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The lesbian life of Jackie O - by Eleanor Brown
Jackie O’Keefe marched in protest of the bathhouse raids in ’81. She was a member of ACT UP and helped found Queer Nation. She dated an Anglican minister...
Then she became Police Constable #7696

I’ve watched demonstrators throw rocks and balloons filled with urine at police officers standing stiffly a few feet away. In comparison, Police Constable Jackie O’Keefe’s story initially seems like such a minor annoyance. Just last month, a woman at a party purposefully interrupted O’Keefe’s conversation with another celebrant in order to proclaim loudly that all cops are “pigs.” It was the second insult of the evening. And they never stop coming, on the job or off. As soon as O’Keefe became a police officer, people felt that it was OK to degrade her. “All of a sudden I lost my identity as a queer. I’m this hypocrite, this betrayer. Your entire life is erased.”

Her life before policing was one of activism. She was in the streets protesting the 1981 bathhouse raids, in which armed police gleefully humiliated and terrorized naked men in the city’s tubs, arresting more than 300 on morality charges. She helped found the uppity Queer Nation and was a member of AIDS activist group ACT UP. She was a principal of Girlco Productions, producing short feminist skits and hanging out on Queen Street West during the heyday of the big girl bands like the Heretics. She volunteered at women’s shelters. And in 1999, she became Police Constable #7696, joining what many in the gay and lesbian community would identify as the enemy.

But O’Keefe says she’s not the enemy. In fact, she sees herself now as taking activism to another level: “Being queer in a police culture could be considered a radical act,” she announced from the podium at fab’s public forum on “The Next Queer War” in March.
Activism isn’t just about attending a demonstration once a month. It’s about each person trying to make a difference every day. O’Keefe told the crowd: “I believe that the more we participate and educate within the ‘power communities,’ the more we can learn how to break down the walls that bind us. I’m not talking about simply working for a corporation and staying in the closet, I’m talking about taking up the space required to be yourself and queer in what is perceived to be a hostile environment.

“The next queer war, for me, is about infiltration,” continued O’Keefe. For her, this means giving up your comfort zone to take up space “queerly.” Don’t be a quiet “gay lady”; be out and be proud. “Infiltrate, learn, study, keep what you respect and fight to change what you don’t. And do it from within, do it in an environment that has historically been oppressive to queers. Establish a secure position and then strike out for radical change.”

O’Keefe – all spiffed up in her uniform along with 15 lb. of gun, pepper spray, rubber gloves, handcuffs, walkie-talkie and metal baton – brought the house down. And the warm applause for O’Keefe, the Toronto Police LGBTQ community liaison officer, was still a surprise at such a lefty political event.

The issue for critics, of course, is whether anyone can retain their sense of self in the overwhelming culture that is the police brotherhood – whether just being there makes you part of the problem. Every few months there’s another story of alleged police brutality or homophobia: a police raid on a bathhouse, another hassle over a violation of some nonsensical 200-year-old booze regulation. It’s a complex and difficult environment.
Loralee Gillis, who helped cope with much of the legal fallout from the 2000 Toronto Police raid of the Pussy Palace, recalls that Constable O’Keefe stood outside during a women’s bathhouse night last year being charming and chatting people up. But despite being invited, O’Keefe never walked through the door. “I think that she has been as supportive as she can possibly be – as a cop,” says Gillis. “She’s part of our community, but she can’t come in because she’s a cop.”

O’Keefe responds: “To be perfectly honest, it wouldn’t be appropriate for a police officer to enter into any environment like that. It’s pretty obvious I wouldn’t go in. Not to mention the ex-girlfriend factor.” O’Keefe’s decision is firm, even though she was in civvies, directing a friend from out of town who was afraid of getting lost on the way.

Then there’s O’Keefe’s ex-boss. Many queer activists greatly feared and loathed Julian Fantino, the just-departed Toronto police chief who brought with him the baggage of what’s been characterized as a “gay witch hunt” during his previous term in London, Ontario. Says O’Keefe: “I think that he was a straight man who wanted to try to do things that perhaps were very foreign to him.”

O’Keefe is clearly a diplomat. She says working with the police has taught her skills like self-discipline. But that skill might also come with maturity. She was actually a bit old to join the force. A Toronto police spokesperson guesses that the average new recruit is 25 to 30 years old (no actual statistics are available). O’Keefe, now 43, was hired at 36, “with a very firmly entrenched personality,” she says dryly – and that may be the very reason that she’s so sure of herself now.

“Had I joined at the tender age of 20, I would be a very different person and would have been far more acculturated into the policing world, the paramilitary hierarchy and such.”
Her interest in police work goes back to her youth. O’Keefe imagined herself as Robin Hood or Tarzan. “I wanted to help people. Save babies from choking, women from being beaten up by husbands, saving the world one person at a time – Maid Marian and Jane and all the other damsels in distress. I wanted to right wrongs.”

Her dad was a truck driver; her mom worked factory shifts. “I grew up dirt poor, with nothing. Father was an alcoholic; my mother struggled to keep us fat and to keep us religious.” (These days O’Keefe is a recovering Catholic, with no interest in organized religion.)

The Newfoundland family moved to Hogtown (Regent Park and later Parkdale) when Jackie was five, and any hint of a regional inflection in her voice is now gone thanks to the nuns who oversaw her education. “The school seemed to think [the accent] was a problem, I still remember them trying to break us of our little Irish lilt.”

In a few years the family split up (O’Keefe, a brother and a sister stayed with their mother; another brother went with Dad). Her mother’s eventual remarriage was not welcomed: “My stepdad was horrible.”

At 15, O’Keefe began misbehaving on purpose, eventually reaching her goal of being admitted to a group home. But O’Keefe says she was never really a bad kid – more of a scamp. “I was pretty religious, and innocent.”

As a teen, O’Keefe knew she was a lesbian, and the agony was made all the worse by attending an all-girls school. But she never told anyone: “I was going to hell and prayed to God to make me normal.”

She also knew she needed more freedom, and within a year and a half she began receiving student welfare cheques, moved into supportive housing and started work as a cashier at Honest Ed’s. Her family moved back to Newfoundland, and she was alone.
At 18, she enrolled in Humber College, pursuing a degree in Law and Security Administration. She had a boyfriend: “We only kissed because I couldn’t bear [sex], and the poor guy thought it was all about being a Catholic.”

She picked the gay community for a school project, meeting with late activist David Kelley to discuss community policing. O’Keefe held her boyfriend’s hand throughout the interview. Then they all went to a lesbian bar. “I thought, oh my gawd, these are my people. How do I make this happen?”

She finally dumped the boy and surreptitiously found a girlfriend – an Anglican minister. The relationship lasted a year. “She was very closeted, and that’s basically why it ended. She couldn’t cope,” recalls O’Keefe.

O’Keefe was alone again. She knew no other gay people, and used to phone a gay youth hotline repeatedly and hang up. “I was losing my mind.” After walking around the block a few hundred times, she walked into the 519 Church Street Community Centre. “They were just a godsend. The lesbian support group became my family and posse.” She was 21.
O’Keefe’s mother discovered her sexuality by reading her diary. Mom cried about invading her daughter’s privacy, but was driven by worry. “I just hate the thought of those women taking advantage of you,” she told her daughter. (O’Keefe, of course, saw herself as the debonair seducer.) Her father, who died a year ago, dealt with the revelation better than her mother did. Things settled.

O’Keefe worked in retail, and discovered queer activism, bars and beer. She found, and helped to create, a community. “We were professional lesbians; we worked for the weekend. We made our childhoods in our 20s. Everybody was poor; we lived with five other people in ramshackle rooms.” There was serial monogamy, the Michigan Women’s Music Festival (O’Keefe has attended for 17 years running) and a life of fun and travel.
Then, 10 years ago, O’Keefe got tired. “I just decided I wanted to get things going.” She went to York University, and is now two credits short of a degree in Mass Communications. She wrote (and continues to write) fiction, but hasn’t yet tried to get anything published, though it’s a dream of hers. Finally, she emailed a Toronto police recruitment officer, asking what they’d think of a 36-year-old feminist lesbian. Six months later, she was hired.
It was expensive and tough. The application fee alone is $300 (the price has gone up since O’Keefe applied). She took up daily weight training and jogging to build strength and stamina. And though she passed the phys. ed. exam on her first try, she was often the last one to hit the finish line running.

For two weeks at the Toronto Police Force’s Charles O. Bick College, she learned to march in lockstep. Then came Ontario Police College in Aylmer (tuition is $7500, but by then you’re on salary). O’Keefe sat through LGBT sensitivity training, where recruits are asked questions like how they’d deal with a gay domestic dispute.

“I had a full-on anxiety attack for a year. It’s like being tossed into a foreign country and you don’t know the language. The culture is so intensely white male – a lot of these people aren’t urban. They have different community standards, a different culture.” And O’Keefe was an urban, downtown, Church Street butch dyke.

Her first assignment, in May, 2000, saw her at 52 Division, patrolling an area that included the queer Village.

Unlike television shows in which the cops work in permanent pairs, O’Keefe never knows who her partner will be on any given day. She educated them. She would tell squad car partners to ask whatever they wanted – like who’s on top. (When I ask, O’Keefe says she’s on top, then laughingly asks her girlfriend for confirmation. She responds, “You wish.”) Eventually, O’Keefe says, the questions changed. They’re no longer about being a lesbian, but about what she did on the weekend.

Asked whether she’s ever dealt with homophobia on the force, she says she doesn’t know. It would be stupid for any officer to tell her so overtly. “I’ve had to deal with ignorance,” she adds. “But that’s different.”

I wonder whether femmes would have a harder time getting respect from co-workers than would butches. O’Keefe says the distinction is irrelevant: “Getting respect as a woman is challenging, not as a lesbian,” she says. (O’Keefe is one of about 820 women cops in a force of 5000.)

As for the work, it’s unpredictable. “You’re attached to the radio – every call, you go. It could be a cat in a tree, a domestic assault, a murder. You never know. On weekends, it never stops.

“I’ve had moments of being afraid.... I do know I will always have backup. It is very true, you know, the brotherhood is strong.” She once found a homeless man whose fingers had been chopped off while he fended off a man with an axe. As she searched for the assailant, every shadow could have concealed a swinging blade. (She never found the would-be murderer.)

The most difficult aspect of the job, however, is never knowing what becomes of the people she meets. “A man who’s assaulted his wife, a victim of sexual assault in hospital – you never really maintain any contact. That to me is the biggest emotional drain.... I see the sad and tragic moments of people’s lives, every day.”

After three years on the beat in 52 Division (during which time she was featured in a TV series called Graveyard Shift, sandwiched between the tales of a drag queen and a dominatrix), O’Keefe became the Police Service’s LGBTQ liaison officer in April, 2003. She’s the second to hold the job (then-Constable Judy Nosworthy, now a sergeant, took the flack for being the first), and she enjoys it. As clichéd as it sounds, she says, she’s helping to demystify the police.

O’Keefe’s careful not to contact other gay officers. She doesn’t know whether they’re out, whether they’ll panic. “Just standing next to me makes them gay,” she says. She knows two other out lesbian cops.

Her workday is a combination of helping people and working on policy. Callers seek advice on applying to the force; they want to report something criminal but are afraid; they are victims of domestic violence and don’t know what to do. She’s working on a tip line for prostitutes who are assaulted (details will be announced in the next few months) and developing guidelines for strip searches of trans people. She speaks at schools and community events.

She knows she’s successful at her job because she gets stopped at least five times for advice while walking home from work. There are limits, though. People ring her doorbell at 9pm – a lack of regard for personal privacy that makes it difficult to have a life away from work (a life O’Keefe shares with her girlfriend of six months, a singer and massage therapist).

O’Keefe says she was re-energized when she became the LGBTQ liaison. She had become complacent: “You get insulated – it’s all my queer friends, my queer house. But it still isn’t OK to be gay. I was reinvigorated. I’m the dyke all the political feminist dykes can call. All the leathermen know me – and they’ll call me if they need me.”

Sure, O’Keefe receives some insults. But there are many people who have come to rely on her. She once got a call from the organizers of a public fetish party. Her advice is general: the courts are the ultimate arbiters of legality, not the cops. But she takes the time: “Here I am sitting on the phone talking to them about anal intercourse and butt plugs. That would never happen if I didn’t exist.”

• Eleanor Brown is a Montreal-based writer. Read her blog at www.OpinionatedLesbian.com.