Content warning: This piece includes offensive language.
Gathering in Toronto’s Church-Wellesley Village for Halloween is a longstanding tradition. Church Street is closed while crowds descend upon the neighbourhood and revellers display their costumes; people snap photos and admire the creativity on display. In the 1960s and 1970s, though, some saw Halloween as an excuse to head down to a nearby stretch of Yonge Street to jeer, hurl eggs, and threaten.
In the 1960s, an increasing number of bars along Yonge between College Avenue and Wellesley Street catered to gay clientele, although the establishments’ heterosexual owners occasionally allowed police to target them. Halloween offered a legal loophole: for one night a year, it was fine to flout laws prohibiting men from dressing as women — laws that, on other nights, could lead to people being hauled down to Cherry Beach for a beating. This gave rise to costume balls on October 31 that allowed participants to publicly display their sexuality.
Some were lavish affairs: during Halloween 1969, the August Club at 530 Yonge offered a ball with prizes, buffet, and champagne for $12.50 a head. As the decade ended, the balls drew plenty of onlookers along Yonge Street; according to the Globe and Mail, people “trooped downtown to watch the procession of fabulous female-creatures-who-aren’t.” The paper also observed that the crowd “seemed to regard it as a sort of sophisticated Santa Claus parade.”
The spectacle provoked mixed feelings among some in attendance, as Tony Metie’s account in the debut issue of the gay journal The Body Politic in 1971 indicates. Metie went down to Yonge Street incognito, bringing along a female friend. “Coming as I did from a town where the very thought of a bar catering exclusively to homosexuals would have driven the local populace to prepare nooses and stakes, the sight of thousands of people gathered to watch men walk the streets openly in female costumes blew my mind,” Metie observed. “A mixture of emotions was stirred within me. I felt a sense of elation at this blatant display of homosexual culture; it was the first time I had ever seen gay people revealing themselves publicly as gays. When the crowd gasped at some particularly stunning drag queens, I felt a strange sense of pride in being a gay person. But then I would become aware of the jeers and contemptuous laughter, and another part of me would feel ashamed. I realized that the straights were laughing at me, the part of me the drag queens represented. Then I would hate the drag queens. They seemed to be satisfying the straight belief that all faggots were limp-wristed and effeminate. And I knew this wasn’t true; after all, I wasn’t effeminate, was I?”
Photo from the November 1, 1977, edition of the Toronto Sun.
Those who were antagonistic didn’t limit themselves to jeers and contemptuous laughter. “As soon as the parade is over in front of the St. Charles [Tavern] and the drag queens have gone inside, the mood of the crowd quickly becomes surly and vicious,” Hugh Brewster wrote in The Body Politic of the scene on Yonge Street on Halloween 1970. “Gangs of tough adolescents egged on by their girlfriends go looking for ‘queers’ to beat up. The police have an increasingly difficult time controlling the crowds. Ink is thrown and faces get smashed. Last year one sixteen-year-old in semi-drag was tied to a post and left there until morning. Each year the situation becomes more ugly and potentially explosive. Halloween is on its way to becoming a confrontation between a large gay subculture and a city that pretends it doesn’t exist.”
By 1971, police control was required to hold back a hostile crowd of around 8,000 people. While traffic crawled along Yonge between 10 p.m. and 1 a.m., side streets that offered too many opportunities for bashing were closed off. The sidewalk for the block around the St. Charles Tavern was guarded by police, who, according to the Toronto Star, allowed in “only admitted and obvious homosexuals.” Members of the University of Toronto Homophile Association (Canada’s first gay and lesbian student organization) passed out leaflets pleading for understanding.
But the egging and jeering continued.
Anxiety was high in 1977 in the wake of that summer’s sexual assault and murder of 11-year-old shoeshine boy Emmanuel Jaques in a Yonge Street body-rub parlour, a crime that increased public antagonism toward homosexuals. Community members and politicians who feared the worst, including Mayor David Crombie, urged police to crack down on the mob instead of looking the other way when attacks occurred. Members of the Gay Alliance Toward Equality and the Metropolitan Community Church created Operation Jack O’Lantern to offer escorts to protect against assault. Most patrons of the St. Charles entered via the back door to avoid the usual egging.
Photo from the November 1, 1977, edition of the Toronto Sun.
With around 140 police officers on duty that night, 40 people out of a mob estimated to be between 3,000 and 5,000 were arrested for various misdemeanours. Seizures included 15 dozen eggs, which were served for breakfast the next morning at the Fred Victor Mission and the Salvation Army. Some of those eggs landed on Deputy Police Chief Tom Cooke’s car. “One young goof was charged with public mischief when he tried to hit a gay, missed, and smashed his fist through an unoffending window,” wrote Globe and Mail columnist Dick Beddoes. “His impious paw was bleeding when officers led him away. Comes under the heading of taming an oaf.” Beddoes lamented the need for a police presence when any minority group celebrated their community, as “we are not civilized enough to accept differences in colour and sexual persuasion.”
The courts didn’t look kindly on some of those arrested. When three egg tossers were sentenced to three days in jail in mid-November 1977, Provincia Court Judge Frank Fay expressed his low opinion f their actions. “If you gentlemen think that the people at whom you tossed the eggs were sick, I can assure that this court views your mentality as being much sicker,” Fay noted. “This kind of act will not be tolerated by the courts nor the city and the people of this community. This is the ultimate cowardice.”
The following Halloween, as the police increased efforts to work with the gay community, 95 people were arrested.
As preparations were made for Halloween 1979, Jack Ackroyd, deputy chief of the Metro Toronto Police, indicated he wouldn’t tolerate any physical violence or property damage and promised gay community leaders that he would remove any officers who made homophobic remarks. Volunteers from an activist group, the Gay Liberation Union, offered to escort anyone who felt threatened.
Yet people continued to join in the spectacle, urged by radio DJs who hyped the Halloween mob in advance. Those heading downtown thought it was innocent fun. “It’s great, because everyone’s so friendly, right?” a 21-year old woman who couldn’t wait to toss some eggs told the Globe and Mail. “Except if you’re a faggot — that’s different.” Some chanted “kill the queers.” Out of an estimated crowd of 5,000 in 1979, police arrested 130. Most taken into custody were hauled away for breaching the peace, which translated into detention until the party was over without earning a criminal record. A police superintendent interviewed by The Body Politic called the mob “a sad-looking bunch” that had stood for six hours doing little but tossing eggs at one another; the 300 attendees at the St. Charles ball, he added, “were inside having a great time.”
Article from the November 1, 1979, edition of the Toronto Sun.
As preparations for Halloween 1980 began, The Body Politic ran an editorial urging an end to the madness. “The events of October 31 are a civic disgrace, and should be a source of shame to every citizen of the city. Every citizen, every elected official should share every gay person’s dismay at having to face, each year, a night of humiliation and hate. A night that is passed over in silence, that has drawn no criticism, no condemnation, that has not moved one single elected official to say ‘This is appalling and disgraceful. This must be stopped.’ It is in the interests of the entire city of Toronto that the city lose its reputation, both here and abroad, for allowing a night of anti-gay bigotry unparalleled in any other city in Canada.”
Police contemplated blocking off the St. Charles Tavern with a convoy of garbage trucks but concluded that “hoodlums” would damage them. Instead, they erected metal barriers along the east sidewalk. Media outlets, especially radio stations, received letters from police and from city councillor Allan Sparrow urging them not to publicize the evening. Local merchants were asked to reserve eggs for regular customers. The Westbury Hotel (now the Courtyard by Marriott Toronto Downtown) closed off 120 rooms overlooking Yonge Street. As Halloween occurred during a municipal election campaign, local candidates condemned the violence. “It was perfectly clear,” activist and council hopeful George Hislop said, “that the entire community just wouldn’t tolerate suburban punks coming downtown to get their jollies — at our expense.”
The tactics worked. Those who showed up expecting to engage in violence were disappointed. “This place sucks,” one person told The Body Politic. “I came down to see somethin’ happen.” Police prevented people from stopping and made only a fraction of the previous year’s arrests. “By eight o’clock,” The Body Politic observed, “there were so many police officers on Yonge Street it was beginning to look like a replay of the October Crisis.”
A Body Politic headline declaring that the “Halloween hate-fest comes to end” proved accurate. Continuing efforts by the community and police curtailed the egg tossing and maintained the peace in 1981. There were still some jeering yahoos, and the Toronto Sun couldn’t resist making snarky comments — “It’s a special night for these homosexuals, the people who dress up every night of the year” — but there was a strong sense the annual onslaught was drawing to a close.
While crowds continued to come down to the neighbourhood on Halloween, they shifted to Church Street, bringing cameras instead of eggs. In 1996, the attitude shift was remarked up by the Globeand Mail’s John Bentley Mays, who described the scene as having “all the menace of a neighbourhood block party.”
Photos from the December 1980/January 1981 issue of The Body Politic.
“The antique stereotypes of what gay people on parade are supposed to look like seemed long past — along with the sense that this was a party just for gay and lesbian folks,” Mays wrote. “From where I stood, the fancifully attired were matched just about one-to-one with straightly dressed, snap-shooting tourists, your basic suburban moms and dads with the kids, and other regular Torontonians in a holiday mood. Our downtown Halloween this year, in other words, represented a certain way of using the streets quite different from the old one. It wasn't about one community firmly displacing another for a few hours, in a spirit of defiance and self-definition. The evening was about as happy, tolerant and middle class as a multicultural carnival in Mississauga.”
Sources: the November-December 1971, November-December 1972, December 1977-January 1978, November 1979, December 1979, October 1980, December 1980-January 1981, and December 1981 editions of The Body Politic; the October 31, 1969, October 28, 1977, November 2, 1977, November 1, 1979, and November 6, 1996, editions of the Globe and Mail; the November 1, 1977, November 1, 1979, and October 21, 1980, editions of the Toronto Star, the November 1, 1981, edition of the TorontoSun; and the November 16, 1977, edition of the Windsor Star.
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