The Globe and Mail Coverage of the Truxx Raid: Gay History, State Interventionism, and Queer Deviance
The Globe and Mail Coverage of the Truxx Raid: Gay History, State Interventionism, and Queer Deviance
by Anonymous
In 1976, looking
towards the upcoming hosting of the Olympic games, the city of Montreal began
to crack down on queer spaces and sex workers in an effort to clean up the
city. In October of 1977, the police raided a well-known gay bar on rue Stanley
called Truxx. Around 50 police officers participated in the raid, some armed
with machine guns, 146 men were forced to take tests for venereal disease, and
then arrested for being in a “bawdy house”. Following the raid, a manifestation
against the raid was then held with somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000
participants (numbers vary in different reports)[i]. On October
24th, 1977, the Globe and Mail, a Toronto anglophone newspaper, wrote a very
brief article covering the Truxx protest[ii]. The article
is 117 words / 5 sentences long, drastically limiting the scope of information
that it can provide in the story, and therefore giving us insight into what a
large newspaper outside of Québec thought of as the most important information
to provide about the Truxx raid. Using Steven Maynard’s The Burning, Willful Evidence: Lesbian/Gay History and Archival
Research[iii],
in this paper I will look at the how this Globe and Mail article demonstrates a
state agenda at the time around regulation of what was seen as sexually deviant
space and the role protest of those boundaries played.
Important context
going into this analysis is that this article in the Globe and Mail was
produced before the infamous Toronto Bathhouse raids, and so coverage of raids
on gay bars were not yet on a large scale in Toronto print newspapers, but as
the Bathhouse raids would happen within a few years, we can almost guarantee
that state surveillance of queer spaces in Toronto was occurring at the time
that this article was printed. A close reading of this article, looking at what
are it presents as the key information, and the language/vocabulary that is
used are very indicative of this interaction of the queer Montreal community
and state regulation.
The point I would
like to first focus in on is the use of quotation marks around “police
oppression” in the article. In a workshop entitled “How to Read the News” last
November on McGill campus as a part of QPIRG’s Culture Shock event series,
Desmond Cole unpacked the use of quotation marks in articles and headlines[iv].
The implication of quotation marks around an experience of violence creates a
debate of the validity of the experience, and lastly detaches the reader from
the experience described, implying that there may be an exaggeration or
subjective take on the event. As well, the inclusion of the details of the
manif happening “shortly after midnight” and “in the core of Montreal’s
nightlife” - really the only descriptors we are given of the manif beyond the
amount of people and that pamphlets were handed out - adds a gothic, mob-like,
and deviant impression to the events that took place, reminding one of the
characterization of the Street of Miracles in Kai Cheng Thom’s Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A
Dangerous Trans Girl’s Confabulous Memoir.
The length of the
article allows little room for analysis, and therefore I would look at the
first and last sentences as providing the framework or lens that we, the
assumed heterosexual readers of the Globe and Mail, are to use when engaging
with this article. The first sentence, “Police blocked off part of downtown
Ste. Catherine Street to traffic early yesterday as about 2,000 people gathered
in the core of Montreal’s nightlife area to protest against a mass arrest after
a weekend raid on a downtown bar”, centres the police as the subjects of this
article rather than the protestors, implying that they are who we should be
sympathizing with. It also immediately introduces the idea a) of regulation of
public space, and b) the idea of disruption, or public disturbance, leading the
reader, if we do not empathize with the police, to at least sympathize with the
Montreal commuter whose day has been disrupted. The end of the article
reinforces this lens : “More than 50 officers took part in the raid at the Trux
Cruising Bar, a police spokesman said. He added that detectives had been
watching the bar for several weeks.” Again, the police are the main focus of
the story, and the only people whose opinions on the raid and subsequent
protest we both begin and end with. The very last sentence assures the intended
reader that the police had surveilled the bar and determined that a raid was
warranted. The labeling of Trux as a capital-C “Cruising Bar”, invokes a
history of homosexuality as being regarded as sexual deviance and therefore
dangerous.
In his paper, Steven
Maynard argues that gay history has always been one of state regulation, and
that is why often archival work on finding queer history revolves around
criminal records or other records of criminality, of which he names newspaper
articles as one example. Maynard explains that he focuses “on crime-related
records and institutions is that homosexual activity has most often been
illegal, and so it is in these types of records that ‘homosexuals’ usually
appear”. The criminality and regulation of queer bodies and queer spaces is one
that has rendered queerness hypervisible through constant surveillance, and at
the same time invisible through constant threat of disappearance by the state -
the invisible gay history that Maynard speaks of.
This article in the
Globe and Mail is a very clear example of gay history being archives through
records of social deviance, civil unrest, or state regulation, as outlined by
Maynard. The framing of the police as the subject of the article, the use of
descriptors that invoke an ‘in-the-shadows-ness’ to the events, and the use of
quotation marks around “police oppression”, we see how this protest was
presented to the assumed straight white cis middle-class anglophone Globe and
Mail readers as an instance of civil deviance that is being monitored and
regulated through state intervention, and presented to the readers from the
queer community in Toronto as a warning of state mentalities that were to be
soon to be invoked in their spaces as well.
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