It’s about time we drop this odious icon
In 2005 when a statue of Alexander Wood was unveiled in Toronto’s gay village, a former chair of the Church-Wellesley BIA described the bronze figure of Wood, a 19th-century merchant and unofficial gay icon, as a “symbol for any minority community that has struggled and fought to be accepted for their place and home in our city.”
Sixteen years later, community leaders are making the exact opposite argument in their efforts to have the statue removed.
Limited evidence exists that Wood, who owned 20 hectares of land northeast of where the gay village sits today, was gay himself. His tenuous connection to homosexuality — or more accurately to sexual predation — stems from a scandal in 1810, in which he was accused of abusing his power as magistrate by inspecting the genitals of men who were suspects in a sexual assault investigation.
According to writer Ed Jackson, in the 2017 book “Any Other Way: How Toronto Got Queer,” Wood “claimed to be doing preliminary investigation into the rape of a woman who said she used scissors to wound her attacker in the crotch.”
After this incident, Jackson writes, “Wood was derisively called ‘Molly Wood’ ” — “molly” being a disparaging 19thcentury term for homosexual. The area north of Carlton was dubbed “Molly Wood’s Bush.”
But though scant evidence exists to confirm Wood’s gay bent, enough evidence does exist to confirm an odious one.
This week, the Church and Wellesley’s current BIA released a statement demanding the removal of the statue after discovering via Toronto Public Library archives that Wood “was a founding board member and for many years the Treasurer of the Society for Converting and Civilizing the Indians and Propagating the Gospel Among Destitute Settlers in Upper Canada.”
The BIA writes, “During the time of the existence of this ‘Society,’ its main focus of work was the raising of funds and the development of ‘Indian Mission Schools.’ One such mission, which was started in Sault Saint Marie in 1832, shows a clear path from their initial school to the ultimate existence of the Shingwauk Residential School, which closed in 1978.”
It was this information, alongside news of horrific findings at a former Kamloops residential school of the remains of 215 children in unmarked graves, that led the BIA to request not only the statue’s removal this week, but the city of Toronto’s help to fund in its place a new project advised by the 2-Spirit community.
“We did speak to a Knowledge Keeper in the 2-Spirit community and their response was very clear that they were very pleased with the fact that we were taking this step,” says BIA chair Christopher Hudspeth. No one asked me, but I’m pleased, too.
This may sound self-centred (though I’m fairly certain everyone does it), but when thinking about dilemmas of this nature I ask myself a straightforward question: How would I feel and what would I say if it was my own cultural identity involved?
In this case: How would I feel and what would I say if my community erected in the mid-2000s (when they really ought to know better), a monument to a founding member of a group called “the Society for Converting and Civilizing Jews?”
The answer is easy. I would feel hurt and angry, and I would say cart that thing away or relocate it to a bad-guy sculpture garden that students may visit with history teachers in tow.
But even if I said none of these things, I wouldn’t mourn the monument’s removal or fight to prevent it.
There’s a pearl-clutching tendency these days when it comes to statues representing repressive historical figures to argue that they must be preserved intact and in place (see the recently decapitated brass noggin of Egerton Ryerson) so that we may learn from them. That to bash a bust is an insult to history.
But history isn’t a passive thing to “learn from” for people who were brutally and systematically wronged by it. It’s a living thing that follows them down every avenue. If anything, statue toppling is a direct consequence of — and nod to — history.
The only thing ahistorical about the statue removal controversy is the notion among right-wing pundits that it’s a new phenomenon brought on by “cancel culture.”
I’m sometimes sympathetic to the “cancel culture” argument when it concerns publishers cancelling book contracts of authors whom Twitter deems morally impure, or bureaucrats pulling songs from the radio or books from school curricula.
(Anyone who argues that identity politics is never censorious, or toxic, is likely both of those things.)
But statues? Of magistrates? It’s their destiny to be toppled, defaced and replaced. It’s what they live for.
“As an art historian, I know that destruction is the norm and preservation is the rare exception,” American art history Prof. Erin L. Thompson told the New York Times last year, following the toppling of various Confederate monuments in the U.S.
“We have, as humans, been making monuments to glorify people and ideas since we started making art. And since we started making statues, other people have started tearing them down.”
King Leopold II. Edward Colston. Christopher Columbus. Egerton Ryerson. Alexander Wood. Another one bites the dust.
Eventually they all do.
As for the gay village, I’m confident a new far more fabulous and less creepy icon will emerge. Icons are kind of our thing.