“Fall, 1980” - Writing About Operation Soap and the Beginning of the Gay Rights Movement in Toronto

This February will mark 45 years since Operation Soap, the raids on Toronto’s gay bathhouses that ignited gay rights organizing and resistance to police brutality in Toronto. While the Stonewall uprising, in New York, has become iconic, the Canadian iteration has received less representation. (In 2016, Buddies in Bad Times put on Raid: Operation Soap and the Toronto Police Chief officially apologized; there are also good articles from 2021, the 40th anniversary of the raids). Digging around, I found some excellent archival material, including a CBC Radio podcast containing an interview from shortly after the raids with a man arrested there. He says:

“Doors were being smashed, glass was cracking and we were silent. Our heads were lowered and suddenly a frightening realization of being naked and being surrounded by raw power. How hopeless the situation was. What despair came over us. I am the son of concentration camp victims, and I never knew what my parents went through until that night.”

I included a bit of this interview in a scene in “Fall, 1980,” a short story I worked on periodically over many years, now out in Toronto Journal. The story’s narrator was a teenager in 1980, who finds herself drawn to a punky, politically-conscious kid in her affluent high school. They start walking around the city together and discover Queen West and the bathhouses on Richmond Street; after the raids, they attend an organizing meeting at Jarvis Collegiate and then join more than 4000 people at a demonstration on Feb. 20, 1981. In the story, these events are part of a teenager’s dawning realization of her own queerness, of the world’s brutality, and of people’s continual fight for justice. For her, as for many of us, love and a sense of alienation from dominant culture are the catalysts for political awareness and the belief in working towards a better world.

I’m grateful to those who fought and continue to fight for queer liberation and against oppression and police brutality in all its forms. And I post this with thanks to the early readers of this story and to Toronto Journal for giving it a home.

Letter-writing

October 4, 2025

A template for writing to Premier Ford about Bill 33 and his takeover of five school boards in Ontario. With thanks to the Toronto Education Action Network for their research and outreach:

To: Premier Doug Ford, Minister of Education Paul Calandra

Cc: MPP Chandra Pasma (Education Critic); Your MPP

Dear Premier Ford and Minister Calandra

I am writing to you as a parent/caregiver/concerned citizen in Ontario to express my strong opposition to the Provincial takeover of five school boards. I oppose the removal of our democratically elected local trustees, an action you have taken despite more than one audit finding no financial mismanagement or wrongdoing. You have placed the entire responsibility of these 22 elected trustees into the hands of one appointed supervisor who has no experience in education. 

Furthermore, all trustee decision-making was made publicly and with full transparency, including monthly live-streamed board meetings. There is no longer any public consultation in decision-making processes about our children’s education. The provincially-appointed supervisor provides no explanation of decisions – for instance the recent decision to end the lottery system of admissions to specialty schools. This is a complex issue, yet a policy has now been taken, without consultation with educators and parents, by an unelected administrator with, again, no expertise in education. This lack of transparency is further highlighted by the move to halt live-streaming of public meetings of TDSB Advisory Committees, such as the Parents Involvement Advisory Committee (PIAC) and the Special Education Advisory Committee (SEAC). Limiting these meetings to in-person places an unnecessary and unfair restriction on parent and caregiver involvement in these committees, which exist to facilitate parental involvement in students’ learning environments and processes. 

Bill 33 also promises to reintroduce police officers into schools, a dangerous move that demonstrably harms racialized and disabled students. In 2017, after years of advocacy by students, parents, educators, and community members, TDSB trustees voted overwhelmingly to cancel the School Resource Officer (SRO) program. Staff and student surveys and community consultations consistently showed strong  opposition to this police-in-schools program, which studies show does not reduce instances of violent behavior in schools, except those experienced by students (disproportionately racialized students) at the hands of the police officers. If you truly want to reduce violent incidents in schools, there is clear evidence about what measures will accomplish this: smaller class sizes and more mental health support in schools. 

Despite your government’s claims that you are investing record amounts of money in education, the numbers present a clearly contradictory story. 

Since 2018, the provincial government has cut $6.3 billion from education. As a result, half of the school boards across Ontario are grappling with deficits and are being forced to cut vital staff and programs. 

The answer to this is not supervision and the elimination of public consultation and voice in public schools. The answer is to provide sufficient funding for school boards to provide excellent public education to all children. 

I’m calling on you, the Provincial Government, to:

• Provide proper, sustainable, inflation-adjusted funding for education;

• Withdraw Bill 33;

• Reinstate our trustees and leave local decision-making in the hands of locally elected trustees.

I look forward to hearing from you regarding your position on these issues and hope you will stand up for our children and public education.

Sincerely,