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Bawdy language - by Eleanor Brown

Homos and hookers are hoping to change Canada’s anti-sex laws

Gay men and prostitutes are hoping to scrap a chunk of Canada’s anti-sex legislation, demanding the repeal of the country’s ancient bawdy-house laws – laws that are regularly used as an excuse to raid homo bathhouses as well as to harass hookers.

“The whole fucking mess has to go,” says Peter Bochove, part-owner of the Toronto bathhouse Spa Excess and the main force behind the Committee to Abolish the 19th Century, a group lobbying to dump laws that criminalize semen. “It is a question of making a lot of noise, generating a lot of press and educating the general population on the issues. It is no small task. It will be mightily resisted.”

Bochove is working on a brief to be submitted to the House of Commons Subcommittee on Solicitation Laws, a group of politicians currently touring the country studying anti-prostitution laws. Other gay men are butting in, too, like Toronto gay activist Richard Hudler.

“We support all freedom of sexual expression and oppose the criminalization of sex, sexuality or sex work,” Hudler said last month during a four-minute presentation to subcommittee members. “Too often we have seen laws put in place ostensibly to protect, but these laws tend instead to be used to control people and impose particular moral codes on people who do not themselves endorse those codes.” Hudler spoke on behalf of the Sex Laws Committee (www.web.net/~clgro/call_cat.htm), an offshoot of the Coalition for Gay and Lesbian Rights in Ontario.

Gay Toronto city councillor Kyle Rae also told the politicians that prostitution should be decriminalized. “It surprises me that these men and women [prostitutes] are prepared to risk being charged with bawdy-house charges. Since these are an indictable offence, as keepers or found-ins they can lose their apartments, their belongings, their children. So working the streets helps protect your assets and family, but it’s not safe. Current laws that draw men and women to the street to work must be changed.”

Rae got the gay angle in at the end: Gay men, he complained to subcommittee members, are regularly targeted by cops using the bawdy-house laws.

Why? Because while a bawdy house is a den of prostitution, it’s also a place where “acts of indecency” (a term that’s not defined in the Criminal Code) occur. And some cops believe that homo spunk is very, very indecent.

If you get caught doing someone in a bathhouse common area – like a porn video room, for example, rather than in a rented roomette with the door closed – your behaviour could be considered indecent, and you’re busted. In fact, because of the way the law’s written, everybody in the building would be arrested, too, and considered found-ins in a common bawdy house. Even if they’re fully clothed and walking towards the exit.

British Columbia New Democrat MP Libby Davies wasn’t thinking about gay men when she first introduced a private member’s bill demanding a review of Canada’s prostitution laws. While the act of prostitution itself is legal, hookers are banned from soliciting customers and discussing costs and services. They can’t work out of an office (that would make it a bawdy house) or hire security (a guard’s salary would be considered “living off the avails” of prostitution).

Davies pushed for the legal review because her Vancouver riding includes the Downtown Eastside, where 69 street prostitutes went missing in the span of two decades. Many of their bodies, or body parts, have been found buried in a pig farmer’s lot. And Davies believes the law has contributed to the deaths.

Davies says she has no problem sneaking in the gay bathhouse angle when fighting sex laws (she herself came out during a fractious parliamentary debate on same-sex marriage). “It’s a good idea and we’ll deal with it. When I’ve raised it at the committee, no one’s said no.”

Whether anything will come of the review is a different matter. Davies says it’s too early to know how her fellow commissioners will line up on the issue, though she hopes for a complete decriminalization of prostitution. Davies says the final report, expected in June unless there’s a snap election call, must be so well argued that the ruling Liberals will find its ideas easy to accept.

Federal justice minister Irwin Cotler “is interested and sympathetic, but he’s made no promises,” says Davies. “If we can produce a good report that we can defend and rationalize,” then change might be in the offing.

Richard Hudler of the Sex Laws Committee wants something to come of his work, but he’s cautious in his outlook. After all, gay groups have been calling for the repeal of bawdy-house laws since the 1970s.

“This is certainly an ongoing battle,” he says. “What concerns me is that we not just see ourselves as going around in circles and give up.” Hudler notes that it took 12 years of fighting to get anti-discrimination protection based on sexual orientation included in the Ontario Human Rights Code.

“It seems to me that once police stop making raids for a while, we become complacent and let our guard down, just to have these laws used once again to clobber us. I think we just have to keep a consistent battle going to get rid of the laws, however long it takes.
“We have to take every opportunity we get to keep up pressure and point out situations when these laws are being used to control people.... this all really boils down to pointing out the need for separation of church and state.”

Of course, repealing the bawdy-house laws is only half the battle. In recent years, other provisions of the Criminal Code (including separate prohibitions on nudity and indecency) have also been used to stop gay men from having yucky gay sex. But we’ve got to start somewhere.

• Eleanor Brown is a Montreal-based writer. Written submissions to the House of Commons Subcommittee can be emailed to sslr@parl.gc.ca.