If you want to learn more about this era, we suggest you read The Heart of Toronto by historian Daniel Ross, Brian Dedora’s A Slice of Voice at the Edge of Hearing, Tim McCaskell’s Queer Progress and Immoral, Indecent and Scurrilous: The Making of an Unrepentant Sex Radical by Gerald Hannon, to whom this episode is dedicated. 

This podcast also could not have been produced without funding from the Toronto Arts Council, who helped fund the efforts of Tom Hooper, narrator, Scott MacDougall, voice actor, Christine Sismondo, writer and co-producer and Brent Bodrug, sound design, music composer and co-producer.   

The Toronto Arquives were an invaluable source for this episode, since it has a vast collection of all of the tabloids of this era. In addition, though, the role the 519 played in the creation of this should be recognized, since it only because that space exists that we were able to meet and interview Paul MacDonald, Don Middleton, Bob Pearse and Neil Gilson, who brought this era to life.

This episode is dedicated to them.   

This podcast also could not have been produced without funding from the Toronto Arts Council, who helped fund the efforts of Tom Hooper, narrator, Scott MacDougall, voice actor, Christine Sismondo, writer and co-producer and Brent Bodrug, sound design, music composer and co-producer.   

This podcast also could not have been produced without funding from the Toronto Arts Council, who helped fund the efforts of Tom Hooper, narrator, Scott MacDougall, voice actor, Christine Sismondo, writer and co-producer and Brent Bodrug, sound design, music composer and co-producer.   

If you want to learn more about this period, Jim Egan’s Challenging the Conspiracy of Silence and The Ward, The Life and Loss of Toronto’s First Immigrant neighbourhood are both essential reading. And, to learn more about the federal government’s purge, The Canadian War on Queers by Patrizia Gentile and Gary Kinsman is a key text. More Foolscap interviews, including the one with Elgin Blair, can be found at the Toronto Arquives, which is also home to many of the tabloid newspapers used for this story. 

We dedicate this episode to Sandy de Almeida, our dear departed friend, who was – and always will be – the Mayor of Queer West. 

This podcast also could not have been produced without funding from the Toronto Arts Council, who helped fund the efforts of Tom Hooper, narrator, Scott MacDougall, voice actor, Christine Sismondo, writer and co-producer and Brent Bodrug, sound design, music composer and co-producer.   

For further reading on this subject matter, you might want to read Rick Bebout’s Promiscuous Affections, The Canadian War on Queers by Patrizia Gentile and Gary Kinsman. For more on settler colonialism and the policing of sexuality, Scott L. Morgensen’s Spaces Between Us: Queer Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Decolonization is a good read. 

Interviews such as the one with Don Franco are available through the Foolscap Project at the Arquives, which also has many of the tabloid newspapers used for this story. And, for anyone who wishes to learn more about the history of drinking in Canada, we highly recommend Booze: A Distilled History by Craig Heron, who we also want to thank for his tremendous help with this project. It would never have happened without his support. 

This podcast also could not have been produced without funding from the Toronto Arts Council, who helped fund the efforts of Tom Hooper, narrator, Scott MacDougall, voice actor, Christine Sismondo, writer and co-producer and Brent Bodrug, sound design, music composer and co-producer.