June 28, 2016
Source: Bigstock
Memory is a funny thing: Like lots of locals of my generation and older, the bathhouse raids will always be conflated with another, far more serious, event. When the “Operation Soap” apology was announced, this reaction on Facebook was representative:
What led up to the cleanup of those Bathhouses and other gay hangouts?
I was living in Toronto in 1977 and I vividly remember the rape and murder of a 12-year-old Emanuel Jaques, a shoeshine boy.
The shock and outrage that followed the murder of Emanuel Jaques led to efforts to clean up the downtown strip.
So pardon me if I shed NO TEARS, or feel no remorse over the cleanup of a den of sexual deviants and predators!
Yet it wasn”t until I started writing this column that I realized the Jaques murder”after which it was declared that Toronto the Good had “lost its innocence“”had occurred almost four years before those bathhouse raids. In fact, just days after the boy’s body was discovered on the roof of a downtown “body rub parlor,” some Yonge Street hustlers reported that life on the strip was mostly back to “normal.”
Now, obviously it would be intellectually dishonest to link these two events.
Yet clearly that’s what I and frankly everyone I know have done.
Perhaps because one of the killers confessed first to a local gay activist.
Perhaps because the city’s peasantlike Portuguese community, from which the boy came”normally invisible even during that era of cloying ethnic pride”marched too, over 10,000 strong, shouting things we”d call “homophobic” “hate speech” today.
But even then, while many ordinary folks cheered them on, others ridiculed those marchers. Big shots in the Portuguese community, as well as a few “real” Canadians, scolded them to stop making such spectacles of themselves.
I wonder if I”ll live to see gays apologize for violating other people’s rights to privacy and free association, simply for refusing to bake a cake or go along quietly with transgender bathrooms or whatever the next “Salem, not Selma“ fad turns out to be.
I do know there isn”t an annual parade for Emanuel Jaques.
And anyhow, “when you speak to any gay man in Toronto about the case, the first thing they say is the boy was no saint.”
