[URBAN NOTE] "The Murder of Emanuel Jaques and the Cleanup of Yonge Street"

[rfmcdonald]

Published before Orlando massacre, Chris Bateman's Torontoist article looks at the historical significance of one Portuguese-Canadian boy's murder in 1977, for Toronto's GLBTQ communities and for Yonge Street.

The murder of Emanuel Jaques stunned the city in August 1977. Police handout.

The body of 12-year-old Emanuel Jaques was found wrapped in a green garbage bag on the roof behind a Yonge Street body-rub parlour on August 1, 1977.

The young boy worked shining shoes at Yonge-Dundas Square to make extra money for his family, Portuguese immigrants who had arrived in Canada three years earlier.

Jaques had been missing for four days, when, after an excruciating long weekend of frantic searching, police detectives found his lifeless body above the ramshackle three-storey building.

He had been lured inside, injected with needles, sexually assaulted, and drowned in a sink.

[. . .]

Downtown Yonge Street in the late ’70s was lined with strip clubs, body-rub parlours, and sex shops.

Between Adelaide and Bloor, there were 31 “nude encounter” or massage parlours, about six adult bookstores, and dozens of porno movie houses, according to a report published in The Globe and Mail about a week before Jaques’ death, making one of the largest concentrations of sex-related businesses in North America.

“In addition to strip-tease and live sex shows, there is one parlour that guarantees that its female attendants will masturbate customers as part of the $25 entrance fee,” the paper reported.

The strip’s reputation for vice and sleaze flew directly against the idea of “Toronto the Good”—the city’s perception of itself as a religious and moral stronghold.

As such, the municipal and provincial governments committed serious efforts to cleaning up Yonge Street by trying to sweep away its gritty, neon-soaked sex emporiums and chintzy stores.

Just at the time Jaques was murdered, Ontario premier William Davis and Metro Toronto officials were drafting legislation to drive out the street’s most undesirable elements through rezoning and licensing.

There's much more at Torontoist.