[URBAN NOTE] "A Look Back At Toronto’s Gross Indecency Laws"

[rfmcdonald]

Torontoist's Michael Lyons notes the way Canada's gross indecency laws have been used over the generations to persecute Torontonians, particularly but not only non-heterosexual ones.

Prior to Pierre Trudeau’s amendments, sexual legislation was a direct import from British colonial rule. Up until 1892, Canada aped Britain’s sodomy or buggery laws that, ever unhelpful, considered the crime so grave as to be unnamable and indefinable. Convictions for consensual sex between adult males were rare, as “sodomites” needed to be literally caught with their pants down.

After new “gross indecency” laws were written into British legislation, they were imported almost word for word by a young minister of justice to Sir John A. MacDonald, and eventual fourth prime minister of Canada, Sir John Thompson. At the time, members of Parliament admitted that the vagueness of the bill “might lead to consequences that he [Thompson] does not intend. Thompson responded: “I think it is impossible to define them any better, for the reason that the offences which are aimed at are so various. […] I think it is better to leave it in this form.” He pointed out, rather unhelpfully, that they were no more vague than their English origins.

But the rationale behind these indecency laws was to make a mockery of gay men, explains queer historian Tom Hooper. “It was never designed to populate prisons, it was never designed to gather fines. It was designed to make people an object of scorn, humiliation, and shame so that you can control society through your moral values,” he says.

Hooper’s work explores the infamous 1981 Toronto gay bathhouse raids and community reaction to the Metropolitan Toronto Police’s rounding up of more than 300 men in a single night. While Trudeau’s amendment partially decriminalized homosexual sex, it excluded acts not “committed in private if it is committed in a public place, or if more than two persons take part or are present,” making the raids technically legal. Owners of the bathhouses were also charged under common bawdy house laws, giving police room to maneuver their dubiously titled “Operation Soap.”

The 1981 Toronto bathhouse raids may be the most widely known, but are far from the only time the full force of the law was brought down on members of the gay community—including the 1978 Toronto Barracks bathhouse raids. One of the men arrested there was teacher Don Franco, who sought legal recourse and brought the issue further to the forefront.

“In the weeks after Franco was arrested in that raid, a staff sergeant named Gary Donovan called his school board and notified the school board that he had been charged,” Hooper says. “The police force disassociated themselves from this incident. It was not standard practice to do this, but it was nonetheless seen as a violation of their right to privacy.”