Madonna vs. The Toronto Police Morality Squad
Plus lost tourist attractions, a wrestling scandal, and more...
It’s the spring of 1990. Toronto is changing. For more than a century now, it’s been a notoriously boring and conservative place — the kind of city where for a long time it was illegal to do almost anything on Sundays, swear or go tobogganing or even catch a streetcar, where you needed a license to buy booze on any day of the week and the government kept close tabs on your drinking. But over the last few decades, a transformation has begun. New arrivals have been coming to the city from all over the world, helping make Toronto a modern, multicultural metropolis — a city that wants to become truly world-class. That optimism has few greater symbols than the giant new baseball stadium that has just opened at the base of the CN Tower. But now, the SkyDome is about to find itself on the frontlines of a culture war — a battle over city’s soul.
Madonna was one of the biggest pop stars on the planet, a legendary performer at the very peak of her career. She’d spent the last seven years releasing one chart-topping single after another. And now she would embark on the most famous of her world tours — an epic trip through nearly a dozen countries organized to promote two new albums: Like A Prayer and I’m Breathless (the soundtrack to Dick Tracy, the movie she had just starred in with her boyfriend Warren Beatty). The event would prove to be a landmark in the history of popular music, ranked as the greatest tour of the decade by Rolling Stone and hailed by VH1 as the moment that “solidified Madonna’s status as a cultural tour-de-force and groundbreaking pop artist.”
But the Blond Ambition tour was surrounded by controversy from the very beginning. It was originally supposed to be sponsored by Pepsi, who had just launched an ad campaign centered around Madonna. But the company had pulled out after she released the video for “Like A Prayer.” Watching it now, it seems surprisingly tame, but it was condemned by the Vatican, sparked protests by Christian groups, and led to boycotts of the soft drink company. The video was banned by TV stations. The ad campaign was axed. Pepsi dropped their support of her tour.
And that’s before anyone had even seen what she was planning to do on stage. The show would be a spetacular mix of influences: German Expressionism, early Hollywood, the avant-garde fashion of Jean Paul Gaultier, the voguing of Harlem’s LGBTQ+ ballroom scene, Catholic imagery… and sex. “She swore, she punched, she kicked,” The Toronto Star reported after the first of her three shows at the SkyDome. “It was a strip joint, a cabaret, a church.” The most daring moment came during her performance of “Like A Virgin,” when Madonna writhed around on satin sheets pretending to pleasure herself.
For some, it seems to have been truly shocking. Madonna was denounced by people all over the world — in much the same way Elvis had been demonized for shaking his hips more than thirty years earlier. The Pope called the Blond Ambition tour “one of the most satanic shows in the history of humanity.” Boycotts forced Madonna to cancel a concert in Rome. And Toronto would prove to be one of the most controverisal stops on the entire tour.
Nearly thirty thousand people packed the SkyDome for the first of her three shows here. The overwhelming majority seem to have been delighted by what they witnessed that night — even the most risqué moments. “She asked whether the fans liked a little pain with their sex,” according to The Star, “and Toronto The Not So Good responded with a resounding, ‘Yeah!’”
But not everyone was thrilled. Toronto was changing, but there were still plenty of people who wanted it to remain a repressed and repressive place. This city was still a couple of years away from allowing people to go shopping on Sundays. The residents who were outraged by the idea of opening a store on a day that was supposed to be reserved for church, certainly didn’t like the idea of a pop star mixing religious and sexual imagery. After what Madonna did on stage at the SkyDome, Toronto newspapers would be getting angry letters for weeks. One reader wrote, “If Madonna is typical of the kind of role model our society wants to emulate, no wonder we have so many problems… This garbage is poisoning our minds.” Another linked the pop star to Paul Bernardo: “Is it any wonder that the next day [after publishing a review of Madonna’s show and an article about the popularity of phone sex lines and escort services] The Star runs a front-page composite sketch of the Scarborough rapist?” And things didn’t end there. It seems as if at least one Torontonian took things even further. They didn’t just write an angry letter to the editor. They went to the cops.
The Toronto Police Morality Squad had been created in the late 1800s. Mayor William Holmes Howland was a temperance-supporter who got elected thanks to a campaign slogan that would become a nickname for our city: “Toronto The Good.” He promised to crack down on drinking and other “sinful” activities, founding the Morality Squad to implement his vision. For more than a century, they would crack down on anything city leaders believed to be “immoral,” including booze, gambling, sex work and homosexuality. They would spy on public washrooms, shut down plays when actors kissed for too long, and were part of the infamously brutal bathhouse raids in 1981, sparking the protest march that has been recognized as Toronto’s first official Pride Parade.
Now, the Morality Squad had Madonna in its sights.
There are different versions of what exactly happened. The accounts provided by the police and the performer’s entourage don’t exactly match up. Some suggest no one in the audience complained at all; instead, they claim a couple of police officers attended the show on the second night and teamed up with an overzealous Crown attorney to make sure there would be no third performance. But however it began, it ended with Toronto police officers arriving at the SkyDome ahead of that final show.
In the documentary made about the tour, Madonna: Truth or Dare, you can see what happened that night. As the pop star prepared to go on stage, she was told the police had shown up. If she repeated her performance of “Like A Virgin,” complete with that scene of simulated self-pleasuring, they were going to arrest her. “Really?” she responds. “Oh good. Let’s see what happens... I’m not changing my f*cking show.”
The film shows her manager negotiating with the police officers. But Madonna wasn’t about to back down. She made that clear from the opening moments of her performance. Backstage, she’d added a twist to her usual pre-show prayer, declaring our city to be the “fascist state of Toronto” and promising her back-up dancers that she loved and supported them all, no matter what was about to happen. As she emerged on stage that night for her first number, rising up from below on a platform, she began with a new introduction. “Alright Toronto,” she said, “I just want to know one thing: Do you believe in artistic expression and freedom of speech?”
The crowd roared.
Later, she would laugh as she moved her hand across her crotch. “Do you think that I’m a bad girl?” she asked. “Do you think I deserve to be arrested?”
This was a time when the refusal to talk openly about sexuality was literally killing people. It was the height of the AIDS crisis. As the disease had begun to make headlines in the early 1980s, President Ronald Regan had refused to even mention it; it was years before he publicly used the word “AIDS”. In the meantime, thousands of people had died. And the death toll was still growing as Madonna set out on her world tour. That year would prove to be the deadliest yet, with tens of thousands of American lives lost — and hundreds of Canadians dead, too. One of Madonna’s own close friends, the artist Keith Haring, died of AIDS-related illness just weeks before her tour started. She told one of her audiences that he “was a man who had the courage to tell the truth. The truth is, he was gay. The truth is, he had AIDS. And he said so to anybody who would listen.” Challenging taboos around sexuality wasn’t just about provocation and artistic license. It was life-saving work.
As audience members poured into the SkyDome for Madonna’s shows that week, they were given a coupon for $1 off the purchase of condoms. And immediately after daring the Toronto police to arrest her, Madonna reached the point in her performance where she brought up safe sex. “You know, you never really know a guy until you ask him to wear a rubber,” she told those thirty thousand people, prompting a huge cheer. “Hey you, don’t be silly, put a rubber on your willy.”
She turned to her back-up dancers to deliver that last line. Most of them were gay. Three of them already knew they had HIV. One of them would be dead within just a few years. The tour and the documentary weren’t just about pop music, they were about changing the world, making it a better and safer place. It was, according to The New York Times, “about revealing truths to erase shame — specifically about being gay or HIV-positive at a time when AIDS paranoia ran rampant.”
Standing on stage that night in Toronto, one of Madonna’s dancers could see the light reflecting off the badges of the police officers stationned at the exits. '“All you saw was shimmers,” Jose Gutierez later remembered. But even as they worried they would be carted off to jail as soon as the show was over, he and the other performers weren’t scared. They were defiant. “That may have been the most powerful moment I ever felt with Madonna,” he explained. “As a team we were all together.”
There would be no arrests that night. The police backed down. The tour continued. And as the thirty thousand people who’d witnessed that final Toronto show headed back out into the night, they were left with the memories of what they’d just seen. Including Madonna’s final words before the encore: her farewell to our city, to her fans, and to the police who’d threatened to shut her down.
“Thank you, Toronto. You’ve made my three-day stay worthwhile,” she declared, grabbing her crotch one final time before throwing her fist into the air. “Power to the people. Right on.”
Madonna has just announced a new world tour, which prompted Shawn Micallef to share a video clip of her Toronto performence on Facebook, which in turn inspired this week’s post.
If you’re interested in the evolution of attitudes toward love in Toronto, you might also like to read The Toronto Book of Love.
MY BIG TORONTO HISTORY COURSE STARTS TONIGHT!
From Hogtown To Downtown: The History of Toronto in 10 Weeks is an overview of the whole history of the city in a series of weekly lectures packed full of fascinating stories. It starts tonight at 8pm! But even if you don’t see this in time, every lecture is recorded so you can catch up on anything you’ve missed whenever you like.
You can learn more about it here.
Before we continue, just a very quick reminder that The Toronto History Weekly will only survive if enough of you are willing to switch to a paid subscription. Only about 5% of readers have made the switch so far, which basically means that by offering a few dollars a month you’ll be giving the gift of Toronto history to 20 other people. You can make the switch by clicking here:
QUICK LINKS
The best of everything else that’s new in Toronto’s past…
LOST ATTRACTION NEWS — Jamie Bradburn shared an old map of Toronto tourist attractions…
…while Jack Landau spotted all the attractions we’ve lost in the decades since:
SHOCKING WRESTLING NEWS — Matt English shares the story of the scandal that rocked the Toronto wrestling world in the 1930s:
Click to read the full thread.
PUNCHING YOUR FANS IN THE FACE NEWS — Katherine Taylor shared the tale of a crooner who punch a Toronto concert-goer back in the 1930s:
VICTORIANS POOPED TOO NEWS — Beneath our city lies a whole underworld of sewers and buried creeks (one of the big topics in my Very Gross History Of Toronto course), much of it built more than a century ago. And every once in a while, we’re reminded of that subterranean city:
ROBBER BARON LIBRARY NEWS — The Toronto Public Library shares the story of Toronto’s Carnegie libraries:
Click on it to read the full thread.
TORONTO HISTORY EVENTS
LIVING IN INTERESTING TIMES: TWO LOYALIST
January 23 — 7:30pm — Both online & at Lansing United Church — Toronto Branch of the Ontario Genealogical Society
“While building out his family tree, Rick Hill was surprised to discover a 3rd great-grandmother who could have boasted that three of her four grandparents were United Empire Loyalists—and she had a Loyalist great-grandfather, too! During the American Revolutionary War, these UEL ancestors—Henry Dennis, his son John, John’s wife Martha (née Brown), and Lawrence Johnson—all fled Pennsylvania. Three of the four made it out of the future USA, first to Nova Scotia, and ultimately to York Township and the Town of York in Upper Canada. Their stories include the Battle of St. Lucia, the Quaker religion, losing a husband at sea, founding a settlement that banned slave masters, shipbuilding in Kingston, ill-starred actions in the War of 1812, a house at the corner of King & Yonge, a Methodist bishop, and the first customer of a new burial ground.”
Free, I believe!
TORONTO MAYORS FROM MUDDY YORK TO MEGACITY
January 25 — 7pm — Online — North Toronto Historical Society
“Long-time NTHS member Frank Nicholson will take us on a tour of our city’s history from 1834 as seen through the eyes of around ten of our 65 chief magistrates. He will include William Lyon Mackenzie (our first mayor), W.H. Boulton (the last Family Compact mayor), Tommy Church (the ‘Father of the TTC’), Leslie Saunders (an Orange Order militant), Nathan Phillips (the ‘Mayor of All the People’) and David Crombie (our ‘Tiny Perfect Mayor’).”
Free, I believe!
TORONTO’S EARLY HISTORY TREASURES WITH JOHN GODDARD
February 1 — 7pm — Online — Swansea Historical Society
“When he left the Toronto Star a few years ago, John delved into the City’s early-history museums. Not being a car owner, he used public transit to visit the many, widely-scattered sites. They proved a revelation, but he had one complaint — after each visit he wanted to know more. When he learned there was no guidebook to buy, not even a pamphlet to take away, he resolved to write the book he wanted to read. In this presentation, he focuses on what he calls ‘the most prized objects’ from six museums, artifacts of special value that illuminate life in early Toronto.”
Free!
THE LEGACY OF THE SLAVE TRADE IN CANADA
February 2 — 7pm — Gerrard/Ashdale Library
& Feburary 15 — 12:30pm — City Hall Library
“Author Andrew Hunter presents a reading and conversation about his new book "It Was Dark There All The Time: Sophia Burhen and the Legacy of Slavery in Canada". Joining the author will be Karen Harkins (Toronto Culture Division), Adrienne Shadd (author; "The Underground Railroad: Next Stop, Toronto!") and Charmaine Lurch (artist/educator) as they discuss the book and provide an examination and reflection on the history of chattel slavery and its legacy of racism in Canada.”
Free! Registration is encouraged for the February 15 event.
BY THE LIGHT OF THE COAL LAMP: AUTHOR TALK WITH RUTH CAMERON-HOWARD
February 2 — 7pm — Toronto’s First Post Office
“Many people who reside in Toronto share the common experience of growing up in other parts of Canada before they moved to the big city. On the evening of February 2nd, join author Ruth Cameron-Howard in a virtual presentation of her book, “By the Light of the Coal Oil Lamp” as she recounts her experiences of growing up in a rural Saskatchewan town in the 1940s.”
CITY OF TORONTO ARCHIVES: RESOURCES FOR THE GENEALOGIST
February 27 — 7:30pm — Both online & at Lansing United Church — Toronto Branch of the Ontario Genealogical Society
“Do you have family tree roots in Toronto? You can discover a lot about a person by researching where they lived. Jessica Algie, from the City of Toronto Archives, will demonstrate, step-by-step, how to find your ancestors in municipal archival records. We’ll start with online resources including maps, city directories and photos, before diving into local tax assessment rolls, which can be treasure troves of information.
“Finally, archivist John Dirks, will give you a sneak peek at an exciting, newly processed collection, Fonds 602, First Unitarian Congregation of Toronto, now available for research at the City of Toronto Archives. This collection is of particular interest to genealogists as it includes vital statistics registers of marriages, child dedications and memorial services.”
Free, I believe!