On July 17, 1869, that guardian of public morals, The Montreal Star, published this piece under the title “Served Him Right”:
Last night, a man was caught on the Champs de Mars attempting in company with a young lad to practice one of the most revolting species of crime that can well be imagined. One of our detectives happened to be passing at the time, but on seeing what was going on he quietly hid himself behind a tree so as to make sure of his man. The detective was about rushing out [sic] to seize the scoundrel when he heard a party of youngman [sic] coming towards him. He signalled them to keep quiet and watch what was going on. They did, and in a moment saw enough to justify them in chasing down the brute and giving him the most tremendous thrashing. The detective left in another direction, not wishing to interfere in the matter, as it was in very good hands. We strongly recommend that a couple of policemen should be detailed to attend the Champs de Mars every evening from about seven to twelve o'clock. It would prevent a great deal of crime.
The age of the “young lad” is never mentioned, but it should not be supposed he was underage. The rare times newspapers deigned to mention homosexuality, they routinely described men in their 20s and even 30s as “boys” or “lads,” and otherwise greatly exaggerated any age difference. The intent was to heighten the reader’s disgust and make an older man seem predatory.
No further details exist. The man was never formally charged, and no mention was made of bringing the “young lad” back to his family (further hinting that he was an adult). The police officer was apparently content to let the vigilantes do their work of beating or perhaps even murdering a man (maybe two) who should have been under his protection, and went on his way without even watching to see how the scene resolved.
Coming a month after the Moïse Tellier and Joseph Gagnon stories – the first police raids – this curious little piece shows us something we have not seen yet anywhere in Canada’s history: the phenomenon we would later call gaybashing.
Defining gaybashing
Gaybashing (also called “queerbashing,” “queer baiting,” “dykebashing” when it happens to women, or simply “bashing”) is a form of anti-LGBT violence committed by individuals. The violence and oppression we have studied up to this point has been largely institutional – governments, police, prisons, churches, and hospitals have been the primary offenders.
Gaybashing is the privatization of that violence, committed almost exclusively by young, heterosexual men.
The curious thing is that while this phenomenon has been studied by sociologists, criminologists, and psychologists, no one that I can find has ever tried to give it a history. Most that mention it in a historical context lump it in with state-sponsored violence, so that the men the Roman writer Tacitus mention as having been drowned in bogs for homosexuality by the German tribes are sometimes described as “the first gaybashings.” Others speak of the first executions in the Middle Ages, again committed by church and governments.
These, though, are state-sponsored or institutional violence. What interests me more – and which does not seem to have ever been studied – is the question of when groups of individuals began attacking and murdering homosexuals or suspected homosexuals entirely of their own accord.
It seems certain that gaybashing has a history of some kind. There was no such thing in Ancient Greece and Rome, and even at the height of anti-sodomite panics in the late Middle Ages and early modern era (when governments were murdering us in significant numbers) there is no sign of private individuals doing the same. “Sodomites” were symbolically burnt in effigy by crowds in the Italian cities of Siena and Florence in the 1400s, infamous examples of mob hatred of homosexuals in the the Middle Ages; but when it came to the actual burning of men convicted of homosexual acts, that seemed to have been left to governments.
What is more, we know that gaybashing is not only something that has a beginning (however obscure that might be) but something that has changed shape over time.
Quentin Crisp, writing in the 1960s, noted that “Queer-baiting” as he called it “has not vanished” but “has fallen into the hands of younger and younger boys.” The stories I have been able to find from the early 20th century seem to bear this out – gaybashing used to be the exclusive province of adult men, but at sometime in the mid-20th century it became an act teenage boys were far more likely to commit.
And since no one studied its history, no one knows why that would be.
The suddenness of its appearance on Canada’s stage in 1869 – a month after the death penalty is removed for homosexuality – does suggest one possibility. More reports of gaybashing appear throughout the west around the same time that western nations were reducing the sentence for “sodomy.” It might simply be that after hundreds of years of hearing that homosexuality was a heresy that brought fire and brimstone, plagues, and the collapse of civilizations, straight society had simply chalked their government’s new leniency up to corruption or weakness, and decided to take matters into their own hands.
Another factor might be that every corner of Western civilization was swelling in population, and those populations were becoming more mobile and more anonymous. The medieval peasant might have had a low opinion of their lord and their priest, but they knew who to bring a crime to, how to report it, and probably what would happen next. In the 19th century, cities were growing exponentially, vast sections of distant countryside were urbanizing and filling up with newcomers, and the West was becoming largely a society of strangers.
In that situation, governments and other authorities seemed newly strange and distant, and there was a sense that folks would have better luck trying to take the law into their own hands and punish crimes themselves. Canada tried to delay this phenomenon by making policing a priority across the country, but given how harried Montreal’s police force seemed at the time, it seems unlikely they inspired much confidence.
(Though if the events portrayed in the article above are any indication, the police of Montreal were all too happy to step aside and let the vigilantes do the “community policing.”)
With any social phenomenon, multiple factors undoubtedly contribute. And while the causes are murky, the result is clearer: the persecution of LGBT folk entered a kind of shadow realm, with no court records, no habeas corpus, no constitutional guarantees, or lawyers, or security of person.
While official persecution continued for some time, this new shadow level of homophobia meant that whatever official protections existed, the safety of LGBT folk would always remain in question. Even after the legalization of homosexuality, governments, police, and courts could tacitly look on, give their silent approval, and retain plausible deniability that they were participating in any way in the persecution.
Only rarely did this tacit approval need to become overt. Should a gaybasher be caught, the courts could reduce or eliminate sentences by claiming that hate was not a factor – any gaybashing that ends with the theft of a wallet will generally be downgraded to a simple mugging – or that the panic induced by the possibility that a gay man might be attracted to him induced a a kind of temporary insanity in the perpetrator (known as the “gay panic” defence).
And of course, it has not gone away. I began working on this article less than a month after the worst mass-shooting in American history, in a gay bar in Orlando. America actually has thousands of gaybashings every year, a few fatal (according to the aggregate statistics compiled by the US Department of Justice) most of which are never noticed by the public. The pundits were quick to write off the mass murder as either an isolated act of insanity or blamed the perpetrator’s Muslim background. Both are strategies for ignoring the real, ingrained, violent homophobia that is part of the cultural fabric of the West.
Canada has only had one real comprehensive study – the Pink Blood study by criminologist Douglas Janoff. He found there had been about 100 murders motivated at least partly by hatred against LGBT folk between 1995 and 2005, or about 10 a year. Shortly before the Orlando shooting, two men were attacked for kissing in a public place here in Montreal.
Yet, these acts seem to have had no history written that I can find. And having no history effectively normalizes them.
Was this the first gaybashing in Canada? It is possible. Montreal’s mostly rural landscape was turning into stone, brick, and finally concrete at a dizzying rate in the mid-to-late 19th century as its population exploded, and the cruising zone of the Champ-de-Mars was likely a new phenomenon for a city (and country) suddenly bursting at the seams. It would have created a tempting target for a gaybasher, as soon as straight society realized what it was.
It is also possible, of course, that this is simply the first case of it we have recorded.
Gaybashing and Silence
There is hardly any mention of gaybashing in any mainstream media before the beginning of the gay liberation movement in the post-World War II 20th century. I have found scattered references in both legal documents and fiction from across the West, but nothing else as early in 1869. Marcel Proust mentions it in his novel A la Recherche du Temps perdu, in a scene set around 1900 in France, where it is shown as a not only permitted but the expected action of a young Parisian man who has been flirted with by a homosexual.
For the most part, silence clings to it. Even now, it rarely makes the media unless it has some especially horrific aspect – Matthew Shepard tied to a fence and tortured, or a mass-shooting in a club. Most pass unnoticed outside of our community.
Stories from an earlier age do sometimes surface, though. The grandfather of a close of friend of mine told his grandson that he and his friends had gone out looking for “queers” to beat up when he had been in the Navy during World War II. I have heard this same narrative in other places – some considered it to have been a normal part of military life, a rite of passage, even proof you were “one of the boys.” Given the heavy rate of military service among Canadian men in the first half of the 20th century, I cannot help but wonder if a large minority or even a majority of men from certain generations participated in gaybashings. We are unlikely to ever know.
Nor was it limited to the rituals of young men. Gary Kinsman and Patrizia Gentile’s book The Canadian War on Queers includes a conversation with a woman identified only as Arlene, interviewed in 1987, who said that police officers in the 1950s Ottawa would “take you down to Cherry Beach and handcuff your hands behind your back and beat the shit out of you. And leave you there…If you were lucky they left your clothes. That was another dirty trick: take your clothes and make you walk home stark [naked].”
Arlene also told her interviewer that she had been raped by police at Cherry Beach when she was 17, after being picked because her “butch” clothes marked her as a lesbian.
Coming out myself in the mid-1990s, there was no shortage of similar stories from older gay men and lesbians that I knew. I myself witnessed a police officer threaten a fifteen-year old boy with a “starlight drive” for heinous crime of looking too long at his police partner. That happened outside the same cafe in Vancouver’s West End, The Edge Coffee House, which was invaded by a pack of gaybashers in 1994. Derek Janoff’s Pink Blood is replete with examples of anti-gay murders of an astonishing brutality from across the country.
Conclusion
Unlike the laws and the institutional brutality we’ve focused on before, gaybashing is less our past and more our present.
Yet part of the hope for the progressive historian is that by giving a complete shape to something toxic in our culture – by examining where it comes from – it ceases to simply be a fact of life and becomes something that was produced and which can be finished by historical factors. If gaybashing had a beginning, it can have an ending.
Since we cannot know if gaybashing was actually a new phenomenon in Canada in 1869, we cannot draw any certain conclusions. My hypothesis is that it was still a recent phenomenon. I suspect that the roots of this new, private violence were twofold – the lessening of the legal penalties surrounding homosexuality in the 1860s, and a new anonymity of people in the fast-growing cities of the West that alienated them from the more traditional authorities.
Moreover, I suspect that the persistence of gaybashing is that it continues to serve a purpose for the forces of privilege and heterosexual supremacy. As society’s official structures become more open and accepting – as we gain more formal protections and greater equality under the law – gaybashing serves the social homophobia that is still deeply rooted in our culture.
In the US, where better statistics have been compiled than we have in Canada, the number of bashings have actually increased since the beginning of the 21st century. While some of that is better reporting, the accelerated rate of increase suggests another, more extreme reaction to official equality and increased visibility. I suspect this echos what was happening in the mid-19th century.
After the bashing in the Champ-de-Mars, The Montreal Star‘s campaign of shaming and moral outrage seems to have come to an abrupt end. Looking into the paper in the months that followed, I found no further references to the cruising zone in the Champ-de-Mars. There was mention of a potential lawsuit from Moïse Tellier’s lawyer (with the paper defending itself) in the edition a day after the Tellier trial was reported, which may have been a factor. The Champ-de-Mars cruising ground itself seems to have lingered on at least into the 1880s before the gay men who frequented it moved into the Parc Mont-Royal.
It was not the end of the moral crusade against homosexuality in the papers, however. Only seven years later, The Globe was covering the celebrity trial of Francis J. Widdowes, and La Presse returned to the subject of the Champ-de-Mars grounds in a lurid piece in 1883.
The Montreal Star might have been the first paper in Canada to lead a moral crusade that required it to speak publicly about “the love that dare not speak its name,” but it was far from the last. With the rise of the “Social Purity Movement,” homosexuality became the sort of social problem that had to be discussed (though still in coded euphemisms).
Meanwhile whatever community had begun to form around the Champ-de-Mars (and the men we have named both lived in the area), it seemed to have disappeared by the 20th century. When next a recognizable district appears in Montreal – or two rather – one is on Peel Street and the other on lower Saint-Laurent. Both would offer an easy walking trip up the mountain where a new cruising area had formed.
Those stories will have to wait. For now we turn to the celebrity trials overseas that inspired moral crusades against homosexuality in Canada, and the press coverage they received.
Sources: The July 17, 1869 edition of The Montreal Star provides the only source of this story. There was no surviving record of either Moïse Tellier and Joseph Gagnon – both formally charged – so it should be unsurprising that there is no official record of this gaybashing unofficially sanctioned by the police. No other paper seems to have covered it. Douglas Janoff’s Pink Blood is as far as I can tell the only detailed study of bashing in Canada, and an excellent resource. For hate crime in the United States, the best source is the US Department of Justice’s own detailed studies. Quoted by the Human Rights Campaign, it showed in 2007 5 murders and over 600 beatings. The statistics I found for 2011-2015 period on the DOJ’s own website work out to more than 40,000 “hate crimes motivated by sexual orientation,” the majority of which took the form of assault. I also drew on The Canadian War on Queers by Gary Kinsman and Patrizia Gentile, and Homophobia: A History by Byrne Fone. The 1994 bashing at The Edge Coffee House was covered in Xtra‘s May 20th edition, 1994. Marcel Proust’s novel A la Recherche du Temps perdu is a work of fiction, but one written by a closeted gay man drawing on his own experiences, and as such offers us some of our few glimpses of gay life at the time. I have also drawn on my own experiences, and those related to me by older gay men – given the absence and extremely homophobic bias of the few written sources I’ve found for earlier periods, I see no problem with relying on these oral histories. Unlike most of the topics covered in this project, gaybashing is very much of the current day.