After the break-up, I walked Yonge St. at night.

I didn’t understand this compulsion, but the circuit remained the same: a few drinks at a village bar and I would wander the corridor between Bloor and Dundas, peering into closed stores or sleepy bars, stopping in at a late-night bookshop to peruse the dusty shelves and eavesdrop on the surly owner’s conversations with customers, habitually thumbing through texts on my phone.

The segment of Yonge I’d chosen was unremarkable—a mishmash of architectural styles, occupied by chain restaurants and convenience stores, seedy enough to attract unsavoury characters and containing a fraction of the nightlife of hipper sections of town. But I liked it—it felt lived-in, like neighbourhoods in Montreal or New York, where converted spaces and faded signage were a source of pride, evidence of civic durability. Nearby businesses like the House of Lords salon had catered to generations of shaggy, misguided teens, while strip clubs Zanzibar and the Brass Rail stood on either end of the street, like neon bookends.

And in the middle of all of this was the decaying clock tower of St. Charles Tavern, one of the city’s earliest and most notorious gay bars, where drag queens paraded on Halloween night in the 1970s, pelted with eggs by jeering crowds. Once a fire hall, it was now a games store with bright yellow signs advertising discount prices on superhero figurines.

I would go as far as my feet would take me, then head home, only to return a few nights later to do it all over again. A comforting cycle. A routine, of sorts.

My ex-partner Mark and I also had routines, when things were working. If the weather was nice, we would climb the steep stairs of his old-but-affordable Chinatown brownstone and take his dog through the university campus, stopping for a quick drink at a pub we liked because it was queer-friendly and staffed mostly by artists. It was there, under the smoky red lanterns, that he had grasped my hands when I received word of my mother’s heart attack, tucking himself into me. He told me he wasn’t going anywhere. His words buoyed me.

On the weekends, we made our pilgrimage to Honest Ed’s, all labyrinthine stairwells and tacky signage. Filling our baskets with vitamins and tchotchkes, we’d pose for playful photographs in front of the dated theatre posters or mirrored displays, one of them with massive pink text: welcome to yesterday. Mark made obscene gestures I’d only discover later while swiping through my phone. “That was the whole point of the photo,” he’d tease.

At night, when the spirit would take us, we’d head to Zipperz, a gay piano bar with a club tucked behind a velvet curtain. It was like something out of a David Lynch film, with its cheap drinks, show tunes, and a large plaster torso and buttocks on either side of the entrance. The bar attracted a clientele older than us by a generation, but one that was more mixed and less pretentious than at other village haunts. Mark loved it and the owner loved him. There, dancing on a chrome floor that was often slick from beer, we’d tangle together, between the bodies and beneath the lights, three decades of music washing over us.

On our way home, we’d stumble drunkenly past that same clock tower above the old St. Charles, trying to imagine walking the circuit as those brave queens all those years before. I’d threaten to scale the building and climb inside the tower. “One day, I’ll get inside that thing.” He’d laugh, “I look forward to seeing it.”

But within a year, Mark was gone. So, too, the Chinatown brownstone, the pub, Honest Ed’s, and Zipperz. And in their places, cavernous pits, large cranes and empty storefronts. The markers of progress in a city with a red-hot real estate market, but also indicators of loss, of absence. Yellowing teeth needlessly tugged from a smile, soon to be replaced with expensive titanium implants, good as new.

There’s something to be said for the challenge of recording memories in a city that rewrites itself, of processing trauma while navigating a backdrop of urban amnesia. In the aftermath of loss, you desperately try to grasp for the concrete, the tangible, to orient you. You retrace your steps, revisit important places, attempt to solidify past experiences or maybe even exorcise them by confronting whatever residue is left behind.

But in the absence of the familiar, there is only the unknown.

All living cities evolve and transform, but our city is different. A metropolis without a guiding mythology, Toronto has been shaped almost entirely by economic whims, political resentments, and slash-and-burn epochs. Sometimes literal fires, as in the Great Fire of 1904, and other times surges of re-development, like the unceremonious destruction of Victorian architecture in the 1970s or the condo craze of the present, with large swaths of the city razed and rebuilt without much thought to history. A city with a comforting blankness, with each successive generation erasing the remnants of the previous one, a civic character defined by willful forgetfulness and in the interest of a certain type of progress.

For some, this progress is a move toward the antiseptic, expensive, and decidedly conservative. A notorious strip club like Jilly’s becomes a boutique hotel, the heritage plaque out front conveniently ignoring the more sordid chapters in the history of the building and the cash-strapped tenants re-homed to less trendy neighbourhoods. Some facades are maintained, but grafted off of historic buildings and then mounted onto glass boxes, the architectural version of a killer wearing their victim’s face. Mark’s old brownstone, populated mostly by queers and artists, is demolished and replaced by an expensive condo marketed on a bohemian brand; an old family-run restaurant is transformed into a hip new brunch spot for new, more monied neighbours.

The city’s edges are sanded down and its darkest corners brightly lit. Organic spaces, sprung from human needs and messy excesses become a marketing tool for real estate agents, but are never an imperative for preservation. Raze and rebuild.

The places we inhabit disappear and the spaces that replace them leave no room for us. The city, a draw for marginalized queer people with an assurance of community and infrastructure, is also increasingly unaffordable, pushing many into outlying suburbs and smaller towns—cheaper places where safety is less certain and visibility is non-existent, and where a lack of density prevents proper community organizing or easy access to progressive workplaces. An economic closeting in a way, where the golden handcuffs that enable you to rent affordably or possibly own property also prevent you from holding your partner’s hand in public.

Memories get written on the margins because there is no space on the page, but soon there is no place in the book.

I think of this during one of my last nights on Yonge, as I climb the clock tower. I’ve gained access to the old St. Charles building as part of a creative project, an attempt to document the space and its history before it is torn down and replaced by an expensive condo. Little remains from that grubby tavern, thirty years on, but I attempt to record it all—the abandoned keg room, the sealed dumbwaiters, even the massive furnace. No drag queens.

Inside, I climb a narrow wooden staircase to the first platform, a filthy room with four windows in each direction. Above me are the cracked iron bell, green from moisture, and a ladder leading to the inner mechanisms of the clock, frozen in time.

Staring up, I feel history wash over me. The firefighters scrambling up and down these wooden stairs, and the queer men on barstools, hunched over cheap beers, desperate for connection, terrified of the world beyond. I feel compelled to contact Mark, to send him a message to let him know that I’ve made it, that I’ve found my way into this hallowed space. That I’m a part of history.

But as I fumble with my phone in gloved hands, I look out onto Yonge, at the strip I’d walked night after night. From this vantage point, I can see the House of Lords and the old bookshop, now both shuttered, large “For Lease” signs looming in empty storefronts. Beyond that, condos and cranes, many rising around the clock tower itself, dwarfing it on the street.

And below me, an uncharacteristic silence.

I put my phone away.

…Everything Remains Raw: Photographing Toronto’s hip hop culture from analogue to digital

Mark V. Campbell’s …Everything Remains Raw is an in-depth look at Toronto’s burgeoning hip-hop scene from the 1980s until present day. It also explores how the city helped mold hip-hop culture. The book is a collection of photos, zines, interviews, and art created during a time in Toronto when hip-hop culture was new. The book is an effort to keep the representation of hip-hop genuinely “raw,” Campbell says. Archival photographs, images of graffiti, and nostalgia about venues are all part of the conversation.

Campbell offers sharp observations about the deep influence that photojournalists and hip-hop artists have made, while also exploring the politics and changing dynamics of the hip-hop experience. The book encourages readers to contemplate the deep connection members of the hip-hop community felt to the music and one another during important moments in the Toronto hip-hop scene.

Readers will be forced to consider institutionalized Western art and the implications that come with leaving out marginalized communities. For example, artwork that is normally seen as nationalistic often deeply contrasts with the reality of what was happening in the country’s physical geography at the time. …Everything Remains Raw encourages readers to ponder and broaden our vision of what we consider to be Canadian art and culture. In the way that The Group of Seven celebrated Canada’s land, hip-hop creators used their words and art to do the same to Toronto.

On August 25, 2003, a transgender woman named Cassandra Do was found dead in her apartment on Gloucester Street in Toronto’s LGBTQ Village.

I don’t know much about Cassandra aside from some essential facts: She was 32, she did sex work, she was once in nursing school, she was Vietnamese. In one of the first Toronto Star articles about her death, her friends mentioned she had a “penchant for French antique furniture.” But her story remained untold.

Forensic evidence from the scene of Cassandra’s apartment suggested her murderer was someone who had committed a sexual assault back in 1997, targeting another Southeast Asian sex worker. The 1997 victim survived the attack and was able to provide the police with a detailed description of the perpetrator as a large cisgender man in his late 30s or early 40s. But from then to 2003, Toronto police did not make the public aware of it until he struck again.

As a trans woman of colour as well as a sex worker, Cassandra was at high risk of experiencing everyday violence, discrimination, and mistreatment by the police. In fact, for many sex workers and for trans people of colour, some form of police harassment is a regular occurrence. While national statistics on transgender people are hard to come by, provincial and local research illustrates what most of us already know: A 2010 survey of trans people in Ontario by Trans Pulse (a project collecting data on access to health care in the trans community) found that roughly a third of trans people who have been incarcerated reported transphobic harassment from the police; the same study notes roughly a quarter of racialized trans people and a third of Indigenous trans and Two-Spirit people reported harassment from the police due to racism.

Yasmeen Persad—an educator, facilitator, and community worker who provides training for racialized LGBTQ people and HIV-positive LGBTQ women in Toronto—encounters this regularly with those in the trans community. “When it comes to law enforcement, there are a lot of challenges,” Persad says. “Because of their identities, of who they are, by default it sets them up for more police scrutiny. Many [people I work with] are newcomers, immigrants, sex workers, living precariously, in the shelter system, under-housed—these people who are often on the fringe of everyday day-to-day survival have real challenges with the police.”

When they are targets of violence, both sex workers and trans women are often dismissed as victims of their of circumstances. Not having a fixed address, being potentially exposed to drugs, and subverting assigned expectations of gender and sexuality contribute to a public perception of carelessness and deviance that tells people and institutions how much they have to care about those they see as putting themselves at risk.

Talking about the lives of trans women is frequently a conversation about risk, and the kinds of risks that cisgender communities and institutions take for granted. Stories about Cassandra’s murder in the Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail focused on the details of her transition, her sex work, and her past in nursing school. According to the site Accozzaglia, a transgender history project run by long-time trans community members in Toronto, the message was clear: “Journalists fabricated a narrative on morality which could try to rationalize how Ms. Do probably brought this death on herself, because she was a woman of colour, trans, and had earned her living from sex work—throwing away a more ‘acceptable’ nursing career.”

The way that the police and the press treated Cassandra’s case was typical of their treatment of trans women at the time. That same year, a trans woman of colour named Shelby Tracy Tom was murdered in Vancouver by a man named Jatin Patel. Reports at the time referred to Shelby only as “an Asian transsexual prostitute.” Police took several days to inform other community members of what happened to Shelby, prompting harsh criticism from other sex workers who felt that withholding information unduly put them at risk.

We still don’t know the identity of the man who killed Cassandra. In February 2016, the police unveiled their new cold-case site, which aimed to publicize information about unsolved cases to engage the public in looking for new information. The next day, the police posted a two-minute video to YouTube describing her case, taking care to disclose the status of her medical transition. Interest in Cassandra’s case briefly renewed, 13 years after she was murdered by a man who had a history of violence against sex-working women of Asian descent. But it soon fizzled out. There was nothing new to be learned.

II: Deanna Wilkinson

Yasmeen Persad’s office at The 519, a queer community centre located in the heart of Toronto’s Village, the area surrounding Church and Wellesley streets. There, she leads the Trans-Identified People of Colour Project. “We work with a lot of trans women who in the summertime might be hanging out in the park because they might be accessing the shelter system, and during certain times of the day the shelter might be closed,” she tells me. “Police see them as troublemakers, like they just shouldn’t be there.”

The Church and Wellesley neighbourhood has seen some significant changes over the last few decades, particularly with how the area is policed. According to Patience Newbury, a scholar of transgender issues related to public space well-versed in the history of the Village, the 1990s saw numerous incidents of assault and vandalism where police would avoid getting involved, or admonish those living there who stood up for themselves. But around the mid- to late ’90s, things shifted. Cisgender people, mostly gay men, began to buy up storefronts and needed to work with police. They wanted cleaner sidewalks, less noise and sleaze, and fewer homeless people, so as to maintain the value of their properties.

Newbury says among the biggest losers in this new closer relationship between cis gay people and police were the trans women who lived and worked in the area. Property ownership in the Village that was accessible to cisgender people was completely out of reach for trans people, especially women, who are relegated to informal and unprotected work. For trans sex workers, the Village was, and remains, one of the key spots to conduct street-based work. The main stretch of road where many trans women make their livelihood is just east of Church and Wellesley, on a street called Homewood Avenue.

Business has taken a hit, largely due to changes in who formally occupies the space. And in the absence of good-faith regulation and worker protections, many sex workers are unduly put at risk as a result of law enforcement.

Since 2014, some laws around sex work have changed in letter, though not entirely in spirit. Sex workers no longer face the direct threat of imprisonment as a consequence of their work. But the risk hasn’t disappeared: It’s still illegal to purchase the services of a sex worker, and to “communicate” for the purposes of doing so, which forces many people into underground and unsafe positions. Police also respond to neighbourhood complaints by stopping and questioning sex workers, a form of casual harassment. Most studies on the legal status of sex work have found that enforcement creates greater risk of harm for sex workers than otherwise, by forcing workers into worse-lit, less accessible, and more isolated locations to avoid police.

Trust in the police is understandably low among sex workers. There’s a long history of exploitation and sexual violence at the hands of law enforcement, especially against women of colour. Just last winter, a member of the Vancouver Police Department was exposed for allegedly exploiting vulnerable sex workers that they had been charged to protect.

“I think any sex worker is threatened by police,” says Monica Forrester, a program coordinator at Maggie’s, a safe community space and resource centre for sex workers in Toronto. She’s been involved in activism on behalf of sex workers and the transgender women for years. “The police will harass the girls mostly when there’s complaints. The girls work in an area where I would say more gay men live, and there has been some friction with the gay men in the area where they work. Police will respond to any sort of call—like that’s there too much noise, you know what I mean? And they’ll push women off of their corners, or tell them to go somewhere else—which can be dangerous considering that they’re trans.”

***

The Church and Wellesley neighbourhood has been in the news lately because police believe the area was the hunting ground of alleged serial killer Bruce McArthur, who, at the time of this writing, has been charged with six counts of first-degree murder. But McArthur is not the first serial killer to make a name for himself in the Village. That title belongs to a man named Marcello Palma, whose victims were three sex workers: Deanna Wilkinson, Shawn “Junior” Keegan, and Brenda Ludgate.

Palma murdered Ludgate, Keegan, and Wilkinson on the night of May 20, 1996. Of the three, only Brenda Ludgate was cisgender; Palma murdered her in the city’s downtown west end. Junior Keegan was only 19 years old when they were murdered by Palma, and while most reporters called them a “transvestite,” it is probably more accurate to describe them as genderqueer.

Deanna Wilkinson was a 31-year-old transgender woman. In the excited reporting days after her body was found, she was referred to only by her former name. Both Keegan and Wilkinson were shot to death on Homewood Avenue, where they worked.

I’ve been thinking about the Homewood murders for several months after learning of them through transgender and sex work activist Morgan M. Page’s history podcast, One From the Vaults. As she tells it, in the wake of the murders, trans women came together to develop a range of community programs designed to help sex workers go about their work with less danger—meal transports, meetings, safe sex supplies.

This was front of mind when I spoke to Persad, who told me about the programming currently underway at The 519. She’s doing good work, but it’s not without its challenges—particularly from police, who often mistreat the trans people of colour in her program. “There’s constant harassment,” she says. “Police see them often like targets, or disposable people who shouldn’t be there, who shouldn’t be around.”

Hours later, I couldn’t stop thinking about those words—targets, disposable. Palma was known to be violent with his wife, and admitted to his psychiatrist that he fantasized about killing street people and sex workers. Despite this, no one tried to intervene in the months leading up to the night Deanna was killed. In fact, Palma was able to freely amass a veritable arsenal of handguns, including the one he used to murder three sex workers.

III: Grayce Baxter

“Transgenderse are also ignored by the police,” writes Viviane Namaste in the 1995 edition of Gendertrash From Hell, a radical transgender zine made in Toronto. Edited by Mirha-Soleil Ross and Xanthra Phillippa, Gendertrash published a total of four issues in the early 1990s—an indie, alternative means of reaching community. In her piece, Namaste mentions three women to illustrate her point: Marsha P. Johnson, whom the New York police called a victim of suicide despite witnesses stating she had been targeted for violence; Tammy Ross, whose sudden death the Montreal police chalked up to suicide; and Grayce Baxter, who disappeared in Toronto in the early ’90s.

“If this is the first time you’ve heard these names and these stories, think about that for a moment,” writes Namaste. “Transsexual sex trade workers are too far removed from the suburban middle class, too marginalized to warrant media coverage, activist demonstrations, or commemorative ceremonies.”

Grayce was 27 when she was murdered in December 1992 by a corrections officer named Patrick Daniel Johnson. She was a sex worker, and Johnson was her client. When newspapers began covering her disappearance, Grayce’s work was just about the only thing journalists could focus on. Described as a “high-priced call girl,” a “prostitute,” and a “transsexual,” reporters conjectured that she was involved with hard drugs, and disclosed both the status of her transition and her former name. She was painted as a caricature, and it was assumed that Grayce’s murder was connected to a sensationalized depiction of what was supposedly a risk-taking, drug-using, party-girl lifestyle. Accozzaglia writes: “Ms. Baxter was murdered by a member of law enforcement. His motive was not drug-related. It related to his own impotence: his purchased time with Ms. Baxter expired before he could climax. So he strangled her to death, cut her into pieces, and dumped the pieces down the apartment tower’s trash chute.”

Community memory runs deep. Grayce’s murder at the hands of law enforcement and her case’s treatment by the police department and media set the tone for what trans women, especially those in sex work, could expect from cisgender institutions and the criminal justice system.

In the ’90s, the stakes for trans women who encountered the police while working were horrifically high. A criminal record could often disqualify someone from participation in gender identity therapy (which includes qualifying for subsidized bottom surgery). There is still only one medical centre in Canada where trans women can get bottom surgery, and the procedure is often prohibitively expensive, even with subsidization. If an encounter with law enforcement went wrong and a trans woman ended up with a criminal record, it would effectively cut off access to further transition-related health care.

Though this is no longer the official policy, many women continue to face similar risks because access to transition-related care often depends on the training and biases of individual service providers and how they choose to interpret government regulation.

The fall 1993 issue of Gendertrash featured an interview with a trans woman and sex worker named Justine Piaget. She describes several instances of being attacked by clients, including once having to cut a man’s testicles “just about off” during a bad call in Montreal. The same issue also features a full-page warning about a dangerous man targeting trans sex workers in the Church and Wellesley area.

This was in 1993. But not much has improved. This February, Monica Forrester told me about her experience seeking police protection after a violent incident with an armed man. “When I was doing outreach, a few women were voicing a guy threatening them. Then he threatened me and he pulled a knife. I did a report, and then I hear, two months later, ‘Oh, well there’s nothing we can do,’” she says. “And they know where he lived, but they said they couldn’t get video surveillance—you know, just a bunch of crap to say, ‘We did what we can do,’ and that’s it.” She saw it as the bare minimum attention required to close the issue, but not to take an active interest in her safety as a trans woman and a sex worker.

Forrester believes that, if it ended up becoming more serious—if he had acted on his threat—we’d quickly see that police would get the necessary information to investigate him after the fact. “It just goes to show that with sex workers, their experiences are considered not as important as someone who might not be a sex worker or who might not be trans,” she says.

Police took two months to begin their investigation into Grayce’s murder back in ’92.

Her remains were never found.

IV: Alloura Wells

I tried three times to get in touch with the Toronto police for this story. When I finally got on the phone with Constable Danielle Bottineau, Toronto Police Service’s LGBTQ Liaison Officer, I was surprised by both her frankness and friendliness. Constable Bottineau had no illusions about the kind of history that Toronto police are grappling with in moving forward with the LGBTQ community. “Historically, as an institution, policing has never been good at being transparent and having those tough conversations,” she says. Because of this difficult history, combined with a failure by police to make known their processes and mandates, Bottineau worries there is a climate of misinformation in which people are quick to come to their own conclusions or fill in their own answers.

A lack of answers has been a recurring theme for the transgender community’s relationship with the Toronto police for three years now, starting with the death of Sumaya Dalmar in February 2015. Toronto police didn’t classify Sumaya’s death as a homicide and provided no further public updates. Many were unsure how to react.

The 26-year-old model was widely beloved both within and beyond her Somali community, and people were heartbroken over her loss. At that point in 2015, six trans women of colour had already been murdered in the United States, all under age 36—a rate of about one murder per week. Many felt afraid and vulnerable, unwilling to believe that Sumaya’s untimely death was not a homicide.

“I still don’t know what exactly happened with Sumaya,” says Abdi Osman, a Toronto visual artist. Osman knew Sumaya personally, and she was the subject of his 2012 documentary Labeeb, which explored gender and sexuality in the Somali community. According to Osman, many of her other friends are still in the dark. Because she had such an important place in her wider community, the silence that followed her death was hard to make sense of.

I spoke to another friend of Sumaya’s, whom I’ll call Shamir (he requested his name be excluded for privacy purposes). Shamir says Sumaya was the first in their circle to come out publicly, and her pride and excitement was infectious. Shamir was very close to Sumaya, and he was with her family the night her body was found. According to him, Sumaya’s family had requested privacy for the course of the investigation, and because family meant a lot to Sumaya, Shamir thought it best to respect their wishes. That meant no police announcements, no public follow-up, no feeding the rumours. “As much as we wanted to put pressure on the police, we wanted to respect her family’s wishes,” says Shamir. He had to become comfortable with silence.

Though it upheld her family’s requests, the silence around Sumaya’s death contributed to the impression that many share of the police taking a hands-off approach to the deaths of marginalized trans people.

Shamir contrasted Sumaya’s case and the police’s cautious silence with the case of Alloura Wells. People who knew Alloura described her as quiet but well-liked. But she was without a fixed address for years, making her part of a population that is at greater risk of death or disappearance.

According to research collected by anti-homelessness information centre Homeless Hub, trans women are overrepresented in the shelter system, especially as youth. Yet, one in three trans youth in Toronto are rejected by homeless shelters due to transphobic discrimination. Research reveals that homeless trans women and women of colour, especially those of Indigenous descent, are frequent victims of discrimination and mistreatment through the shelter system, though issues with data collection make exact statistics hard to find.

Still, reports by Toronto-based researchers found that police harassment of homeless people has remained disproportionately high over the past two decades, ranging from abusive language to physical assaults. In 1992, one in 10 homeless people reported having been assaulted by police, and a 2009 survey of homeless people in Toronto found that over half of the respondents (58 percent) had been victims of violence at the hands of law enforcement.

Alloura went missing in Toronto in July 2017. Folks at Maggie’s organized a search for the 27-year-old, but found nothing. In November, several months after the body of a transgender woman was found in a midtown ravine in August 2017, Toronto police were able to identify the body as Alloura’s.

“I think the situation with Alloura was just total police negligence,” Shamir says. “The situation with Sumaya wasn’t comparable in that sense.” He stressed that in Alloura’s case, he felt the lack of consistent outreach with the trans community only served to break down whatever trust had been built between trans people and the Toronto police.

Maggie’s Monica Forrester sees Alloura’s case as a prime example of police indifference to marginalized trans women. “They didn’t reach out to the community to see how to identify this person, they didn’t do any public awareness around this trans body. It shows you that trans people are not looked at as important or worthy,” she says. “And that’s something that’s still very prevalent.”

Forrester was in contact with Alloura’s father, and encouraged her family to file a missing person report with the Toronto police. But when her family reported her disappearance to the police, they claimed that police officers blew them off, giving them a non-emergency number and refusing to begin the investigation themselves. Alloura’s father says he was told that she was not a “priority” because she was homeless. Forrester was disappointed, but unsurprised. “They knew that this was a trans body they found. Because she was homeless, they really didn’t care,” she says.

In the days following, Toronto police announced that they would begin a review into how they handle sensitive missing persons cases. Police spokesperson Mark Pugash told the Toronto Star that it was “not the proper response from any part of this organization,” and said police had attempted to apologize to the Wells family.

Toronto is an increasingly unaffordable city; it’s hard to survive without access to protected employment, stable housing, and friendly service providers—a situation rarely available to the overwhelming majority of trans women.

When someone is lost, it becomes easy for institutions like the police or the media to dismiss them. Osman called it “victim-blaming.”

***

Everyone I talked to for this story spoke to a sense of feeling worthless in the eyes of police. And as long as we remain locked into a system designed by and for cisgender people that treats transgender women as disposable, that feeling is not going away.

What struck me when researching this story was how close many of the women were to each other. There are women who have had to bury multiple colleagues. They took care to tell their friends that they loved them, because there was no guarantee they would see each other again. That care spilled over into searches, memorials, protests, and news stories, demanding that their sisters be remembered with love.

This city is not friendly to trans women, especially not to those who do sex work, who don’t have fixed addresses, who have been exposed to drugs or violence, who need help and protection. Their disappearances are not the inevitable result of the risks inherent to being transgender; whether by murder, drugs, disease, suicide, or poverty, every trans woman’s death is the product of multiple interlocking systems of exclusion and marginalization.

Each one of them is a preventable tragedy. Each one of them is a priority.

Photo by Nick Lachance.

On February 4, members of Toronto’s LGBTQ communities gathered at the Metropolitan Community Church, in the city’s LGBTQ Village, in search of solace and comfort. Just a month prior, police made public their arrest of Bruce McArthur, the 66-year-old alleged serial killer who has been charged with eight counts of first-degree murder. The news came after years of outcry that Toronto’s queer community was being targeted by a killer when several gay men vanished from the Village. Now, many say the police has failed the community. As Hank Idsinga, lead detective on the case, has told media that the number of McArthur’s victims is expected to rise, the gathering in memorial of those identified thus far provided an opportunity to process grief among friends and loved ones in what has become an unprecedented criminal case.

Photo courtesy of Ryerson University.

Kenneth Moffatt is the 2018 Jack Layton Chair of Social Justice. That sounds fancy, and it is. Appointed across the Faculty of Arts and Faculty of Community Services, the Chair emphasizes the causes of the late NDP leader, and works “to effect progressive social change.” But to many Torontonians, especially those of us in the queer arts worlds, Moffatt is simply Kenny, the Ryerson University social work professor who curates and contributes to art exhibitions: shows (to list a few) about troublesome masculinities, punk rock graphics, the unreliability of institutions, fatherhood, and bears-and-moose Canadiana (deeply queered Canadiana). And by “curate,” I mean he actually hangs the work himself and brings a box of wine for the opening. When Moffatt finds himself in an ivory tower, he burns it down.

As the Layton Chair’s first artist-curator, Moffatt has given himself a challenging task. He plans to support artistic endeavours that highlight the lives and struggles of marginalized peoples. So far, so sociologically/Community Art standard. Except, Moffatt wants the works to be both about and—here’s the important part—driven by the subjects. As he told me recently, “I’m tired of going to social work art shows where the people actually in the photos or who made the work are invisible. Curators, people like me, we get plenty of air time.”

His first project was a sponsored screening of Hugh Gibson’s documentary The Stairs, a film about addiction harm-reduction strategies and how they are applied in marginalized communities. The talk after the screening was lead by the people portrayed, not outside experts. That’s Moffatt in a nutshell.

This Magazine spoke to Moffatt about his new role and his plans for it.

How did you become the Layton Chair, and what did you understand about it before you took the position? 

I am thrilled to be in this position! I highly respect the two previous chairs for their sharp social critique and interest in supporting others’ voices. I understood the position to be aspirational in nature—that is, to encourage students in social justice to re-imagine the interface between community and university. And of course, the Chair recognizes the legacy of Jack Layton, who taught politics at Ryerson and was a very dynamic, engaged educator.

Your focus so far has been to let people who are involved with/clients of social work to speak for themselves. Isn’t it weird that we’ve come to the point where having actual clients speak is considered unusual?

This is still very much a struggle. In the stranglehold of neoliberalism, the voice of service users is obscured. There is a move in social work to [become akin to] managerial duties, thus leading to “outcome measures” and data collection. There is a push to technologize measurements of a person’s worth, which leads to reductive measuring of the service user’s life. More than ever, we need to figure out how to free up and hear service-users voices.

You have been involved with projects that entwine art and social justice work/social work for years. What have you learned from these projects, and how will that learning inform what you do with the Layton Chair?

I’ve learned there is a lot of intelligent and interesting art made in community and in non-profit, and, at times, elusive spaces. You need to reach out, search for space that exists without a profit motive. Often people are not noticed or are silenced because of class, race, gender sexuality and ability. Avoid always looking for experts or “big names,” because, honestly, that can be stultifying.

Contemporary art is notorious for being disconnected from contemporary problems, issues, society, etc. But Community Art can sometimes feel condescending and simplistic. How can people interested in both the arts and helping others bridge this gap?

Academics and people tied to big institutions get caught up at times in ontological loops proving their worth to each other. Contemporary art is at its best when it ruptures disconnected abstract thought and politics. Rather than be preoccupied with innovation and entrepreneurship, guiding principles [in art] could be literacy, listening, humility, and confidence in the local. Mix it up. Rather than merely facilitate voice, let it queer your perceptions.

CORRECTION (03/21/2018): A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that Moffatt was a professor of sociology, not social work. This regrets the error.

This article has also been updated to provide more detail into the role of Jack Layton Chair at Ryerson.

Photo by Michael Cooper. Photo courtesy of VideoCabaret.

Walking into a small room, I am greeted by an usher as songs about Louis Riel and Canadian identity foreshadow the upcoming play. I take my seat across from the centre of what I assume is the stage. Scarlet curtains frame a black window made to look almost as if you are peering into a TV screen. Above the stage, Comedy and Tragedy Masks take the shape of maple leaves, accentuating the name of the theatre company responsible for the next two hours of hilarity and history: VideoCabaret.

The play I am about to see is the first of a summer-long, two-part series called Confederation & Riel and Scandal & Rebellion, which is about the struggle of forming the Dominion of Canada. These plays do much more than entertain, though–they teach. They are a clear feat to anyone who fought to stay awake during their grade school history classes: Canadian history has become interesting. They manage this through a type of speed, wit, and hand-eye coordination that left me flabbergasted at how much I didn’t know before walking into this room.

The theatre company, founded in 1976, utilizes video cameras, hot-wired televisions, and the power of rock ’n’ roll to engage its audience in plays concerning mass media politics. Since then, VideoCabaret has toured the world, won a total of 23 awards, and produced over 15 plays. The Confederation series, being shown at Toronto’s Soulpepper Theatre, is part of a 21-part play cycle written by VideoCabaret co-founder Michael Hollingsworth that dramatizes and satirizes four centuries of Canadian history in all of its problematic glory.

The plays aren’t what you would think of when hearing the word “theatre.” They are presented in black-box style, where the entire theatre is darkened save for a sliver of light that reveals the actors and subtle projections on hidden screens that form a setting. Hollingsworth’s goal is to create scenes that are under one minute. With speedy character introductions and successional quips that leave no time for afterthought, it’s inconceivable that only eight actors cross the stage, each having more than five roles.

As the play progresses, there is no time to mentally review what you know from elementary school. The play presents a story of Confederation through archetypes that made the characters and plot identifiable, leaving no room for second-guessing the difference between the Fenians and the Orangemen.

In today’s fast-paced age of content creation, the average Canadian’s attention span is eight seconds. VideoCabaret’s theatrical splicing of the lesser-known facts of history has created an indispensable teaching tool that stands its ground in a time where celebrity featured commercials and clickbait titles vie for our attention. VideoCabaret’s Confederation doesn’t ask for your attention, it grabs it, and doesn’t let go until you’ve learned a thing or two about the True North.

Photo courtesy of Another Story/Facebook.

A chalkboard sits on the sidewalk outside of Another Story, the first sign that this isn’t your typical bookstore. Written on it is a quote from American political activist Angela Davis: You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time. Since 1987, Another Story’s mission as an independent bookstore has been to do just that—carrying titles with themes of social justice, equity, and diversity.

Located in the Roncesvalles neighbourhood in the west end of Toronto, the store has become a staple in the community and beyond, receiving orders from across the country. Another Story’s carefully curated collection is a reflection of owner Sheila Koffman, who died in September after a battle with cancer, and her strong commitment to increasing the representation of different perspectives and ideas through literature.

Independent bookstores like Another Story are much more than a place to buy books. They become a local hub for neighbours to meet and interact, a space to launch indie authors, and where customers and staff are on a first-name basis. But as big-box stores and online giants, such as Amazon, continue to grow, independent shops find it more and more difficult to stay afloat.

This year marks 30 years since Another Story opened. It’s a milestone not just because the store has survived, but because it has thrived and plans to continue what Koffman set out to do three decades ago. 

Koffman worked as a civil servant prior to opening Another Story in the late 1980s. Its first location was in a basement on the Danforth in the east end of Toronto. For the next decade and beyond, the shop struggled as one of the few political bookstores at the time. Koffman ordered titles from home, inviting publishers over and forming lasting friendships along the way. The store relied on its wholesale business to keep afloat, eventually establishing strong relationships with teachers, librarians, and school boards across Ontario.

Jeffrey Canton, a former employee, began working at the store during this period and credits Koffman’s foresight and business savvy. She recognized the need to incorporate more diverse books into classrooms early on, before curriculums caught up. “That focus on equity and social justice… and all the various things that she focused on in the store were things that she was doing long before it was part of the real conversation that we have today,” says Canton. “She fought really hard to make sure that her store reflected that.”

It was important to Koffman to champion smaller and independent titles. Another Story held launches, readings, and evenings specifically for teachers, to introduce customers to books they might not have heard of otherwise. The store would end up moving twice more around the same area. In 2006, the store made one last transition to its current space in Toronto’s west end.

In the store, books are organized by theme. The brightly painted orange, green, and purple walls are lined with titles covering topics such as race and gender identity. At the front of the store is a shelf of staff picks—they try to read as many as they can and discuss before ordering. Boxes labelled with the names of various schools are stacked high at the back of the store, soon to be transported across the province.

Anjula Gogia, former co-manager of the Toronto Women’s Bookstore, organizes events for Another Story. This past summer, the store hosted two of its biggest—the Toronto launch of Roxane Gay’s Hunger and Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. Each event brought out hundreds of attendees. For the store, it was proof that small, independent sellers still have a place among their larger retail competitors. “It’s a chance for people to gather together, to talk about issues, to meet one another, [and] to discuss strategies for change,” says Gogia.

Like many of the store’s staff, co-manager Laura Ash was drawn to Another Story for its commitment to making a social impact through books. For the past few years, the store has been organizing book fairs in schools, bringing alternative titles directly to students. The shop continues to host author events, supporting and advocating for underrepresented writers that might not be carried anywhere else. “All the bookstores that have survived and been around for so long in this city, it’s because they have a community that loves them and they also support that community,” says Ash. 

Staff are determined to keep the store moving forward with the knowledge that Koffman’s legacy lives on in Another Story and all that’s on the shelves. “I come in everyday and I still think she’s going to call,” Ash says. “All these books are books that she bought—this is all her.”

Another Story Bookshop’s 30th Anniversary Bash and Tribute to Sheila Koffman will be held on October 21.

These letters provide an eye witness account of the HIV/AIDS crisis in Toronto. Beginning with a New York Times article in July, 1981 titled, “RARE CANCER SEEN IN 41 HOMOSEXUALS,” the disease was soon called GRID (gay related immune deficiency) before becoming known as HIV and AIDS. Rick mentions a “strange flu” circulating in The Body Politic (TBP) office in October 1982. When he was diagnosed in 1988 his doctor said he had probably contracted the virus at that time. Rick’s letters become a personal journal as the disease begins to affect his friends and as TBP responds to the confusion, loss and contradictory advice threatening the community. Fear caused some to see the disease as God’s punishment for deviant sexuality.

In April 1983 Jane sent Rick a draft of an essay titled “An Act of God: AIDS and the Fear of Death,” eventually published in the July/August 1983 issue of TBP:

If AIDS is going to be called an Act of God, I want the phrase interpreted as it is in some insurance policies. I collected 100 percent instead of the usual $50 deductible when my car was damaged by a fire in the engine. For an insurance agent, Acts of God relieve the victim of any responsibility and therefore require total compensation. For god is one of those wanton boys Shakespeare told us about who kill us for their sport. His other names are accident, disease, natural disaster, death.

We live in a country which aspires to universal health care, which declares disaster areas for victims of earthquake and flood, which maintains rescue crews for people stranded in storms at sea, trapped in an aircraft, lost on a mountain. For anybody.

Yet, when something terrible happens, particularly something for which we are helpless, the greatest temptation is to judge the victim. Victims, too, can seek defence against the irrational by looking for something or someone to blame, even themselves; for whatever cold comfort that is, it can seem preferable to facing the fact of random, morally purposeless disaster. . . .

Illness is given moral stigma only when it is related to an activity or a group of people disapproved of.

My niece has five stress fractures in one leg from playing basketball. I wouldn’t play. I wouldn’t climb a mountain either or try to cross an ocean in a small boat or do a lot of other death-defying things so much admired as human achievements, simply for their own sake.

For some men the baths may be what mountains are for others, worth the risk for the view at the top, both the experience and the freedom it symbolizes as good a thing to die for, or of, as any. Many more people die of pleasure, even of the sort reserved for procreation, than is ever reported in the newspapers. Why should it be less admirable than falling in battle, where people are actually trying to kill each other?

It is not the length but the quality of life that matters to me, more easily said now that I am over 50. But it has always been important to me to write one sentence at a time, to live every day as if it were my last and judge it in those terms, often badly, not because it lacked grand gesture or grand passion but because it failed in the daily virtues of self-discipline, kindness, and laughter.

It is love, very ordinary human love, and not fear, which is the good teacher and the wisest judge.

April 1, 1983

Dear Rick:

I have been thinking about your fondness for battle imagery, a way of keeping courage and a sense of importance, and I’m sure that’s why “dying in battle” got into the enclosed essay “An Act of God” about AIDS. I do think it bizarre that we are taught to honor those who die in battle, condemn those who die of pleasure. In the States we early memorize the last words of Nathan Hale, “I regret I have but one life to give to my country.” He didn’t give his life. He gave his death. Giving birth is giving life. There is something basically peculiar about the idea of “dying for other people.” Is there in it a male attempt to equal or transcend the power of giving birth? If only women can do it in this life, only a man can do it for the next? If dying isn’t a punishment, it certainly isn’t a virtue either. I really do want a morality focused on life rather than death.

I must now get back to fiction.

Affectionately,

Jane

3 October 1983

Dear Jane,

The material on war in your essay is very good, and, curiously, reflects a feeling I had just last night when I went to the Albany. One of the bartenders is named Carlos, a man whose intense Latin beauty could be taken to dictate that his role in clone culture would be to stand sullenly against a wall attracting lust and giving nothing in return. In fact, he’s incredibly cheery and physical, rubbing up against people and grinning as he collects empties, dancing with people he knows, taking advantage of the fact that the crowd is small enough that he can relax and actually get to know more people.

There’s a big video screen at the bar, and last night they were showing the first segment of the CBC’s new series on war—tanks rumbling, marching troops, corpses—and all this accompanied by the dance floor’s disco and Carlos—rich, lush, happy Carlos in an ambulatory dance looking for ashtrays to empty. That anybody could ever see him as a “troop,” as one of that mass of expendable bodies to be thrown into these burning fields of mud and machines, that that amazing, warm, alive body could be sent off to become so much carrion—it was all too much to believe. Yet, of course, it’s not too much to believe: that’s how millions and millions of Carloses ended up. It doesn’t all quite make me a pacifist; I think there are situations in which one might have no moral choice but to fight. The horror, I think, is in the massive casualness of it all—all those hundreds of thousands of individual lives turned into faceless soldier-machines, inconvenient refugee problems and innocent civilian targets. All that gets lost except when the CBC shows scenes of war over their happy bodies on the disco floor. It was very curious.

Sincerely,

Rick

Photo by Lindy Wilkins.

Tucked away in an alley off the corner of Bloor and Ossington is what looks like a two-storey garage with only a small purple neon sign acting as a beacon to passersby. This is home for a collection of hackers and hobbyists known as Site 3—a communal space that rewards curiosity of the trades.

Many are there because they simply do not have the space to tinker with machinery in the urban city. The atmosphere is relaxed and akin to hanging out in someone’s garage as saturated reds adorn the upper deck amid throwaway couches that make the space pop with vibrancy. Hanging on the shelf is a giant sign that reads, CHARCADE—a reference to the fire art installation made by a few members that ended up as an attraction at the Burning Man festival.

“The space was founded on a four-step mission: teach, create, display and inspire. It’s not strictly an artist studio. We are trying to build community around it,” says Seth Hardy, one of the co-founders.

The diverse membership includes machinists, coders, OCAD students, architects and prop makers. It strives to be inclusive by offering a LGBTQ and Ladies night on Tuesday evenings. At a given moment members could be working on any number of projects: whether it be hacking the vending machine to be accessed by their key fob, working on a way of using electroencephalography (EEG) technology to pour drinks into a cup or working on their latest fire art installation.

Members of the space have gone on to acquire various jobs or have used the space to start their own business. Teaching is done on a volunteer basis. The instructors are people who have hands-on experience working in some capacity with rarefied tools. Members will often pool their resources together to procure equipment as well as having items on site for other members to borrow.

No matter what project you have in mind, “chances are there are people here that can help you realize it,” says member Krista Cassidy.

Cassidy is now working on her own fire art project with a friend. Enthusiastic about her experience, she comments on the process: “It’s great if it serves a purpose, and it’s great if you want to build something that serves absolutely no purpose at all and is just there to be cool,” she says. “Anything kind of goes here—which is awesome.”

As many skills are lost through the convenience of technology, hard skills like welding and blacksmithing become a lost art. As Cassidy put it, Site 3 offers a space where people can “figure out where things work, taking things apart, and learn how to fix them.”

Photo by Yonah Obadia.

The seating area of the Burdock music hall is cast in a faint glow by the string lights above. A spotlight creates a faint hue behind a microphone. Tonight’s artist line up is taped on the microphone stand. The Slackline Creative Arts Series is ready for another show.

The volunteer-run arts series started in July 2016, when Evan J. Hoskins and Jess Crawford saw the need for a literary arts hub in Toronto for emerging artists. Hoskins, a poet that recently moved from Ottawa to Toronto, recounts Googling Toronto’s poetry scene and finding little. “You get virtually nothing. You get Art Bar [Canada’s longest weekly poetry reading series and hub], some slam communities, and that’s it. And you’re like, ‘Why is that the case?’ If you wanted to start out, is that not your first Google? Why is there no better way to find this stuff?” The summer of 2016 saw the end of The Emerging Writers Reading Series, a monthly literary event that is dedicated to passionate emerging writers, and there was a gap in the Toronto literary arts scene that needed to be filled. That’s when Slackline came in, acting as a space for artists of all art forms to mingle. “We…disliked how the literary scene was so separate from other art scenes and tried to create a forum that was more open and integrative between these communities,” says Hoskins.

Slackline encourages emerging artists from the Toronto arts community to share their work and recognizes that sometimes the community can feel daunting. The Slackline team addresses this through creating a welcoming atmosphere. Even before the show, members of the Slackline team are mingling with audience members and artists within the modest space of the Burdock music hall, attempting to make their guests feel more at home. “We have said from the beginning [that we] want to make a point to talk to everybody possible,” Hoskins says. According to Victoria Cho, a Slackline curator who is also involved with community outreach, the monthly arts series has a certain mood: Slackline isn’t intimidating like other arts events hosted by the community—it’s inviting.

By introducing themselves to as many people as possible prior to the show, the Slackline team helps to transform the venue into a place of communal gathering for audience members and artists who may have felt intimidated. When the show begins with brief introductions of the performers and Slackline team, most audience members are familiar with the hosts on stage. After introductions, the crowd channels that sense of community by extending their hospitality to emerging artists on the open mic. An intermission between two sets of performances by curated artists creates more opportunity for the Slackline team to get to know the people attending their shows. The evening wraps up with community updates, closing remarks, and hearty banter. 

Photo by Justine DiCesare.

The arts community in Toronto can be hard to discover and break into as an emerging artist, with short performance times and the scarcity of series that focus on newcomers. Drew Douglas, a host and curator for the arts series, says that there is a lot of “cliquey thinking” at art events. “You all know the same stuff. [For example] you all know this one book. So if someone starts a conversation about a book that you’ve all read…obviously you’re going to want to be a part of that. But it’s gonna form a circle, and it’s gonna form a clique. And someone’s not going to have read that book,” Douglas says. The cliquey thinking creates a feeling of isolation that can easily be overwhelming in a space full of strangers.

Cho says that isolation happens systemically, and that it can be addressed by actively engaging with people. The choice to mingle with people humanizes them and can help to eradicate cliquey thinking. “When you bring subjectivity to people I think that’s a step into addressing the isolation problem,” Cho says.

But sometimes mingling with strangers in a dim room can be a challenge. Crawford, who has social anxiety, finds attending art events by herself to be stressful. She describes the feeling as being “huge[ly] out of my shell.” When people attempt to make her feel welcome during art events, she finds that she can better cope with her anxiety. Being greeted and engaged during an event, notes Crawford, “brings you into the community and makes you want to come back.” Through greeting and engaging people who attend their shows, the Slackline team has been actively countering the effects of cliquey thinking within the community.

In addition to addressing isolation and cliquey thinking, Slackline is also being mindful about diversity—both in terms of the performers they showcase and the art forms they present. “We realize that we are suffering from just having poets all the time,” Hoskins says. “Which is okay, but we definitely want to change it.”

Photo by Yonah Obadia.

That’s not to say that Slackline hasn’t showcased its fair share of non-traditional performances. During its September show, Brolin Devine gave a stand up comedy set after reading prose. Cian Cruise handed HARIBO gummy bears to the audience and continually filled his mouth with gummy bears as he read his piece titled “Haribo” during an October show. On May 21, Rasiqra Revulva will be performing a nautical piece with voice-altering technology.

The team also attends non-poetry events once a month, actively engaging with other arts communities while looking out for emerging artists who are interested in performing under the Burdock’s spotlight. Crawford affirms, “We’ll be continually trying to figure out how to be in different communities and bring everybody together.”

Slackline’s efforts to dismantle cliquey thinking and address diversity within its community is ongoing. As the year moves forward, the team will be planning multiple projects including an outdoor show focusing on Indigenous artists and producing a podcast that incorporates workshops where artists will be able to collaborate, speak about their pieces, and have a good time.

Upcoming spring Slackline shows take place May 21 and June 18 at the Burdock Music Hall.