Gays, organized crime and Andre Boisclair

A substantial number of people go into journalism because we are insufferable moralists out to change the world into our own image, and you readers are stuck with what we want, agree or not.

And so just a couple of days after a mainstream reporter lashed out privately to a sympathetic moi about Parti Quebecois leadership front-runner Andre Boisclair, the issue hit the front pages (yeah, journalists often "borrow" each other's ideas). The question is about the gay wannabe Quebec premier's admitted past cocaine use: in Canada, if you buy coke, you're supporting organized crime. Period. There's no other way to get the stuff except through the Hell's Angels network, or via some other similarly sickening bunch of murdering yahoos.

In the local media this morning, Boisclair is quoted is saying he didn't buy the stuff himself. Not guilty! Not guilty! It was a gift!

Certainly a lot of people don't make the connection between personal hard drug use and financing thugs. For most, organized crime is a far away, nebulous creature. Girls just wanna have fun.

As with young straight adults, gays socialize in bars and at raves, and drugs are a part of those cultures. Some pharmaceuticals are home-grown, some have a nasty pedigree. And to make things even more complicated, the gay community also owes a great deal to organized crime.

In the early days, organized crime gave us a refuge that we found nowhere else.

Gay sex was illegal, and so we made palsies with the other illegals. It was an open secret that many gay bars (and some bathhouses) in the 1950s and onward were operated by some nasty folk. Ownership followed the evolution of crime itself, flowing from the street gangs to the big crime families to the Mafia to today's bikers. (In Montreal, where I live, a 1970s provincial in vestigation into organized crime called the CECO traced it all.)

Lesbians should not feel superiour. Gay men's bars were tainted, yes. But early dyke bars were mixed, with many of the femme customers making a living as prostitutes, hooking up with a butch for protection while working the straight men on the other side of the room. Guess who owned many of these bars?

There's much talk of how the police were held off from their too-regular rounds -- many of the spots were located in the infamous Red Light District. Organized crime pay-offs and special agreements kept the raids down. (The cops were the gay community’s greatest threat through the 1960s. I'd go so far as to say that Canadian cops were the greatest threat to our community through the whole of the 20th century.)

Our intimate links to organized crime are not easily severed. Montreal's modern Gay Village is a playground for the Hell's (or was until very recently). The Village is said to be home turf to reputed head Hell's guy Mom Boucher (happily, this charmer's in jail).

Today, many of our bars are owned by earnest entrepreneurs looking to make some money while helping build community. A few are not. There are certainly rumours of two Montreal bars being connected to organized crime.

Buying their booze is buying in to a lot more. Purchasing drugs off an "in-house" dealer puts your hard-earned cash into the pockets of the bad guys. In Montreal, only six or seven years ago, the Hell's threatened or hurt independent sellers and there were almost none operating in the city anymore. A few years ago, a (straight) bar owner named Francis Laforest, in the town of Terrebonne, refused to allow a Hell's dealer to work his establishment. Laforest was killed with a baseball bat.

We have some decisions to make. More here, in this older post.