October is Queer History Month, and to celebrate, Queer & Now has dug into some of the most revolutionary moments in Toronto’s queer history.
As a group historically subjected to intense discrimination and persecution, the 2SLGBTQ+ community has a long, rich history filled with resilience and triumph. This includes moments of intense joy and deep sorrow, as well as fierce protests and colourful celebrations.
Dr. Craig Jennex, a Toronto scholar of performance, queer politics, and feminist theory and assistant professor at Toronto Metropolitan University, explains that it wasn’t until after the Second World War that queer subcultures became visible in the city.
“There are many reasons for this: the development of suburbs for good ‘normal’ families, new apartment buildings allowing single or shared occupancy, the growing awareness of the ‘threat’ of homosexuality, increasing anonymity, and, in the 60s, publications, organizations, and social spaces that are explicitly framed around urban gay life,” Jennex told Queer & Now.
“There are queer people everywhere, but the seedy promise of urban life has lured many of us from smaller cities and towns,” Jennex explained. He shared that in the 1970s, as Toronto became Canada’s biggest urban city, lesbian and gay politics and culture were coming to the forefront of the city’s culture.
“In the 1970s it was possible to work part-time and survive in this city,” Jennex explained. “Queer activists and artists were able to devote time and energy to imagining and building alternatives. That’s not to say it was easy for them, but it was different from what many of us experience now when we work paycheque to paycheque and still worry about how long we can afford to stay in the city.”
While this is by no means an all-encompassing timeline, in honour of Queer History Month, Queer & Now is highlighting some of the most crucial moments in the queer history of Toronto.
THE FOUNDING OF GLAD DAY BOOKSHOP – 1970
Now standing proudly in Toronto’s Church and Wellesley Village, Glad Day Bookshop had very humble beginnings in 1970. Recognized as the world’s oldest surviving queer bookstore, Glad Day was founded by Toronto queer activist Jearld Moldenhauer as a response to the lack of available queer texts available in the city.
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The first brick-and-mortar Glad Day shop was located at 65 Kendal Ave., with the iconic shop bouncing around various locations over the following decades before landing at its current Church St. home in 2016. As well as providing resources to the community, this venue has been the site of various events and iconic meetings among queer rights activists.
“[Moldenhauer] was very involved with a lot of important censorship cases with Canada Customs [which is] important from the perspective of Canadian legal history,” Dr. Elspeth Brown, a history professor at the University of Toronto told Queer & Now.
“He also was critical to founding The ArQuives. But he also founded the first university-based gay organization. In 1968, he founded the University of Toronto Homophile Association.”
Some of his other accomplishments include founding the Cornell University Homophile Association, as well as the Toronto-based queer magazine The Body Politic.
In addition to her work as a history professor, Elspeth Brown is also the founder and director of UofT’s LGBTQ+ Oral History Digital Collaboratory where she has worked on a variety of different projects focused on queer history.
TORONTO’S FIRST “GAY DAY” PICNIC – 1971
While Toronto Pride celebrations have bloomed into a month-long celebration, the very first Pride was a humble affair. The first Pride picnic was held on August 1, 1971, at Hanlan’s Point on Toronto Island. Organized by the Community Homophile Association of Toronto (CHAT) and Toronto Gay Action, the event focused on community and included food, music and joy.
The following year, Toronto saw its first Pride Week, which included another picnic, panel discussions, an art exhibit, and dances. The inaugural Pride Week also included the city’s first Pride march, which had only 300 attendees, according to The ArQuives.
ESTABLISHMENT OF THE 519 – 1975
In 1975, the City of Toronto purchased the building located at 519 Church St. to open the iconic community centre that still stands there today. The following year, the board that operated the space received an application from a youth services organization requesting permission for a group of gay youth to use the centre. According to the community centre’s website, the request was controversial, with a vote leading to a split between queer and heterosexual board members. The deciding vote, allowing the group to use the space, was submitted by a member who was bisexual but closeted at the time.
Since its inception, The 519 has provided crucial services to the community, including but not limited to support for people experiencing homelessness, safe-sex resources and educational materials, counselling, and early education services. The centre has also been home to many queer activist groups, including those who fought for marriage equality and against police brutality.
Fun fact, The 519 is the original home of Canadian comedy giant YukYuk’s, which has hosted the likes of Jim Carrey and Howie Mandel.
OPERATION SOAP – 1981
Toronto was the location of many queer bathhouse raids carried out by police from the early 1970s to the beginning of the 2000s. However, one night in 1981 changed the course of Toronto’s queer history. On Feb. 5, 1981, in an effort dubbed “Operation Soap,” police raided four queer bathhouses in Downtown Toronto, arresting nearly 300 people. Following the raids, the names of those arrested were published in media reports, leading to additional consequences for those arrested, including homophobic discrimination from employers, friends, and family.
The following evening, community members took to the streets and protested the abuse they experienced at the hands of law enforcement. According to records, the protest included more than 3,000 participants and saw violence break out between police and protesters. A second larger protest calling for an end to police violence against 2SLGBTQ+ communities took place two weeks later. These raids also led to the forming of Lesbian and Gay Pride Day in Toronto.
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Many of those who were charged in Operation Soap had their charges either dropped or dismissed. The 1981 Toronto bathhouse raids and the protests that followed are frequently compared to New York’s 1969 Stonewall riots, where guests of Manhattan’s Stonewall Inn gay bar retaliated against police brutality.
While a pinnacle moment in Toronto’s queer history, Operation Soap was not the end of bathhouse raids in Toronto, with police continuing to raid Toronto bathhouses, gay and lesbian strip clubs and nightclubs up until 2000, according to the Canadian Encyclopedia. However, five years after Operation Soap, in 1986, Ontario added sexual orientation as prohibited grounds for discrimination into its Human Rights Code.
AIDS ACTION NOW! FOUNDED – 1988
During the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, several activist groups were established in Toronto, with members calling on elected officials and healthcare systems to take action to combat the ongoing crisis, this includes AIDS ACTION NOW!, founded in 1988.
“There was a lot of ignorance from politicians, from community members and AIDS ACTION NOW! was very rightfully fed up with it,” Roxy Moon, archives assistant at The ArQuives told Queer & Now.
“They were done with things not being taken seriously, with things not being addressed, with the government refusing to acknowledge that this was something that was occurring, even within the hospitals, [where] people were not giving their respect and care that they deserve when going through this.”
Operating from 1988-2023, AIDS ACTION NOW! focused on improving the length and quality of life for people living with HIV/AIDS by improving their access to treatment for the disease. The group held its first meeting, with around 300 attendees, in February 1988 at Jarvis Collegiate. Heritage Toronto says AIDS ACTION NOW! was one of the most active HIV/AIDS community groups in the city during the 1980s and 90s, hosting various protests and die-ins during this time.
A “die-in” is a protesting tactic where activists would congregate in a public location like Queen’s Park or City Hall, lying down on the road to signify the number of people who had died, or were dying, due to a deadly issue like HIV/AIDS.
Over its 35-year history, the organization held many protests, the first of which occurred in March 1988, outside of Toronto General Hospital, with protesters setting up empty coffins to symbolize the countless people who had died due to AIDS. This was one of the protests that led to the Canadian government giving doctors the green light to offer experimental treatments on compassionate grounds to those living with HIV/AIDS through the Emergency Drug Release Program.
Among its other accomplishments, the group was one of the first in Canada to create an HIV/AIDS treatment information system. Known as the Treatment Information Exchange (TIE), the system collected new information on HIV/AIDS treatment and shared it with community organizations, patients, and healthcare workers.
TORONTO’S FIRST OUT COUNCILLOR ELECTED – 1991
In 1991, Toronto saw the election of its first openly gay councillor, long-time queer rights activist Kyle Rae.
In 1981, Rae was involved with “Gays & Lesbians Against the Right Everywhere,” the activist group behind the iconic Lesbian and Gay Pride celebration that took place in June of that year. Five years later, Rae began working at The 519, before becoming the organization’s executive director in 1987.
Among his accomplishments, Rae was a juror for Toronto’s permanent AIDS Memorial, and he worked on the passage of Bill 7, which amended Ontario’s Human Rights Code to include sexual orientation. Rae also established sensitivity training with Toronto police and convinced TPS to include gay and lesbian victims in statistics on hate crimes.
He was elected to Toronto City Council in 1991, representing Ward 6 as Toronto’s first openly gay city councillor. He chaired the AIDS Subcommittee from 1991 – 1999, worked to get several Toronto hospitals to provide same-sex benefits to their employees, and is behind the annual tradition of raising the Pride flag at Toronto City Hall each Pride Month.
“Then, incredibly, in 2010 his successor for Ward 27 was Kristen Wong-Tam, who is the second elected openly 2SLGBTQ+ person to serve in the city office,” Moon told Queer & Now.
BLOCKORAMA FOUNDED – 1999
Founded in 1999, Blockorama is Toronto Pride’s oldest and largest stage. According to the organization’s website, the event was created due to a lack of representation for African, Black and Caribbean LGBTQ community members during Pride Toronto’s yearly festival.
Founded by activist Jamea Suberi, Blockorama is an annual event organized by Blackness Yes!, a volunteer-run group that celebrates Black queer and trans history, art, and resilience.
“It was founded because those who were not white essentially – but especially Black – 2SLGBTQ+ people did not feel at home in a lot of the Pride events,” Moon explained.
“There wasn’t a space carved out for Black, queer and trans people to exist and to take up space in the same way,” Moon shared.
“It was a way to also reinforce and reinsert Black, African and Caribbean diasporic queerness into already existing Toronto Pride events, asserting that these communities are here and they do exist.”
In addition to the annual Blockorama event during Pride weekend, the group also hosts Blockobana, a similar party hosted the Sunday after the annual Toronto Caribbean Carnival.
TORONTO’S FIRST TRANS PRIDE MARCH – 2009
Toronto’s very first Trans Pride March saw more than 1,500 people take to the streets on June 26, 2009. Inspired by similar rallies stateside, the Toronto event was organized by trans rights activist Karah Mathiason and her wife, Diane Grant.
“With Pride events in the community more oriented towards lesbians and gay men in the queer community, along with political legislation and attacks on the trans community, the need was never greater for Trans Marches in Canada,” the Canadian Pride Historical Society reports.
The annual event typically takes place in Toronto’s Church and Wellesley Village on the Friday of Pride Weekend and celebrates the resilience and beauty of transgender, two-spirit, non-binary and gender-diverse communities, while calling attention to the need for more rights and protections for these marginalized communities.
BLACK LIVES MATTER SIT-IN DURING PRIDE – 2016
In 2016, Black Lives Matter (BLM) activists organized a sit-in while leading the annual Toronto Pride parade, bringing the march to a halt. Protesters called on Toronto Pride to take action on various issues, including funding for Black Queer programs and the end of police participation in Pride.
“Although Pride has radically political Black roots, from the Stonewall Riots to AIDS Action Now! struggles, it had become an increasingly hostile space for Black queer trans individuals,” reads the BLM Canada website.
The parade restarted once the then-executive director of Pride Toronto Mathieu Chantelois signed a document agreeing to the group’s demands.
“There are still issues with Pride,” Moon said. “[This is a] way that community members and community groups like BLM Toronto have asserted that communities don’t have to accept what is given to them, and you can make demands, and you can make things, force things to be changed. This was a really important thing.”
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