Just as the 1969 Stonewall bathhouse raid and riots in New York had galvanized the gay and lesbian community south of the border, the 1981 Toronto bath raids marked the moment in this country that lesbians and gays stopped believing that small, quiet (Canadian-style), tiptoeing steps might be enough to secure them the respect and acceptance they deserved. It was the night that enough was finally enough. Enough of succumbing to fear. Enough buckling under to blackmail, pleading guilty and going back into the closet, as most people had done after similar raids in the past. It was the night people said, Hang onto your hockey helmets, Canada, this country’s about to get a lot more colourful.
Or, in the words of the gay/lesbian publisher Pink Triangle Press, “The outcome that we seek is this: gay and lesbian people daring to set love free.”
* This Toronto Star article describes the events of “Operation Soap.” http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/article/933821–thirty-years-after-the-bathhouse-raids
* From Track Two, a 1982 documentary by director Harry Sutherland about the 1981 Toronto bathhouse raids and riots and the events that precipitated them.
* From Track Two documentary.
* From Track Two documentary.
HOMEMADE EROTICA AND NEIGHBOURHOOD NEWS
That was Toronto. I was a hundred miles and several galaxies away in Peterborough, which was, in those days, a quiet, homogeneous town whose newspaper rose to the self-appointed task of confirming, daily, that virtually nothing of any interest or import ever occurred there.
The night of the bath raids, I was at band practice. Had been, at any rate, having developed a furious fascination for percussion shortly after I started high school, the rhythmic beating and clanging of willing objects providing me with such ineffable satisfaction that I often stayed late after practice just to whack some of the larger drums.
So while police were striking homosexuals into submission, I was probably in the music room of Crestwood High School, thwacking the cauldron head of the timpani with a hard mallet, creating a roomful of thunder cracks with my bare hands and feeling like a teenage girl version of Zeus.
I didn’t learn of the raids or the protest march until much later, when Jessica Bell (who had become aloof in recent months; my mother said she looked “unhappy”) casually mentioned that she had heard something about my dad from a friend down the street.
I can still feel the flames of shame that shot up from my stomach to my cheeks.
We were in Jessica’s bedroom collaborating on a Harlequin-type romance story in which we would each write juicy, quasi-sexual scenes of the other being greatly desired by the hairy-chested Barry Gibb (the eldest Bee Gee). He probably sucked in real life, Jessica had told me. But in our imaginations, he could be perfect. That was the nice thing about writing. I was never very good at creating erotica, Jessica being far more worldly and knowledgeable in such matters than I. She would lie on the floor and moan, “Oh, can you just imagine what it would be like to have Barry Gibb as a lover?” I couldn’t. Try as I might.
But once, before she shrieked her disgust and shamed me into never uttering such a pathetic thing again in my life, I admitted that sometimes I did fantasize about having Barry Gibb as a father.
Hip, hairy and heterosexual. I couldn’t imagine a more thrilling combination of traits to have wandering around the house.
“You’re so weird,” she said, returning to penning scenes of Barry undressing me by a poolside in Australia. (My scenes of Barry seducing her were never quite as exotic or lubricious as she hoped.)
“Oh, I forgot to tell you,” she said, pen in her mouth. “Victoria Brown said that your dad’s been very naughty.”
I was burning within seconds. Nothing gradual about it. Just: hot.
“What,” was all I could say, scarcely moving my lips. It wasn’t a question at all. It was a demand. I hated Jessica in that moment. The power she held over me. This is what happens when you tell someone about this, I concluded, my jaw forming a hard ridge against the world. “Just tell me what.”
The trials for the found-ins had taken more than a year to complete (total taxpayer bill for the raids: more than $250,000) with the vast majority pleading not-guilty and winning their cases. One of the techniques of the gay rights organizers fighting the cases was to fill the courtroom with “decoys” to confuse the police, who had to identify, from among a roomful of men, those they had arrested during the raids. The decoys were gay men who resembled the accused. One of them was my dad.
One afternoon, as my father and his moustachioed friends were quack-quack-quacking around the courtroom trying to get the police to shoot confused glances in their direction, the judge arrived. All rise. My dad did. But he nearly sat down again when he saw the black-robed, bespectacled man presiding: Judge Brown, his former neighbour from lovely, leafy, suburban Merino Road.
Everyone having been sworn to an oath of privacy, the matter did not leave the courtroom, though somehow news of Dad’s participation in the trial and what that meant did reach the judge’s teenage children, who were kind enough not to shoot off the firecracker gossip too loudly (Jessica was told not to tell many people), and fortunately, none of them were the nah-nah type.
Jessica was out of rum, so once she’d divulged all the details of the gossip, we drank a pitcher of Kool-Aid with extra sugar and fell asleep with twitching eyelids and pink tongues.
We remained friends, but guardedly so. And I wasn’t close to anyone after that.
How could I be.
From then on, it was difficult to shake the feeling, as I walked around the neighbourhood, that there was this teensy little gargantuan secret, and if it accidentally slipped out, well, it just might have the social effect of whacking me to my knees with a metal bar and knocking my teeth out.
And then there were the looks of pity, which might well have been worse than a metal bar to the knees. Oh, poor you, your life’s so awful, neighbours could say with a simple glance. I had moved into the “we’re fine, carry on with your lawn mowing” stage of scandalous-pansy-in-the-family living, and I didn’t really relax or feel part of the neighbourhood for another few years.
Maybe ever.
In my quietest moments, I began to believe that there had to exist—far, far away—a place where none of this would matter. Where I wouldn’t have to lie or pretend, where I could walk out the door, wave to neighbours, and feel like I belonged. Though I’m sure I didn’t put the feeling into words at the time. It was more of a churning, a queasiness I ached to resolve. The way a seasick person longs for land. Scans the horizon for it, constantly. Dreams of it, the sensation of stillness beneath her feet. Yet the only thing visible in every direction is water. Waves everywhere.
That search for land would come to shape my adult life. It would take me to the far edges of the world, have me peering out over the edges of continents, moving through war zones and revolutions, learning languages and songs of belonging, and revelling in the sensation of being deliciously alone. Anonymous. Suspended from the world. It was a quest that fuelled some of the richest, most fascinating periods of my life.
Who knows. If Dad had been hip, hairy and heterosexual, I might never have left Peterborough.
EMPTYING OUT
One day shortly before my fifteenth birthday, I walked into my parents’ bedroom and the twin beds were gone.
“Your dad needed them for his new house,” my mother said without any music in her voice at all.
And that was that.
He’d moved out for good.
I don’t remember whether or not I cried.
CHICKEN BALLS AND CIRCUSES
Dad moved into an old house on a quiet residential street in a comfy neighbourhood of Toronto. He had considered buying a house closer to downtown, but a friend had warned him that his children might not feel comfortable with the neighbourhood, so my dad took the advice and chose the fixer-upper with posh-potential.
I didn’t really like the place. For one thing, it smelled funny. Smelled old.
There was gaudy wallpaper throughout that was heavy with other people’s lives, and the kitchen floor sloped so severely we couldn’t put a dish down on the table without it sliding off the other side. I can’t remember how we ate in those days; I guess we all held our bowls. The stairs creaked excessively (still do), the bathroom was black and white with a tile floor that was always cold, and the yard was the size of two parking spaces at Kmart.
But the neighbourhood felt better than the gay ghetto: no graffiti or drag queens, lots of narrow houses with tidy little gardens, and no traffic. Toronto was still filthy, littered with cigarette butts and advertising, the subway like a rat pit. And the Chinese food Dad took us out for was all slurpy and bumpy, bowls of white spongy blobs and gooey vegetables, nothing like the chow mein and chicken balls you could get at the Crest Chinese & Canadian Restaurant at the edge of town in Peterborough.
Why live in Toronto? Especially when you still work at Trent University in Peterborough!
Why eat weird stringy food?
Why be gay?
There were so many questions I didn’t have answers for and no one I felt I could ask.
Actually, I don’t believe I ever thought of asking anyone anything, or that I even considered myself full of questions. I just moved into a period when my life became made up of things I did not fully understand.
Dad tried to fill our visits to Toronto with things we enjoyed, in my case ballet and chocolate. He got season tickets to the National Ballet and introduced me to things like profiteroles with extra crème fouettée, so quickly I began to associate the city with things less dreary and smelly.
Occasionally my brothers and I went together. Early on, when the kitchen was still slopey, Flip and I were taken to see a touring Chinese circus and we were so inspired by the superhuman feats of the troupe that we spent the rest of the evening flinging each other around Dad’s house, balancing dishes on our feet and leaping from the back of the couch onto each other’s shoulders. Dad came downstairs at one point—someone had fallen and was in tears, probably Flip, as I was never very good at catching—and once it was established that everyone was okay, Dad said, in a voice that was kind of froggy, as though there were tears gurgling in his throat, that he enjoyed hearing our laughter in the house.
It got a bit awkward at that point because no one wanted Dad to cry, so Flip got all cheerful and said that we sure had found the Chinese circus stimulating.
He knew that would cheer Dad up.
For Paul, eating, and food itself, was stimulation. He and my dad spent months scoping out the best holes-in-the-wall in Chinatown, eating dim sum, and buying bizarre Asian fruits that had prickly skins and smelled like farts. Paul went on to develop a passion for food and wine that has turned into a successful and much-loved career, which began around the age of fifteen, when he began catering the parties of our neighbours in Peterborough. Using ingredients he picked up in Chinatown and a large set of Chinese dishes my mother had given him for Christmas, Paul served multicourse meals of exquisitely prepared Chinese food to parties of astonished neighbours. It was just about the last thing anyone expected of a teenage boy on Merino Road.
I was as surprised as anyone that Paul’s food was such a hit, as well as being greatly relieved. The first time he set out for the neighbours’ house with all those dishes of food piled into a huge long box, I was afraid that after all that careful preparation, that endless chopping into little pieces, all that whisking and stirring of sauces, fiddly frying and drying, the neighbours might find the food as barfy as I did. But they raved and raved.
Like I said, there were so many things I did not fully understand.
WAGNER AND ELEPHANTS
Dad gutted his new (old) house bit by bit, refinishing wood floors and laying oriental carpets, replastering and painting the entire house Wedgwood blue with white trim, and filling the place with the furniture he had inherited from his parents; among other things, the twin beds my mother had said she didn’t want. He hung an astonishing number of chandeliers and sconces, unpacked his collection of sketches, paintings and statues of naked men, and found places for every one of them.
My weekends in Toronto during that period were spent amid plaster dust, Chinese restaurants and Wagner operas, and gradually my brothers and I grew accustomed to the changes in our lives; not in our father, for he was largely the same (with a few added personality sequins), but in all that surrounded him. He had been coming out for about two years by the time he bought his house, so we were already used to seeing copies of Body Politic: gay liberation journal lying around. Many of his new friends had a way of speaking that identified them clearly as “gay” (not quite as pronounced as “Thammy” from the Gay Fathers of Toronto potluck, but thimilar). And they were suddenly not all academics but also normal people: postal workers, Bell Canada employees, architects, dessert chefs, lawyers, opera singers, and a journalist/prostitute who was the least pretentious well-read person I’d ever met.
While I found it strange that my dad was suddenly hanging around with postmen and prostitutes, I must have been young enough to not really care. (Incidentally, the journalist/prostitute looked and dressed like a university professor, and a few years after I met him, he became one.) Or rather, I must have been young enough still to care more about what they were like than what they did for a living. I was also young enough to continue to take cues from my dad, who didn’t seem to find any of it strange at all. And I was so used to his university friends speaking excessively syllabic nonsense about things that mattered only to them that it was a relief to spend time with people who spoke real English about things that also mattered to me.
Also, these guys were fun. They loved to make jokes. Make light of things. Double over giggling. Groan about good chocolate. The whole thing might have been considerably harder if Dad’s new circle of colourful friends hadn’t been so likeable. But they were engaging and interesting, mirthful and eager to chat. I truly enjoyed hanging out with them. By the time Dad introduced me to his “boyfriend”—the postman as it turned out—I was so taken by the man’s playfulness that I came away hoping only that they wouldn’t split up, so that he could continue to be my friend.
Which he has done. For more than thirty years.
It never occurred to me to hate Dad for being gay, nor did the notion ever seem to dawn on my brothers. There were plenty of times when I was angry about the whole thing—deeply sad, actually, though hiding it beneath a mask of cool teenage ire—but to wag my finger at Dad’s willy and get all worked up about what he was choosing to do with it never crossed my mind. Somehow, my brothers and I understood that the “sex part” had nothing to do with us. And that to be furious at him for being gay was as pointless as cursing a bat for hanging by its feet.
What I did hate was the Greyhound bus, that long sprint on the dog’s back to and from Toronto, the grime and stink of it, the feel of the highway in my chest; to this day the reek of bus fumes throws me into a nauseated funk. I hated the shame my mother wore in her eyes, the way she would sit in the La-Z-Boy rocking chair in the backroom listening to old, scratchy recordings of Schubert Lieder and swimming in a pain for which the world had no place. I hated that it was the day of Flip’s ninth birthday party that she had discovered a love letter from her husband to a man—pin the tail on the donkey everyone!—and that after the party she decided to go camping by herself. Two cans of tuna, a loaf of black bread, a husband in love with a man, and a life with three young children to figure out.
I hated that they fought over money. I hated it when my mother walked around looking like a top that was all bound up and busting to have her string pulled so she could spin. I hated that, especially by comparison, my dad seemed so damn happy. But more than anything else, I hated all the stories I needed to invent about my life, the dancing pink elephant in the room that I spent my adolescence trying to conceal.
I became an acutely talented liar. Could talk for hours about things that never happened, tire people with details of th
e illustrious job at the University of Toronto that had forced my dad to move (in truth, he still taught at Trent University and lived, during the week, in a house with some other gay profs across town). I claimed great vexation at my mother’s refusal to move the family to the city, throwing in enough histrionic gestures to make my frustration believable. As my friends chewed their bland sandwiches in the cafeteria, I would regale them with tales of the dazzling and mythical metropolis of Toronto—the restaurants, the films, the concerts, the art (a word I learned very young to use as a weapon of superiority)—all the while conveying my sympathies that both their parents lived in poky, dull, provincial little Peterborough. Probably even shared a bed. Lamentable things.
REEDS AND REMARRIAGE
In addition to the piano, my mother also played the oboe, a notoriously difficult reed instrument that when played badly sounds like a Canada goose with croup, but when played well creates one of the most sublime sounds on this earth. My mother’s playing was on the sublime end of the scale, although she never considered herself a master of the instrument.
The oboe bears a superficial resemblance to the clarinet, but the oboe is played with a double reed stuck into a hole at the top of the instrument, rather than a single reed on the side of the mouthpiece. Oboists being a rare breed (in Peterborough, there was, let’s see … one: my mom), she had to make her own double reeds, which she did by cutting two pieces of cane with a very sharp knife, binding them together with red thread and sticking them into a tube of cork, which fit into the top of her instrument.
Sounds simple enough, and it is relatively easy to make a reed that goes squawk, but making a good reed is an art in itself and for years my mother devoted herself to it. Our yellow kitchen chairs, strands of red thread forever dangling from them, were testaments to this devotion, as my mother’s technique involved using the chairs as ballast while she wound the red thread around and around the cane, stacking each layer of coiled thread neatly upon the last, the chair back holding the thread tight. When she was finished, she would snip the red thread, make a firm knot and stick the reed in her mouth—peepeepeepeeeeeep—to test it out. There would always be adjustments to make: chiselling with the sharp knife, shaving a bit off here or there. Sometimes, she would have to make so many cuts and shavings that the reed would be ruined. But other times, she would hover over her small grindstone, chiselling and shaving, playing a few peeps, chiselling again, until the peeep was just right. Then she would plug the reed into her oboe, play a few velvet passages, and pull the reed out with a smile of triumph. “I just made a great reed!” she would proclaim.
Confessions of a Fairy's Daughter Page 9