Box Turtle Bulletin
News and commentary about the anti-gay lobby“Now you must raise your children up in a world where that union of man and box turtle is on the same legal footing as man and wife…”
News and commentary about the anti-gay lobbyJuly 17th, 2016
Left to right: David Foreman, Tim McCaskell, Ed Jackson, Merv Walker, David Gibson, Michael Riordon.
40 YEARS AGO: On February 12, Bill Holloway and Tom Field were in front of a Hudson Bay store in Toronto, posing for photos for an article on homophobia. The photos were to depict the two of them kissing, right there out in the open, on the streets, where anyone could see them. When a police officer saw them, right there out on the street, he arrested the two and charged them with committing an indecent act: kissing. On July 12, they were found guilty of committing an indecent act, kissing, and fined $50 each (CAN$210 today).
Gay leaders were outraged. “Gay people can kiss their rights good-bye,” said Tom Warne, president of the Gay Alliance Toward Equality (GATE). “It looks as if there’s now a legal precedent that can be used against gays who want to express their affection in public. I feel certain that a straight couple in the same situation would not have been charged.” As Tim McCaskell explained in 2015:
The two arrested men were part of this “Alternative to Alienation” collective, which was kind of flaky. They weren’t particularly a gay group, but they were sexual liberation, psychological stuff, anti-capitalist. It was all this primeval muck of that 1970s period.
But when it actually came down to it, they hired a lawyer who said we don’t want any kind of politics around this at all. So they were found guilty. And they said they were going to appeal. And they didn’t appeal, just paid the fine. And it was over. But for those of us in the gay liberation movement, that left this precedent on the law books that two men kissing in public was a crime, because they hadn’t fought it. So in order to be able to try to challenge that, we organized a kiss-in.
On July 17, GATE and The Body Politic, Toronto’s gay newspaper, went back to the scene of the crime, and committed that same crime again. As The Body Politic reported:
About 20 gays paraded in couples and triples, kissing as they walked. Occasionally, the group would stop and create a small circle of kissers
Reaction from passers-by was mixed. The group had prepared an attractive hand-bill which explained the situation, and those who look the time to read it seemed convinced of the injustice. Others were offended, a few were outraged. Although about a half dozen police arrived on the scene during the course of the hour-long event, they merely watched from the sidelines and did not interrupt. The kissers were careful to keep moving so that no one could be charged with obstructing the sidewalk.
Gerald Hannon was one of the kissers:
It’s hard to imagine now, when it’s pretty easy. You were supposed to be ashamed of yourself. This was a good way of showing that we weren’t. … U think we felt mostly exhilaration that we were doing it. You know, the exhilaration you get when you go out on the edge of a building, where you’re both excited and you feel slightly in danger. It was that kind of mix of feelings. We didn’t really expect anyone would come and beat us up. (But) the police (charging us was) also a possibility. I mean, they’d already done it once.
No one was arrested, but because there was now documented evidence that police did not intervene to bring a halt to those indecent acts, kissing, it established a kind of precedent that would make any more such prosecutions difficult. A week later, protesters were back again, this time for an old-fashioned picket in front of old City Hall, which housed the court room where the convictions took place. “Again, the event attracted a crowd of interested bystanders,” reported The Body Politic. “Ironically, the demonstration played itself out against a background of wedding parties being photographed on the steps of the historic building.”
[Additional source: “Kiss-In Protests Conviction of Kissers.” The Body Politic (September 1976): 3. Available online here.]
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