It’s Pride in Montreal this week — and that city has a long and illustrious queer history. The first recorded gay establishment on the North American continent was in Montreal — but that doesn’t mean our history there has always been a pleasant one. One particularly contentious episode in that history began in 1975.
Montreal was selected by the International Olympic Committee to host the 1976 Summer Olympics. In retrospect, there’s a number of reasons this was not exactly the most successful Olympics ever (and by that I mean, just short of being a total disaster). Not least among those reasons, of course, was that preparing for these Olympics sparked a clash between the police and the LGBTQ+ community.
Mayor Jean Drapeau established the Public Morality Program to help clean up the city’s image when the eyes of the world would be upon it. I’m sure I don’t have to explain that “Morality”, in this case, means “not queer”. They began a campaign of oppression, specifically designed to terrorize the LGBTQ+ community. As Gay Times reported, citing a police source, it was “designed to frighten gays from frequenting public places where Olympic tourists [were] likely to be.”
Using a law that was initially designed to allow police to raid brothels, the police launched a series of brutal raids, over the course of which an estimated 175 people were arrested for being in a “bawdy house”.
It began on February 4, 1975 with a raid on Sauna Aquarius. Police broke down the door, and arrested 36 people. (Just a side note — I found some incongruities here, a couple sources said this was on April 4 and one said in August. Also, a couple sources said it was 35 people arrested. So, somewhere in all of that is what actually happened, but I’m pretty sure it was February 4.)
This initial raid was shocking to the LGBTQ+ community — but seemed like an isolated incident until October of that year. On October 17 and 18, police raided five gay bars. That Halloween, two more gay bars — the Limelight in the heart of downtown, and lesbian dance club Baby Face. Anyone at Baby Face who could not produce an ID or refused to show one was taken into custody until proof of their identity was provided by family or friends. The next month, a series of raids in downtown — including another one at the Limelight — led to the arrests of 80 men.
On January 23 of 1976, police raided Club Baths. Although they were provided a master key to each room in the bathhouse, the police officers broke through the doors with axes instead. They caused more than $500 of property damage and arrested 13 men. On February 11, Sauna Cristal was raided.
And then in May (or possible in March, depending on who you ask), things became truly brutal. On May 14, Neptune Sauna was raided and 89 men were arrested. Police also confiscated a membership book, with an estimated 7,000 names of members of the bathhouse. (But like, how amazing must that place have been to have had 7,000 members?) Over the next week, there were raids practically every day — Sauna Cristal was raided again. Police invaded popular lesbian bar Chez Jilly’s — carrying cameras and rifles. No arrests were made — it was clearly an effort to intimidate. And it worked. On Ste. Catherine Street, police demanded IDs from everyone trying to enter the Bellevue Tavern — again, no arrests were made there but the impact was undeniable. On May 22, Club Baths was raided yet again.
And this was the final straw. By this time, there had been eighteen raids — mostly in Montreal but with a few in Ottawa and Toronto (where a handful of the Olympic events would be taking place.) The raids in May alone had led to so many arrests that it was the largest mass arrest in Canadian history since the October Crisis of 1970 — which was a terrorist action that led to martial law being instituted, just so we’re all clear. Like, it could not have been closer to a declaration of martial law on the LGBTQ+ population of Montreal without someone in the government actually declaring martial law.
So the community formed an organization, calling themselves the Comité homosexuel antirépression (CHAR) or the Gay Coalition Against Repression. On June 19, CHAR gathered roughly 300 demonstrators to protest police oppression of their community — at the time, the largest LGBTQ+ protest in Canadian history. They marched through Montreal, down what was then called Dorchester Boulevard, marching in front of both the Olympic headquarters and city hall.
Although this protest was enough to temporarily stop the raids on queer establishments, CHAR accomplished something else pretty remarkable. Prior to the Olympic clean up, the LGBTQ+ community of Montreal was divided by language — English speakers versus French speakers. CHAR bridged that gap. Eventually, CHAR became the L’association pour les droits de gaies du Québec — an effective political organization that began winning legal protections for LGBTQ+ Canadians in Quebec by the end of 1977. The successful protest encouraged Gays of Ottowa (or GO) to hold a press release condemning the police actions, and demanding a meeting with the mayor on the issue.
And yet, the stage had been set for another clash between the queer community of Montreal and law enforcement. All of this laid the groundwork for the Truxx raid of 1977 — one of biggest events in the queerstory of Canada. And one we will cover another day. Stay tuned!
World Queerstory 