Michael Stark was walking around the block. It was a rainy Saturday night during the Victoria Day weekend of 1981. He was trying to build up his courage. There, just down a laneway, was the entrance to a gay bar called Buddies.
“I hadn’t been out very long,” he later explained, “and was nervous about someone seeing me go in.”
Stark had been raised in a military family, spending most of his youth in small communities in the Maritimes before moving to Toronto to attend Ryerson University. The big city was a big shock. He was still just twenty-three, shy, and not yet entirely comfortable being open about his sexuality. That night, he was supposed to go see a movie with a friend, but when she cancelled, he decided to steel himself and head downtown instead. It took a few times around the block, but he finally gathered enough courage to head inside. And there in that underground bar at Church and Gerrard, he would find the love of his life.
Michael Leshner was a bit older, a lawyer in his early thirties. “Somehow our eyes must have met,” he remembered about the moment he first saw Stark, “and I went over to introduce myself. Quickly, we realized there was a physical as well as an emotional connection. The bottom line was Mike was very cute, handsome, and radiated goodness.” As the bar closed down for the night, the two Michaels headed off into the rain. They would spend most of that weekend together. And decades after that.
There was good reason for Stark to be nervous. Ever since the days of Alexander Wood and George Markland, queer Torontonians had been forced to keep their feelings secret, driven into the shadows by public prejudice and legal discrimination — sometimes quite literally. Unable to safely carry on their romances in the public eye, some men looked for connections by cruising in dark alleyways, parks, and public washrooms. There were “glory holes” in the bathrooms of the old Union Station by the end of the 1800s. In the early 1900s, spaces like Queen’s Park and Albert Lane (on the edge of The Ward) were earning reputations as cruising grounds.
They became contested spaces. In the washrooms at Sunnyside Amusement Park, metal plates would be erected in the partitions between stalls to keep men from making holes in them. “Morality lights” were installed along Philosopher’s Walk at the University of Toronto, bushes were cleared from Queen’s Park, and many public washrooms were closed entirely. Even there, in the few marginal spaces where gay men could meet, the officers of the Toronto Police Morality Squad followed. Their first ever report, written back in 1886, listed sex between men as one of the priorities on the list of “vices” they were targeting. In the 1920s, the squad regularly spied on men using the public washroom at Allan Gardens — climbing a ladder so they could peer through a peephole into the stalls. Officers were known to burst into private parties, businesses, and bathhouses in their search for gay men to round up and drag in front of a judge.
And it wasn’t just ancient history. The most notorious police raids against the gay community came a century after the Morality Squad was founded — just a few months before the Michaels met. The police called it “Operation Soap.” At eleven o’clock on a winter night in 1981, two hundred officers in plain clothes, armed with sledgehammers and crowbars, burst into four gay bath-houses. Over the course of the night, they arrested more than three hundred men — at the time, it was the single biggest police roundup in the history of the city. Those who were targeted would later remember police officers hurling homophobic slurs, busting down doors, breaking into lockers, even taking photos of their naked prisoners. “I wish these pipes were hooked up to gas,” one officer reportedly told a row of gay men as he lined them up against a shower wall, “so I could annihilate you all.”
People had been fighting back against that kind of oppression for decades. Over the course of the 1900s, Toronto’s LGBTQ+ communities had been carefully carving out more public space for themselves. Bars like the Continental and the Rideau began to welcome a lesbian crowd in the years after the Second World War. Hanlan’s Point on the Toronto Islands became a gay hangout, the beaches where Elizabeth Simcoe once found social freedom still serving a similar function two centuries later. By the 1950s, an annual Halloween drag ball was being hosted at the Nile Room, the Egyptian-themed basement of the Letros Tavern on King Street; the sidewalk outside served as a makeshift runway. In the 1960s, and ’70s, as Canada’s first gay rights groups were being founded, an increasing number of openly queer-themed books, plays, and films began to be released. And at the time the Michaels met in the early eighties, the country’s airwaves were filled with a new wave hit from Toronto band Rough Trade: “High School Confidential” featured a woman singing about being attracted to another woman. While some radio stations censored the lyrics, that didn’t stop the song from climbing the charts.
By then, the annual Halloween drag ball had migrated north. The St. Charles Tavern, an old Chinese restaurant on Yonge Street, was now a gay bar. So was the Parkside Tavern just down the street. The Glad Day Bookshop had opened, with the Body Politic magazine published out of its space. Buddies in Bad Times Theatre was putting on groundbreaking productions. The heart of the community would shift slightly eastward in time, centred on the intersection of Church and Wellesley. Countless queer romances would play out on the land where Alexander Wood’s forest had once stood. The Church Street Village became the focal point of Toronto’s LGBTQ+ communities.
The Michaels took things slow at first, not making any long-term plans. “Don’t forget,” Stark later explained, “back in the early 1980s, gay men and women didn’t couple that frequently. There really wasn’t any road map or any role models.” Neither one of them had ever had a boyfriend. But they kept seeing each other every weekend. Before long, on weekdays, too. They were growing closer. “[It] felt very safe, natural, even carefree,” Leshner remembered. “We enjoyed each other’s company — going to movies, meeting my friends, and socializing with them with dinners, brunches and parties.” After a couple of years, Stark got an apartment in Leshner’s building on the fringes of the Village — and six months after that, they moved in together.
Building that kind of stable, long-term relationship already felt like an immense accomplishment. “To meet someone,” Leshner once told Xtra magazine, “fall in love and grow old together. From our first consciousness we were taught we could never have that, that we’re bad people not allowed to dream that dream.”
But there was still a long way to go. Every year on Halloween, a crowd of hateful bigots would gather outside the St. Charles Tavern, hurling eggs and insults at the drag queens. It carried on all through the 1970s and there was still plenty of hate in the ’80s. The first cases of AIDS were reported in Toronto the year after the Michaels met, unleashing a new wave of public homophobia. Just a few years later, a gay librarian was beaten to death by five teenagers in High Park. There was clearly a lot more work to be done.
The Michaels would become leaders in that struggle, joining countless others in the fight for gay rights. Leshner wrote op-ed pieces in the Toronto Star, arguing for equal employment benefits, the right to adopt children, and an end to homophobic legislation. When the police service introduced gay sensitivity training for its officers, he was there to observe the proceedings. He even took the fight to his own employer. In 1988 he launched a lawsuit against the Ontario government, where he worked as a lawyer in the Ministry of the Attorney General, demanding that gay and lesbian couples be given the same pension rights as straight couples. When someone died, he argued, the person they loved and spent their life with should get the same benefits, no matter what their gender or sexuality. His victory was a landmark moment for gay rights in Canada, laying the groundwork for even more progress.
When Leshner was passed over for a promotion, despite a glowing recommendation from his boss, he complained that it was a clear case of homophobic discrimination. When he was reprimanded for talking about it with the Star, he sued again. And won again.
All the while, he was resisted at every turn by conservative groups, Christian organizations, and those in power. “You think if you’re logical and rational,” he explained, “the establishment will see the error of its ways. You think that structural discrimination will end overnight. Guess what? It doesn’t work that way. The people with power hang on to their power, and if you want to open up that status quo, you’ve got to fight.”
It was a lesson the Michaels would take into their biggest battle of all. Decades after homosexuality began to be decriminalized, gay and lesbian couples in Canada still weren’t allowed to get married, to officially and legally share their lives with the person they loved. The Michaels had been together for decades, but as far as the government was concerned, that didn’t matter. They still didn’t have the same rights as straight couples.
“There’s no reason why I shouldn’t be able to marry Michael,” Leshner explained at their twentieth anniversary party. “I have three brothers and a sister, and I’ve attended all of their weddings. It would be nice for them to be able to attend mine. I’ve had the longest relationship of any of my siblings, yet I can’t marry.”
But that was finally about to change.
A modest, red brick church stands on a quiet residential street in Riverdale, just around the corner from Broadview and Gerrard. It’s been there for more than a century, since the early 1900s, but the biggest moment in its history came much more recently.
It all started on a December Sunday in the year 2000. By then, the old building was home to a relatively new congregation. The Metropolitan Community Church was founded in California in the 1960s and came to Toronto a decade later; it’s a Protestant denomination specifically created to welcome to LGBTQ+ parishioners. For more than twenty years, it bounced around the city, holding services everywhere from the Church of the Holy Trinity to the Bathurst Street Theatre. But it eventually found a permanent home in that old building in Riverdale. And it was there the minister was planning to make history.
The church had always been involved in the fight for gay rights — and marriage was the next big battle. The senior pastor, Brent Hawkes, planned to open up a new front by using a loophole in Ontario’s discriminatory laws. The reading of marriage banns is an ancient tradition stretching back nearly two thousand years, first adopted as part of the law of Upper Canada all the way back in the 1700s, when John Graves Simcoe was battling with Parliament over the legal definition of marriage. If Reverend Hawkes read out the banns on three successive Sundays, announcing a coming wedding and giving everyone in the community a chance to object, then the church didn’t need an official licence. Gay and lesbian couples could get married without needing permission from the government.
One winter Sunday after another, Reverend Hawkes stood in front of the congregation and read out the banns for two Toronto couples. He announced that Kevin Bourassa and Joe Varnell were planning to get married. So were Elaine and Anne Vatour.
The first Sunday went off without a hitch. But by the second and third readings, conservative activists had heard what was going on. They arrived at the old church in Riverdale determined to block the plan. When the time came, they rose to make their objections — but the reverend dismissed each of them; their arguments, he explained, weren’t rooted in the church’s beliefs or in Ontario law. He carried on. The banns were read three times.
On the second Sunday of 2001, more than a thousand people crowded inside the church. Reporters and television crews came from around the world, camera shutters clicking away as Reverend Hawkes took his place before his congregation. He was wearing a bullet-proof vest hidden away under his robes: a bomb threat had been called in, he’d already been attacked at that morning’s service, and a small group of protesters was gathered on the corner, hateful placards in hand. One woman tried to derail the proceedings, declaring herself to be a messenger sent by Jesus. But nothing would ruin that day. Despite the protests and distractions, the ceremonies were performed. The crowd cheered and applauded as the two newly married couples kissed.
The government of Ontario, as everyone expected, refused to recognize the weddings. And the Metropolitan Community Church launched a legal battle, uniting with seven other Toronto couples who applied for marriage licences and were denied by city hall — including the Michaels.
It took more than a year for the case to be heard, appealed, and the final decision to come back. But when it did, the Michaels were ready. They’d already bought their rings — their miniature schnauzer, Schmikey, threw up in the jewellery store — and the morning the decision was scheduled to come down, they got dressed in their suits before heading down to Osgoode Hall. An envelope was waiting there for them, the court’s decision inside. They opened it to find the news they’d waited so long for. The Ontario Court of Appeal declared what so many already knew to be true: the law banning same-sex marriages was discriminatory. Gay marriage was now officially legal, effective immediately. The ceremonies performed at the old red church in Riverdale would now be recognized as legally valid. And new weddings were cleared to take place.
The race was on. The Michaels were worried the government might launch an immediate appeal, but they were sure the Supreme Court wouldn’t overturn the decision if they were already married before the appeal was launched. So, they rushed over to city hall, just metres away, to get their marriage licence, and then scrambled back over to the nearby courthouse on University Avenue. A judge was waiting there to perform the ceremony. They weren’t allowed to hold their wedding in an actual courtroom, so a cloakroom would have to do. There they stood in front of Leshner’s mother, a crowd of journalists and cameras, a few lawyers, and some of the cleaning staff.
After all those years of struggle, it was finally happening.
“I Michael, take you, Michael, to be my lawfully wedded spouse. To have and to hold, from this day forward, whatever circumstances or experiences life may hold for us.”
The Michaels were officially married.
* * *
The night after the bathhouse raids, people took to the streets. More than three thousand protestors marched down Yonge Street behind a banner declaring “ENOUGH IS ENOUGH! STOP POLICE VIOLENCE.” And that was just the first in a series of protests. People in Toronto had been meeting for annual Pride events for years, stretching back to picnics held at Hanlan’s Point on the islands. But the 1981 Pride, held just months after the raids, took on new urgency and momentum. A thousand people gathered in Grange Park and then marched on 52 Division, the nearby Toronto police station. That protest is now recognized as the first official Toronto Pride.
The Michaels were there that day in 1981, marching outside the police station, protesting the raids, and standing up for their rights. It was a big step for them. Just a few months earlier, Stark had been worried he would be spotted walking into a gay bar. Now, they were both proudly demonstrating in public. “Quite frankly, we didn’t care if our bosses and coworkers learned of our participation. It was a very important first step in our public advocacy.… There was no turning back.”
The Michaels would attend Pride every year after that, watching the protests grow and evolve. Even as progress was made, there was always a lot more work to be done — and there still is. Despite public apologies, periodic police raids against queer spaces have continued in recent years, a century and a half after the Morality Squad was formed. A serial killer preyed on gay men in the Village for nearly a decade while police turned a deaf ear to the community. Pride itself faced internal turmoil after Black Lives Matter organizers protested police involvement in the big Sunday parade. More than two hundred years after the city was founded, there are still plenty of people in Toronto who want to enforce strict limits on love.
But progress was being made. Important victories were being won. The event became more of a celebration with every landmark win, and as more and more Torontonians came out of the closet. By the time the fight for gay marriage had finally been won, the old bathhouse protests had been transformed into a massive, week-long party attracting throngs of people every year. Pride was not just a celebration of the progress that had been made, but a chance to proudly stand up in public, in full view, after centuries of being forced into the shadows. In time, the crowds grew from thousands to tens of thousands and then to hundreds of thousands. It’s now one of the biggest events in the city.
The 2003 edition was a particularly special one. Pride came just two weeks after the big court victory on marriage. Scores of couples were flocking to Toronto from around the world, eager to get married in one of the few places on earth where those marriages were legally recognized.
It was a hot Sunday afternoon at the end of June when the big parade got underway. The sun beamed down on the huge crowds of people gathered along Yonge Street in the heat. The land that had once been home to Alexander Wood’s forest was now draped in rainbows, alive with the sound of techno music. People danced, waved flags, and shot confetti, streamers, and water guns into the air. And there in the middle of the celebration, rolling down Yonge Street in the back of a blue convertible, their faces painted in a rainbow of colour, were Michael Stark and Michael Leshner. Newlyweds after twenty-two years.
Every time they kissed, the crowd cheered.