Lest we forget
Apathetic gay community should take cue from the past
I’d be ashamed if I were a faggot living in Calgary.
The utter capitulation of that city’s gutless gay community in the wake of the December police raid on Goliath’s bathhouse is an absolute disgrace.
Never mind that 12 of the 13 patrons arrested that night have copped pleas – activist Terry Haldane is the only one who has refused a fine and community service in exchange for an expunged record in three months. Calgary’s gay community has raised less than $1,000 for Goliath’s Defence Fund.
"Goliath’s has dropped right off the radar," activist Stephen Lock tells me. When I point out the wider community’s civic duty to support all of its members, he quips, "Gay Calgarians aren’t even aware of that. They’re pretty self-centred."
This apathy underscores the importance of remembering our past and taking cues from our elders – in Canada’s case, the pivotal role of Montreal in our nation’s battles for gay civil rights.
After decades of police raids on Montreal’s gay nightclubs and saunas (North America’s first recorded gay establishment was Moise Tellier’s Old Montreal "apples and cake shop" in 1869), Montrealers finally fought back in 1977 in an incident The Advocate last year dubbed "Canada’s Stonewall." After cops arrested 145 men at the downtown bars Truxx and Le Mystique on the night of October 21, protests forced Quebec’s National Assembly to pass Bill 88, which added "sexual orientation" to the Quebec Charter of Rights and Freedoms as an illegal basis for discrimination. Quebec became the second jurisdiction in the world to do so, after the Netherlands.
Truxx – as chronicled in filmmaker Harry Sutherland’s outstanding doc Track Two – also inspired activists protesting Toronto’s infamous 1981 bathhouse raids. "If Montreal can do it, so can we," they said.
Now, I’m of a much younger generation and have always believed Montreal’s "Stonewall" was actually the Sex Garage raid on the night of July 14, 1990. That night, cops busted an Old Montreal loft party attended by 400 partygoers, and the subsequent protests (where latex-gloved police beat the living crap out of activists in front of TV cameras) irrevocably shocked three million Montrealers out of their complacency in a way Truxx never did.
"The Truxx raid never changed the attitudes of Montrealers towards gays and it certainly didn’t inject pride in the gay community," veteran activist Michael Hendricks told me for a 10th anniversary Sex Garage feature story I wrote. (Michael is currently suing Canada for the right to marry René, his partner of 29 years.) "That’s why I believe Sex Garage was Montreal’s Stonewall. It created community and brought us together in a common front. It also brought English and French together."
Not surprisingly, the week my story ran, a well-known Canadian journalist reproached me. "You’re wrong," he said. "Truxx was Canada’s Stonewall."
But I point to Puelo Deir, whose Party in the Park fund-raiser with La La La Human Steps and Top 40 Canadian rock band Bootsauce raised $5,000 for the Sex Garage Defence Fund.
That fund-raiser inspired Puelo to co-found Montreal’s Divers/Cité Gay Pride celebrations in 1993 with Suzanne Girard. Divers/Cité attendance topped 1.4 million last summer and helped establish Montreal as one of the world’s Top 5 gay destinations.
"Truxx was a great achievement for its time and people now take it for granted," Puelo says. "AIDS and Sex Garage politicized an entire generation of university students and the disenfranchised, and Divers/Cité showed the mainstream we were numerous and weren’t going to be stopped. But Truxx got the ball rolling."
In other words, even I’ve caught myself thinking the Will & Grace generation doesn’t care about our gay past because their lives are easy, just like older gays and lesbians trivialize the accomplishments of my generation and Sex Garage because they feel their own important contributions have been neglected or ignored.
Now it appears Puelo himself is being written out of the history books.
"Divers/Cité is my baby and when we don’t document our histories, they are reappropriated by others. Of course I want my legacy protected so that when others pushed to the margins see Truxx and Sex Garage, they too can believe they can make a difference and be remembered. That’s why people dying of AIDS created The Quilt – so their deaths were not in vain," Puelo says. "I’m just trying to protect our legacy because if we don’t take care of it, no one else will do it for us."
In Calgary, meanwhile, most faggots still couldn’t give a shit.
Richard Burnett is Editor-at-Large of Montreal's Hour magazine, which published this article on March 27, 2003. Goliath's found-in Terry Haldane's new Calgary court date is scheduled for April 16. |
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