SOAP: A Remembrance of the 1981 Bath Raids

Saturday, February 5, 1983
The Concert Hall

The GCDC’s dance on February 5, 1983, was called “Soap,” referencing Toronto Police raids of four gay bathhouses in downtown Toronto on February 5, 1981. The bathhouse raids,  coined “Operation Soap” by police organisers, resulted in the arrest of three hundred men, the horrific physical and verbal abuse by Toronto Police officers, and thousands of dollars in damage to gay-operated venues. In Toronto City Council’s “Report on Police Raids on Gay Steambaths,” one unnamed Toronto Police Officer was quoted saying “I wish these pipes were hooked up to gas so I could annihilate you all.”  

During these raids, police charged twenty employees for “keeping common bawdyhouses” and charged the other 280 individuals for “being found in a bawdyhouse.” The mass arrests and abusive conduct of the police is striking for its severity, but also because the legislation prohibiting “bawdyhouses”--upon which the raids relied– was an archaic holdover of  the Canadian Criminal Code from 1892. The Police Department’s Morality Squad–the group that organised and led the raids–is a similar relic of the past, founded in the early 1880s. 

This was the first of two GCDC dances planned in  remembrance of the bathhouse raids of 1981 (see also: Soap II on February 4, 1984). As Chris Bearchell explains in the 1982 documentary Track Two, the shock felt after the bathhouse raids quickly “gave way to fury. Women and men in the community went from disbelief to just rage. Rather than letting that anger weigh us down–debilitate and demobilise us–we were able to channel it into a collective statement.” The “collective statement” that Bearchell references included some of the largest queer protests in Toronto’s history and multiple rallies meant to build connections with other communities that faced police harassment in the city. 

"After the bath raids, the gay community was really galvanized, we’re not taking this shit no more. No more shit. I was outed after being seen at the protest. I had never heard of the baths, knew nothing about the baths, but I remember a friend of mine was very upset that morning. I saw a poster about the protest and decided to go.”

- Chris Lea, GCDC Organiser

By foregrounding the raids and the collective response that occurred in their wake, the GCDC created space to recall  state violence and the community’s response to it.  The dances provided opportunities to gather, remember, and celebrate the LGBTQ2+ community’s resilience and power. 

"After the bath raids there was an attempt to come up with something called the Gay Community Council (GCC), which was representative of various organizations that would speak on a panel to the media, trying to coordinate community response of both men and women. The GCDC was maybe the height of attempts to pull various community services together to work together…the GCDC represented a kind of a positive view of how we could all work together to raise money and to make things better for ourselves."

- Ed Jackson, GCDC Attendee