To date, we have studied thousands of records stored at the CLGA. Without a doubt, the most compelling have been those that include quotes from people who directly experienced or participated in something related to our research. These first-person accounts form a valuable oral history, providing us with fine-grained information that humanizes and personalizes the stories we prepare to tell. Interestingly, oral records were first employed to study rising social movements. Thus, fittingly, the CLGA is currently collaborating in the largest oral history project in North America, an international effort spanning Canada, the US, and Britain. The CLGA has an original copy of a 1981 report submitted to Toronto City Council three weeks after police raids, codenamed "Operation Soap," were conducted simultaneously against four bathhouses. Hundreds of officers were involved and hundreds of men were arrested. The raids sparked the largest-ever riots by gays and lesbians in this country and a huge political backlash. This now-infamous event is remembered today as Canada’s Stonewall. The authors of the report, two city aldermen who were demanding an impartial inquiry into the raids, noted “The further we get away from the actual events … the more difficult it becomes to establish what really happened.” Thus, while memories were still fresh, they reached out to some of the men who were arrested to find out exactly what happened. We found theses statements, recorded in the report, truly gripping. They describe scenes of verbal and physical abuse, as well as damage to property. As officers rounded the men up — pulling them out of their rooms, showers, hallways, or hot tubs — they made liberal use of pejoratives that included faggot, fairy, and fucking cock-sucker. One individual provided the following summary of treatment — conduct clearly amounting to torture — that the men were subjected to before being carted away for processing at police headquarters: “If you looked anywhere but at the wall one of the cops would come over and push your head to the wall and tell you not to look at anything else. I had to stand that way with my arms up [above the head] for one hour and 20 minutes.” One officer forced his fingers down a man’s throat after he refused to call the law enforcer “sir.” Another statement references how, without any legal justification, constables gleefully smashed and laid waste to facilities. “I witnessed one officer wielding his sledgehammer with abandon and then saying, and I quote, ‘Boy, I must be getting old, that took two whacks.’ I also saw another officer pull an undamaged door shut and then smash it with his hammer.” The report provided an astute analysis of the “terrifying use of massive police resources” on others in the city. It concluded that “police action against the gay community ... sent shudders through other minority communities in Metro.” At the time, tensions were also running high between the police and black and South Asian communities. Profiling of minorities by police continues to be an issue. In fact, the same day this blog is being posted, the Toronto Star is running an article about the controversial police practice of carding, which disproportionately targets members of the black community. Mayor John Tory is quoted describing the effects as “corrosive and inconsistent” with the way this city is meant to work. The 1981 raids thus serve as a reminder that, as another report on the bathhouse incident concluded, when police “deal in instant judgments and instant punishments” such actions amount to “vigilantism.” Tim McCaskell recounts the demonstrations at 52 Division to protest the violence and homophobia expressed by police at the 1981 Toronto bathhouse raids. The crowds demanded police accountability to gay and other minority communities facing police harassment. For more about the 1981 bathhouse raids in Toronto watch Track Two - Enough is Enough | |
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The following blogs provide vivid accounts of discrimination perpetrated against people in Canada whose sexual identities did not conform to standards of the day. In equal measure, they provide stirring anecdotes about brave individuals who — in the face of overwhelming oppression — challenged ignorance and injustice. Archives
March 2015
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