Marvellous Grounds

Queer of Colour Histories of Toronto

Jin Haritaworn, Ghaida Moussa, Syrus Marcus Ware, Jin Haritaworn, Ghaida Moussa, Syrus Marcus Ware

• Publisher: Between the Lines
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781771133654
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: LGBT Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Toronto has long been a place that people of colour move to in order to join queer of colour communities. Yet the city's rich history of activism by queer and trans people who are Black, Indigenous, or of colour (QTBIPOC) remains largely unwritten and unarchived. While QTBIPOC have a long and visible presence in the city, they always appear as newcomers in queer urban maps and archives in which white queers appear as the only historical subjects imaginable.

The first collection of its kind to feature the art, activism, and writings of QTBIPOC in Toronto, Marvellous Grounds tells the stories that have shaped Toronto's landscape but are frequently forgotten or erased. Responding to an unmistakable desire in QTBIPOC communities for history and lineage, this rich volume allows us to imagine new ancestors and new futures.

Part One

Counter-Archives

1 Organizing on the Corner

Trans Women of Colour and Sex Worker Activism
in Toronto in the 1980s and 1990s

Syrus Marcus Ware interview with Monica Forrester
and Chanelle Gallant¹

Monica Forrester is a long-time activist and organizer in Toronto. In 2004, she founded Trans Pride Toronto to develop supportive resources and programming for trans people in the downtown area. Over the past twenty years, she has also developed sex worker outreach programs for the 519 Church Street Community Centre, Maggie’s Toronto Sex Workers Action Project, and other organizations in the city of Toronto. What follows is a conversation between Syrus Marcus Ware, Monica Forrester, and Chanelle Gallant, a long-term sex worker and organizer in Toronto who contributes to this conversation by sharing the important intersectional lessons that she learned from Monica and other trans women of colour.

Monica Forrester: My work focuses on visibility and awareness for trans people. I was doing activism before I knew what activism was. When I was young, like eighteen, I was educating trans women on the corner about safer sex. The corner was the only community that existed at that time, the only place where we could share information. And that’s where I learned about organizing, where I got the determination to make change and the inspiration to be an activist almost thirty years later.

When you approached me to do this interview, I started thinking about the history of archiving, and I thought, “I wish I took pictures!” We were in such a different place back then. Survival was key. Nobody thought about archiving things because no one really thought we’d live past thirty. Our lives were so undetermined. No one really thought: “Oh, we should archive this for later years.” The only thing I really thought about was the deaths—how trans people were dying prematurely because of injustice, violence, and stigma.

I sit back and think about the deaths I’ve seen in those days. I’ve seen so many people dying at twenty-one, twenty-two. At that time, to make it to thirty was super big. It seemed like a long life for them because of the lives they lived out there since they were twenty. I’m forty-five now, but these things are still going on. Not at as high a rate, but we still see people dying. And then I think, I’m forty-five, shit, I still got another forty years.

I came to formal organizing and activism around 1999 because the murders of trans women had skyrocketed. In 1997, two trans people and one cisgendered Aboriginal woman were murdered on the corner in Toronto. Mirha-Soleil Ross, a long-time radio programmer and activist who helped start the Counting Past 2 transgender film festival² in Toronto, myself and a few other people got together to demand a space safe for trans people now. The direction at the time was going good. This informal coalition included trans people of colour like me, Mirha, and others. Then it kind of went sour when they started adding more white people, people with more academic skills, people with more policy experience, people that really didn’t know the real issues. It made a lot of us without that formal training feel pushed out, and we got pushed out. Perhaps in a different way, these issues remain relevant and trans-specific activism is still very much needed.

Chanelle Gallant: Hearing you talk really reminds me of how hard it is for us sometimes to recognize our work as activism and as worthy of recording. I am a white cisgender organizer and I’ve lived and done activism in Toronto for about twenty years. My first activism was around the raid on what was called the Pussy Palace, a bathhouse here in Toronto, in the year 2000. This led to a three-year court case, a three-year human rights complaint, and mandated policy changes against the Toronto police. So, out of that human rights settlement came the policy that required cops to ask trans people what their preferred gender was for the officer they would be searched by, which was later copied by the New York City police. That was my first introduction to activism. Racialized and Indigenous trans women were teaching me about intersectionality, even though we didn’t use that language at the time.

Monica, I saw you in Red Lips, Cages for Black Girls,³ Kyisha Williams’ film about the impact of the prison industrial complex on Black women. I saw you and thought, “I want to know that girl. That girl is going to be my friend if I have anything to say about it.” And then, shortly after, you started working at Maggie’s!⁴ One of our first projects was the Aboriginal Sex Worker Education and Outreach Project. Since then, Monica and I have worked together through an organization that we started calling STRUT, and we brought together the first national gathering of racialized, Indigenous, and street-based sex workers and allies. The reason we wanted to do this kind of work was because we both really wanted to see and support more people, specifically those who had experiences of criminalization, in leadership roles around sex work activism. Because it was confidential, we actually did all of our outreach and fundraising for it quite quietly and without much fanfare.

MF: Maggie’s was the only driven sex work agency for sex workers. For a brief little moment there we thought: “Oh my god, this is the only place that sex worker-led activism on sex work goes on.” We wanted there to be more options for supporting sex worker-led activism, so we started STRUT. Initially, STRUT was a three-day conference. The first day was the Indigenous-only pre-convening, and it was all Indigenous people who either had experience in the sex trade or were allies. The second two days were for everyone. We wanted to build relationships and networks. One of the biggest goals, ultimately, was shifting the sex work activist agenda—what we’re fighting for and how we do it. Even though Maggie’s was doing a lot of great work across Canada and the States, we were not connecting with as many places. We wanted to see what people were doing on the East and West coasts. We wanted to get new ideas, to connect with the successful work they were doing with programming and outreach.

Syrus Marcus Ware: What is unique to the activism that you and other sex workers, including trans sex workers and sex workers of colour, are doing in Toronto? Is there something that’s different about organizing here than say, in the Yukon, BC, or Montreal?

MF: Because Toronto is so diverse, and because it is such a trans hub, we can’t just organize on one particular single issue—we need to connect issues of transphobia with issues of anti-Black racism, for example. I think that there’s a lot of work left to do. I read rants on Facebook about Black Lives Matter, and I just want to yell at people because they really just don’t get it sometimes. What is hard to understand about ensuring that we as Black people get to live our lives? Trans people are at the forefront of Black Lives Matter organizing, as well as other activisms around interconnected issues like homelessness and the stigmatization of sex work. I think connecting Black Lives Matter and other trans-focused organizations is important because the issues of transphobia and anti-Blackness do overlap for Black trans people. I’m pulled in all kinds of different directions as a Black trans activist.

In my experience, a lot of people come to Toronto because of lost community or to find community because of stigma, due to being trans or a sex worker or whatever. They are isolated, so they build new community over here. I worked with organizers in BC, where a lot of the sex workers are Indigenous or of colour. I found how they embrace their community and culture within their sex work inspiring. The organizers in BC were empowered by community, and they educated their community about their bodies, their work, and all these different parts of who they were. It was beautiful. Whereas here in Toronto we’re a little more political, but perhaps less focused on personal development. We don’t talk about our own needs a lot, which is hard sometimes because we need that individual support, too.

There’s always such a limited capacity within organizations to support individuals. I work at Maggie’s, but I am only part-time. I’m aware of how understaffed we are. And yet a lot of the other, non–sex worker specific agencies haven’t really picked up on sex workers’ needs. So where do we go to get our needs met? For example, if I need to provide a referral to another organization for a sex worker client, where do I send them? What organizations are knowledgeable about our issues? I mean, there is the 519 Church Street Community Centre and other great places where I’d like to send them for support, but looking at the 519’s programming now, there’s nothing for sex workers there anymore, although there used to be. Their trans programming has shifted away from supporting trans sex workers—it’s as if we’ve totally forgotten what the program existed for. Past 519 program co-ordinators, like the late Kyle Scanlon,⁵ had a different understanding of what the 519’s Trans Program mission or vision was. There has been a shift in institutional mandates.

We try to fill the gaps left by these program shifts in other agencies. For example, I do a monthly program for trans women of colour—but it’s too short, the time flies by. We can’t really do much together during the program because it’s only two hours. By the time we eat, talk, and check in, it’s already over. So we’re really not even getting to the deeper issues and needs of trans women because it’s only one day a month for two hours. I worry that we are just throwing money at the program but not really getting involved in a capacity that is changing anyone’s lives.

And then where do we go? We do a lot of our convening and togetherness in the streets: in spaces that are dangerous, in spaces that are targeted, in spaces that are visible. For example, we have a lot of trans people of colour who are continuously targeted and carded by the police because they look street involved. So, I do a lot of education to make sure that they’re aware of their rights in order to challenge this targeted policing. I’m not knocking the programs—there’s a lot of great programs. I access them, I do outreach in them, but there’s really not enough going on in them.

CG: And that’s what we wanted to deal with in STRUT. We need services, but we need organizing too. We want to be part of a movement, not just a sector that has slashed or abandoned these essential programs. I really don’t want to see that continue to happen to sex work organizing. Frankly, the selling out in the gay and lesbian movement is my worst case scenario for what could happen if we abandon the early principles that came out of organizing on the fucking corner and don’t make sure that we honour and carry them forward. That’s where the principles of sex work activism come from. I want to retain that and share that with others. Also, I feel like I would be remiss not to talk about the enormous impact of Mirha-Soleil Ross on the Toronto community.

MF: She had a vision. As an activist she started a bunch of programs and did research about trans women and access to shelters. She had a radio program and a ’zine where she would showcase sex workers. Her work was so groundbreaking and innovative for that time.

SMW: I actually wanted to talk about her great video project, Madame Lauraine’s Transsexual Touch,⁶ which is an educational sexual health narrative film for trans women of colour sex workers. You star in this video! It’s such an important resource.

MF: The Ministry of Health gave us a bunch of money and said: “Don’t put our name on it, but here’s a grant.” We wanted the video to shape the movement. We did a lot of networking in preparation for this project. We knew it was important to connect with Montreal and Vancouver, the more populated areas where there were a lot of trans sex workers, so we went to Vancouver to talk to sex workers out there...

Table of contents

• marvellous
• Marvellous Grounds: An Introduction
• Part One:: Counter-Archives
• 1: Organizing on the Corner: Trans Women of Colour and Sex Worker Activism in Toronto in the 1980s and 1990s
• 2: It Was a Heterotopia: Four Decades of Queer of Colour Art and Activism in Toronto
• 3: Power in Community: Queer Asian Activism from the 1980s to the 2000s
• 4: Loud and Proud: The Story of a Brown Callaloo Dyke Coming Out in 1970s Toronto
• 5: Speaking Our Truths, Building Our Futures: Arts-Based Organizing in 2SQTBIPOC Communities in Toronto
• 6: Time Capsules
• Part Two: Cartographies of Violence
• 7: Cops Off Campus!
• 8: Migrant Sex Work Justice: A Justice-Based Approach to the Anti-Trafficking Movement
• 9: Queer and Trans Migration and Canadian Border Imperialism
• 10: Queer Circuits of Belonging
• 11: Collateral
• Part Three: Communities of Care and Healing
• 12: Toronto Crip City: A Not So Brief, Incomplete Personal History of Some Disabled QTPOC Cultural Activism in Toronto, 1997–2015
• 13: Healing Justice: A Conversation
• 14: A Love Letter to These Marvellous Grounds: Living, Loving, and Growing in a City Called Toronto
• 15: Race, Faith, and the Queering of Spirituality in Toronto: Reflections from Sunset Service
• 16: Creating Community and Creating Family: Our QTBIPOC Parenting Group
• 17: The Mourning Dress: Creating Spaces of Healing for Black Freedom
• Photos
• Acknowledgements
• Notes
• Contributors
• Index