The Legal Reform: May 4th, 1969
To be free to live in your body and love who and how you wish has been a contentious topic in Canada for a long time. Among those who became marginalized and punished on these grounds were LGBTQ2S+ people in Canada. For a little over the first hundred years of the settler colonial nation-state of Canada, people perceived as queered from the norm in their sexuality and gender were persecuted for simply being alive. It was not until May 4th, 1969, that homosexuality was decriminalized in Canada through the Criminal Law Amendment Act. Now, while this hard-won legal change meant you couldn’t be imprisoned for certain ‘homosexual acts,’ the fight for the acceptance of people’s right to love and freedom to choose who and how to do so was far from finished. The prejudice that had created the practice of imprisoning people for being queer did not disappear overnight, nor did people gain the right to love freely in Canada. That was a long battle ahead. While many remember the legacies of these moments of resistance through the demonstrations of outrage and anger at the injustice, there is often a less remembered form of resistance that was practiced daily, and it is the right to find joy in your desires. As the reality of the decriminalization of homosexuality set in, queered people across the nation came together to create pockets of acceptance for themselves. This is the future they were fighting for, and in those dance halls, parties, and pubs, it was the embodiment of hope for safer queer futurity that was being expressed – not despite their sexualities/genders but rather in celebration of them.
The Incident: January 5th, 1974
On January 5th, 1974, almost five years after the decriminalization of homosexual acts, Adrienne Potts, Pat Murphy, Sue Wells, and Heather Elizabeth found themselves arrested outside a Toronto Bar for expressions of homosexual joy.
Publications popular in the Queer community like The Body Politic quickly spread the news of this injustice and shared the details of the arrests for the broader queer community. The article entitled “Uppity Women” was published in the February edition of the Body Politic and shared details of the arrests.
As relayed through the Body Politic article, women had gone to the ‘Brunswick Tavern’, a pub located on Brunswick and Bloor street in Toronto, for ‘amateur nite.’ They quickly found themselves being sexually harassed by a male patron. As they refused his advances, he became increasingly aggravated, to the point where he went so far as to dump a glass of beer out on Adrienne’s head. The women decided a small rebuff would be to sing “I Enjoy Being a Dyke” (a parody of “I Enjoy Being a Girl” by Rodgers and Hammerstein). Mid-song, the bar owner pulled out their mic and demanded they leave the premises. Eyeing the male patron, who was still there despite the bar owner’s promise he would be removed from the establishment, the women refused to leave. This escalated, and the bar owner called in the police, who spent hours holding the women at the police station and making sexist and homophobic remarks.
For more on the Brunswick Four, see: I Enjoy Being An Activist: Lesbian Protest in Canadian History.
The Community and Public Response: Feb 1974
This maltreatment sparked outrage not only in the queer community but also for lawyer Judy LaMarsh, a former Liberal cabinet minister, who took on their case pro-bono. In part, her involvement with the case led to wide-scale coverage of their arrests and trial across Canada, cemented its place in Canadian Queer History.
To help these women, The Body Politic shared that a community legal defence fund has been created for the women who had come to be known as the ‘Brunswick Four-Minus One’. The fund was entitled the H(eather).A(drienne).S(ue).P(at), or more often just ‘H.A.S.P. Fund’. In advance of the March 4th, 1974 trial, there were a series of fundraisers for the H.A.S.P. Fund, most prominently a series of dances. The H.A.S.P. Fund organizers invited the queer community to come out and not only dance but in a sense ‘come out of the closet’, if only for the evening, to celebrate their sexualities and, in doing so, to actively protest these same freedoms being taken away from the ‘Brunswick Four- Minus One’.
Dancing, Joy & Resistance: Feb 28th, 1974 & Thursday, May 23rd, 1974.
It was a desire for a safer queer future then, that one February 28th, 1974, on a nose-bitingly chilly evening in Toronto, queer community members gathered at the C.H.A.T. Centre to embody their protest through dance. The flyer had the sublime catchphrase “dance and have a gay time, support a worthy cause,” and I’d like to imagine they did just that in the Community Homophile Association of Toronto (C.H.A.T.) Centre on 201 Church Street, they not only fought to raise money for the future they deserved but also had fun in the present in which they lived.
Taking the pun of ‘Gay’ here, I think it gives liberty to imagine that this was a space not only of resistance but also of joy. As I write this in 2022, I can imagine that experience, entering a dance – bursting with a mix of nerves and excitement as I move out of the night air into a warm, safe space in which I am free to move as I wish. I can imagine that the mundane was mixed into the revolutionary. As the day shifts from the mundane of work or school to sordid phone calls with friends and lovers alike, friends getting together before, drinks being made, gossip exchanged, and the particular timeless conversation of “is this the right outfit” being played out. All this building excitement and joy, mixed together with the fight for a future in which this dance becomes a little more mundane, in which the underbelly of fear behind your excitement is no longer a factor. Most importantly, a future in which the world feels like a space where you can safely be yourself. For now, though, you swallow your fear and fight for freedom, so you dance – for yourself, the ‘Brunswick Four – Minus One’, and the future.
The history of Canadian queer life is fraught with oppression and attempts to deny queer people in Canada their freedoms. And the fight is far from over, but it’s won over time, over days and events like the second H.A.S.P. Fundraising dance on May 23rd, 1974. Or maybe from your screen, learning about histories of joyful resistance. May you dance again, “have a gay time, [and get to] support a worthy cause.”
For more on the power of collective dance, see: “Community, Joy, and Collective Resistance Through Dance: The Gay Community Dance Committee Presents…”