Before Pride, there was a kiss: Toronto gay activists look back on 1976 protest

Tim McCaskell: The two arrested men were part of this “Alternative to Alienation” collective, which was kind of flaky. They weren’t particularly a gay group, but they were sexual liberation, psychological stuff, anti-capitalist. It was all this primeval muck of that 1970s period.

But when it actually came down to it, they hired a lawyer who said we don’t want any kind of politics around this at all. So they were found guilty. And they said they were going to appeal. And they didn’t appeal, just paid the fine. And it was over. But for those of us in the gay liberation movement, that left this precedent on the law books that two men kissing in public was a crime, because they hadn’t fought it. So in order to be able to try to challenge that, we organized a kiss-in.

Gerald Hannon: It was the perfect emblem. The two men were arrested and charged and fined for their kiss. It makes perfect sense to flaunt it after that, and say, we dare you to do something this time. (The police) didn’t, of course. And it was so important to be public in those days. It’s hard to imagine now, when it’s pretty easy. You were supposed to be ashamed of yourself. This was a good way of showing that we weren’t.

What do you remember of the experience?

Tim McCaskell: It was a bright day. We took our pictures and there were maybe 20 of us kissing. And the police were watching, but they didn’t do anything.

Gerald Hannon: I think we felt mostly exhilaration that we were doing it. You know, the exhilaration you get when you go out on the edge of a building, where you’re both excited and you feel slightly in danger. It was that kind of mix of feelings. We didn’t really expect anyone would come and beat us up. (But) the police (charging us was) also a possibility. I mean, they’d already done it once.

Ed Jackson: It was a bit of a performance thing to draw attention and take photographs. I’m not sure whether the Star covered it at the time. There was a time when the Star and the Globe didn’t cover gay issues very much at all. It wasn’t considered important. It was considered marginal.

More at thestar.com

Smooching in the streets, mincing at Queen’s Park: Gay rights protests of the 1970s

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What did the kiss-in achieve?

Tim McCaskell: On the one hand, it didn’t escalate into a kind of political battle in the courts (which is where the group was willing to take it if anyone had been charged). But on the other hand, the fact that we had done it and documented it, and that police hadn’t intervened, kind of undermined the notion that two men kissing was somehow an indecent act that needed to have legal intervention.

What was the gay rights movement like in those days?

Tim McCaskell: I came back (to Toronto) in 1974. At that point I knew I had to either deal with being gay or jump off a bridge or something. I’d been deep in the closet for a long time. I stumbled into a Pride demonstration in August, leaving Allan Gardens, and I knew all about demonstrations because I’d been in the anti-war movement. OK, it was a demonstration — I’m going to go. This is before Pride really began to happen at the end of June. And so we marched around Allan Gardens over to Queen’s Park and back.

(The movement) was very general in those days. There weren’t really very clear demands. I think there may have been a demand around getting sexual orientation included in the human rights code, but mostly it was just “gay liberation now,” that kind of stuff. It was before the shift to gay rights.

The early gay liberation movement saw itself like the black liberation movement and the women’s liberation movement — movements that were going to produce a fundamental social change because the capitalist system couldn’t accommodate us. They were kind of wrong about that.

Gerald Hannon: It was the Body Politic then (a gay liberation newspaper). That was the movement for me, although I belonged to Toronto Gay Action and a few other (groups). Once I started working there full-time, it was my life. I was charged and tried for immorality and indecency and acquitted. That was the “Men loving boys loving men” raid.

… The movement meant friendship, it meant fights. It meant public opprobrium and public support. It meant just about everything that was good and bad in my life. Mostly good, though.

It’s easy to paint all those years as kind of terrible, but in some ways it wasn’t. You saw the beginning, a nucleus, of people fighting for gay rights. And they were fun to hang around with. You risked being beat up or arrested or being fired, but still you could see things beginning to change. You could see more people coming into the movement. And you realize you’ve taken your life into your own hands, something none of us had ever done before. And that was exciting, too.

Ed Jackson: We wanted to change some of the laws and make it easier for people to live their lives. People would often be prevented from renting an apartment because they were gay or lesbian. They might lose their job if they came out.

There were many, many things that we documented (in the Body Politic). People would be arrested or harassed on the streets … it was really about changing the laws. And there were many laws. Immigration law said you couldn’t immigrate to Canada if you were identified as homosexual.

I met people through the movement … it was one of the side-effects, the good effects of becoming involved. We lived in communal households, which was pretty common at the time for people involved in movement activities.

Where did gay people hang out in Toronto?

Tim McCaskell: There was the Parkside and St. Charles (taverns), both on Yonge. There was nothing on Church St. Church at that point was kind of a depressed area — lots of pawn shops — and it was because of that that as the community began to grow, it was close enough to the usual gay haunts, just a block away, but the rents were really cheap. So you started to see small gay-owned businesses, because the St. Charles and the Parkside were both straight-owned. So gay entrepreneurs began springing up with gay bars and the centre of gravity shifted from Yonge to Church. By the late ’70s it was already shifting.

Decriminalization (of homosexuality) only happened in 1969 … Certainly the social attitudes were that this was a dangerous criminal class. There were no human rights protections, so anybody who came out could be thrown out of their apartment they were renting, could be fired from their jobs. They could be refused service in a restaurant. There was no protection at all if they wanted to go after you because of your sexual orientation.

So most people quite logically stayed in the closet because they wanted to work and they wanted to have an apartment. And they wanted to be treated semi-decently.

Gerald Hannon: (The Body Politic) had trouble accepting advertising at first because we were all so crazy leftist. But we realized that what we called the ghetto in those days, all those bars, and which we kind of deplored because it was straight people taking advantage of gay people, they were also one of the few places to meet.

The Parkside was notorious. They had a special room built behind the men’s washroom in the basement — and I know, because I was in it after it was exposed — where police officers could stand and look through a fake grille into the men’s washroom and see guys trying to get it on. And they could just walk around the corner and arrest them. It was one of the indications of the burgeoning power of gay people that we could request a meeting with the police and the bar owner and bring that to an end. But it took a while.

We hung out with each other then. There were a lot of communal houses back in the day. I was part of one, along with Ed Jackson and his partner, Merv … There were two on Seaton St. that became known as Seaton North and Seaton South. There was a lesbian one on Walnut Ave. Partly it was the cheapest way of living. You paid fees in proportion to your income. And it felt like family. Real family often rejected people, like my dad did me. And suddenly you found people who didn’t. Who accepted you. It made a big difference.

Ed Jackson: There was a gay community, but it was very subterranean. There were gay bars but if you saw anyone on the street who people might identify as gay, it would probably be a drag queen or someone who was very stereotypical and flamboyant.

(The village) was definitely a very small place where people could feel comfortable, and that was mostly in bars. And maybe Hanlan’s Point, where you could swim. But it was very limited where you could be public and feel comfortable.

What do you remember about the bathhouse raids in February 1981?

Tim McCaskell: I was head of the public action committee of the Right to Privacy Committee, so I actually organized most of the big demonstrations. It was like the best of times, the worst of times. Baths had been going on in Toronto since the turn of the century. And since they were behind closed doors, the police had generally left them alone. There was not really any interference.

And then in the late 1970s, the Barracks, which was kind of the more S&M, bondage, leather bath, was raided by the police. And that was the first time and people were pretty shocked. And it wasn’t really until the raids of 1981, when they raided all the baths simultaneously and arrested close to 300 people, that it produced this sense of violation in the community. A lot of people who went to the baths were pretty closeted. This was their safe space. It always had been. And there’d been a social contract — if you’re discreet, we’ll leave you alone.

Gerald Hannon: They were a really creative moment. I can remember that night very clearly because Ed and I were working at the Body Politic office late and got a phone call from a cab driver, who said there was something weird happening at the baths. I thought, well, we should check into this. So he drove by and I got into his cab with my camera and went to the baths. And one by one they were being led out the door and stuffed into paddy wagons. I got a couple of photographs that night and the next day we called a lot of other community members together at the Body Politic office on Duncan St. and said we’ve got to do something. And we managed to pull together a demonstration (and this was before Twitter) for that night.

George Hislop (a leading gay rights activist in Toronto who died in 2005) used to say there are three ways to get news around: you telephone, telegraph or “tell-a-fag.” And we told as many fags as we could by telephone. But we also managed to get a flyer printed up during the day and handed it out at bars during the afternoon. We didn’t know what to expect. Would anybody turn up? Because we knew people would be afraid, the police just having arrested 300 men. But they did. Thousands turned up and we knew we were onto something then.

Ed Jackson: That’s when media such as the Star and the Globe really began to cover things and see them as symbolic of changes in social attitudes. But at that time, you really had to shake the bushes to get the mainstream media to pay attention to you. The bath raids were kind of our Stonewall (the 1969 riots that became known as the birth of the gay liberation movement in New York). It was the largest mass arrests (in Canada) since the War Measures Act.

How do you account for the societal change since then?

Tim McCaskell: The activism of the last 25 to 30 years. We fought it over and over and over again. The police raided the baths in ’81 expecting that most people would plead guilty. When they raided a bar, or picked people up, gay men would always plead guilty because you didn’t want a court case that would bring attention to the fact that you were gay.

And police were quite astounded when the community organized and brought together lawyers and raised money to pay for the lawyers. I think 80 per cent of the cases (the Crown) lost. They won very few of them. And they tied up Toronto courts for almost a year. And judges were complaining and Crown attorneys were complaining because it was creating this huge backlog.

So this kind of fighting back in the community forced the cops to begin to back off. But the fact that we were also fighting back brought us to public attention, so we’d be speaking on the radio and we’d be speaking on the television. And people would begin to hear about gay people for the first time. More people came out, so that people would be more likely to know gay and lesbian people. And then we finally got the changes to the (Ontario) Human Rights Code in ’86, which meant people weren’t as vulnerable as they had been. So the social change that happened was a direct result of the activism that refused to take this second-class citizenship status that gay people had always been resigned to beforehand.

Gerald Hannon: To a large degree, we always used to say, “Come out, come out, come out.” The more people realize that they actually know someone who’s gay or have someone who’s gay in their family, it’s pretty hard to resist. You have to be kind of hate-filled, I guess. It happens. Kids are still being tossed out of homes or worse. They feel they have to kill themselves. But that’s so much less. As banal as it might be to say, coming out has made a huge difference.

Ed Jackson: There was an attitude about openness around feminism as well, and race issues. The city changed. The city became a lot more diverse and a lot more open. It was a narrower, more provincial city earlier on. One of the things you’ll notice in the image of the six of us, we’re all white. But if we did the same thing now, there would be people of colour because that’s the nature of the community now. It’s a diverse community. And people are out.

Even though it seems like a long time ago, it is not in fact a long time ago, and there has been enormous change in a very short time. I don’t think any movement has seen the kind of advances that we’ve been able to make in the queer movement. It’s been faster than one could ever have imagined from when we were first involved in the early ’70s. So there are still issues, and more complex issues, but there is a huge, huge societal change.

What are the challenges today?

Tim McCaskell: The major challenges today are the way that broader social changes have affected our community. For example, when we started in 1970, when you look at the Three Cities Within Toronto study (by David Hulchanski), 66 per cent of people in Toronto were living in middle-income areas. So that meant there were people who were a bit poorer, there were people who were a bit richer. But there was this critical mass of working-class people with decent jobs who considered themselves middle-class. And you could all go to a bar, you could all go to a bath. There was enough disposable income floating around that there was this real sense of community.

If you look at the same city today, 50-something per cent of people live in below-average-income communities. And when that’s an average, you have a small group of people in Toronto, about 20 per cent, who are enormously rich and then a lot who are quite poor. And the kind of middle-class areas are down to about 20 per cent. Those kinds of class divisions really start to pull apart this notion of community, because when we were all in the same sort of economic bracket, the glue that held us together was the common harassment that we would receive as gay people. But a young black kid growing up north of the city has an extremely different life than me downtown, an older white gay man who’s moving into retirement age and has a work career behind him and enough money to survive, take holidays and all those things.

So the cultural differences in the community have been really exacerbated by these class changes … People don’t come together in the same way that they once did.

Ed Jackson: I think transgender (and gender non-conforming) folk would say it’s not always safe on the street for us. For people who blend in, that’s a bit easier. But it’s not safe for everybody.

In larger cities like Toronto, the challenges are less, but if you look at certain ethnocultural communities, they’re still dealing with attitudes about sexuality that need to change. We’re looking at a much more diverse community now, so there are other cultural kinds of regulations that people are dealing with that are still very challenging — possibly not getting married; people probably still have to decide if they’re going to be open in their workplace situation.

The 1976 kiss-in photo: Who’s who

From left:

David Foreman: Born in Preston, Ont., the son of a Pentecostal preacher, he came to Toronto in the late 1970s. He studied at the University of Alberta and Carleton University. Foreman has been a member of the Communist Party of Canada since moving to Toronto, and was a member of the Gay Alliance Toward Equality (GATE) at the time of the kiss-in.

Tim McCaskell: He grew up in Beaverton, Ont., and first came to Toronto in 1970 at the age of 20. McCaskell holds a master’s in sociology of race relations and worked for 20 years at the Toronto public school board on equity policy.

Ed Jackson: He grew up in New Brunswick and came to Toronto to attend graduate school in English at the University of Toronto in the ’70s. Jackson was an editor and writer for the Body Politic at the time of the kiss-in. He is one of the founders of the AIDS Committee of Toronto and just retired from the Canadian AIDS Treatment Information Exchange.

Merv Walker: At the time of the kiss-in, he was working for the Body Politic as an office administrator and graphic designer. Walker came to Toronto in 1971 from Kamsack, Sask., to attend U of T. He now works as a graphic designer and lives with his partner in Burlington.

David Gibson: Gibson volunteered as a graphic designer at the Body Politic. He now lives and works in New York. According to an online biography, Gibson studied architecture at Cornell University, went to the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and received a master’s in fine art from Yale University in graphic design.

Michael Riordon: He wrote a regular column for the Body Politic. Riordon is now a writer and documentary filmmaker living in Prince Edward County.

Gerald Hannon (not pictured): Hannon, who took the kiss-in photo, worked as a writer and photographer for the Body Politic for 15 years, from 1972 to 1987. He came to Toronto from Marathon, Ont., to go to school at U of T. Hannon taught journalism at Ryerson and now sits on the board of Pink Triangle Press.