Stanley-Eric-Captive-Genders-Trans-Embodiment-and-Prison-Industrial-Complex

Captive GendersOf 104 rooms, 3 were left standingObliterated, massacred, taught a lesson“Because that wall belonged to a bunch of fuckin’ fruits” 2Because that wall between us and themNormal and perverted, moral and criminal, man and sissyHad to be penetrated on the Big Boys’ termsMaybe with a bit of excessive “rowdyism” 3But we chalk it up to the inevitable:Boys will be boys.Post-raid retaliationThe sissies and others-also-fucked-by-police fill the streetsThey spill into their public spacesNot respecting bordersHeadline reads: Gay Rage.I wrote this poem after listening to over twelve hours of interviewsconducted by Nancy Nicol with twenty-two men and women who wereeither present at the now-infamous bathhouse raids of 1981 or who wereindirectly involved through their post-raid activist engagements. Thoughit seems so long ago, so far removed from myself and from what I knowto be queer life in the new millennium, something drew me to studyingthis topic. Indeed, I was born the year of the mass raids in Toronto, andnow it seems fitting to probe the archives thirty years later. At first glance,the raids appear to have been a humiliating, horrific, and terrifying eventin Canadian queer history. But far from painting a picture of victimizationand brutality at the hands of police, I hope that this project will alsohighlight the tremendous rallying point that this event created for queersin Canada. Post-raid, the demonstrations that filled Yonge Street in downtownToronto, not to mention the growth and increased visibility of newactivist organizations, all testify to the fact that queers and their allies werenot going to take the assault lying down. Instead, the police inadvertentlycreated the context within which a more united—though not homogeneous—queercommunity could take shape, live more openly, supporteach other, and form important coalitions with other groups who felt similaralienation and discrimination from police and Canadian society at large.Raids on queer bathhouses occurred in Canada at various pointsleading up to the mass raid in Toronto (such as the Montreal raid in 1977,for example) and have continued as recently as 2004 when the Warehouse64