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Montreal seemed a haven from anti-gay police repression. The city is generally the freest homosexual space in North America, with an abundance of male strippers, sex clubs, and street cruising. Some fear this may be changing. A series of crackdowns began last summer on hustlers in the parks and streets. On May 9th came the first major bar raid in Montreal since 1994. On a busy Friday night, 40 police invaded Taboo, one of four gay male dancer bars. They declared the establishment a "house of prostitution," initially placing over 100 customers, dancers, and staff under arrest. After about an hour, all but four customers were allowed to leave. The others were not searched or asked for ID's. But 34 people were arrested, including all 23 dancers and all seven staff.

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Police say a four-month investigation found underage dancers. Canada's age-of-consent is 14, but 18 is the legal age for sex work, porn, or stripping. Only one such dancer was found-- one month short of his 18th birthday. He'd provided a false ID to Taboo managers, who say they had asked Montreal police months ago for help in verifying ID's, with no response.

Police also claimed they had observed "public indecency" in the side room at Taboo where table dances are offered for six dollars. Both prostitution and acts of public indecency are part of the "bawdy house" definition under Canadian law. Yet when police were questioned at an assembly the next month of "La Table," an umbrella coalition of gay groups, they could only recall one such act-- a finger in the anus of a dancer.

The dancers face non-felony "tickets," with fines usually averaging $100-300, though some dancers have been threatened with criminal charges for alleged sexual activity-- charges the cops have sometimes agreed to drop in exchange for help in convicting other dancers. Such dancers as well as the staff face stiffer fines-- but jail time is very unlikely.

Taboo reopened the next day and the bar is crowded again, especially on weekends-- an indication police practices and social attitudes in Montreal remain more tolerant than elsewhere in Canada and certainly the US. Some dancers were scared off or moved to other clubs because new rules put in place made it difficult to earn money. But many dancers remain faithful to the club, which most consider a pleasant working environment. Newcomers vie for auditions every week.

From dancers to suspects

"The police put a lot of pressure on me to say things about other dancers, but I would not," says Jimmy, the minor who police found dancing in the bar. "Finally, they turned me over to the Societé des Jeunesse (the youth protection agency), who said because I was just 20 days short of my 18th birthday, I was free and on my own."

"I gave Taboo a false ID, it was not their fault," Jimmy continues. "I was living on my own, paying my own apartment, and I felt like an adult. At 14, I had sex with a guy, and I thought I was bisexual. By 15, I knew I was just gay. So by 17, I had a lot of experience. I was as mature as any dancer who was 18, or even 20. I did not need to be 'protected,' and if so, why didn't the police tell the bar when they first knew about it? I enjoyed dancing and I met some great people. The experience was good for me, but now I'm finished with dancing. I'll go back to school this fall."

Another dancer was fired by Taboo several months before the raid when they found out he was not yet 18. He felt differently. "I won't dance in that bar. It is what the police say. It is a house of prostitution."

Vince started dancing just after he turned 18-- he's now 19-- and he also performs on live internet sex sites. "I just thanked God I wasn't there" he says about the raid. "But who are they kidding-- they want to protect youth? Then why don't they help find more jobs? I want a regular job, too. I've come to feel that I could do more with my life. There were some assholes I met as a dancer, but also some of the finest men I've known. I like to perform, to be seen, to show off. Dancing was part of my coming out, and it has been mostly positive." Vince, who speaks five languages, no longer dances at Taboo, but drops by, he says, to "hang out and play pool."

"Pedro"-- not his real name-- danced about six months at Taboo-- he's 22 and gay. He has never done prostitution, would not let men touch him sexually, does not do drugs, drink, or smoke. He is a landed immigrant who proudly marked "erotic dancer" on his application for citizenship. He sent more than half his money to his third-world homeland to support his mother and younger siblings. "It is very unfair to the dancers and bartenders, who did nothing wrong. It is very hard on all of us-- the fear and the public shame," he says.

Pierre, who is 19 and also gay, was arrested as a dancer in the raid, and he has continued at the club. "Taboo has been a good place for me. It's like my home. I won't stop dancing there until they tell me I can't."

How come?

"Taboo is not a raunchy place at all. Everyone there is so polite-- nary a drunk in sight," says a 70 year old man who frequents the bar with his 28-year-old lover. "It's just a place to sit and chat and eye the naked male body."

So the question remains, as a visitor to the McGill University "Queer Forum" web site put it, "The laws haven't changed. After years of lax enforcement in Montreal, why now? Why in such a manner? Why only there?"

The age mix of Taboo's dancers and customers is part of the explanation, suggests Ron Harris, manager of a gay leather shop. "There are some who hate to see any older man with any younger man," he says. At the time of the first gay challenge to a raid in Montreal, the Truxx raid in 1977, some 2000 mostly French-speaking, working-class gay men took to the streets-- a response comparable to New York's Stonewall a few years earlier. The demonstration provoked the francophile gay community to emerge, with many queer spaces moving into the French-speaking eastern part of the city. "We found a better home here," says Harris, "since it is well-known, and verified in poll after poll, that French-speaking Quebecers are much more permissive on sexual matters.... Left to their own devices, Quebecers would approve back rooms and hustling and any sex that is consensual."

That was then

The response to May's Taboo raid has been quite different from the Truxx raid-- or to the last major public raid in Montreal at KOX in 1994. La Table, the Montreal gay coalition, was informed by police of the raid the day after. Police asked them not to take a position. La Table's co-president, Francis Lagacée, insists he made protests that were not carried by most of the media.

"It may have been an accident," says Louis Godbout of the Archives Gaies du Québec, "but it's suspicious that the raid took place the day of the deadline for Fugues [Montreal's major gay monthly] and there could be no immediate reaction." Eventually, every major Montreal gay publication-- Fugues, RG, Etre, and some other alternative media including the Mirror and Hour-- published articles or editorials condemning the raid. Two petitions have circulated. "We ask people to remember," Godbout says, "that the majority arrested were gay young men, who will live with the stigma of this. Police are not protecting gay youth, but victimizing them."

Yet calls to action have not spurred much concrete organizing. At a May conference in Montreal of Egale, the national Canadian gay legal group, efforts to mount a demonstration to protest the Taboo raid failed, according to Gary Kinsman, an Ontario gay writer.

Bloggers on the McGill Queer Forum think they know the reason for the quiet response. "We're talking about a bar where children are put on stage to dance naked for dirty old men," one student wrote, despite the fact that 22 of the Taboo dancers were between 18 and 23. "Most 18 year-olds are not mature enough to make a decision [about sex]," the student goes on. One of the arrested dancers was a well-known McGill student who was quoted in the Mirror describing his work as non-exploitative, but his fellow students showed little sympathy for him. "Get a real job!" was one reply.

Why now? Just as Canada seems headed in a progressive direction-- legalizing gay marriage as well as decriminalizing marijuana. A contributing factor is the new city government, in the hands of a conservative mix of English-speaking officials from small cities recently merged into Montreal, and the right-wingish Liberal Party, which recently defeated the relatively pro-sex Parti Quebecois at the provincial level.

"It's interesting that the local (francophone) police unit in the gay Village was not even informed of this raid," says Godbout. An English-speaking Taboo patron with political connections adds, "The city has put one of the most notorious anglophone homophobes in charge of the morals squad."

"Police know how to drive a wedge between the respectable and the non-respectable-- just as we have legalized gay marriage, which has been the main thrust of the work by assimilationist gays," says Godbout. "Many gay businessmen and professionals just want to be quiet about it-- they see it as an aberration. The most vociferous defense of the raid is by young educated people who have never lived in a period of persecution. This has never stopped being a class issue."

Godbout points to a 1954 classic study of Montreal gay life by sociologist Maurice Leznoff, which described a dichotomy between working class "overt" homosexuals and elite (often English-speaking) "covert" men who led double lives and abhorred the in-your-face drag queens and trade of the streets and rough bars.

"Our history is full of such raids," Godbout continues. "All that we've won has been a reaction to them. There are no better militants than those who have been persecuted. It is particularly odious that we don't stand by these young men on the margins. Are we to believe they need to be saved? If so, we haven't saved ourselves."

Across Canada, the reaction to the Taboo and other raids has provoked a strong response. The Toronto gay weekly Xtra is circulating a petition (www.xtra.ca/bawdywork) which calls for the end to such raids and the removal of "indecent acts" from the bawdy house laws-- though not laws against prostitution. Kinsmen sees this as "a real regression, since the Right to Privacy Committee in the early 1980s in Toronto made a clear call for the repeal of all the bawdy house legislation, including sections on prostitution and indecency." Nevertheless, Kinsman agrees with Professor Brenda Cossman, also writing in Xtra, that the current atmosphere in Canada for liberalizing sex and drug laws may provide an opening to try to get rid of anti-sex laws in general. "But," Kinsman warns, "the reforms of the Federal Liberals have been joined to their call to stigmatize sex offenders and raise the age of consent."

View from the hood

François Bedard is a francophone construction worker who was at Taboo during the raid. He was also forced by police to stop reading in the park where hustlers were busted the previous summer. "Certain people see these actions as an effort to 'clean' the Village," he wrote in the gay monthly, RG. "I'm afraid this police repression may be amplified. It's necessary that the community mobilize and question such police aggression."

There is a park at the foot of Mount Royal where hippies, punks, and others have gathered every Sunday for years to smoke pot, play drums, and sometimes make love. It's called the Tam Tam. The inscription on the statue where they gather, from Quebec educator Georges-Etiénne Cartier in 1867, reads, "Canada must be a country of freedom, and all freedoms must be protected." Montreal's strip club tradition goes back many years. In the late 1940s, famed female stripper Lili St. Cyr was arrested for sexual improprieties on stage. She had clearly broken the law and the judge considering her case appointed a commission of respected Quebec citizens (including a monsignor) to consider whether she should be punished. The commission wrote, "The work of Miss St. Cyr provides comfort to the old and satisfies the curiosity of the young," and ruled that she should be let off. It remains to be seen what will happen to the defendants in the Taboo case-- but sex of all kinds, homosex especially-- thrives in Montreal. There's still hope that the famous Quebec permissiveness will prevail, and all freedoms, including the overtly sexual, will be protected.