Toronto the Gay: The Formation of a Queer Counterpublic in Public Drinking Spaces, 1947-1981

This dissertation examines the development of a queer counterpublic in Torontos post-war taverns and cocktail lounges, which were overseen by a relatively moderate provincial licensing authority. In the absence of homophile associations, social networks and discourses of resistance were formed by men in Torontos public drinking spaces, wherein strategies to oppose discrimination were formed, as well as subversive camp rituals that protected the community and expressed pride. The dissertation focuses primarily on mens spaces and communications and is divided, roughly, into four major areas of inquiry, namely, community formation in bars and resistance to patron discrimination; public rituals as an expression of camp discourse and community pride; resistance to surveillance and, finally, the culmination of all these bar-based strategies into an overt queer activism that challenged hate crimes as well as systemic discrimination. The counterpublic was made up of competing discourses, that created and negotiated gender, class, ethnicity and sexual comportment, largely falling into two main categories: mononormative discourse and camp. The latter was more likely to challenge the disciplinary discourses of the era, which were present in both print media and physical surveillance, whereas, the normalizing discourse engaged civil rights arguments and was successful in reshaping the media and general publics ideas about queer Toronto. At times, the two discourses acted co-operatively, as an expression of solidarity and both expressions of Torontos bar-based queer political activism were key to the development of more overt activism of the 1970s that laid the ground for resistance to and protest over Operation Soap in 1981.