44

The Village

IN THE RUNNING DISTRICT OF 314 is the gay village, a neighbourhood just east of Yonge Street. The heart of the Village sits at the corner of Church and Wellesley. Toronto has the largest population of gay folks in North America, next to New York City and San Francisco. And as you may have realized already, those people know how to party!

I lived in that neighbourhood for several years, and being stationed on a truck that ran the Village, I knew I was seeing things that no redneck hetero would ever be privy to.

The inclusivity of the gay culture into contemporary society has evolved after decades of struggles by strong individuals advocating equal treatment under the law. When I came on the job in 1985, the older men I worked with were still part of the prejudiced society of the day and boasted about throwing eggs at gays during the Halloween drag parades; the predecessor of what we now know as Pride Day celebrations. During the 1950s in Toronto, gay men would ask to “meet me under the clock,” in reference to the clock tower of the St. Charles Tavern on Yonge Street, a bar that served as an underground venue for men to socialize with others of their sexual orientation away from judgemental eyes. The clock tower was the original clock tower of Fire Hall #3, which was built in 1871 and closed in 1926 when the current Fire Hall #3, my fire hall, opened and later renumbered as 314.

There were several bathhouses in the Village with names such as Steamworks and Barbed Wire. These were places where you could rent a little room complete with bed, locker, and and a TV playing porn. You could also have a steam and maybe work out in the gym. I’m not sure, but I think the odd sexual encounter might have gone on in those little rooms. Maybe the monstrous bowl of condoms at the check-in desk was a clue.

Some bathhouses catered to the older, more established gentleman, some to the younger party boy, and others to the hardcore “I’m going to hurt you” kind of man. After a few years of answering medical calls to the bathhouses for drug overdoses and alcohol-related stuff, we’d find ourselves sucked in by the selection of video entertainment. After a while we’d realize, “Hey, I’ve seen this one. Watch this guy. Holy shit, no way is he going to … Wow, impressive!”

Impressive is the word to describe what we experienced one night with a man who had taken a popular drug known as GHB. Once the high is gone the user crashes hard and falls into a deep sleep. This guy had obviously “fallen asleep” during the act: he was standing erect, oblivious to the half-dozen onlookers. We put his underwear on and tried to hide his goods but, impressed or not, I’m not a magician. I couldn’t hide it or even stretch the underwear — it was impossible. Sure enough, when paramedics showed up to take this dude to the hospital, it was two women who answered the call.

We had to search the guy’s storage drawer looking for identification, which involved rummaging through his toys to find his wallet. I got a kick out of watching the young guys who came in from other areas of the city to ride the truck. They were shell-shocked by the goings-on — innocent lambs being led to the slaughter.

One of the things about working downtown that made the job so interesting was the diversity of the calls. One minute you would be fighting a fire in an underground parking lot or forty stories above ground in a high-rise, the next you might be lifting an incubator with a one-pound preemie baby inside for an EMS crew, and the one after that you might be tending to a man who had been gang-raped at a party.

DURING A BUSY SATURDAY NIGHT, we answered a medical call to a lesbian bar, right around last call. We had to fight our way into the club through the throngs of people leaving to take cabs, seeking some privacy with new “friends.” An “assertive” woman led us to a front room, where we found a butch-looking lesbian holding her head. Blood was streaming down her face. Someone had thrown a beer bottle and hit her on the noggin. My partner, Russ, and I checked out her cut; she needed a stitch or two.

As we were wiping off the blood, Captain Billy looked at the dispatch sheet. “It says here CPR is in progress. Is the ambulance here?” he asked.

“Yeah, in the back,” said the assertive woman. Holy shit, this was the wrong patient! Russ and I taped a bandage to her head, grabbed our stuff, and headed over to the real emergency.

We pushed our way to the back room. Sure enough, the ambulance crew had come in the back door and were doing compressions on a patient on the stage. The performer, a twenty-five-year-old drag queen, had collapsed while singing “I Will Survive.” Thud.

We had to take off her dress and pull out her falsies to place the defibrillator pads. Her irises were complete pinholes — probably an overdose. We assisted the paramedics by doing chest compressions and ventilations as they pumped drugs into the patient. After about forty-five minutes of chest compressions while the paramedics followed their complete protocol, injecting the entire cycle of drugs, they pronounced him dead, following directions from their base hospital. The compressions stopped. The IV lines were taken out of the patient. A sheet was pulled over the dead man’s face.

As we stepped back after frantically trying to save this person’s life, another drag queen came up and spoke to the paramedics. She casually told them that the man under the sheet was from Montreal and spoke only French, so she could translate when he woke up.

The man was lying on the floor under a cotton sheet — a universal sign that he wouldn’t be needing a translator. Incredulous, one of the paramedics spoke to the performer — who seemed to be whacked out on drugs — as if she were a child: “He … is … dead.”

The drag queen started wailing. “I want to cry, but the tears won’t come,” she said. “He has a boyfriend in Montreal. Who’s going to tell him?” We tried to calm her down as she continued to scream.

The butch lesbian with the bandage on her head wandered into the back room looking for help. So now we had one dead female impersonator lying under a blanket on the floor, one very lively female impersonator screaming like crazy, jumping across the stage, and one very pissed-off butch lesbian looking to rumble.

THE TORONTO FIRE DEPARTMENT HAS been participating in Pride celebrations for several years, adding fire trucks and firefighters to the parade. Firefighters walk the parade route with Super Soaker water guns jousting with the partiers, a traditional activity, during what is typically a hot summer day. One afternoon when I was still working at Regent Park, I ended up in the Pride celebrations by accident.

On the afternoon of the parade, we responded to a report of a person trapped in an elevator on Yonge Street. The parade was wasn’t to start for thirty minutes or so but people were starting to gather along the route. Once we located which floor the trapped person was on, it took a few minutes for our crew to extricate them. The captain wrote down the information of the person, and we grabbed our tools and walked out the front door of the apartment building. By now the sidewalk was packed with parade revellers and our truck had disappeared. My captain radioed the driver trying to find out where he went.

“The police told me to move the truck. I’m up on College Street around the corner,” said the driver. College Street was the next block north but the parade had now started and the sidewalks were chock a block full of people. Dressed in our fire gear, we pressed our way through the crowd to try to locate our missing truck. Many people thought we were just partiers enjoying the parade. We encountered several men in fire gear from different cities celebrating Pride and I was cruised a few times, just like I was when I lived in the neighbourhood years before.

One year a couple of firefighter friends of mine from the College Street Fire Hall, #315, participated in Pride celebrations. Both are gay and were dressed in their Toronto Fire gear. A photographer from the Toronto Sun snapped a photo of them celebrating Pride Day with a kiss. The photo made the front page of the paper. The two men got much light-hearted ribbing and the photo was framed and placed on the wall of 315 alongside photos of significant fires and rescues — a hall of fame, of sorts. Years later, however, there was a reminder that, although Pride is a sanctioned event embraced by most firefighters, not all were on board. A fire chief of significant rank walked into 315 and saw the photo on the wall of fame. He demanded the acting captain take down the “revolting photograph.” The acting captain did as he was told. News travelled across the job. The crew were pissed off and responded in protest. The photograph was replaced with a picture of Margaret Atwood, a vision of culture and inclusion. It still hangs on the wall to remind the crew at 315 that bigots are still out there. The crews complained about the action of the chief and he was disciplined, and ordered to take sensitivity training. Part of his punishment was handing out fire recruitment flyers at the corner of Church and Wellesley.