The Right to Privacy Committee, Toronto Gay Street Patrol, and Early AIDS Work
As GAT fought racism within LGBTQ communities, it simultaneously embraced united front tactics in the coalitional fight against police brutality. In defending the men arrested in the bathhouse raids of 1978 and 1981, the Right to Privacy Committee relied on the ingenuity of volunteers as well as legal professionals. RTPC Legal Defence Committee Coordinator Dennis Findlay became such a fixture at the trials of men arrested in the bathhouse raids that he was made an official “friend of the court,” securing withdrawals and acquittals for a dozen men without any formal legal training.[1] When defending men of color, RTPC coordinated with Zami and GAT to pack the courtroom with Black men when Black defendants were before the court, Asian men when Asians were on trial, and so on. RTPC exploited police officers’ inability to identify the accused – many could not tell men of color apart – to get charges dropped.[2] When Asian men were called into court, GAT members, including Lim, would show up in force.[3] Strategic coordination with GAT was just one facet of RTPC’s multiracial organizing, which included alliances with prominent Black critics of police violence, such Fran Endicott and Pat Case, both of whom were school board members, and Lemona Johnson, a Jamaican Canadian activist whose husband had been killed by Toronto police.[4]
When GAT organized a fundraiser to benefit the RTPC, Lim choreographed another new dance work, “Never Again,” which took up the pink triangle, a symbol reclaimed by gay liberationists from the Nazis, who had used it to mark homosexuals as degenerates. The dance seized on the popularity of Bent – a recent Broadway play about gay love, friendship, and the struggle to survive in a Nazi concentration camp – that came to Toronto just weeks after Operation Soap.[5] “Never Again” also echoed the activism of John Burt, a gay Jewish Canadian and RTPC organizer who was among the bathhouse arrestees and who was the son of Holocaust survivors.[6] As McCaskell explained, “In the context of a resurgent right wing in both Canada and the United States, comparing the activities of the police in Germany in 1935 and in Toronto in 1981 did not seem far-fetched.”[7] Lim would reprise “Never Again” for co-director Harry Sutherland’s camera for inclusion in Track Two.
In mobilizing against police repression and abuse, Toronto LGBTQ activists simultaneously sought to forge alternative institutions of community security. In May 1981, Lim, and Findlay became founding members of the RTPC’s Toronto Gay Street Patrol, which organized volunteers into four-person teams to protect Toronto’s “gay ghetto,” then anchored on Yonge and Wellesley Streets, from queerbashers. Such violence was then a routine occurrence, especially around Halloween, when large crowds would amass near the Charles Street Tavern to harass LGBTQ revelers.[8] In addition to training in conflict de-escalation, first aid, and self-defense, the Patrol took volunteers through guided meditation exercises, led by Lim, to help them remain coolheaded.[9] In November 1981, TBP reported that despite mutual antipathies between LGBTQ communities and police, a combination of policing and Street Patrol efforts had significantly reduced Halloween queerbashing.[10]
The Patrol was also notable for the alliances and friendships across race and gender that it made possible. Lim and Findlay were later joined by Chris Higgins, who recalled that her work with the Patrol was the first time she had worked closely as an activist alongside gay men.[11] Lim, Findlay, and Higgins became close friends, and when Higgins faced the end of a major relationship, Lim welcomed her to room with him in the home he rented on Langley Street in Toronto’s Riverdale neighborhood. Although Lim cultivated a macho image, the complexities of his relationship to gender came out in his close friendships. Higgins spoke fondly of Lim’s self-deprecating, playful, maternal side, which came out as he “mothered” her at a difficult time. Fung, too, recalled Lim’s simultaneous preoccupation with elaborating a “butch” masculinity and his experiments with what might now be called genderqueerness, epitomized in Lim’s quip that “every gay man should have a dress in his closet.”[12]
Lim’s Toronto friends also recall his firm belief in what is now called sex-positivity – a commitment that was, in a word, vocal. Fung, who along with McCaskell lived in a gay leftist collective house on Seaton Street where Lim also resided briefly, recalled that “when Lim was coming, the house would shake.”[13] At times, Lim’s pro-sex ethic could verge on contextual insensitivity. Higgins recalled a mixed-gender meeting of the Gay Street Patrol at Lim’s home on Langley where he thought nothing of leaving gay men’s pornography playing on a television in the background. But when Higgins confronted Lim on his behavior, he proved both understanding and responsive, handcrafting an elaborate apology card to convey his heartfelt regret.
As with his collaboration with Fung, Lim’s work with Higgins continued as the city’s LGBTQ activists, accustomed to fighting state repression, increasingly found themselves also contesting state abandonment in the face of growing public and personal health crises. In 1983, Higgins and her partner, hoping to have a child, asked three close friends, including both Lim and another friend, Rob Fulton, to consider serving as sperm donors. When Lim went in for a medical evaluation, he learned he was HIV-positive and was unable to serve as a donor due to the limits of extant reproductive technology.[14] Lim’s lover, a softspoken painter named Joseph C. Reid who also worked as a sound recordist on Fung’s Orientations, was also positive.
Lim remained in relatively good health for years after his HIV diagnosis, and although the news did little to slow his artistic and political output, the collective fight against AIDS took on increasing prominence in his work. Lim designed the poster for the first annual Gays in Health Care Community Health Fair in 1984, and he and Higgins teamed up on the official posters for Toronto Lesbian and Gay Pride Day in 1985 and 1986.[15] These posters evince Lim’s growing fascination with grids, possibly a critical response to an early, stigmatizing name for AIDS (Gay-Related Immune Deficiency, or GRID) and also in keeping with the resurgence of art deco in the period. The Pride 1986 poster, a direct product of Lim’s volunteer work at a local hospital caring for people with AIDS (PWA), depicts the last heartbeat of a PWA based on actual electrocardiogram readings, insisting that the PWA would be neither uncounted nor unmourned. When Lim and Reid left Toronto for Vancouver in 1986, fighting the epidemic through every available avenue – medical, political, spiritual, and artistic – had become a definitive personal and collective priority.
[1] Dennis Findlay, interview with the author, June 11, 2024.
[2] McCaskell, Queer Progress, 166.
[3] Dennis Findlay, interview with the author, June 11, 2024.
[4] Track Two.
[5] McCaskell, Queer Progress, 146-147.
[6] McCaskell, Queer Progress, 141.
[7] McCaskell, Queer Progress, 147.
[8] “Toronto Gay Patrol Information Binder and Posters, Fliers,” Box 4, The Right to Privacy Committee Fonds, The ArQuives; “Hill on Hold, and the Cops at the Door,” The Body Politic, May 1981, 10; “Homosexual Activists Organize Street Patrol,” Globe and Mail, May 13, 1981, 5; “Toronto’s Gay Street Patrol: Protection for the Homosexual Minority,” Toronto Star, June 29, 1981, A3; “Street Patrols: A Whistle Away From Help,” The Body Politic, July 1981, 11; “Halloween Balls at the Letros and St. Charles Taverns,” The ArQuives, https://digitalexhibitions.arquives.ca/exhibits/show/halloween-letros-stcharles/introduction.
[9] For an important analysis of the contradictions of similar patrols in San Francisco and New York, see Christina B. Hanhardt, Safe Space: Gay Neighborhood History and the Politics of Violence (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013).
[10] “Controlled Crowd a Hallowe’en Treat,” The Body Politic, Dec. 1981, 11.
[11] Chris Higgins, interview with the author, June 7, 2024. For a range of perspectives on the fragility and beauty of friendships between lesbians and gay men forged through community organizing and care work for PWAs, see Joan Nestle and John Preston, eds., Sister and Brother: Lesbians and Gay Men Write About Their Lives Together (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1994).
[12] Richard Fung and Tim McCaskell, interview with the author, June 3, 2024. While little visual evidence of the queerer dimensions of Lim’s relationship to gender remains, he did pose for the JAC Collective, a prolific trio of painters (John Grube, Alex Liros, and Clarence Barnes) who portrayed hundreds of gay men in Canada and the United States between 1980 and 1988. Although all three collective members unfortunately passed away before its identity could be confirmed, at least one of JAC’s portraits – of a male figure in a black leather harness, frilly white socks, and red high heels – aligns with recollections of Lim’s play with gender from his friends and loved ones. See “Racism Tape,” 1983; “The JAC Collection,” Pink Triangle Press, https://www.pinktrianglepress.com/jac-collection/.
[13] Richard Fung and Tim McCaskell, interview with the author, June 3, 2024.
[14] Fighting Chance.
[15] Chris Higgins, interview with the author, June 7, 2024.