Take this thing on, uh, homosexuality.
I think the view we take here
is that there's no place for the state
in the bedrooms of the nation.
I think for those of us
who grew up in the '50s and '60s,
it's hard to communicate what it was like
to begin to suspect
that you might be part of this category of subhumans
that was really the most shameful,
disgusting kind of thing that anybody could possibly be.
We were invisible.
The straight world wanted us to be invisible.
Being gay was an abomination.
It was a sin.
It was a form of spiritual corruption.
We paraded in secret.
And then we were paraded...
through prison corridors and the courts.
Homosexuality was essentially illegal.
You could get 8 years in prison or a mental institution.
Fascists!
We have crucial moments where the state would attack us.
Gay rights now! Gay rights now!
We were forced to respond. There was no choice.
Shame! Shame! Shame! Shame! Shame! Shame!
As young activists, we had a vision.
We wanted a world that was free of homophobia.
It's just a really beautiful thing
to think about the idea of all of the people
who have stepped off of the sidewalk and into the road.
This is that genealogy of resistance.
I worked really hard at not recognizing
that I was attracted to people of my same sex
for a long, long time,
even though at a certain level,
I think I knew it.
I remember the song Downtown.
And hearing that in Beaverton.
And, like, Beaverton had a downtown.
It was the IGA, the post office and the drugstore, right?
That was the downtown.
But this idea that there might be this place
where you could go downtown where you could be different.
I wanted to go downtown but didn't know why.
♪ When you're alone and life is making you lonely ♪
♪ You can always go downtown ♪
Toronto is a very gay city.
Yonge Street just seemed to be
one of the gayest streets in the world.
♪ Downtown ♪
♪ Just listen to the music, all the traffic in the city ♪
♪ Linger on the sidewalk ♪
♪ All the neon signs are pretty ♪
Going back to the 1950s,
bars in Toronto hosted these drag balls for Halloween.
So on Halloween night, they would host these events,
these pageants where drag queens would show up.
They would be judged.
They would win awards and prizes.
And it was just sort of this celebratory kind of atmosphere.
One of the big reasons is because it was the only day
that, legally, you could get dressed up.
Halloween.
So we would...
That's when we really pushed it.
The hot spot was St. Charles Tavern.
By the 1970s,
the drag balls attracted a more hostile crowd.
Holy mackerel!
Look at that!
It was a very brave thing to do.
You know, drag queens were at the sharp end, even back then.
But there was a kind of great defiance and bravery.
They didn't care. You know, ink, egg, spit...
The woman came running up to me as I'm going in,
spit on me like a truck driver.
"Fucking faggot!"
And the police would stand there: "Get that one!
You missed that one!"
Laughing.
It's comforting to know that there were people before.
Yeah, they paved the way for people like me,
as Michelle Ross did and others.
"Who's that amazing woman on stage?"
And of course, it was a drag queen.
But impeccable and flawless.
And this was Michelle Ross.
Michelle Ross,
a legendary Black queer Canadian of Jamaican heritage.
When you walked into a club on Yonge Street
where Michelle was performing,
you knew that a particular kind of Black life
was being made present.
The majesty of her gowns.
I feel grateful when I see those photographs,
and I also feel like those people need to be honoured and remembered
because they were trailblazers.
We made a point.
"We're here, we're queer.
We're in your face."
My name is Jeanine Maes. I'm 83 years old.
I am one of the last women
that was locked up in a psychiatric hospital
for lesbianism.
It happened in Saint-Jean-de-Dieu
in Montréal 1962.
The door closed behind me.
I saw the bars on the windows.
My husband and my psychiatrist decided they were going to cure me.
Because at that time, being homosexual wasn't just illegal,
it was considered a mental illness.
They didn't have a lesbian wing, so they sent me to the schizophrenic wing.
And that's when the nightmare began.
Every day, except on weekends, I had to see my psychiatrist.
He was looking for the problem in my head.
But that's not all.
The gynecologists were looking for the problem in my vagina.
They were both looking for what was wrong, but nothing was wrong.
I was very comfortable in my skin.
I had discovered I was a lesbian, that I liked women.
I didn't understand their attitude at all.
And that was the second blow: she never came back.
He stole my daughter and gave her to his mother,
because for him, she was his child.
He didn't want her to be raised by lesbians.
So he gave her to his mother in France.
I told him I wouldn't let that happen, I'd take him to court.
She was my child.
I went to see three different lawyers.
They all said the same thing:
Don't try it, it'll cost a fortune, and it won't work.
You won't get her back.
Because you're a lesbian, and she's a girl.
The view we take here is that there's no place for the state
in the bedrooms of the nation.
And I think that, you know,
what's done in private between adults
doesn't concern the criminal code.
When it becomes public, this is a different matter.
In December 1967,
Pierre Elliot Trudeau's government introduced this bill
that has been labelled
the decriminalization of homosexuality in Canada.
What it actually did was to say that
if two people, both of whom were over 21,
had sex...
in private and nobody saw it,
then the police wouldn't arrest you
and you wouldn't go to jail.
You won't be charged criminally
for gross indecency or buggery
as long as there's only two of you
and it's in private, right?
Well, I was 17, and so I would have been a criminal.
It didn't deal with any kind of civil rights.
I mean, you could still be fired from your job,
thrown out of your apartment,
refused service in a restaurant if you wanted
if they thought that you looked gay, right?
But I think that Bill C-150
actually dramatically changed the conversation.
From something that was the love that dare not speak its name,
it suddenly became something everybody had to talk about.
It was on television.
At first it was very hard for me.
Because so many people were against me.
I developed a guilt complex.
They told me I was bestial.
That two women having sex was disgusting.
Heterosexuals would often insult me loudly, to my face, in public.
It was really awful.
At that point, I got depressed.
I was the first who dared say,
officially and on television,
that I was a lesbian and why I was a lesbian.
Are you abnormal?
I don't consider myself abnormal, not at all. Not at all.
I am like everyone else.
Of course, I wasn't cured. I hadn't changed.
Rather, I was absolutely convinced that this was the life I wanted to lead.
I think I was queer from birth,
in that, you know, like, I was a sissy.
I loved dressing up in my mom's clothes.
In fact, one of my earliest memories
is wearing my cousin's wedding dress.
My father worked all the time.
In the evening,
he would come home and go and sit on the back porch,
and it was my duty to bring him
what was called "the evening news,"
which was the evening paper.
And I remember reading about gay activists in 1969
and the Stonewall riots then,
and thinking somehow, that was me.
Gay, gay all the way!
Think of those early organizations were called Gay Liberation Fronts.
That was named after
the National Liberation Front in Vietnam.
We had women's liberation,
Black liberation, Chicano liberation.
And we saw ourselves part of a much broader movement
for deep social change.
We were overwhelmingly male, overwhelmingly white.
So it was kind of a working class or middle class
upwardly mobile group of young white men
who felt that we were going to change the world.
Gay liberation, for me, was the place where
I could express the truth about my sexuality.
Discrimination became more a reality
as gay people emerged from the closet in larger numbers.
And we wanted to organize people
in opposition to that discrimination,
in part to bring them out in even greater numbers,
knowing that that was a necessary precondition
for the creation of the gay community.
In 1971, Toronto Gay Action decided
to organize the first national protest march in Ottawa...
and to, as the substance of the march,
to write a document listing all of our grievances
against the federal government.
When you're attempting to build a political movement,
you have to get your act together
and spell everything out.
One of the beauties of the We Demand document
is that we saw it as so incredibly utopian.
We didn't think we had a hope in hell
of ever winning any of those demands.
I made a lot of the signs, you know.
But we didn't know much about making protest signs
that would survive rainstorms.
So I think about 50% of them disintegrated almost instantly.
I mean, I was running around trying to take photos,
because I realized they would be of historical importance.
Canadian homosexuals are having their careers ruined,
being kicked out of their churches,
having their children taken away from them
and being assaulted in the streets of our own city.
What have we done to deserve this?
Love, that's all we have done.
All we want to do is love persons of the same sex
and live our lives we decide for ourselves.
They were basically civil-rights-style demands.
They were forcefully made,
and it really set an agenda
that put this whole question of gay sexuality on the map.
"Today marks a turning point in our history.
"No longer are we going to petition others
"to give us our rights as gifts.
"We're here to demand them as equal citizens
"on our own terms.
"Homosexual women and men in Canada
"are fed up with being the butt of other people's jokes.
"We are fed up with the lack of basic respect
"due to all human beings.
"We're fed up with having to hide to preserve our jobs.
"We're fed up with having to hide
"to preserve our own freedom.
"We're fed up with the genocide of gays,
"fostered by psychiatrists,
"using medieval tortures to destroy us.
"We're fed up with being discriminated against
"in employment, housing and the courts.
"We're fed up with being arrested and harassed
"by police forces paid for by our own taxes.
"In fact, we're fed up
with paying the price of other people's hangups."
"There's no homosexual problem in Canada.
"There's a heterosexual problem.
"Two million homosexual men and women in Canada
"are watching us.
"We're going to show them that it can be done.
"We can go anywhere we choose as homosexuals
"and as Canadian citizens with full civil rights.
"Gay is proud and gay is good.
Let's say it wherever we go."
I suggested the most important thing we could do
to build the movement and build community
was to start a newspaper of our own.
There was silence in the media,
the mainstream media,
around homosexuality in general.
So I think the conclusion was:
"We need to have our own newspaper
where we can write what we want to write."
And I think that became an important thing
that there really was a place
where you could actually look at something
written by queer people.
For a Canadian publication,
the Body Politic was pretty unique
because it had achieved a reputation internationally...
which very few Canadian periodicals have done.
Chris Bearchell was the only woman
on the editorial collective of the Body Politic.
She was this feisty little dyke
who made sure that feminism was on the agenda
and made sure that gay liberation
was on the agenda for feminists.
All of us on the initial collective,
we would sell the newspaper on the street.
I mean, I can remember going out with a bundle of 100 papers
and selling them all.
Yeah, there was lots of reaction.
I mean, I have to say I was pretty cute.
You know, I was 21 and wearing a gay pride T-shirt and so on.
And they'd all say, "Oh, I don't want your paper,
but I'll take you,"
and all this kind of stuff.
You know, lots of cruisy stuff going on.
I'd say: "Oh yeah, well, you know,
I cost more than 25 cents, ha-ha."
The Body Politic, you know,
had to decide what kind of covers,
what kind of art on the covers would be used.
We began to cover stories we'd heard
of people being arrested in washrooms,
you know, people being thrown out of apartments
because they were queer.
One of them would be Douglas Wilson,
who was a teacher in Saskatchewan.
He was fired because he was openly gay.
Really at the time,
the Body Politic was globally recognized
as being one of the leaders in terms of debates, discourses,
fights, theories,
development of a rigorous queer liberation theory.
There was this sense of:
"I'm getting this amazing immersion and education
in what gay liberation can look like."
People growing up in small towns and so on
say that they saw the Body Politic in the library,
and they couldn't believe it.
You know, they couldn't believe that such a thing existed.
I found the Body Politic.
Who knew the Cedarbrae Public Library
was so progressive to have all of this.
That where I was there feeling isolated,
it gave me a space to sort of find myself.
And so, the Body Politic
actually located queerness and gayness in Toronto.
So I knew, you know,
not far from where I was sitting in Cedarbrae Public Library,
that there was a whole community.
I started buying the Body Politic on the sly,
and I started reading the paper
and found that there was going to be this Gay Pride march.
It started at Allan Gardens.
And I remember hiding sort of behind the bushes
and kind of watching these people as they formed up.
Then as they began to pick up things to go,
I thought: "This is the moment."
And so I walked over and picked up a sign that said,
you know, "Gay Liberation Now," or something.
I had a bullhorn at the front of the parade
and was calling out the chants.
We were all pumped and excited and chanting:
"Two, four, six, eight,
gay is just as good as straight."
And the advantage of having so few people
was that I was recognized as a new face in the crowd,
picked up, taken home, had sex with,
given a stack of gay liberation literature
and told to come back for more when I finished reading.
And I read.
I saw this very masculine, handsome young guy on the side there.
And so I asked him if I could hold his hand.
To pull him into the march, really.
So we held hands, and then we became...
very close for a year.
And that was very lovely.
And that helped Tim evolve into...
perhaps the most important single gay activist in Canada.
That's how I see it.
So in that way, if I played a positive role,
I'm proud of that.
Jearld Moldenhauer provides an invaluable record
of those early days,
both in photographs and in the Super 8 footage.
Jearld is a remarkable archivist.
Why it's important to document history?
It shows real live human beings in their situation
trying to change their society.
When people see that, you know, especially as time goes by,
and they look back and they see what those people did,
that they took a stand, they participated,
and that's how change occurs.
This was a joyous, in-your-face, profoundly political event
because it was not OK to be out back then.
We were very young and committed to resisting, rebellion
and being out to everyone.
That was new.
Do you understand, those of you who are not gay,
how we have been violated since the very beginning of time?
Do you understand that they violated us during the Inquisition
by burning millions of us as witches at the stake
because we were interested in herbal medicine
or that we spoke out with the truth?
Do you know how men got the name "faggot,"
for any of you guys that still use the word "faggot"?
Because they were tied to the witches,
doused with gasoline and lit on fire.
And that's how they got the name "faggot".
They were used as a wood to burn the women.
My name is Robin Tyler.
And I knew I was born a lesbian when my mother delivered me
and the doctor hit me, and I hit him back.
I was the first out gay or lesbian comic.
I've also been an activist all of my life,
including here in Winnipeg.
I never came out of the closet.
I was never in the closet.
I remember falling in love with Sheri Bernstein
at the Banff School of Fine Arts, you know,
and picking up a book called The Ladder.
And it was: "If you're a woman, you love another woman,
"what you are is a lesbian.
If it feels right to you, it is right."
I ran down the Banff School of Fine Arts screaming:
"I'm a lesbian, I'm a lesbian, hooray!"
And my teacher, who was just like this Maggie Smith
in The Prime of Jean Brodie,
came out and said:
"There, there, dear, we're all thespians.
That's why we're here, right?"
So I couldn't even come out when I came out.
I remember being on a work crew with a woman
that, um, wore blue jeans, and she had an army jacket,
and she was a poet,
and she was yummy.
And I said to her: "Can I kiss you? I must kiss you."
And she said yes.
I remember thinking,
as we were in bed having wild sex for the first time,
it's like: "OK, I'm a nice Catholic girl from, you know, northern prairies,
and this is worth going to hell for."
I come from a very repressed family
in a small town in British Columbia, in Kelowna.
It was very tiny.
It was very conservative.
I used to have these reoccurring nightmares
that these beautiful women turned into witches
and they were trying to get me.
And I would run and run, and I would panic,
and I would wake up.
And it was kind of like this terror nightmare.
And I thought: "Oh my God, lesbians are witches.
"Clearly, like, it's bad.
It's a bad thing that I'm feeling this."
And I guess one day, I actually analyzed it differently.
And I thought: "It's just...
"It's what I'm afraid of,
because it's going to change my life."
♪ My fear has turned to anger ♪
♪ As my anger's turned into rage ♪
♪ And I won't live my life in a cage ♪
♪ So we're gonna fight back ♪
♪ In large numbers ♪
♪ Fight back ♪
♪ I can't make it alone ♪
♪ Fight back ♪
♪ In large numbers ♪
♪ Together we can make a safe home ♪
Two, four, six, eight,
lesbians are really great!
Lesbian organizations were popping up all over the country.
And it really was a time when we needed to separate from gay men.
Because what we were fighting for
felt very different as women and as feminists.
♪♪ Angry young woman ♪
♪ I've been around ♪
♪ Angry young woman ♪
♪ I'll bust up the town ♪
♪ Angry young woman ♪
♪ They call me a dyke ♪
♪ I don't know much about it ♪
♪ I just know what I like ♪
This is a time that requires that we be on the street.
This is a time that requires us to be visible.
This is a time that requires us to take up space.
And we did.
♪ A motorbike with whistles ♪
♪ Hey, you want a ride? ♪
♪ You don't understand when I say no, it's no ♪
I believe that we began to build in 1977.
Now, originally, when we were trying to figure out
what to call ourselves, actually,
the first idea was the Toronto Organization of Lesbians.
But we didn't like the acronym, which was TOOL.
So we flipped it
and decided it would be the Lesbian Organization of Toronto,
LOOT.
And we found this house.
It was a little ramshackle, but that was OK.
Women started coming in,
and we started seeing that we weren't alone.
Just the notion that we could be out there,
we could be together, we could celebrate,
we could flirt, we could, you know, find a new lover,
we could find a new friend,
we could go out afterwards,
we could go home afterwards with somebody.
All of that was just, uh, oh, it was so luscious.
♪ I just know what I like ♪
I knew what a lesbian was.
That still wasn't really what I felt comfortable with.
And after going there for about, I guess, 3 or 4 days,
I heard the word "dyke," and I asked what that meant.
And they said:
"Oh, you know, "that's somebody who is politically active,
and they like to kick ass."
And I said: "Well, that's me."
When it was my shift on the phone lines
and young women would call up,
and they would hear my accent, my Trini accent,
they would say: "Oh, you sound like my mother,"
or, "You sound like my aunt, but I was born here.
Can I come down and meet you?"
I don't know how I ended up there.
Somebody took me there,
but I ended up playing some of my first gigs at LOOT.
And I was so bad.
Oh my God, I was so bad.
But they were so supportive, and it gave me...
Just watching these women talking together,
you know, I was a little...
I was a little baby dyke at that point, right?
I was still fresh and new in this world,
and I didn't know...
how I was going to evolve.
But I knew that these women were going to be a piece of it.
I have been blacklisted for exercising the right of a mother
to defend her children and all children
against their being recruited by homosexuals.
Anita Bryant was coming to town.
And we knew she was dangerous.
We knew she was having an impact,
especially in the United States.
And there were many of us who really can't stand it
when anybody in the United States
has any kind of influence over our politics here.
She was going around the US
campaigning against human rights for queers,
in particular, human rights for queer teachers.
Would you welcome, please, Bob and Anita Bryant-Green.
God bless you.
Anita Bryant was very dangerous.
The first thing was her hair was very stiff.
So if you bumped into her, you could get wounded.
Do you know what I mean?
There was so much hairspray that it was a helmet that she wore.
But she was also dangerous because it wasn't her.
It was really a huge right-wing factory.
The war goes on to save our children
because the seed of sexual sickness
that germinated in Dade County
has already been transplanted by misguided liberals
in the US Congress.
700 lesbians, gay men and feminists
went up on a very cold, cold,
chilly, blistering-cold night
and marched and protested against her speaking.
Hey, hey, ho, ho!
Anita Bryant's gotta go!
Hey, hey, ho, ho! Anita Bryant's gotta go!
The presence of Anita Bryant in Canada
galvanized queer activists.
There we were,
furious with this right-wing backlash.
And it also kind of connected us to,
especially lesbian feminists like myself,
to gay liberationists
in a way that we hadn't been connected before.
Gay rights now! Gay rights now!
Gay rights now!
Even as we were having leaps of visibility
and extraordinary gains in the public sphere,
and as a community, were exerting ourselves
and expressing our agency.
And it wasn't just through the protests
or through the pride parades,
but it was through all the day-to-day changes
that were occurring
that was making queer visible,
but equally making queer vulnerable
to that sort of backlash or that sort of attack.
In 1976, Montreal hosted the Olympics.
This was Mayor Jean Drapeau's major event for him.
He made sure that the city was, quote unquote, cleaned up.
So there were a lot of arrests.
A lot of arrests of gay people,
a lot of arrests of street workers, sex workers.
And that continued into 1977.
We went to this place--
it was relatively new-- called Truxx.
And it was on an upper floor.
And it was kind of dark.
And it was just people sitting around,
talking and drinking beer.
And I remember shortly before all hell broke loose,
Warick saying:
"This is really boring. Let's go somewhere else."
The police showed up suddenly.
They were carrying long guns.
They harassed us, hitting us on the legs.
And then they loaded us into vans.
I remember sitting in this paddy wagon.
There was a lot of distress,
because there were people, for instance, married men.
There were people who weren't out.
There was one guy who had some kind of immigration problem
that he was really worried about.
There was a lot of anguish.
The police forced us into a physical inspection,
including our sexual parts.
This was an operation among the 3 police forces.
They treated it as if this was a major crime scene,
which of course it never was.
In the meantime, gay rights activists
were planning a protest for the next day.
Over 2,000 people showed up.
It was like being on the crest of a wave.
It wasn't like we started the wave.
The wave was there and carried us with it,
and we were just there manifesting.
We decided that, no more slinking away into the night.
The defence would be one of identification.
What happened would be
that they would call a policeman to the stand, the prosecution.
"Can you identify the accused?"
Well, in those days, if I may say so,
a lot of gay people, you know,
were dressed and looked very much alike.
And so how would the policeman
remember that particular accused?
Could not point them out in the courtroom.
And the case collapsed.
In the meantime,
me and my friends in the organization were asked to write a brief
to the Minister of Justice.
Well, above all, I asked them
to include in the Charter of Freedoms for the Quebec population
a clause stating that sexual orientation
is not grounds for discrimination.
It was the first such amendment,
first protection at the provincial level
or state level in North America.
And was a major, major, major milestone for gay civil rights.
Quebec has become the first province
to make discrimination against homosexuals illegal.
Saskatchewan and Ontario are considering a similar law.
Human rights have to be codified.
They have to be made as broad, as wide, as widely understood,
as widely protected as possible
for everyone in our Canadian society
and, in this case, for one of our more beleaguered minorities,
for the gay and lesbian people of Canada.
The gains of the community
were being noticed by our community's enemies.
And our community's enemies, they were galvanized,
and they fought back against our progress.
There were a lot of debates within the Body Politic.
And one of them was the idea
that gay men's sexuality shouldn't be policed.
And at the same time,
I was very clear that I did not want to fall into the trap
of, uh, supporting a moralistic view
around sexuality and representation.
Gerald Hannon was my best friend.
Gerald, I think, became one of the most important activists
in the country.
And one of the reasons is that he was such a good writer.
Gerald Hannon had written a number of articles
about youth sexuality.
The law had been partially changed
to allow sex between men in private at 21.
So that's quite old.
But, I mean, for heterosexuals, it was something like 16.
It was about,
when do young people have a right to sexuality?
When can they choose to be sexual?
We were about to publish another article in the series
when the Emanuel Jaques murder happened.
Emanuel, the shoeshine boy.
He was about a 12-year-old boy and his brother.
Everybody got to know of them.
Like, they just loved them.
Even if their shoes were clean,
give the kid a few bucks and that.
The media decided to sort of conflate this
as being a gay crime.
Clean up Yonge Street!
Clean up Yonge Street! Clean up Yonge Street!
That lit the bomb everywhere, with the police and everything.
Because then, we were all murderers and pedophiles.
Any premeditated murders should be
pained with the same pain!
The decision to publish the article Men Loving Boys Loving Men
was not taken lightly,
and we all had differing opinions.
I was not certain that this was the right time to do it.
There's no time is right.
And in an introduction, we said that.
And we published the article.
We had different ideas about what sexual liberation was.
And I understood, in particular regarding the article Men Loving Boys Loving Men,
that Gerald Hannon was interested in pushing boundaries.
All these debates were very personal and very intense.
And people came from very different histories.
Like, a white gay male notion of liberation
had a very different inflection than a feminist.
We had different histories.
It was controversial, but we felt it needed to be addressed.
It led to the Toronto Sun in particular, Claire Hoy,
going on and on about, you know, how horrible homosexuals were,
molesting children,
and calling for some kind of reaction from the police.
And it's not the sort of thing
that I want the homosexual groups
to get into the schools,
which is really the main area where they want to get in,
and they'll tell you this themselves,
and preach their gospel of homosexuality
to impressionable kids.
I don't want that to happen.
We had never ever in a million years
thought there would be, you know, the police coming in
and raiding the office, and then laying charges.
That was a very traumatic night.
It was late.
They just walked in the door.
They showed us the search warrants.
They took the subscription lists.
But that's what scared us,
was that they now had a list,
you know, addresses of a whole bunch of queer people across the country.
We were in an old warehouse,
so it was like an old industrial elevator
that kind of slowly descended.
And that was my image of these boxes slowly descending.
But that night was a pretty seismic moment for me
in terms of my sense of police and what they could do.
It seemed obvious that the goal
was to put it out of business
and therefore achieve a suppression
of the exchange of ideas
within the gay and lesbian movement.
So ultimately, it would be instrumental
in destroying the gay movement.
We were charged with the use of the mails
to transmit immoral, indecent and scurrilous literature.
We were acquitted the first time.
It went to an appeal court,
and we were acquitted the second time.
This was a censorship trial.
We won, and I think the message to the state
was that we would not be censored
and that freedom of the press was important.
Operation Soap began in August 1980
by sending 3 undercover agents
into the various bathhouses across the city.
The police were already going into the bathhouses before then.
They raided the Barracks bathhouse in December 1978.
It was an ordinary night.
All of a sudden,
this kind of crowd that were a little boisterous came in.
And as soon as I buzzed the door,
all of a sudden, there's a whole burst of them going through
when they hadn't actually been signed in.
Operation Soap really was a perfect storm
that hit in the early 1980s.
They had four bathhouses in their targets:
the Richmond Street Health Emporium, the Barracks,
the Club Baths and the Romans Health Spa.
Any act that would take place in private
would be covered under the 1969 reform,
and so the men couldn't be charged.
So, the bedrooms of the nation.
Public is defined as any place
where more than two people are present or taking part.
So the bath houses,
because there were lots of people around,
and in some cases,
men were having sex with more than just one person,
these places were considered public.
The door came off its hinges
and flew onto the bed where I was sleeping.
With a policeman screaming at me to get up and get out.
I remember the police insulting us, calling us "faggots."
And I thought to myself: "I'm not doing anything wrong."
Whatever officer, he put his head in and he yelled out:
"You're lucky there's no gas in the showers."
They called this investigation Operation Soap
because they wanted to clean up the city.
It was really meant to morally judge the queers
and to condemn that sex as being dirty
and somehow a threat.
You know, I was one of 36 men who were actually found guilty
out of 288 who were charged.
As a result of that night, two men took their own lives.
This was one of the largest mass arrests in Canadian history.
We see this sort of trajectory that our community was on
toward human rights,
but also toward sexual liberation
and this reaction, this violent reaction
that comes from, you know, the moral reformers in the city,
but also from the Toronto police,
to try to, you know, push us back into the closet.
Gay rights now!
The next night, thousands poured into the streets.
That was a real experience for people in a demonstration.
It had never been like that before.
Gays fight back! Gays fight back!
As we walked up towards Yonge and Wellesley,
you could see more and more queers and lesbians and drag...
coming out.
And by the time we got to Yonge and Wellesley, it felt enormous.
Gays fight back!
We expected 300 people. I think we got 3,000.
That gives you the courage to carry on.
There are people behind you. You're not alone.
All of these things are really important
in terms of the development of the movement.
Chris got up, and she starts with:
"No more shit. No more shit."
No more shit! No more shit!
No more shit!
We're overflowing out onto Yonge Street
in the opposite direction to where we'd intended to go,
to head down toward 52 Division,
where so many of them had been processed the night before.
So the major slogan
that had spontaneously emerged in the crowd was:
"Fuck you, 52."
Fuck you, 52! Fuck you, 52!
They were responsible for the raids.
And so, "Fuck You, 52,"
became a real focus for the anger,
because that's where this thing had started.
No more shit! No more shit! No more shit!
Don't be afraid of violence and anger!
Protect yourself and keep fighting!
It felt frightening to be in the protest.
You didn't know what kind of level of violence
was going to take place.
Everyone who chose to be on that street at that time
had to kind of dig into a level of courage.
You'd think that something
that had required so much police person power...
would have to have some sort of political support
from farther up.
And then, almost as spontaneously,
people said: "Queen's Park."
There were a series of other demonstrations that took place
over that winter and spring right into June.
One of the most important moments was when Lemona Johnson,
who was the widow of Albert Johnson,
who had been gunned down by the police
in his own home in front of his kids,
I think a year before,
she actually spoke.
A Jamaican immigrant talking about
what was happening to the Black community.
Raids and arrests of members of this Toronto gay community
is a further indication that the police force of this city
is lacking in discipline and proper supervision.
The police force in this city
is being used as a political tool by politicians.
The outcome of this
extraordinary grassroots response
was 80% acquittals,
unprecedented in terms of activism and fighting back.
This truly was our Stonewall.
We were particularly shaped
by the police attacks on our community,
not uniquely, but profoundly.
And that opened up doors to solidarity
and working together with Black community,
with other communities who suffered at the hands of police.
This was truly a game changer.
I came out in the early '80s,
at a time when the Black community
was really organizing around police violence.
As young activists,
we had a vision for the kind of world we wanted to live in
and really took it seriously that it was our responsibility
to create that world.
And so, we wanted a world that was free of homophobia.
We wanted a world where Black queer people will be seen
and recognized within Black struggle.
And we also wanted a world where,
within the larger queer community,
issues of race and racism will be addressed.
As we did this work,
more and more, we were hearing from young Black people
that they didn't have any place to go,
that they didn't know where to show up.
Dewson House was very much about the energy
of the women who lived in that house,
the women who owned the house.
So there was Makeda, and then her partner Stephanie.
Dewson House, I think for many of us, was ground zero.
It is where not only we developed our politics
around being queer,
it was a place where people came to party.
It's the place where Black lesbians
who lived in Scarborough,
who were closeted from Monday to Friday in their jobs
and then their families
on a Friday or Saturday night
can come downtown to Dewson House
and know that they would be welcome.
You know, it was in the front room
that I first heard Nina Simone, right?
It was in that space where I first danced with another man.
You know, it was in that space
that Blackness and queerness
and Caribbean-ness was normalized.
I put an ad in the Body Politic
for people who were interested in starting a group.
And that was the beginning, for me, of Gay Asians Toronto.
It was the first organization that was,
you know, specifically looking at people who were not white.
You know: "If you're white, you're all right.
If you're brown, turn around."
There just was no space for people of colour.
At least that was my experience of it.
In the summer of '82, they were actually trying to look for
someone from Gay Asians Toronto
to be a speaker at the Pride parade.
And the parade went through Chinatown.
And of course, as Gay Asians Toronto,
we recruited in Chinatown.
We put up posters in Chinatown.
That was really very affirming for me,
to be marching in a parade
where people all around you were cheering you, you know.
And so like: "Hello, here I am!"
For most of them who hasn't really come out, like myself,
it was really a groundbreaking thing.
And I think that was actually the first time
that I feel really proud of my own community.
To have that courage to break through those barriers.
The '70s and early '80s were a time of enormous growth
and organization in queer communities.
And then out of left field, people started getting sick.
Strange cancers were occurring
in otherwise healthy young gay men.
I was brought in to do support services,
which was basically helping
really young, scared gay men die.
That was basically the job.
I had no idea.
I thought for sure if they could send a man to the moon,
they would have AIDS done by September.
I spent my next 30 years working in HIV and AIDS.
Some people thought it was poppers, right?
Or they didn't like poppers.
Other people said it was, like,
too much sex, drugs and rock and roll,
just too much sex in general.
Right? Christian fundamentalists said it was God's retaliation,
God's punishment for sinfulness, right?
The reaction to the pandemic, the AIDS pandemic,
by the straight world was shocking in that context.
The fact that they didn't care,
even openly on some areas of the religious right,
and others almost celebrated it.
We were dealing with end stage of AIDS
of our friends, our lovers,
whether they were Indigenous or non-Indigenous.
So it was that stigma, that fear of AIDS,
the isolation and the segregation.
And we were going to palliative care wards.
You know, we were arranging funerals
or cremations for our friends
without any support from our families or their families.
It was that toxic combination
of political negligence and criminal indifference.
Finally, I bid you pray for the dying...
for those who have to die alone...
for those who are afraid to die...
and for those who cannot wait to die.
I mean, that was a real wake-up
for those of us who had already been infected at that point,
but also in the gay community,
that they were willing to just sit around
and wait for us to die off,
and then straight people and the world would be safe.
The food was left outside my door.
I had to get out of my bed to get the food.
Almost nobody came in,
and if they came in, they were in masks and gowns and gloves
and spent as little time as they could in the room.
The nurses, the orderlies, the doctors,
all of them treated me like I was a leper
back in the biblical times.
I remember the first time sitting there getting a call
from somebody who says:
"I can't bury my lover.
No funeral home will take his body."
And so we said:
"We need an organization that takes on those issues."
And we could speak truth to power.
We could say what needed to be said.
- What do we want? - AIDS action!
- When do we want it? - Now!
- What do we want? - AIDS action!
- When do we want it? - Now!
- What do we want? - AIDS action!
- When do we want it? - Now!
- What do we want? - AIDS action!
- When do we want it? - Now!
- What do we want? - AIDS action!
- When do we want it? - Now!
- What do we want? - AIDS action!
- When do we want it? - Now!
In 1989, the AIDS conference was scheduled for Montreal,
the first time in Canada.
And AIDS Action Now and Act Up New York
and a smaller group called Réaction Sida
decided that we needed to have an impact at this conference.
Not victims, not patients,
but people living with AIDS.
Not victims. Not patients. But people living with AIDS.
At this point,
these conferences were medical and scientific conferences.
And if people with HIV appeared at all,
we appeared as kind of specimens and patients
and nothing much else.
And we decided that it was important
for our voices to be heard
as part of this political project that we were engaged in,
because nobody else was concerned
with accessing experimental treatments.
History will recall, Mulroney did nothing at all.
We were out.
We had a group of maybe 200 people outside
in this demonstration.
And all of a sudden, I heard this ruckus behind me
and turned around to see what was going on,
and it was the Act Up guys,
who just had barged through the main gates to the Palais.
And so, all of a sudden, the entire crowd,
who didn't know what else to do,
decided: "Well, we better follow them, right?"
Silence equals death!
And we seized the stage.
We die, major profits!
This government has been criminally negligent.
People with AIDS have died in this country
without care and without treatment.
We got the message across to the conference organizers
that these conferences could not continue
unless people with AIDS were front and centre.
Release the drugs, stop the profiteering.
As AIDS progressed and as more and more people got ill,
then we began to see
that this was a kind of a sense of community loss,
communal loss that needed to be represented in some way.
And Michael Lynch formed a group
to put together an AIDS memorial.
It was very important to kind of mark the number of people
who were dying.
So this was an extraordinary thing to see.
I had an uncle who was gay.
I was 11 years old when he died.
What I grieve the most, actually,
is not having that gay uncle,
that gay mentor sort of take me through my teenage years,
my coming of age, moving to Toronto,
finding myself in our gay community.
I think I would have really benefited
had he still been around.
Sometimes I would go to Pride,
and it would feel like the universe
was Swiss cheese with holes in it,
like I would see the people who weren't there.
And there was a point where, maybe three years,
I couldn't go to Pride events
'cause I would only see the ghosts.
But I had this fantasy when I was a baby lesbian
about, you know, getting old with these guys
and the guys in my world.
And we'd have an old folks home,
and we'd have, you know, cute little people to take care of us
wearing French maid's outfits.
I don't know what I thought.
But it would be a community
that was growing old and growing grey together.
And all those people that I went dancing with when I came out,
they're dead.
Not just one or two.
They're all dead.
All dead.
Ultimately, the AIDS epidemic
decimated a significant number
of the most important leaders
of the gay movement here in Canada.
People I knew very well and was very close to and respected
and knew how powerful they had been in their contributions.
And many of them are forgotten, totally forgotten today.
When I ran for public office, of course, I realized
that it would be unthinkable for me at that point.
I squashed it.
But I was also absolutely determined
that while I at that point couldn't come out,
that I would do everything in my power
to fight for a world
in which people like me felt totally comfortable and free
to be who we are and to love who we love
and to have sex with who we wanted to have sex with.
And so from the time I was elected, I spoke out.
I want to ask the minister,
does he stand by the promise
that was made by his predecessor as Minister of Justice?
And if so, when will he finally move
to make equality a reality for Canadian gays and lesbians?
In '81, I moved an amendment to the Constitution of Canada
to include sexual orientation in the Charter of Rights,
which was kind of revolutionary back then.
Of course, my amendment was defeated 22 to 2,
crashing defeat.
Madam Speaker, this is not an amendment on sexual orientation.
This is an amendment on sexual deviation.
I am afraid that our society is becoming overly permissive.
We're at a point where sodomites, pedophiles, people who practice bestiality
are becoming our children's guardians.
I mean, really!
If they want to stay in the bedrooms of the nation,
let them stay in the bedrooms of the nation,
but Madam Speaker, never let us allow them
into our armed forces, our RCMP,
and we will work with them so they can stay silent.
Three years later,
a parliamentary committee was established to hold hearings.
And I went to the prime minister then,
Brian Mulroney, and I said:
"Look, you're gonna hold hearings on this section.
"Sexual orientation isn't in Section 15,
"but I have a private member's bill
"to include sexual orientation in human rights legislation.
"I want you to let the committee,
"as part of its hearings across the country,
deal with the issue of sexual orientation as well."
On March 4th of 1986,
John Crosby stood up in the House of Commons
and said the government accepts
the recommendations of the committee.
"The government will take whatever measures are necessary
"to ensure that sexual orientation
"is a prohibited ground of discrimination
in relation to all areas of federal jurisdiction."
This was 1986.
We were the only country in the world, in the world,
which actually had a constitution
that prohibited discrimination based on sexual orientation.
Good evening.
Never before in Canadian history
has a politician publicly declared
that he or she is a homosexual.
It has always been something whispered about,
a rumour, an innuendo.
But now, veteran MP Svend Robinson
has decided to break that political taboo.
What I'm telling Canadians, Barbara,
is that I'm a member of Parliament
who happens to be gay.
I'm, I suppose, saying, "So what?" to that.
But I'm also using this
as hopefully a means of telling Canadians
that there are many other gays and lesbians in this country
who are not able to live up to
their full potential as human beings,
who are subject to discrimination,
who can lose their jobs,
who can be thrown out of their homes,
who can be the subject of violence.
And I guess it's a plea for understanding, for acceptance,
and for laws which will say that we as a society
don't tolerate this kind of discrimination.
I flew home to my constituency, as I did almost every weekend.
And Saturday morning, went into my office,
and it had been completely smashed to bits.
The windows smashed, hate literature there and so on.
I mean, I had death threats.
I had a bullet fired through my office window.
And it was a big, big reason for me coming out,
was to try to fight that hatred and to say to people:
"Yes, maybe you're gay, but that's a gift.
And nobody should take that away from you."
In the early '80s, I was living in Winnipeg.
I had returned from Vancouver in 1983,
primarily because we had learned, you know,
the Indigenous gay men living in Vancouver,
that HIV was transmitted by a virus.
So I thought I could outrun HIV by coming back to Winnipeg.
When I came to the city, I met other youth,
young people that were struggling with their sexuality
and struggling trying to find themselves.
But I knew that if I stayed here and I hung out here
and I met enough people,
I would figure out what it was to be gay.
I have four names, but two are only public.
Only two of them are public.
...is the woman that sits at the centre of Four Directions.
And...
...is a second name that I carry.
And it means you're a helper.
I'm a helper.
My job is to help people, to help Mother Earth...
all creatures that are living.
I grew up in a little village in Northern Manitoba
called Cormorant.
Very early on,
I knew about 5, that I was different.
I was sort of magical in some way.
In 1990, we decided that we were going to host
a gathering in Winnipeg.
When we went to that land...
It's beautiful, beautiful land.
It was not gonna be a mainstream gathering,
a conference or anything like that.
It was going to be a gathering of nations.
Not too tight, you know.
We wanted to have ceremony
as the main part of what we were going to do.
A red-tailed hawk was flying above us in Beausejour.
It was a very hot day.
And to me, that was the sign.
That hawk revealed itself.
Myra came and told us...
While we were in a sharing circle,
she came and told us
that she had had this vision given to her,
and she was given this name
of who we were as gay and lesbian people.
They gave me the words Niizh manidoowag.
Niizh meaning two.
Manidoowag meaning spirit.
Manidoo would be one spirit.
Manidoowag is more than one.
So Niizh manidoowag is what they shared with me.
And...
they spoke with me in a way that was gentle and calm.
But it was also with a certain strictness
that you don't fool around with this.
You don't play with this.
This is sacred.
We opened a portal into the spiritual world
because we had followed those instructions
by our elders and our knowledge keepers
of how to petition the spiritual world for what we need.
And out of that portal came a name, Two-Spirit People.
That name went everywhere,
because everybody heard what she had visioned.
Naming or renaming or self-naming
is an act of liberation.
I felt strange sometimes.
Not only because of being gay,
but because of who I was, my background.
There was something missing.
I needed other Latinos there with me.
I would go to parties, and I'd see Samuel.
And Samuel was already out.
Samuel was the gayest Latino there was.
There was no way that we were going to be part of something
that we didn't belong to.
So we needed to create our own moment,
our own movement.
What was clearly needed is to have a group.
And then HOLA started.
At that time,
it's when the immigration explodes.
Homophobia is intense in Latin America.
It's a crime in some of those countries to be gay.
So, many people were fleeing.
And say, if your friend had arrived here,
the board of volunteers will help people,
go pick people up at the airport...
you know, give them shelter, you know, give them clothing,
winter coats, whatever, food,
take them to, you know, a lawyer,
help them go all the way to immigration.
Chabuka went to immigration a few times.
I went there.
In drag, I went to immigration to help people.
Marching with Grupo HOLA, the first time...
We were apprehensive.
We were, of course, afraid.
But it was time.
Laugh, enjoy
Life is beautiful
Live, sing.
There was a lot of us.
And there was solidarity.
There was care.
There was laughter. There was fun.
There was love. There was camaraderie.
My heart was beating, marching.
And it was emotional, uh...
Just to be free...
and just be ourselves.
When I started doing my parties,
it was right in the middle of the whole AIDS crisis.
My primary goal was to try and make sex positive
and good and sexy.
I went to the party, from what I remember, two times.
I just remember it was very underground.
You know, we were in a special place.
It was a space that was free of prejudice,
free of judgment.
We could just dance and feel beautiful.
Nicolas tapped me on the shoulder and said:
"Listen, I think we're gonna be raided."
We just, you know, got our stuff together and ran out the door,
ran out the window, jumped out the window and hid.
They basically came in,
a bunch of them with flashlights.
A lot of the policemen had removed their badges,
which is definitely a warning sign.
People reacted very quickly.
Go away, fascist cops!
There was a big protest outside of the police station,
the ones that were responsible for the raid.
- Pas de violence! - No!
The police, they taunted people.
They used their batons
and made reference to, like, dicks,
and they would say: "Come suck my dick."
We're here, we're queer, and so are some of you!
We're here, we're queer...
Pas de violence!
Fascist!
Shame, shame, shame, shame, shame, shame!
Shame, shame, shame!
I remember my friend standing in front of the crowd
and crying and showing his bruises and saying:
"Look at what they did to me."
Every social movement is like this.
People get brutalized by the police.
Sex Garage was about the activism
that came out of it.
As marginalized people,
we wouldn't take that shit anymore.
The 1990 raid on the Sex Garage
really set the precedent for establishing Pride in Montreal.
This is seen as this major turning point
in the history of the city for the queer community,
and it really revealed to our community
that the fight wasn't over.
Officer!
I remember walking up Church Street
sometime in the mid to late 1990s,
seeing the police at Pride
and being, like, really taken aback.
I was, like, just really taken aback by it,
and I was like: "What is happening?"
It's about to come to an end.
They're going to take it over.
Pride is going to morph into something
that we will soon not be able to recognize.
What we saw is a simultaneous policing
of what queer life and possibility
and expression should look like.
Folks that were not Black, queer, and trans
were not thinking that police were an issue.
There were a lot of people who felt safe around police.
And because they felt safe around police,
"We won't listen to you Black folks
when you're talking about police issues," right?
So there was often... Folks felt that erasure.
Folks were really upset
and folks wanted somebody to say something.
Sumaya's life matters!
Philando's life matters!
Black Lives Matter, they were the honoured group.
They were leading the parade that year.
Black lives matter!
It was the first pride
that a prime minister was marching in the parade.
And so Justin Trudeau was marching in his linen outfit,
and he was ready to go.
And everything had to move smoothly.
There were snipers on the roof.
The level of, like, police presence
was at an all-time high.
I was part of the Black Lives Matter contingent
who marched at the front of the parade.
So many young Black people
just in all of their full glory.
We had to do a lot of work behind the scenes
to be like: "Trust us, y'all.
We're not just going to, we're not..."
We were like: "No, if we're going to do this,
it's gonna be an action."
ide Toronto!
We are calling you out for your anti-Blackness!
Your anti-Indigeneity!
We will not be moved!
I don't think we have much to be proud about.
I don't think this is a cause for celebration!
Garbage! Assholes. Racist bastards!
Oh, boo!
The only time I've ever heard this
was from a community who should understand what it feels like to be oppressed.
We fought for you. We threw bricks for you.
We got locked up for you!
And so we created the demands,
and it was deliberate that we chose 8 demands about Pride
and one about the police,
because let's be honest,
people were going to focus on the one.
Everyone in this space, sit down!
Stopping the parade for us
didn't mean Pride would not happen.
In fact, it would bring back Pride
to its roots of direct action,
of spontaneous action, of people-led action.
It started out that Prides
were a way of winning visibility
for fairly concrete demands.
The first pride that I went to
was calling for the inclusion of sexual orientation
in the human rights code.
When you look at Pride,
you really see what we fought for.
Who we became.
How we grew as a community.
And what we lost along the way.
Watching that evolution over decades...
Inevitably, we would see that collision
around conservative politics, conservative assimilationist,
and the sort of community-based liberation politics.
If you're a trans high school student
or you're a queer racialized person,
you might not have access to these victories,
these gains that we've made.
You may not.
The kind of work that we should be doing
has to do with broadening out the notion
of what our movement is about.
Right now, the debate is about trans youth.
I follow it closely because I was a trans youth.
I can't believe somebody would oppose what I was doing.
For me, it was completely the opposite.
My family supported me.
I first came out as a young queer kid.
And then when I got to be a little bit older,
I realized there was a bit more going on.
I wanted to be able to look in the mirror
and see myself looking back.
That was so important to me.
So there I was, realizing that I was trans,
and so I came out again.
I think that for some of us, there is...
a sense of being at home everywhere you go.
For some of us, everywhere is your living room.
And for the rest of us,
unfortunately, that's not the case.
Leave our kids alone!
Protect trans kids!
It is a time to stand up,
and I'm really proud of those youth around the world
who are standing up to this patriarchy,
to this fascism.
Love is louder!
I'm thinking about the young who, if the laws change,
if their rights are once again taken away...
I won't be here to see it.
It could happen. I hope it doesn't.
I don't want them to go through what I went through. No. No.
Protect trans kids!
My granddaughter is also homosexual.
She will suffer if the times change.
Do you think a boy is a girl?
What does it matter to you?
It's like we did 3 steps forward,
and now this million for children
is bringing us so far behind.
The same people who wouldn't visit their sons
when they were dying from AIDS
are back forming committees to protect their children,
to ban books.
And the backlash is upon us.
History matters because of what it can do for us today.
The fights maybe are in very different places
than they were 50 years ago,
but the necessity to fight is as urgent now as it was then.
Phobia is about not knowing.
Hate is about not knowing anything about real life.
If Niizh manidoowag could spread like wildfire,
why can't peace, love and respect?
That's my question to the world.
Love is louder!
Closed Captions: MELS