Righting a wrong

Nobody knows who told Toronto police to launch raids on gay bathhouses back on Feb. 5, 1981. Nor does anyone know why the raids were ordered, since homosexual acts were decriminalized in Canada in 1969.

Shamefully, no one has ever taken responsibility for the brutal arrests, during which police smashed their way through doors and hauled about 300 men into police vans.

But 35 years later, police Chief Mark Saunders will take some of the sting out of the memory of the raids when he formally apologizes for them at his annual Pride reception at police headquarters today.

It’s a sensitive gesture from the chief to those who were assaulted and arrested in the raids, as well as those who were intimidated by the events. It should go a long way to healing past police wrongs.

Saunders’s acknowledgement of the past and commitment to do better in the future comes at a bittersweet time for Toronto’s LGBTQ community.

On one hand, for the first time the community is celebrating a full month of Pride festivities, rather than the traditional week.

On the other, the festivities are marred this year by the horror of the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history, when 49 people were slaughtered at a gay nightclub in Orlando.

“Thinking about the massacre in Orlando 35 years later reminds me that we were not safe in 1981 and that is still the case today,” Ron Rosenes, who was arrested in the bathhouse raids, told the Star.

Still, there is much to celebrate. LGBTQ rights have come a very long way since 1967 when then-justice minister Pierre Trudeau introduced legislation to decriminalize homosexual acts and famously declared that “the state has no place in the bedrooms of the nation.”

And they’ll come further still when Chief Saunders marches in the Pride Parade on July 3, becoming only the second police chief to do so after Bill Blair. It will be a proud moment for the chief — and the LGBTQ community.