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Having built his career fighting victimless sex crime, Julian Fantino was the last person most gay Torontonians hoped to see become the city's next chief of police. A sharply divided Police Services Board had rejected him last time around him in 1994. Afterwards, Fantino left the Toronto force to become chief of police in nearby London, Ontario where he launched Project Guardian, Canada's largest ever and most expensive sex-and-porn investigation. But after denying he was seeking the post or that he was even in the running, Fantino was declared the Toronto chief-designate last December, at the behest of Ontario's right-wing Progressive Conservative government, which was seeking a new chief who would beat the drums of law-and-order. With Toronto's gay community chafing at a series of raids and arrests for sex in gay establishments, some activists predict Fantino's assumption of the chiefship on April 3rd will set police-community relations back 20 years.

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A capacity-crowd of some 500 packed the 519 Community Center on January 26th, in the heart of Toronto's gay Church-Wellesley neighborhood, for an open meeting between Fantino and the gay community.

"I ask your indulgence. I also need time. Admittedly, I have a lot to learn," Fantino told the crowd. "A lot of the labels that have been put on me and the stereotypical rhetoric... is unfair, unjust, ill-informed, and devoid of the facts."

The chief-designate faced catcalls and cries of "Shame!" when he refused to discuss Project Guardian, his C$1.57 million investigation into "kiddie porn" that Fantino made the centerpiece of his tenure in London. But the supposed "porn ring" never existed. Two men were sentenced to 10 and 15 years in prison for taping a 14 and a 15-year-old masturbating and engaging in fellatio acts that are not themselves illegal under Canadian law. None of the other 59 men arrested in the investigation, which ran from 1993 to 1995, were convicted of any porn offenses, most being charged with buying sex from teenage hustlers.

Fantino obtained the membership list of Homophile Association of London Ontario, the city's main gay organization, to aid in the investigation. Among the material Fantino claimed was kiddie porn was a gay video Private Dancer produced by the US firm Falcon, and three other videos sold widely over the counter in Canada, one of which was approved by Ontario censor board. When the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) aired a series critical of Project Guardian, Fantino lashed out at what he termed the CBC's "fanatical agents" and their "perverted propaganda."

A few days after the public meeting told a convention of Progressive Conservatives that Canada's top crime problems were kiddie porn, child criminals, and organized crime, and urged "sanctions" for those who write or speak in support of the right of minors to have sex.

Meanwhile, police scrutiny of Toronto's gay bathhouses continues. On January 26, morals police raided the Bijou and charged two men with having sex. In raids last summer at the same place, 19 men were arrested. A sign of things to come? **