On Saturday February 5, 1983, the Gay Community Dance Committee (GCDC) held “Soap: A Remembrance of the 1981 Bath Raids” (Jennex and Eswaran 187). Exactly two years earlier, on February 5, 1981, the Toronto police raided four bathhouses in what was called “Operation Soap.” Over 300 men were arrested in the raids, with 286 charged for being found in a common bawdy house and 20 for operating a bawdy house.
Canada Refuses to Acknowledge State Violence, We Refuse to Forget
In a time where the Canadian government loudly proclaims its tolerance and acceptance of 2SLGBTQ+ people, it can be hard for those of us who didn’t live through these raids to understand the hatred and malice expressed towards queer people by the state. Canada has a shining image to keep up—the government and patriotic public don’t want us to remember the state-sanctioned violence performed against queer people (or to recognize ongoing violences, for that matter). The “Equality Dollar” was rolled out in 2019, marking 50 years since homosexuality had been decriminalized in Canada (Jennex and Eswaran 231). This celebration of decriminalization ignored the fact that the men arrested in the 1981 bathhouse raids were charged with being found in a common bawdy house, a bawdy house being a place “kept for the purposes of prostitution or for the practice of acts of indecency” (Jennex and Eswaran 158). With no incidents of sex work found in these raids, we’re left to assume that consensual sex between adult men was still considered an indecent act over a decade after “decriminalization.”
Add this onto the pile of reasons we must remember—not only remember the violence, but also queer resistance.
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