Realtors would say, “it’s a neighbourhood in transition,” shorthand for gentrification. Prior to the raids, this had begun to change. Long Branch was for many years a racially-mixed, working class and newcomer neighbourhood. After I posted on the Marie Curtis message board, I got a notification sent to my email for each message posted underneath. Posting on turned out to be one of our most valuable tools of outreach. (Everyone who contacted us and decided to fight eventually had the charges withdrawn.)įor lawyers, our first problem was to identify who had received these tickets, so that we could offer them help.
The company that owns Squirt gifted me with a premium membership, in November 2016, when I was organizing with a group of lawyers to provide free legal defences to the men who were affected by Project Marie. The Marie Curtis Park page on Squirt is a good way to keep tabs on the park’s cruisers. The interface is a bit like a throwback 1990s “bulletin board” - each cruising spot has a page, with a description, and a place for men to post underneath. Parks, gym lockers, washrooms, if you can think of it, there is a listing for it on. Squirt is a hookup website, but on top of its chat function, it also has the world’s most complete cruising listings. The pings on my phone were from an adult website called. Most were given by-law tickets for sexual activity in the park or trespassing outside of park hours, minor from a legal point of view, but serious enough to potentially cast a pall over their marriages, the results of certain police checks, and their mental health. Police dubbed the raid “Project Marie” - a moniker slyly feminizing and homophobic. Police sent plainclothes officers to a forested bike path, where they baited men to solicit them, and they conducted uniformed sweeps of the parking lot after midnight, when the park was technically closed. Those who could work from home were doing so, and millions across the country were without work altogether.Īnd still, men cruised Marie Curtis Park.Īmong cruising parks, Marie Curtis is well known, in part because it was raided by police in October and November of 2016. By the end of the month, Toronto was a ghost-town: subway ridership down over 90 percent. Following the WHO’s declaration on March 11 of a “ pandemic,” new restrictions were announced almost daily. Because of the lake effect, winter temperatures tend to be a little higher on the waterfront, but suffice it to say, March was a cold, dreary month, even before the novel coronavirus began to cast its widening shadow. In March 2020, the average temperature in Toronto was 3 degrees Celsius/37 degrees Fahrenheit, with temperatures falling as low as -10 C / 14 F. Let me know.” The messages continued to roll in, intuitive and prescient. For example, one message, from March 28, 2020, reads, “It would be socially responsible to meet in the woods and just watch another guy jerk off. Amid messages which sounded exactly the same as always - “Anyone there?”, “Other hung guys around now?” - were new messages. In late March, my phone started to ping with messages from men who were cruising in Marie Curtis Park. On public transit, it could take 90 minutes or more, depending on the time of day, to get from Toronto’s gay village to the windswept tip of Long Branch. Aside from an adult video store, it is the only game of its kind for miles around. As a result, the park is relatively secluded, especially in the off-season, and it affords a degree of privacy. The park is at the southern tip of the Long Branch neighbourhood, in the suburb of Etobicoke.
Marie Curtis Park in Toronto Canada is not the most hospitable spot for park sex, and yet it is a year-round cruising area, for reasons that are in part geographical. Only a forested area at the north end cuts the wind at all. Wind whips off the lake on winter nights, up the empty beach, whistling over the park’s snowy grasses.