Coming Together

Saturday, June 29, 1985
The Concert Hall

“We knew about the AIDS crisis two, three years before it was in mainstream press. We knew about it in 1982, we were writing about it in The Body Politic, we called it GRID, gay-related immunodeficiency disease. But it didn’t make the mainstream papers until [American actor] Rock Hudson died in 1985. Before Rock Hudson died, it was just killing fags and Black people and [the general public] didn’t care. It was terrible. We were in the middle of an epidemic and nobody knew about it, except for those of us who worked at The Body Politic, which wasn’t a huge number of people. Thousands of people were infected and died as a result of that. Which is unconscionable and nobody paid for that--those big organisations, those big newspapers that were suppressing the story for three years.”

- Chris Lea, GCDC Organizer

As Chris Lea makes clear above, accurate information about  AIDS was difficult to find. Indeed, for a few years it seemed that the only writing about AIDS being produced in Canada was published by The Body Politic. Gay activist Michael Lynch and epidemiologist Bill Lewis, for example, wrote regular columns in The Body Politic to counter misinformation about AIDS being spread by mainstream media and politicians in the early and mid-1980s. 

In March 1983, the AIDS Committee of Toronto (ACT) began distributing pamphlets at GCDC dances. ACT had formed that same month, after Ed Jackson, a founding member of The Body Politic, met with nine other individuals interested in providing leadership on the issue of AIDS in Ontario. Later that year, in July, ACT joined the GCDC as a member group. At dances, ACT set up information tables, collection boxes for donations, and distributed leaflets to attendees  as they left. 

In 1985, Toronto Pride–themed “Coming Together”–held its first AIDS walk up Church Street. The GCDC organised the Coming Together dance adjacent to Pride in June, 1985. Before they allocated funds to member groups, GCDC organizers donated $300 from this dance to ACT in memory of James Fraser, a prominent member of the community and instrumental figure at The ArQuives (known in the 1980s as the Canadian Gay Archives) who passed away in March of 1985 from HIV-related complications. 

“Everybody wanted to help out. People gave their volunteer shift credits to AIDS organisations to try and help them. It was affecting everybody, we were never sure who was going to be around. Back then once you got it there was no chance you were going to get better. It was only a path to decline. In the early times there was nothing, there was no treatment whatsoever. Some people passed away really fast other times it would drag out. A lot of people that I know are gone because of it. The sweetest people, the ones that you wish you had in your whole life, and they’re gone just like that.”

- Rob Stout, GCDC Organizer