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Operation Soap was a raid by the Metropolitan Toronto Police against four gay bathhouses in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, which took place on February 5, 1981. Nearly three hundred men were arrested, the largest mass arrest in Canada since the 1970 October crisis,[1] before the record was broken during the 2006 Stanley Cup Playoffs in Edmonton, Alberta.[2]
Although many gay bathhouses had previously been raided in Canada and other smaller raids followed,[1] Operation Soap is considered a special turning point in the history of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community in Canada; the raids and their aftermath are today widely considered to be the Canadian equivalent of the 1969 Stonewall riots in New York City.[3] Mass protests and rallies were held denouncing the incident.[4] These evolved into Toronto's current Pride Week, which is now one of the world's largest gay pride festivals and celebrated its 35th anniversary in 2015.
Most charges connected to the incident were eventually dropped or discharged, although some bathhouse owners were fined $40,000. Canada's "bawdy-house" law, under which the charges in this raid were laid, remained in effect until it was repealed in 2019,[5] but was only rarely applied against gay establishments after the trials connected to the 1981 raids ended.[1]
- ^ a b c McKenna, Terence (1981-02-15). "The Toronto bathhouse raids". CBC Radio archives. Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Retrieved 2007-05-11.
- ^ "Hurricane season, June 2006; Massive arrests June 10 and 17 a sign of no-nonsense policing, rowdier behaviour". The Edmonton Journal. June 3, 2007.
- ^ "Pride history display flaunts the past". Xtra!. June 23, 2005. Archived from the original on 2010-11-01.
- ^ Gordon, Rebecca; Ingram, Gordon Brent; Bouthillette, Anne-Marie; Retter, Yolanda (March 1998). "The Price of Visibility". Review of Queers in Space: Communities, Public Places, Sites of Resistance by Gordon Brent Ingram, Anne-Marie Bouthillette, Yolanda Retter. The Women's Review of Books. 15 (6): 7. doi:10.2307/4022897. JSTOR 4022897.
- ^ Repealed: 2019, c. 25, s. 73. An Act to amend the Criminal Code and the Department of Justice Act and to make consequential amendments to another Act, SC 2018, c 29