In this episode, our main character, Garrett, who has just moved to Toronto, is looking for a gay bar. This episode will deal primarily with the way the “closet,” was imposed on queer people in Toronto in the 1950s. During the Cold War, the RCMP started investigating and keeping files on civil servants who were suspected of being gay. By the end of the 1960, they’d have compiled some 9,000 files on suspects with what they called a “character weakness.” Often, authorities got information by going undercover in bars, so the quest to find a gay bar was a complicated endeavour.
For further reading on this subject matter, you might want to read Rick Bebout’s Promiscuous Affections, The Canadian War on Queers by Patrizia Gentile and Gary Kinsman. For more on settler colonialism and the policing of sexuality, Scott L. Morgensen’s Spaces Between Us: Queer Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Decolonization is a good read.
Interviews such as the one with Don Franco are available through the Foolscap Project at the Arquives, which also has many of the tabloid newspapers used for this story. And, for anyone who wishes to learn more about the history of drinking in Canada, we highly recommend Booze: A Distilled History by Craig Heron, who we also want to thank for his tremendous help with this project. It would never have happened without his support.