Review | Gay journalist and activist Gerald Hannon’s memoir ‘magnetic as a personal history and edifying as social history’

“I am, at least by reputation, a sex radical: gay activist dating back to the Cretaceous period, defender of pedophiles, defender of (and participant in) sex work, sometime porn actor and maker, shameless voyeur …, perpetual sourpuss on the subject of gay marriage”: quotable, colourful, perceptive, and appealingly matter-of-fact, “Immoral, Indecent & Scurrilous” has tales to tell.

And Toronto’s 77-year-old award-winning multi-hyphenate Gerald Hannon, who opted for an assisted death in May, knew how to write a story.

Far, far from Toronto — and its history, to which Hannon added footnotes, paragraphs and a chapter or two — I savoured the memoir from start to finish. It is magnetic as a personal history and edifying as social history. “Immoral”’s portraiture — of a preceding generation and bygone nation — feels endlessly absorbing.

Hannon’s book isn’t an autobiography, he writes; it’s an account of his “sexual and political awakening and subsequent activism.” Indeed, after a chapter set in 1971 his family effectively disappears.

Born in New Brunswick in 1944 and reared in Marathon, Ontario (“little more than a wound in the bush on the north shore of Lake Superior,” he quips), young Hannon worshipped Metropolitan Opera broadcasts on CBC but wrestled with his mother’s eleven-syllable sex education talk (“Daddy puts his birdie in Mommy’s belly”). His raging father’s drunken violence and anxious mother’s attempts to protect her two boys kept the nascent activist wary and conflicted. And angered.

Hannon left for university in Toronto (along with a girlfriend, a hairdressing academy student), sensing the city held answers. Life, he writes, was “puzzling and brutal and sometimes kindly in its intermittent magic.” A semester later, Hannon confides, he’d “failed every subject except Religious Knowledge.” The city, it turned out, would pose greater challenges than this former “A” student had anticipated.

He’d heard of homosexuality by this age, but had not connected it to himself. Soon, though, he’d make a daily trek to solitary trees to warily affirm a truth aloud: “I am a homosexual.” “Though there was no ‘gay’ back then, what was out there was ‘queer,’” Hannon explains. Queer was synonymous with sickness and perversion.

Though he finished school jobless and directionless, the aspiring poet and musician met lifelong friends who educated him about Culture (including literature, opera, art, and camp humour). A trip abroad in 1971 amounted to impoverished misery until a pivotal moment in London — a gay rights demonstration. Hannon remembers seeing a “world of possibilities, at least for white, cisgender young men”

He returned to Toronto and joined a fledgling newspaper, “The Body Politic,” which consumed him until the mid-’80s. Hannon remarks on the “benign selfishness” of activism: “I and my friends, colleagues, and lovers were doing it for ourselves, sometimes in a rage, sometimes for the sheer joy of stirring things up.”

The collective’s “activist fervour” (“We had the answers for everything in those days,” he concedes) faced numerous obstacles, such as being charged with a kind of mail fraud, to transmit “indecent, immoral or scurrilous matter.” The eventual seven-year legal process was exhausting but educational. For one, Hannon learned to accept complications and to navigate political systems that were resistant to his reasoning and abundant charisma. A judge favoured “the right of free discussion and dissemination of ideas” and the collective celebrated a hard-won acquittal.

Later hardships included police raids, AIDS, and enemies in high places. Hannon’s lucid account relates losses and setbacks but also an unflagging resolve — despite ongoing financial hardships — to build community and challenge homophobia in all its pernicious forms.

With that said, in 1995 a Toronto Sun headline (“Ryerson Prof: I’m a Hooker”) sparked a degrading scandal that ended his university career. The narrative, in this case, was outside his control. By nature (and of necessity), Hannon continued to work until fatigue and illness limited his routine to his home address.

A formerly “devout Catholic boy” and later “provocative old bugger” who held apparently “repugnant” views commented on in newspapers as far as Indonesia and Russia, Hannon’s book will delight some and antagonize others. Yet, written with such clarity and verve “Immoral, Indecent & Scurrilous” cannot help but impress.

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