Danny Cockerline wearing one of the Prostitutes’ Safe Sex Project’s fundraiser t-shirts. Photograph by Konnie Reich. From the estate of Christine Louise Bearchell, courtesy of executor Andrew Sorfleet.

C-49 briefing prepared by Danny Cockerline and submitted to the Standing Committee on Justice on behalf of the CORP. From of the estate of Christine Louise Bearchell, courtesy of executor Andrew Sorfleet.

“Safer Sex: Make It Your Business” HIV prevention pamphlet created by Danny Cockerline in December 1987 as CORP’s attention shifted from fighting Bill C-49 to the growing HIV/AIDS epidemic. Courtesy of Andrew Sorfleet.

Gay and lesbian organizing in response to bathhouse raids in Toronto were organized under the banner of the Right to Privacy Committee (RTPC). The organization was founded in 1979 after the raid of the Barracks bathhouse in December 1978.[1] Activism under the auspices of the RTPC ballooned in the aftermath of a set of coordinated 1981 bathhouse raids commonly referred to as “Operation Soap,” which resulted in one of the largest mass arrests in Toronto’s history.[2] Unlike in many countries, gay men and sex workers were charged under the same set of criminal laws, including but extending beyond vagrancy and sodomy. The bawdy house laws, for example, were originally intended to criminalize brothels, unregulated gambling, and “disorderly” houses, but came to be the primary charges that sex workers who worked indoors and gay men who gathered in bars and bathhouses faced.[3] This led gay men and lesbians, many of whom were working against police harassment through the RTPC, to team up with sex workers, as both groups were fighting against the same set of provisions in the criminal code that targeted them. In 1983, this led veteran sex worker Peggie Miller to team up with Chris Bearchell and Danny Cockerline to form the Canadian Organization for the Rights of Prostitutes (CORP).[4] Around this time, Danny quit an unsatisfying administrative job for the city of Toronto and began working as a successful prostitute himself, which his friends called a natural fit for him as it combined his interests in both gay and sex worker activism.[5]

By historical coincidence, CORP emerged just after the start of what would soon be called the HIV/AIDS epidemic in North America. As evidenced by the organizational materials in the CORP fonds at the Archives and Special Collections at the University of Ottawa, much of CORP’s early work was fighting back against the public hysteria around HIV/AIDS and prostitution in a period when prostitutes were often blamed for the spread of HIV.[6] Protests against proposals to quarantine HIV-positive people and the forced testing of sex workers were important parts of CORP’s work at this time. The introduction of Bill C-49, a law that criminalized “communicating in a public place for the purposes of prostitution,” in the Canadian Parliament in the fall of 1985 and its subsequent passage into law by the end of that year, was also a central focus of CORP’s work in the mid-1980s.[7]

[1] Jamie Bradburn, “Toronto Bathhouse Raids (1981),” The Canadian Encyclopedia, Apr. 17, 2018.

[2] Tom Hooper, “Chart: Bathhouse Raids in Canada,” Anti-69 Against the Mythologies of the 1969 Criminal Code Reform, Aug. 2019.

[3] Ummni Kahn, "Homosexuality and Prostitution: A Tale of Two Deviancies," University of Toronto Law Journal, 70.3 (Summer 2020): 283-305.

[4] Andrew Sorfleet Transcript, AIDS Activist History Project, Feb. 10, 2018, 8-9.

[5] Andrew Sorfleet Transcript, AIDS Activist History Project, Feb. 10, 2018, 8.

[6] Canadian Organization for the Rights of Prostitutes Fonds, Canadian Women’s Movement Archive, Archives and Special Collections, University of Ottawa.

[7] Danny Cockerline, “Cops Escalate Entrapment: Citizens Form a Group to Support Their Local Prostitutes' Rights,” Epicene, May 1987, 43-44.