Michael Rowe is a Toronto-based novelist and essayist. Angel John Guerra is a Toronto-based writer, visual artist and designer. They are the author and photographer of Pride, from which this essay has been adapted.
We are among the most photographed subculture communities of the second half of the 20th century and beyond.
From photographs of us as “curiosities,” to photographs of us as “rebels” (or “freaks,” depending on the viewer’s self-assumed moral perspective), to sufferers of a plague, to fighters-back, to soldiers, to elected officials, to film and television stars, to same-sex brides and grooms, to the grandchildren and great-grandchildren – spiritual and otherwise – of the original “curiosities” and “rebels,” and more. And we are rarely ever as photographed as we are in the month of June.
Popular wisdom would have us believe that a Pride parade isn’t an accurate reflection of our community, but I politely disagree.
The theatrical aspect of Pride notwithstanding, it’s all there, in one form or another: the panoply of ages, the rainbow of genders and gender expressions, the lifelong friends, the beloved straight allies, the queer families with their kids, the veterans of decades of Prides, the first timers who run the gamut from the shy ones taking their first tentative steps into the light of community and the ones who are joyfully hurtling toward their new queer lives like meteors entering a dazzling new atmosphere.
I attended my first Pride march in 1982. Back then the parade was small enough that a just-out 19-year-old gay boy could step off the sidewalk and join the march if he wanted, and feel it was safe to be visible, in that tributary of queer humanity, in a way that he would never have felt walking down those early eighties Toronto streets.
It was considered good, wholesome fun in those days for gangs of straight men to hurl eggs and rocks at drag queens as they made their perilous way down Yonge Street to the St. Charles Tavern on Halloween Night. Stories of gay bashing – including by the police – were so common that they barely raised an eyebrow.
Much has been written about the infamous “Cherry Beach Express,” the colloquial name for a horrific late-night ordeal, dating from roughly the 1950s to the early 1990s, endured by some Toronto gay men and lesbians, as well as others deemed socially undesirable by the authorities.
According to their accounts, unlucky victims were driven by police, under the cover of darkness, to Cherry Beach, a lakeside beach park located at the foot of Cherry Street just south of Unwin Avenue, on Toronto’s outer harbour just east of the Eastern Gap and there, in the headlights of police cruisers, beaten bloody.
That these guardians of Toronto’s much-vaunted virtue could take such ogreish pleasure in the music of our screams, or the sight of our blood flowing, or the sound of our breaking bones, was one of the city’s worst kept secrets, but it was also a given.
The unquiet ghost of the “Cherry Beach Express” haunted the city between 2010 and 2017, when serial killer Bruce McArthur stalked the streets of Toronto’s queer community, eventually murdering eight men, most of them men of colour, before his apprehension, but not before community members and activists had tried, in vain, to convince the police that there was a predator stalking them, and being met, well into Mr. McArthur’s spree, with a measure of apathy that was, historically, unsurprising.
I came out to stories like the Cherry Beach Express, as well as stories of police raids on the bathhouses we frequented in those days, and the stories of gay men’s lives destroyed by the concomitant fallout of exposure and public shaming.
The year before I moved to Toronto, on the night of Feb. 5, 1981, the Toronto police launched “Operation Soap.” Two hundred police officers, some armed with sledgehammers and crowbars, raided four bathhouses and arrested nearly 300 gay men.
Most of the men, both the patrons and the owners of the bathhouses, were charged with vague “indecency” acts, including the impossibly quaint sounding “keeping a common bawdy house.” That phrase, as prissy and Victorian as a lorgnette, is a sharp reminder that homosexuality had only been legal in Canada for 12 years when the cops broke down those doors that night.
While the raids would become a landmark moment in Canadian 2SLGBTQ+ history, and the subsequent protests widely considered to be Canada’s Stonewall moment, as well as the year of Toronto’s first official Pride, the subtext of those stories was that being an out gay man, in the company of other out gay men, while powerful, could carry the potential of a grisly toll extracted in retaliation for the affront of visibly existing – particularly for existing as outlaw sexual beings.
But there was an even more important subtext: Being out was essential – not just for us, but for the generations that would follow.
