they do that? Like, why was that guy wearing a tutu?”
Dad shrugged. “I guess he just finds it kind of fun.”
Kind of fun.
I wasn’t sure what to do with that explanation.
Decided to pick my cards back up.
Maybe try for a flush.
I can’t remember where I used to sleep in that apartment (Dad didn’t live there very long), but it might have been on the couch in the main room. Wherever it was, that night I lay awake listening to the traffic, staring at the city lights out the curtainless windows and carving out a slightly different perspective on my situation. Suddenly, there was something worse than being gay. There was being a drag queen. And at least Dad wasn’t one of those. In spite of the cars roaring through my head and the strangeness of the apartment, I relaxed slightly, knowing that there were men out there walking around in tutus and saying toodle-oo, and at least my dad was slightly more normal than that.
A RECIPE AND A REVELATION
While divorce was not unheard of in those days, it was uncommon enough, particularly under these circumstances, that acquaintances in Peterborough were left to improvise the recipe for an Appropriate Reaction:
1 part indignation, for there was nothing as dissolute as what my father was doing, apparently, especially in this kind of town
5 parts pity, that lumpy ingredient that is such a relief to offload and so back-breaking to receive
3 parts denial, a highly soluble emotion that gives most situations a pleasingly creamy texture
10 parts pre-sifted silence, with the neighbourhood taking on a collective strained smile and hush-hush tone, everyone knowing everything but no one actually saying a word about anything.
Ever.
Which left me wondering.
Did my father now cease to exist to everyone but my brothers and me? Would he keep being part of our lives in secret or would he eventually disappear into some epicene vortex somewhere around the Toronto intersection of Church and Wellesley? What would I say if people eventually asked? Would I need to invent an imaginary heterosexual person called “my dad” and talk about all the great, straight things we did together? What kinds of things did straight fathers engage their daughters in anyway? None of the ones that I knew baked or sang Broadway show tunes over breakfast or went to the ballet or liked shopping. What on earth did these enviable, heterosexual fathers actually do?
The only childhood friend I ever told was Jessica Bell. I was fourteen. I had kept the secret to myself for a year, until late one night when we were lounging on the floor of Jessica’s basement, sloshing ourselves up with a mickey of rum she kept stashed for such occasions. I had never tried alcohol before, but pretended to be seasoned because I longed to be as confident and grown-up as I saw Jessica to be.
As the spiked Coke poured through me, I felt myself unfurling, my stomach unclenching. The basement pulsed with the high-pitched, chimpanzee-esque chanting of the Bee Gees and I felt cool and sophisticated for the first time in my life. And then the words came out:
“My dad’s gay.”
There. I’d said it.
Oh my God. I’d said it. I’d said it. I’d actually fucking said it.
Jessica lay beside me, torturously silent.
The panting and squealing of the Bee Gees throbbed around us.
“Get outta town,” Jessica eventually said in a tone that meant stop fooling around.
“My dad’s gay,” I said again. (Oh my God, I’d fucking said it again!)
More silence.
Until finally she asked, “You mean, like a fag?”
I didn’t know how to answer that. So I didn’t.
“For real? Like … he does it with other guys?”
I didn’t know how to answer that either. Or maybe I just didn’t want to answer that.
Jessica shifted her position on the floor. Drank some more. Let another song go by. By the time she spoke again, she was thick-lipped and droopy, the alcohol seeping into all the spaces between the words.
“So … is yer mom gonna kick ’im out?”
I shrugged. Had no idea.
“So … is it kinda weird t’be around him now or is it just kinda the same?”
I shrugged again. Had no idea.
We both retreated into our respective stupors, letting the primatological disco music dominate the moment.
“Well, I’ll still like ‘im,” Jessica eventually promised. “And I won’t tell anyone anything—honest.” She tipped more rum into her can of Coke, tucked the bottle back under the sofa and leaned into my ear. “And holy fuck, you think that’s bad,” she said in a husky whisper. “My dad’s been havin’ an affair for the last twelve years. He’s even got a kid over’n East City that we’re not s’posed to know about.”
Mr. Bell. Lawyer, school board trustee, pillar of the community.
Once Jessica had poured out the details of her story, we sat on the floor together, blinking in all the new information. The music ended, leaving the needle of the record player tripping—flumb flumb flumb—against the label. We sat in the blurry stillness of the basement until Jessica said, “Shit, man. I can’t figure out which one of our lives is more fucked up.”
“Yeah, I know what you mean,” I said, stupefied.
We roped our arms around each other like survivors of a shipwreck and carried each other upstairs. Sitting on the shag carpet of her lacy, pink bedroom—neither of us felt steady enough to sit on her bed—we stared at the ceiling and digested the evening’s revelations all over again.
“You know what?” Jessica finally said angrily, kicking through the silence with her signature expression: “Men suck.”
In Jessica’s mind pretty much everything eventually sucked. School sucked. Summer holidays sucked. Snow sucked. The boy she had liked at school sucked. The girl he now hung out with sucked. And now men sucked. It was hardly a surprise.
“Yeah,” I said, feeling nauseated from my initiation into alcohol as I lay down on the carpet and pressed my cheek into the crimps of the shag. It felt nice against my face. I wished I had shag carpeting in my bedroom.
“Get off the floor,” Jessica said, prodding me softly with her foot. “My mom’ll know we’ve been drinking if we’re lying all over the floor. Not that it matters: they went to a party, so my dad’ll be hammered too.” She paused, then concluded: “My dad sucks.”
We heard their car pull into the driveway and w
e climbed into bed. The front door opened and closed, her parents clomped up the stairs, and a few terse words passed between them as they walked down the hallway towards Jessica’s bedroom. Something about “… so don’t deny it, Jack, I’m not blind …” and “… you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about …” Then Jessica’s bedroom door opened.
Silence.
Jessica and I made sure our eyes were closed. Put on innocent, sleeping-young-girl expressions.
When her parents had closed the door and gone into their own bedroom, Jessica leaned over to me and whispered, “So your father’s a faggot, big whoop. At least he’s not a lying, cheating, son-of-a-bitch, drunken asshole.”
My laughter came out as a giant snort, something that sent us both into pillow-muffled hysterics.
“So quit yer belly-achin’,” she said, elbowing me under the covers. “Your life’s a bed of fucking roses.”
I laughed half-heartedly. Then a thought came to me. “Pansies, actually,” I whispered, and we both nearly fell off the bed stifling our giggles.
Gradually, the syrup of drunken exhaustion poured over us and I heard Jessica fall asleep, her throat rustling with the faintest of snores. I couldn’t sleep, the combination of nausea and the hugeness of our small lives making me feel that I was falling through space. The bed seemed to be moving, winding and twisting through the darkness. I blinked away soundless tears, the black night a thick ink against my eyes.
“I know where we are,” I whispered. “We’re lost.”
FEBRUARY 5, 1981
WE INTERRUPT THIS PROGRAM TO BRING YOU AN IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT:
Toronto Metropolitan Police have raided four homosexual bathhouses and have arrested approximately 300 men. This is the largest mass arrest in Canada since Prime Minister Trudeau invoked the War Measures Act during the October Crisis of 1970, when 465 individuals were arrested and detained after the kidnappings of two government officials.
In a series of coordinated raids code-named Operation Soap, more than 150 Toronto police stormed four of the city’s gay bathhouses. A total of 286 men were charged with being “found-ins” at a bawdy house, a term (with an admittedly quaint colonial ring to it) that means brothel, essentially, or a place where “lewd or indecent acts” take place. The employees and owners of the bawdy houses (also an admittedly fun homonym, for they were certainly all about bodies) were also detained.
The police inflicted in excess of $50,000 in damages on the bathhouses, some of it with sledgehammers and crowbars, and everyone on the premises was arrested, all for suspicion of conduct that was, since the Criminal Law Amendment Act, legal between two consenting adults in private.*
Despite the removal of homosexuality from the Criminal Code more than a decade earlier, in 1981 being out of the closet was still a major risk, even in Toronto. It was still legal to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation, and being a fag could mean losing your job without recourse, risking the love of family and friends, being ostracized, being beaten up in the street (and having, let’s see, the police to protect you). This was long before gay characters were written into television shows, and before talk-show hosts, athletes and celebrities began coming out publicly. Such things were still unimaginable. And these were the earliest days of a gay political presence in the city of Toronto, with its first unabashedly gay-positive and openly gay politicians.
John Sewell was mayor of Toronto at the time of the bath raids. Two years earlier, he had spoken in support of the gay newspaper Body Politic, as well as for the proposed amendment to the Ontario Human Rights Code that would protect gay and lesbian people from discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Mayor Sewell admitted later that he was surprised by the vociferous criticism and opposition he faced for taking such a stance; he hadn’t counted on people actually defending discrimination.
In the 1980 Toronto municipal elections, an openly gay politician by the name of George Hislop ran for alderman. Mayor Sewell endorsed his campaign. Hislop was an amiable, down-to-earth guy in his fifties who wore business suits and had investments in a number of gay establishments. He helped found the Community Homophile Association of Toronto in 1970 and organize the first gay rights demonstrations on Parliament Hill in 1971. Hislop had been on the city Planning Commission, was well liked and well respected, and was famously wonderful with the press. His chances of being elected were good.
During the last few weeks of Hislop’s campaign, however, pamphlets began circulating in his riding. One such pamphlet, published by the League Against Homosexuals, announced that “Queers Do Not Produce: They Seduce,” and posed a number of questions for people to ponder:
QUESTIONS FOR TODAY’S PARENTS AND FUTURE PARENTS:
DO YOU WANT YOUR CHILDREN TAUGHT BY QUEERS?
DO YOU WISH TO HAVE YOUR CHILD TURN INTO A QUEER?
DO YOU WISH TO KILL OUR FUTURE?
DOES OUR SOCIETY NEED QUEERS?
WHO SUPPORTS QUEERS?
WHO NEEDS THE SUPPORT OF QUEERS?
Lest there be any uncertainty as to the appropriate response, the pamphlet went on:
Here Are The Answers To These Questions:
Any sane, rational, healthy society does not need queers for anything.
Hislop’s campaign went well, although the vote count was not as high as his organizers had predicted and not quite high enough to win the election. Sewell was defeated in his bid for re-election as mayor, and many blamed his association with Hislop for his defeat.
Still, the campaign was a clear indication that a gay and lesbian political presence was developing, that issues of discrimination, status and rights would need to be addressed, and that the face of Toronto’s political and cultural scene was changing.
Just one month before the bathhouse raids, in the January 1981 issue of the Toronto Metropolitan Police magazine News & Views, the “Best Cartoon of the Year” depicted a policeman sweeping up a street while holding a man labelled “Sewell” by the neck; in a nearby garbage can was a man labelled “Hislop.” The caption read: Just doing a bit of cleaning up.
A month later, the police launched Operation Soap.
Once the police had forcibly opened or kicked in all doors in the bathhouses (one of which was partly owned by Hislop), the found-ins were lined up naked in the shower room and forced to submit to rectal examinations. When the first man was told to bend over and he paused in disbelief, an officer ordered him to submit, adding: “Don’t tell me you haven’t done that before.” The other men waited, some for more than an hour, with their arms over their heads. At one point, one of the police officers shouted, “I wish these pipes were hooked up to gas so I could annihilate you all!”*
The scene had particularly painful resonance for John Burt, a found-in of European-Jewish descent, who had grown up understanding on some level what his parents had gone through in the concentration camps, but who felt, as he stood naked in that shower room—humiliated, loathed, vulnerable—a horrifying new understanding of his parents’ experience.*
The police compiled an enormous amount of information from most of the found-ins, including place of employment, superior’s name and phone number, and, in the case of married men, their wife’s name and phone number. In the past, police had been known to make “concerned citizen” calls to employers in cases where homosexuals were charged (though of course it had never been deemed necessary to report to the employers or wives of the found-ins of heterosexual brothels), so those involved could only presume a round of “I know something that you don’t know” calls would be going out shortly.
As news of the raids began to spread, people responded with disbelief, their numbness quickly giving way to outrage, their years of pent-up frustration and humiliation fuelling the shared conviction that a response, a demonstration, was imperative. The day following the arrests, a march was organized to protest police brutality. More than three thousand people, my father among them, flooded Yonge Street, Toronto’s main thoroughfare, chanting, “Stop the co
ps!” and “No more raids!”
The police hadn’t anticipated such a reaction—no one had—and they were unprepared. The crowds stopped traffic completely, marching and chanting all the way to the Metro Police’s 52 Division, where the found-ins had been charged and released the previous night and where most of the police force now stood, surrounding the building. The crowd voiced its fury—“Fuck you, 52! Gay rights now!”—and to the barricade of guarding officers, the marchers issued a massive Nazi salute. From there, they headed up to the Provincial Legislature, where they beat at the doors until violence broke out between police and protesters and the march’s organizers urged the crowd to disperse.
The police could have no idea how helpful Operation Soap would be to the gay and lesbian community, for the furious, frustrated footsteps of those protesters gathered momentum and resulted in the first great strides for gay and lesbian rights in Ontario. There had been smaller raids and marches in other cities and gay rights groups were active across the country. But it was on that cold February night of the Toronto bath-raid protest that the city’s gay community emerged from the shadows and unashamedly, in great numbers, came out into the street.
When author Margaret Atwood heard about the bath raids, her response was, “What have the police got against cleanliness?” One month after the raids, she spoke at a Gay Freedom Rally in support of the found-ins. “It always made me want to throw up when I would see big kids beating up little kids on the playground. And I always wondered why they did that. And then I realized, it’s because they can. Or at least, they think they can.” The crowd cheered and whistled. “But I don’t see why anybody, in a society that calls itself a democracy, should have to suffer from institutionalized contempt.”* The gay community agreed, although there was no such thing as a “gay community” back then—not really. There were gay groups, collectives and political organizations working behind the scenes, but nothing close to the solidarity and sense of shared identity that began to emerge the night the police gave everyone a common cause to gather around.
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