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Bathhouse raid victims who fight back in the courts often have their charges dropped

“The process is the punishment” - by Eleanor Brown

There have been hundreds of them, arrested because they pulled out their wee-wees. There’ll be more to come. Adultery and promiscuity aren’t illegal, so cops raid gay bathhouses and scoop up guys by the dozen on other charges. There are two kinds of men arrested: First there are those who wonder whether they can keep it quiet, whether they can get away with not telling their wives or lovers, whether their boss will come up with an excuse to fire their ass. And then there are those who decide they’re going to make a damned big fuss. Either way, they’re screwed.

“It was absolute torture,” says Terry Haldane, who was arrested in December, 2002, during a police raid on Calgary’s gay bathhouse Goliath’s. “I had four court appearances before I could even enter a plea ... it was the agonizing shit of preparing every time. I was OK until about two or three nights before, then I was just feeling sick.” In all, Haldane suffered through almost two years of waiting, including a heart attack-mimicking panic attack that sent him to hospital. His doctor told him going back to work was out of the question, and ordered a medical leave.

York University law professor Alan Young isn’t surprised. In the larger picture, those who fight sex crime charges often get off. After two years of waiting, Haldane’s charge was simply dropped. But “the process is the punishment,” says Young bluntly. Often, law enforcement even expects charges to be dropped, knowing that the battle takes years – and lots of cash.

Not to mention the physical and emotional costs. Haldane says one of the men arrested for being a keeper of a bawdy house – a Goliath’s employee – had to quit his job. “He was having cardiac problems.” Another “was ready to blow his brains out.”

So imagine the married ones. Soon after his arrest, Haldane recalls, “A married guy was almost throwing up. His hands were on his head. He was repeating over and over again, ‘Oh my God, my wife, my job and my kids.’” Twelve of the 13 found-ins arrested hid themselves away and quietly took their legal lumps. Fighters like Haldane suffer in public.
Police relied on the bawdy-house laws in the Goliath’s raid. A bawdy house is a place where prostitution occurs, but it has a secondary definition: a spot where “acts of indecency” take place. That term is undefined, so it’s up to a bunch of lawyers to argue it out in court, and a judge decides whether or not you’re a sex criminal.

In fact, in the old days, when it seemed that police raided a gay bathhouse somewhere in the country every few months, there were regular tales of suicides. The media loved to print the names of the perverts, even throughout the ’80s.

In 1981, Joey Shulman was a 29-year-old self-employed arts publicist who wasn’t ashamed of being gay. On Feb. 5 of that year, around 11 o’clock at night, the Toronto cops smashed into the Richmond Street Health Emporium. Shulman was in a towel: “It was a terrible sense of privacy invaded. Doors were broken down. I heard more than I saw.”
A man standing next to Shulman said he recognized one of the arresting police officers: they’d had sex together just a few days earlier. The man was devastated – he’d shared an intimate moment with a monster.

The Richmond was a high-class place, which Shulman says helped him, as did his own middle-class demeanour and – once he’d changed back into his street clothes – his business suit. “I was processed without anyone calling me a cocksucker, which speaks more about the establishment. If I’d been at the Barracks…” his voice trails off. Some of the Barracks regulars were big on urination and the place had its own little torture chamber at the time. It was the sort of place where “there was semen everywhere,” says Shulman. The police would not have been as kind at the Barracks.

Shulman might have been out, but there was a limit. He called newspaper editors and lied to them. He wanted to know whether the names of the 306 accused keepers and found-ins arrested around the city that night would be printed, saying he was concerned about a couple of his clients. And in fact the names were not published – in part because there were too many of them. They would have taken up too much space.

Whatever the reason, it was a small victory. Still, pleading guilty to the charges, says Shulman, was a gay tradition at the time. But a handful of activists had recently founded the Right to Privacy Committee, and the large-scale police attack on the gay tubs gave them a healthy dose of righteous anger. They used telephone trees to contact dozens of arrested men, and found Shulman within a couple of days. They stacked courtrooms with similar-looking gay men so that police officers asked to identify the found-in could only shrug their shoulders. Shulman’s cop never even showed up, and the charge was dropped.

Those were heady days. Police are smarter now: they bust one place at a time, arrest a dozen rather than a hundred. And a found-in who speaks out publicly is a rare bird. Most just want the problem to go away. Cops have also begun to expand their legal repertoire. When judges got antsy about convicting men on bawdy-house charges for having sex in private roomettes in bathhouses, police switched to a different section of the Criminal Code. Cops arrested 18 men at Toronto's Bijou porn theatre in 1999 on separate indecency charges – just another law without a real definition that allows cops to arrest somebody whenever they feel like it. Or else they use nudity laws, booze laws, whatever they can come up with. One man I spoke to at the time said he’d plead not guilty to the Bijou charge, but refused to tell me his name. He said he preferred the Bijou to parks because he thought it was safer. “You pay money to get in. I thought it was a private club. Getting a criminal record scares me. I’ve been at my job 27 years.”

It was employees (like Art Whitaker, the cashier on duty the night of one of the raids) who spoke out about the Bijou. He was charged with obstruction when he turned on the lights in the backrooms. Whitaker says police were targeting visible minorities and married men (not everyone in the place was arrested, and some got out the back). He says many Bijou customers were tortured by their religious convictions. “The majority of the people were petrified, they were closet cases. We think gay liberation is over, we think we’re all liberated.” But many still aren’t, and recent immigrants from countries like India and Pakistan, Whitaker says, still have a particularly hard time with their sexual identities. Following negative publicity and criticism, all the Bijou charges were dropped by the Crown a few months later.

The same happened to Calgary’s Terry Haldane: kick up a fuss and the case begins to collapse. The Crown attorney in Haldane’s case recently announced that there was little chance of a conviction.

That didn’t give Haldane two years of his life back, nor did it restore his depleted bank account. And he was lucky, spending only $4000 of his own. Another few thousand were collected by a defence fund, and the federal Court Challenges program then took up the case and offered to pay for Haldane’s legal challenge to the bawdy-house law. Within the next two months, lawyers will file a civil suit against Calgary police and the state for wrongful arrest and two years of malicious prosecution. Soon after that, an application will be made directly to the Supreme Court of Canada to reconsider the country’s bawdy-house laws. Haldane says his lawyers believe he has a good chance of getting the court’s attention, and of repeal.

Haldane is still thinking of the 12 found-ins who meekly accepted their punishment and faded into the night: “In a year or two years, [the police] will just do it again. This isn’t for me, this is for all gays and lesbians.” And from here on in, Haldane is in charge. “Now,” he says, “it’s going to be fun.”

• Eleanor Brown is a Montreal-based writer.