News Item, circa 1981 – police raid gay bathhouses in Toronto, Montreal, and Edmonton. Toronto’s Richmond Street Spa is so badly damaged it never re-opens. Toronto’s gay community rises up in frustrated anger and marches for three nights down Yonge Street and surround Police District 52 chanting "No More Shit!" Examples of police misconduct are cited in gay press. All those charged as found-ins plead not guilty. Following the publishing of his name in local press, a man charged with being a found-in in Edmonton’s Pisces Spa commits suicide.
News Item, circa 2000 – police raid a womyn-only night at a local Toronto bathhouse, citing liquor violations. Organizers of the Pussy Palace claim police harassment and charges are eventually dismissed. In the same year, The Bijoux Theatre is raided. Nineteen men, mainly married and Asian, are arrested. Charges are dropped against those who pleaded not guilty and the Crown is persuaded to reverse the guilty pleas of the others.
News Item, circa 2002 – police raid Calgary’s only gay bathhouse, Goliath’s Sauna-tel, charging 13 men as found-ins in a common bawdy house and four individuals with being keepers of a common bawdy house. Fearing exposure, twelve of the men charged as found-ins opt for Alternative Measures; only one man refuses to be afraid and pleads not guilty. His case has yet to come to trial.
News Item, circa 2003 – Montreal police raid Taboo, a popular gay strip club on St. Catherine’s Street West. Several dancers and patrons are charged with committing acts of indecency and police allege they were investigating under-aged dancers. Only one dancer was found to be under age after he had given management false information. He turned 18 a few weeks later.
News Item, circa 2004 – police raid The Warehouse Spa and Baths in Hamilton Ontario, citing various smoking, fire, and health violations. While no charges of operating a common bawdy house have yet been laid, two men are charged with committing acts of indecency. Allegations of police misconduct including rough treatment of patrons, verbal abuse, and forcing men to drop their towels and dress in front of female officers are made.
Meanwhile throughout the 80s, 90s and into the 2000’s, police continue to lay isolated charges against individual men, often closeted, found cruising the parks or washrooms in most urban centres, and a few rural areas, throughout Canada.
Homosexual sex – specifically gay male sex – continues to be criminalized, at least in practice if not officially. Sex in general tends to be criminalized in Canada, and the US, unless it is between two consenting adults, preferably married, and done in absolute privacy (no three ways allowed).
Why does The State care who’s getting it on with whom and how it’s done? What harm is being done if two men, two women, or any combination thereof, choose to have sex with each other? We are not talking about fornicating on Main Street at high noon and giving Aunt Cissy and the kids nightmares. We are talking about competent adults making choices that suit them and not inconveniencing or offending anyone.
True, some individuals are offended by the idea of two men, two women, or groups of men, women or both engaging in sex. But they are not witness to such acts, so their offence is one of personal morals.
If men having sex in a gay bathhouse offends you, then don’t attend a gay bathhouse. If one is offended by men and women exchanging partners at a swing club, don’t go to a swinger’s club. If men, or women, dressed in Leather or other fetish outfits flogging, paddling, fisting, or binding their submissives and bottoms is offensive to you, the solution is simple; don’t attend S&M parties.
Rendering such activities no longer criminal is not going to result in mass orgies on Stephen Avenue Mall or inappropriate sexual behaviour in the produce department of one’s local Safeway. Those interested in such activities will continue to engage in them without the worry of a criminal charge lurking in the shadows and those not in the least interested in such activities won’t be affected either way.
The August 3rd, 2004 raid on Hamilton’s Warehouse Spa and Baths was, ostensibly, a "routine fire, health, and safety inspection". Between 11 and 13 individuals were involved, including four plain-clothes officers, 2 female officers, and a female Public Health official.
During the "inspection" police went to the dark room where they pulled out two men, and the video room where one man was pulled out. It is alleged that police grabbed the men by the arms then took them "by their heads" and pushed the men’s faces up against a glass wall in the area.
The men, clad in towels, were told to spread their legs, whereupon the police removed their towels and proceeded to frisk them – one supposes to ensure no concealed weapons were on a naked man. The men were then handcuffed and, apparently, treated roughly and rudely. While the male officers went to look at something in another section of the establishment, the men were left alone to dress in front of the 2 female officers who had to assist the men as they remained handcuffed. When asked by the owner what was "going on", police initially responded that it was "an inspection". When he asked them what was going on with the customers, he was allegedly asked "Are you stupid or just pretending to be stupid?"
At the time of writing, The Warehouse has not been cited as a "common bawdy house" although two men have been charged with "committing acts of indecency". The owners of The Warehouse were issued two tickets for having a smoking environment without proper signage; the one ticket was for having a can behind the counter with cigarette butts in it and the other ticket was for having ashtrays in the establishment. Various fire code violations were also cited, one being for a locked door connecting the owner’s private residence to the establishment.
Much of what occurred at The Warehouse in Hamilton is eerily similar to what happened during the raid on Goliath’s. While apparently the Calgary police were considerably more polite than those from Hamilton, the Hamilton raid, like the Calgary raid, also involved several officials from various city and provincial health, fire, bylaw and liquor agencies.
In both instances, the police officers had absolutely no idea – no context – of what they were observing. In both instances, the police operated on the assumption that the establishment was not, in fact, private but public.
In both the Goliath’s situation and in last year’s raids against private swinger’s clubs in Quebec, comments about how the establishments were "clearly" set up to facilitate the commission of acts of indecency were made.
Equally disturbing are the comments from some factions within our own communities that, rather than condemning State interference in the sexual lives of their compatriots, choose instead to applaud the crack down on such "dens of iniquity" and choose to criticize the existence of bathhouses, sex clubs, or backrooms of gay bars (not in Alberta!) as somehow casting a black mark against the community.
While such individuals may very well have ethical or moral issues around such environments, I’m amazed and disturbed by the fact they seem unable to make the connection between a "crack down" on these and the potential for a "crack down" on any form of same-sex sexual expression.
On the other hand, a reaction against such invasions of personal space is starting to form. Groups in Ontario, and specifically Toronto, are mobilizing to fight back against these invasions of sexual space, as agents of the State reject the move towards assimilation of queer culture. The Coalition for Lesbian and Gay Rights in Ontario (CLGRO) has had a committee dedicated to repealing the "sex laws" in the Criminal Code for some time. The Xtra chain of queer newspapers (which publish Xtra out of Toronto, Capital Xtra in Ottawa and Xtra West out of Vancouver) have an online petition to repeal the same laws. People don’t like it when the State starts poking around in their private lives or assuming we are mindless children needing guidance from Big Brother and punished when we flout that guidance.
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Contributor Stephen Lock |
Topic Bathhouse Raid | Politics |
