“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.