How to Organize in a Plague

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If you were an openly gay man in Toronto in 1980, chances are that you would’ve thought that life was getting better.

After all, the last decade had seen so much progress.

Homosexuality had been partially decriminalized back in the late 1960s. A few years later, Toronto had become the first city in the country to ban homophobic discrimination in municipal hiring. Pride parades and festivals were a regular occurrence. There was a thriving queer nightlife and queer press and queer arts scene.

George Hislop, an out-and-proud gay man, was running for city council, and even the sitting mayor, John Sewell, was pro-gay.

Was there still discrimination and hardship? Of course. But more and more people were coming out of the closet, and even the broader society was starting to slowly embrace people with different sexual orientations.

But then, things started to change.

George Hislop lost his run and so did John Sewell, largely because of homophobic attacks in the press. In 1981, the Toronto Police launched Operation Soap, raiding multiple gay bathhouses and arresting almost 300 men. And though the community mobilized — taking to the streets and the courts to fight back against such blatant aggression — all of a sudden, progress doesn’t look nearly as certain.

And it wouldn’t have been long before you started to hear the rumours — something was going around. Some kind of a disease.

You’d notice people around you getting sick. Young men, in the prime of their lives. You’d see the purple blotches peeking out from under sleeves and shirt collars and you’d wonder what the hell could be happening.

And then, one by one, you’d see those people start to die.

By 1982, the disease had a name — AIDS. But the government wasn’t doing anything to help. And most public officials wouldn’t even say the word out loud.

And so you get together with a few other people and decide that something needs to be done.

That is, in essence, the origin story of one of the most impactful grassroots organizations in recent Canadian history — the AIDS Committee of Toronto (ACT), our first so-called “AIDS service organization.”

ACT has had a profound impact on the country, and the world at large. It was a beacon of hope at a time when social conservative forces were ascendent across North America. It spawned other important organizations, like AIDS Action Now! and Casey House, that had their own out-sized impacts. And for decades, it was the largest and most prominent entity of its kind in Canada.

But late last year, ACT announced that it was closing its doors. And as someone who covered the AIDS epidemic for years, this came as quite a shock to me. So I wanted to dig into what happened and take a look back at ACT’s unique history.

And what I found was absolutely fascinating. If we examine ACT over the decades, we see so many examples of the various dilemmas that plague any organization trying to do good in the modern world:

Should you set out to help people or allow people to help themselves?

Is it better to work within the system or to fight it from the outside?

When do charity fundraisers stop being a way to help more people, and become something that exist solely to keep on fundraising?

I spoke to Kevin Hurren, who wrote an excellent profile about the history of the AIDS Committee of Toronto for Xtra, that digs into all of these questions.

To Learn More

“The many eras of the AIDS Committee of Toronto—including its final bow” by Kevin Hurren in Xtra.

How to Survive a Plague by David France

Queer Progress: From Homophobia to Homonationalism by Tim McCaskell

“The Last Pandemic” by Arshy Mann & Jordan Cornish in COMMONS