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	The Body Politic and Visions of Community
	Page 9 of 14 / Appx 1,150 words

Grouplets galore
The boom in community organizing before 1981

It may have taken a while, but The Body Politic did come to see that you can't build a political base just through demos, diatribes and dishing the state.

And the point of gay liberation, after all, had been not simply the struggle for political rights but an awareness of the politics of daily life. "The personal is political" was lifted from feminism; grassroots organizing -- people actually getting together to do things on their own without permission from "leaders" -- came from movements with even deeper roots.

Sometimes gay people got together on their own just to play ball. In its September 1977 issue TBP devoted a two-page photo spread to the Cabbagetown Professional League, the city's and perhaps the country's first gay softball league, growing from a few men getting together to play scrub in 1975 to four teams formally organized. (The organization still exists, as the Cabbagetown Group Softball League.) It was just pictures of a bunch of guys on a ball field, not even in uniform then, with some text that was mostly just them talking:

Jack... There's a sense of belonging. It's something to work on with other gay people. I get really disappointed when games are called because of rain or the field is flooded. ... There are other gay-organized sports. Touch football in the fall. Bowling, volleyball and skiing in the winter. A lot of gays want to get together without having to go to the bars. Baseball is just one way.

Gord... This is probably the only league where you could hug the umpire as you run around the bases.

In the next issue, three letters commented on the piece:

Where the hell are you people at? Canada's largest, proudest gay demonstrations to date are almost ignored but you find space for two pages of "Play Ball." Trash coverage like this we expect from the establishment media, not from our own press.

The Coalition to Stop Anita Bryant wishes to protest the entirely inadequate nature of your coverage of the demonstrations of June 25 and July 22. Why ... is your coverage relegated to less than one quarter of a page, and buried in the middle of the paper, when the formation of a gay men's softball league receives a full two pages?

I was upset too about the baseball game pictures. I'm glad these competitive men have found a way to work up a thirst. Thanx but no thanx. The whole of TBP this past month suffered from a combination of slick pix and sexism; I hope it's not fatal.

The writer of the last letter, Jeff Weinstein of New York, had also objected to a feature article by British film writer Richard Dyer, called "It's being so camp as keeps us going" -- TBP's first foray into the topic since Hugh Brewster's "Counter-notes on camp" in Issue 3, 1972.

Jeff Weinstein would eventually write not just for The Village Voice but for (and once in The Voice about) The Body Politic. And that bit about "our own press" might be taken as a kind of compliment. Or as a challenge: in that "our," who was to be defined as "us"? The movement house-organ days had perhaps begun to fade.

Michael Lynch, erstwhile scourge of budding gay capitalists, wrote in the last issue of 1979 an Out in the City column titled "By-products of liberation: gay eateries." Seems he'd been quite taken with Crispin's, Dudes and Neighbours, all recently opened and gay- owned. (In an August 1979 Out in the City Michael had written about gay men going to the Y: so much for the critique of objectification of the body.)

He was taken to task in a letter from Dennis Findlay, long-time activist (he would later play a major role in the defence of bath-raid found-ins) and baker to the community:

Now we too have our very own restaurants where we can pinch the waiter's buns and make a date with the coat-check boy. How heterosexually equivalent we have become! ... I question what type of audience you're aiming at. Toronto's homo bourgeoisie?

Michael responded that it had been just a toe in the water, critiques of worker exploitation still in order. But he and others (key among them Ed Jackson, who had once seen most gay people as out of touch with us) had been looking hard for ways to connect The Body Politic to the real, daily lives of its readers. Norman Hay, a man old enough to know what gay oppression had once truly been (he died in 1988 at the age of 63), urged all of us on: we must celebrate each other, he said. We decided to give it a try.

In the April 1981 issue and after long planning, Out in the City appeared not as a column any more but as a whole section. Toronto groups weren't on the Community Page -- by then very full, and now renamed Network. They appeared instead in Out in the City, for the first time along with permanent entries for restaurants, guesthouses, pubs, tubs and clubs; and event listings for theatre, film, music, dance, art, TV and "alternative spaces" by then of a different kind.

Those Toronto community groups were for the first time listed by category: Social and Political Action (25 of them); Health and Social Services (seven); Professional (five); Religious (another five); Publications and Information (six); selected Women's Resources ("of particular interest to lesbians," 13); Sports (two, but there were more; more in all these categories and in time they would appear) -- 63 organizations in all.

In 1971 the first Community Page had shown four gay groups in Toronto, nine others straight but sympathetic. The four had been UTHA , the parallel YUHA at York (many early groups were campus-based), CHAT and its spin-off TGA. Now there was not TGA but TAG, a peer support group. There was CODA (Came Out Decade Ago) for older lesbians and gay men; there was FACT, a group for transsexuals.

There were groups dealing with everything from classic politics (CGRO, the Coalition for Gay Rights in Ontario) to the politics of dancing (GCDC, the Gay Community Dance Committee). There were Gay Asians, Gay Youth, Gays Against the Right Everywhere, the Gay Community Choir, Gay Health Care Workers, Gay Teachers, Parents of Gays, the Gay Counselling Centre (almost all would eventually add Lesbian to their names); the Lesbian Organization of Toronto, LOOT, and Lesbian Potluck Suppers; the York Rainbow Society for the Deaf, the Out and Out Club, the Gay Community Appeal raising money to help fund it all ("Getting together to support ourselves") -- and dozens more.

(Information on many of these groups is available in the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives.)

There were grouplets galore (and acronym stew). This is what community meant by early 1981. It had been quite a decade. And another one had already begun.

Next: Our Stonewall? The 1981 Toronto Bath Raids