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	The Body Politic and Visions of Community
	Page 10 of 14 / Appx 1,150 words

Our Stonewall?
The 1981 Toronto Bath Raids

I've mentioned baths raids and said they'd always gone on, but the ones of February 5, 1981 are the Bath Raids of legend, worthy of those capital letters.

On that night, a Thursday, beginning at 11 pm and continuing into the wee hours of Friday, 150 cops swept simultaneously through four of the city's baths. Initial reports said 266 men had been arrested as found-ins, 20 as keepers; later the total would be reported as 306. Either way, it was the largest single mass arrest in Canada since the War Measures Act had been invoked in the October Crisis of 1970.

But the numbers we truly remember came the next night: 3,000 demonstrators taking the streets from Yonge and Wellesley down to the hated 52 Division and then up to the Ontario legislature at Queen's Park, where they slammed against the Pink Palace's doors. And on the night of February 20th: 4,000 marching from Queen's Park down to 52 Division again. The city had never seen anything like it.

In 1991, Queer Nation marked the 10th anniversary of the Bath Raids with posters plastered around Church and Wellesley. The caption: "Our Stonewall." We now traditionally date Toronto's Lesbian and Gay Pride celebrations from the Raids, saying that the "first" Pride Day happened in 1981. We can even talk as if all gay life in this city began only in 1981.

This can make me feel a bit like playwright John Herbert, who signed the guestbook at Pass It On -- a gay history exhibit held in the fall of 1995, bracketed by the 20-year career of CGRO, now the Coalition for Lesbian and Gay Rights in Ontario -- with the comment, "Surely Toronto's gay history did not begin in 1975! I think not!"

John remembers eating at the Devon on Church Street in 1948 -- in full drag. Gay Pride in Toronto began, in truth, with a picnic on The Island in nineteen- seventy-one -- though it did peter out after 1974, apart from Gaydays, a big festival held in Queen's Park in 1978. And we've just been talking about Toronto having more than 50 gay community groups by the beginning of 1981. There was life before The Raids.

But -- it's true -- life hasn't been the same since. The Raids were like Stonewall in one fundamental way: not as the beginning of anything (in Martin Duberman's book, Stonewall, the riot comes near the end) but as a moment of seismic shift, when forces building for years finally cracked a faultline and the earth suddenly shook beneath everyone's feet.

I was part of a planning meeting at the Body Politic office the day after the Raids. I don't remember much about it, really. The March 1981 issue of TBP reminds me that we gathered at noon (some of us had been up all night); that people were there from CGRO, the Right to Privacy Committee and the Metropolitan Community Church, as well as TBP; and that:

by 4 pm the organization was in place -- there was a sound truck, marshalls were recruited from graduates of the gay self-defence course and 4,000 leaflets were ready for distribution. "Enough is Enough," they said. "Protest. Yonge and Wellesley. Midnight tonight."

I do remember that it was winter; that we were issuing a call to come out into the freezing dark. I remember wondering whether it would work. This was about the baths, after all, about sex, about things that many gay people, even if modestly out, might still want kept in the closet. Would they come out now, into the cold, for this? I didn't know.

None of knew, really. TBP's Chris Bearchell remembers walking with Jim Monk (the paper's Windsor correspondent) toward Yonge and Wellesley, wondering what they'd find. "Who knows?" she said. "Fifty people? Five hundred?" Four hundred had come out, by day, to protest the Barracks raid in 1978.

And then there were 3,000. They hardly needed to be urged on (though it was Chris who started the chant "No More Shit!"), had hardly needed even the flyers except to tell them when to show up and where. Activists who in earlier days had marched past bars chanting "Join us! Join us!" -- expecting sneers, maybe, some satisfying guilt at best -- suddenly found themselves vastly outnumbered by bar dykes and disco fags, all truly pissed off.

On October 11, 1979, police raided the Hot Tub Club, at 9 Isabella. A hundred people rushed to the scene and blocked paddy wagons forced to drive off empty. (The police hadn't planned well: it was only 9 o'clock and there had been a Right to Privacy Committee meeting going on just down the street at the 519 Church Street Community Centre).

But instead of seizing the moment, the RTPC leadership of the day urged caution. There was no demo that night or the next or even four days later. There was one on November 17, five weeks later, on a narrow sidewalk outside a building that happened to house the Attorney-General's department. It had been planned in careful alliance with the Mayor's Committee on Police-Minority Relations. Seventy-five people showed up.

In 1981, nobody waited to hear what "leaders" might have to say (cautious RTPC chair John Alan Lee was later ousted and replaced by the more radical George Smith). Nobody called a community meeting (but for that hasty planning session at TBP's office) -- though there would be endless meetings and demos later.

Nobody worried about uneasy alliances between activists and businessmen -- even if Peter Maloney was one of those charged. Nobody waited on other alliances, either -- though they were built anyway: speakers at the February 20 demo outside 52 Division included Wally Majesky, president of the Metro Toronto Labour Council, and Lemona Johnson, a black woman whose husband had been gunned down by the police.

Nobody said: "We wish to protest the entirely inappropriate nature, etc, etc...." They yelled "FUCK YOU 52!" and left some of their "leaders" even more stunned than the cops.

Ed Jackson might now have said that the community was at last in touch with what we had been saying all along (though even the notorious radicals at TBP had generally been more polite). The line separating Bar Dykes and Disco Fags from the Jesus Christ Farts of the Movement had, it seemed, dissolved. Everybody was an activist now and everybody went out to dance. We were all together at last.

Well, sort of.

Next: Race, sex and solidarity: "Community" meets "the inviolability of desire"