“Get StreetWise:” Community Safety and The Toronto Gay Patrol

By Hannah Barrie and Jungsim Ko

The Gay Street Patrol, later renamed the Toronto Gay Patrol (TGP), originally formed in the summer of 1981 after the bathhouse raids in Toronto (Demers 32). Five members of the Legal Coordination Committee of the Right to Privacy Committee, an advocacy group created in the aftermath of the bathhouse raids, met on April 4, 1981 to form the Gay Street Patrol (Hooper 232). These men, Elan Rosenquist, Findlay, Paul Rapsey, Allan Clapp, and John Burt, formed the group with six main goals. They sought to:

• patrol streets and laneways where violence was known to occur;
• come to the aid of any victims;
• follow a non-violent policy;
• assist police in making arrests;
• assist and aid in delivering medical care;
• assist victims in the process of laying a criminal charge (232-233).

The TGP was one of the only LGBTQ street patrols in Canada and responded to the increase in bashing against gay men and lesbians in Toronto’s LGBTQ village, facilitated by the post-bathhouse raid atmosphere that was conducive to violence against gays and lesbians (Demers 32). Danny Cockerline, in the 1982 article shown in Figure 3, writes that the community-oriented patrol was formed “to compensate for inadequate police protection and to embarrass police into taking action against queer-bashing incidents”—essentially, gays and lesbians working together to protect their community from within. According to Cockerline, the TGP also served to remind gay people of the threat of attack—he quotes patrol member Rob Fulton, who says, “Awareness of danger is the key to prevention,” illustrating the atmosphere of vulnerability in Toronto’s gay village at the time.

As shown in the flyer above, members of the TGP were trained in self-defence, and were also required to be trained in medical and legal matters (Cockerline). After the TGP held a set of self-defence classes in Toronto’s gay and lesbian communities, members decided to patrol areas of the village at times when bashings occurred frequently (Demers 33). Volunteers were trained to respond to aggression using techniques learned in self-defence classes: whistles to alert others, hand to hand combat rather than weapons, moving in large groups, and using de-escalation before violence (34). Cockerline quotes Fulton: “We are here to prevent violent situations, not to encourage them. ‘Straight-bashing’ is not tolerated.”

Most members of the TGP were young, white, and predominantly male, though lesbians were encouraged to join as well (Demers 36-37; Cockerline). The patrol focused on street violence and was located in the LGBTQ village. According to Demers, this solidified “a particular image of victimhood within the neighbourhood” that did not, for example, include sex workers or trans people (38).

The TGP patrolled for three summers between 1981-1983, but never actually had to intervene in a violent encounter. As evidenced by the archival material, they placed a great deal of emphasis on community-building and participation in events and activism, aiming to make safety fun and social (35). The patrol disbanded before the summer of 1984, and is remembered largely for an emphasis on community-building around self-protection and street safety (39).

Our perception today of the TGP is of a community safety initiative specific to its era and responsive to the needs that it perceived in the village, aiming for less danger and less violence overall. A theoretical, more radical ideal of a Gay Patrol might have attempted to create an alternative to policing, a community-based vigilante justice initiative, or perhaps even an imagining of imminent violent repercussions for gay-bashers (Halberstam 199). Instead, it could be argued that the TGP worked as a non-violent addition to the police; one of the initial goals of the TGP included assisting police in making arrests, and the patrol also felt that it was their duty to patrol the streets until police were able to adequately protect their community, thus framing themselves as a stepping-stone to the police rather than a radical alternative (Cockerline). From our vantage point, we might critique the lack of open resistance to police, but we understand that the atmosphere at the time, post-bathhouse raids, was likely not conducive to actual retaliation against police from the TGP.

It’s understandable that, after the violence of the bathhouse raids, the LGBTQ community in Toronto sought non-violent alternatives. However, theoretically, we suggest that a limitation of the TGP might be their lack of imagined violence; the TGP’s self-image of gays and lesbians inherently in need of defending themselves may have served to maintain power dynamics and cement a hierarchy that portrayed gay-bashers as powerful and violent, and gays and lesbians as in need of protection. Rob Fulton’s statement that “Awareness of danger is the key to prevention” exemplifies the framework that the TGP was operating within. Aiming for structural change or imagining the possibility of a violent response to violence could have been more radical alternatives.

Similarly, the TGP had the potential to bridge difference across marginalized groups, working together against the common enemy of street violence—this article by Craig Jennex discusses such a coalitional movement against police—and it certainly brought members of the gay and lesbian community in Toronto together with the common goal of protecting each other. However, another possible limitation of the patrol was its lack of diversity; the TGP was largely comprised of young white gay men and several lesbians, exemplifying the divisions in Toronto’s LGBTQ+ community at the time.

But we recognize that it’s easy to critique the TGP from a distance. We acknowledge that the patrol was a unique, community-oriented group with a particular mandate and a focus on protecting each other while making safety social, active, and fun. Despite its potential limitations, the fact that the TGP never had to intervene in a violent encounter is perhaps an example of the patrol’s effectiveness for the specific community it served.

Authors

Hannah Barrie and Jung Sim Ko are both Master’s students in the Gender Studies and Feminist Research program at McMaster University.

Works Cited

Cockerline, Danny. “Gay Patrol: A Different Kind of Streetwalking.” The Body Politic, no. 83, p. 10. Toronto, Pink Triangle Press, May 1982. Archives of Sexuality & Gender.

“Defensercize!” Body Politic, no. 101, 1984, p. 27. Archives of Sexuality & Gender, Accessed 20 Mar. 2019.

Demers, Benjamin. “Constructing a Victim of Violence: The Politics of ‘Safe Space’ in Toronto’s LGBTQ Village.” BA Honours Thesis, McGill University, 2017.

Halberstam, J. “Imagined Violence/Queer Violence: Representation, Rage & Resistance.” Social Text 37, 1993: 187-201. https://programaddssrr.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/imagined-violence-queer-violence-representation-rage-and-resistance.pdf

Hooper, Tom. “‘Enough is Enough’: The Right to Privacy Committee and Bathhouse Raids in Toronto, 1978-83.” PhD Thesis, York University, 2016. https://yorkspace.library.yorku.ca/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10315/33501/Hooper_Thomas_H_2016_PhD.pdf?sequence=2&isAllowed=y

Jennex, Craig. “NO MORE SHIT! Complicated Collectivity, Past and Present.” GUTS: Canadian Feminist Magazine, Winter 2014/15. http://gutsmagazine.ca/no-shit/