In the 21st century, Canada is in the forefront of LGBT (Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) rights in the world. Struggles over the last twenty years centred on equality rights such as same sex marriage and homosexual practices have instilled new understandings of policy change and drive for improvements in social institutions of legal recognition and protection of LGBT citizens. In Toronto specifically, LGBT zones have become increasingly visible and popular with the success of civil right movements advocating equality, prohibition of discrimination, and rights to operating LGBT commercial spaces. This trend resulted in several changes within the city giving rise to a booming market in regard to tourism and new ideas of recognizing LGBT as a market for commodification of space. The City of Toronto, explicitly the officials and private business owners, compete to lure tourists and the public to LGBT zones seeking to market themselves as centres of ethnic and cultural diversity.
Events such as Pride Week and commercialization of gay/lesbian bars, baths, and nude beaches have flourished and expanded as a result of ostensibly support from the government and police officials claiming to promoting the city as cosmopolitan and multicultural place within the globalized world. In spite of the city promoting itself as a major global centre of LGBT community life, governance of spaces and urban politics have revealed alternative desideratum of the government in seeking to neutralize individual transgressiveness of queer identities by assimilating them into the hegemonic state, promoting a peaceful, white-collar, well-behaved gay/lesbian community (Bain, 2007: 17). Stemming from bathhouse raids to security of LGBT events in self-polici. .g their kids in comparison to the centre of Pride Week such as Church and Wellesley village in downtown Toronto. In contrast to day-time clothing shops, museums, and parks where one could see brightly coloured rainbow flags and cheerful homosexual couples holding hands walking down the street of Church and Wellesley, bathhouse events, specifically the “Pussy Palace” is held during the night, in shady, downtown, entertainment sectors of downtown Toronto, promoting perverse, kinky, and devious activity such as sexual practices in closed doors.
Rather then attracting tourists and citizens of Toronto, I argue, that perceptions of these dark activities can negatively affect perceptions of the city for families, businesses, and tourists, decreasing revenue for the city and potential investments for businesses or advertisements and therefore was intervened by the police.
