Introduction
On July 1, 1982, the documentary film Track Two: Enough is Enough premiered at Toronto’s Bloor Cinema to a crowd of 800 LGBTQ liberation activists.[1] The film chronicled the work of the Right to Privacy Committee (RTPC), which formed to protest draconian Toronto police raids on gay men’s bathhouses in 1978 and 1981, fight the charges against arrestees, and demand community control of the police. The latter raid, the notorious “Operation Soap,” comprised one of the largest mass arrests in recent Canadian history.[2] Track Two recounts how the raids backfired, galvanizing Toronto’s LGBTQ communities into forming alliances against police brutality across lines of race, class, gender, and sexuality. The Body Politic (TBP), then Canada’s leading gay liberation magazine, hailed Track Two, arguing that it “not only documents a community creating itself, but, itself, further creates that community.”[3]
As the film’s closing credits began to roll to “a long boisterous ovation,” audiences were presented with a single figure, a graceful dancer boldly waving a pink triangle gay liberation flag on a pier overlooking Lake Ontario at the city’s Cherry Beach.[4] Credited simply as “Lim,” the dancer is also the sole figure on the promotional poster for the film. Although he does not speak in Track Two, the presence and prominence of artist and activist Pei-Hsien Lim, a twenty-nine-year-old Malaysian-Chinese immigrant, in the film and its promotion were themselves remarkable. Canada had only liberalized its immigration laws with respect to national origin some fifteen years earlier, and Toronto had a “visible minority” population of only twelve percent.[5] In the early 1980s, Robert Diaz, Dai Kojima, and John Paul Catungal explain, Asians “were rendered out of place” in Canadian LGBTQ communities and liberation movements, “understood as curious subjects, sometimes desired for their purported exoticness but also absented from mainstream spaces.”[6]
Yet here was Lim, a gay Asian man, presented as the avatar for Toronto’s gay community in 1982. Highly conscious of “the problems being gay and Asian” that he faced in the West, Lim embraced his visibility and defiantly claimed a right to presence in mainstream gay spaces in San Francisco, Toronto, and Vancouver.[7] Until his untimely death at thirty-nine from AIDS-related illness in 1992, he was perhaps the best-known gay Asian person with AIDS in Canada.[8] Lim positioned his creative and political work and his everyday life “in the front line of…a war” against racism, homophobia, and AIDS.[9] His contributions to those struggles stemmed from not only outrage at injustice, but an abiding spirituality, a sense of joy in sexual exploration, and commitments to personal and emotional growth.
Lim’s ability to cultivate such visibility owed, in part, to his relative class privilege, geographical mobility, autonomy from family of origin, and high level of education, as well as to impressive personal qualities.[10] Dazzlingly multi-talented, Lim worked as a nurse, graphic designer, flight attendant, and advertising art director. His vast creative oeuvre spanned painting, sculpture, dance, poetry, graphic design, modeling, line art, and pornography. A self-described “Asian clone” – a reference to the macho aesthetic popular with gay men in the late 1970s and early 1980s – with a deep voice and a physique honed by hours in the gym and dance and martial arts practices, Lim could marshal a measure of erotic capital against anti-Asian racism within gay communities dominated by white masculine ideals.
Yet Lim used these forms of privilege to challenge hierarchies of representation and desire in which many others fared worse than he did. Those who worked alongside Lim remember him as both measured and incisive, refined and ribald, and attentive to the spiritual as well as practical dimensions of activist work. Lim’s story is indelibly one of community and chosen family, further evidence that, as Olivia Laing claims, “queerness requires an ecosystem to flourish.”[11] This biographical exhibit follows Lim’s itinerary, from his upbringing in Malaysia and education in Australia to his adult life in Canada and the United States. It aims less for hagiography and more for an account of the communities and worlds that helped make Lim possible, and those that he helped make possible for others.
[1] “Track Two: Giving Us Back Ourselves,” The Body Politic, Sept. 1982, 31. The film screened in conjunction with “Doing It,” a festival and conference organized by the Toronto Gay Community Council that drew international participation. See Tim McCaskell, Queer Progress: From Homophobia to Homonationalism (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2016), 177-178.
[2] Track Two: Enough is Enough, directed by Gordon Keith, Jack Lemmon, and Harry Sutherland. (KLS Productions/Pink Triangle Press, 1982), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iN4_8euridshttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iN4_8eurids; Catherine Jean Nash, “Consuming Sexual Liberation: Gay Business, Politics, and Toronto’s Barracks Bathhouse Raids,” Journal of Canadian Studies 48, no. 1 (Winter 2014): 82; McCaskell, Queer Progress; Tom Hooper, “Enough is Enough”: The Right to Privacy Committee and the Bathhouse Raids in Toronto, 1978-83” (Ph.D. diss, York University, 2016).
[3] “Track Two,” The Body Politic.
[4] “Track Two,” The Body Politic; Harry Sutherland, interview with the author, June 24, 2024. Sutherland described the choice of Cherry Beach as a filming location was “a bit of a reclamation project,” explaining that “in the seventies the Toronto Police Department was totally out of control and used to pick up people in downtown they didn’t like, particularly loud drag queens, take them to Cherry Beach in a squad car, beat the shit out of them and leave them to walk home.”
[5] McCaskell, Queer Progress, 21, 151.
[6] Robert Diaz, Dai Kojima and John Paul Catungal, “Introduction: Feeling Queer, Feeling Asian, Feeling Canadian.” Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies 38 (Fall 2017): 73.
[7] “Lim,” May 9, 1983, Box 13: Gay Asians of Toronto Video 1985-1985, Richard Fung Fonds, The ArQuives: Canada’s LGBTQ2+ Archives, Toronto.
[8] Walter Quan, interview with the author, May 7, 2024.
[9] “Lim,” May 9, 1983.
[10] “Racism and Gay Male Porn,” Rites for Lesbian and Gay Liberation, Feb. 1987, 14-15.
[11] Olivia Laing, “Foreword,” in Queer Spaces: An Atlas of LGBTQIA+ Places and Stories, eds. Adam Nathaniel Furman and Joshua Mardell, (London: RIBA, 2022), viii.