Radical Ambition: The New Left in Toronto by Peter Graham & Ian McKay

Author:Peter Graham & Ian McKay [Graham, Peter & McKay, Ian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781771134231
Google: hRPMvQEACAAJ
Publisher: Between the Lines
Published: 2019-01-15T13:08:31+00:00

Like Black power and left feminism, gay liberation was suffused with the radical ambition to remake society. Many of Toronto’s gay activists, like their feminist sisters, lived in communal housing. Discussions might flow easily from the editorial offices of The Body Politic collective to the kitchens and bedrooms of co-ops, a reality that some participants said contributed to cliquishness and that others valued as an indication of resistance to the system. Gay journalist Gerald Hannon believed that communal living provided the material foundation for the experiment in journalism: since The Body Politic magazine could never afford to pay more than a pittance to a couple of employees, the economies made possible by living together kept both those staffers and the publication’s wider circle of volunteers alive. Certainly the militants of The Body Politic—founded in 1971, it would be a vibrant centre of new leftism for the rest of the decade—sought to “live otherwise” in Hannon’s Marchmount Road house: income was pooled, food shared, and a joint bank account served the entire home. When food ran short, members might sometimes co-operatively shoplift from corporate—never community-owned—grocery stores.89

Often living lives outside the established social conventions, gay liberationists enjoined others to liberate themselves from their chains. “PEOPLE—TAKE OFF YOUR MASKS—DISCOVER YOURSELVES—BE FREE!” urged a TGA pamphlet.90 The group favoured “zaps,” in which unsuspecting night-clubbers were surprised by same-sex “dance-ins.” It also demonstrated against biased media stories, protested the exclusion of sexual orientation from the Ontario Human Rights Code, and issued warnings to patrons entering places where washrooms were kept under police surveillance. It organized gay-identified contingents to march in large protests against nuclear testing and the Vietnam War. More controversially, it decided that no one supporting the war was welcomed as a member.91

Returning to Allan Gardens at the end of the march, 1972.

Courtesy Charles Dobie.

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