rfmcdonald | [URBAN NOTE] Torontoist on the Halloween eggings of gays on Yonge Street (Reply)

Amy Grief's blogTo post about the history of Halloween in Church and Wellesley made mention of Jamie Bradburn's Torontoist essay from last year, "The Egging of Yonge Street". This essay noting how the egging of drag queens outside gay bars on Yonge Street was actually a popular custom lasting into the 1980s, provides some real Halloween horror.

[D]uring the 1960s and 1970s, when onlookers congregated on a nearby stretch of Yonge Street at Halloween[,] people lined Yonge between College and Wellesley to jeer drag costume ball attendees. The mob came ready with eggs, ink, and threats.

Several bars along Yonge between College and Wellesley, such as the Parkside Tavern and the St. Charles Tavern began catering to homosexuals by the 1960s, even if their heterosexual owners allowed police to nab clientele. Halloween offered a loophole where, for one night a year, it was fine to flout laws prohibiting men from dressing as women. At other times of the year, it wasn’t unusual for men in drag to be hauled by police down to Cherry Beach and beaten up. This gave rise to costume balls on October 31 which allowed participants to publicly display their sexuality. The parties could be lavish affairs—during Halloween 1969, the August Club at 530 Yonge offered a ball with prizes, buffet, and champagne for $12.50 a head. As the decade ended, the balls drew plenty of onlookers along Yonge Street who, according to the Globe and Mail, “trooped downtown to watch the procession of fabulous female-creatures-who-aren’t.” The paper also observed that the crowd “seemed to regard it as a sort of sophisticated Santa Claus parade.”

The spectacle provoked mixed feelings among some in attendance, as Tony Metie’s account in the debut issue of the gay journal The Body Politic indicates. Metie had gone down to Yonge Street incognito, bringing along a female friend to watch what ensued:

Coming as I did from a town where the very thought of a bar catering exclusively to homosexuals would have driven the local populace to prepare nooses and stakes, the sight of thousands of people gathered to watch men walk the streets openly in female costumes blew my mind. A mixture of emotions was stirred within me. I felt a sense of elation at this blatant display of homosexual culture; it was the first time I had ever seen gay people revealing themselves publicly as gays. When the crowd gasped at some particularly stunning drag queens, I felt a strange sense of pride in being a gay person. But then I would become aware of the jeers and contemptuous laughter, and another part of me would feel ashamed. I realized that the straights were laughing at me, the part of me the drag queens represented. Then I would hate the drag queens. They seemed to be satisfying the straight belief that all faggots were limp-wristed and effeminate. And I knew this wasn’t true; after all, I wasn’t effeminate, was I?

Another early Body Politic piece by Hugh Brewster highlighted the tensions at play:

As soon as the parade is over in front of the St. Charles and the drag queens have gone inside, the mood of the crowd quickly becomes surly and vicious. Gangs of tough adolescents egged on by their girlfriends go looking for “queers” to beat up. The police have an increasingly difficult time controlling the crowds. Ink is thrown and faces get smashed. Last year one sixteen year old in semi-drag was tied to a post and left there until morning. Each year the situation becomes more ugly and potentially explosive. Halloween is on its way to becoming a confrontation between a large gay subculture and a city that pretends it doesn’t exist.

By 1971, police control was required to hold back a hostile crowd estimated up to 8,000 people. While traffic crawled along Yonge between 10 p.m. and 1 a.m., side streets, which offered too many opportunities for bashing, were closed off. The sidewalk for the block around the St. Charles Tavern was guarded by police who, according to the Star, allowed in “only admitted and obvious homosexuals.” Members of the University of Toronto Homophile Association passed out leaflets pleading for understanding.