Episode
How to Organize in a Plague
- Podcast
- The Hatchet
- Published
- Jul 23, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 674
- Processing state
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- https://hatchetmedia.ca/p/how-to-organize-in-a-plague
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Summary
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit hatchetmedia.ca If you were an openly gay man in Toronto in 1980, chances are that you would’ve thought that life was getting better. After all, the last decade had seen so much progress. Homosexuality had been partially decriminalized back in the late 1960s. A few years later, Toronto had become the first city in the country to ban homophobic discrimination in municipal hiring. Pride parades and festivals were a regular occurrence. There was a thriving queer nightlife and queer press and queer arts scene. George Hislop, an out-and-proud gay man, was running for city council, and even the sitting mayor, John Sewell, was pro-gay. Was there still discrimination and hardship? Of course. But more and more people were coming out of the closet, and even the broader society was starting to slowly embrace people with different sexual orientations. But then, things started to change. George Hislop lost his run and so did John Sewell, largely because of homophobic attacks in the press. In 1981, the Toronto Police launched Operation Soap , raiding multiple gay bathhouses and arresting almost 300 men. And though the community mobilized — taking to the streets and the courts to fight back against such blatant aggression — all of a sudden, progress doesn’t look nearly as certain. And it wouldn’t have been long before you started to hear the rumours — something was going around. Some kind of a disease. You’d notice people around you getting sick. Young men, in the prime of their lives. You’d see the purple blotches peeking out from under sleeves and shirt collars and you’d wonder what the hell could be happening. And then, one by one, you’d see those people start to die. By 1982, the disease had a name — AIDS. But the gove…