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feature - issue 279

George Hislop liked oral sex, lived in a bathhouse and changed the way Canada treated queers

OUR QUEEN IS DEAD - by Eleanor Brown

George Hislop died because he was old. On October 8 at 78, after five heart attacks in two years, he finally succumbed to esophageal cancer in Grace Hospital. It’s a joy to be able to say it – not that he’s gone, nor that he was constantly in and out of his sick bed, but that he was old. He lived a long life.

There are few gay seniors. So many died during the vicious heyday of AIDS that new generations lost a legion of would-be mentors. George was a proud gay activist who was also damned promiscuous, and made no apologies for it. He talked about sex and had sex – as an old geezer, too. He was said to prefer oral to riskier fucking, and his fetish, he joked, saved his life.

For many, being gay is just a small aspect of existence, an add-on to a busy schedule. George made gayness central; he wouldn’t allow anyone to forget the integral contribution sex and sexuality made to his identity. As Dick Hardon – yeah, baby – he reviewed porno flicks for a long-defunct Toronto gay mag. As part-owner of the Barracks, he was charged with keeping a common bawdy house and with living off the avails of crime. In the aftermath of 1981’s infamous Toronto bathhouse raids, he got off – the rap, that is.

Later, in a lawsuit challenging the city’s refusal to grant a business licence to a proposed new men’s spa, a judge accepted George as an expert witness, calling him an “habitué of gay bathhouses for the past four and a half decades.” When the Spa on Maitland opened its doors in 1990, George was presented with his own five-by-seven cubicle. After his beloved dog Fudger died, George rarely went home to his Avenue Road apartment. If you wanted to talk to George, you’d call his office – at the tubs.

Long-time friend and activist Peter Bochove, a part-owner of Spa Excess, says George was lonely in those days. Ron Shearer, George’s lover of 28 years, had a stroke after heart bypass surgery and died in 1986. George never quite recovered from the loss. The bathhouse gave him companionship and community.

A list of George’s contributions to Toronto and to the gay community would leave you slack-jawed. In 1970, the year after homo sex was finally legalized, George founded the Community Homophile Association of Toronto (CHAT), and he became a regular in the then-unsympathetic media. Name a homophobic practice in Toronto, and George fought it. Name a bigoted journalist, and George courteously but firmly told them they were wrong. He even organized dances to bring the homos together, and in 1980 was the first out gay man to run for Toronto city council (he lost, as he did when he ran for the provincial legislature to protest the bathhouse raids). He was president of the Village’s Hassle Free Clinic from its founding in 1973 to his death. George gave a lifetime of service to his community that cannot be revealed in this small space. For all this, he was rewarded with the malnutrition and poverty that come with being a senior citizen in this country.

Ronnie Shearer worked so that George could volunteer to change the world. And when Ron died, George had almost nothing. In gratitude for his years of activism, Peter Bochove says few Church Street businesses would accept George’s money. City Councillor Kyle Rae threw his weight around and got George an apartment below market value once the Spa on Maitland shut down in 2004. And Bochove and his landlord, John Conforzi, regularly sent George money.

George finally won a class-action lawsuit against the federal government demanding Canada Pension Plan spousal benefits for same-sex survivors. But the feds kept appealing, although the bad publicity of skin-and-bones seniors led them to start mailing out cheques earlier this year. The money came with the proviso that, depending on the ruling of the Supreme Court of Canada, it might have to be repaid. Despite it all, George was known as a cheerful charmer. A celebration of his life will be held at Woody’s (465 Church St.) on Sun., Nov. 6 from 5 to 8 pm. Anybody caught crying, says Peter Bochove, will be thrown out. George’s orders.

Eleanor Brown is a Montreal-based writer.