Toronto has had a serial killer operating in the gay Village for nearly a decade.
Gay men have been going missing in Toronto’s gay village since 2010. Last month, an arrest was made by Toronto police and Bruce McArthur has since been charged with 5 counts of first-degree murder. Today, police announced that six bodies were discovered on his property.
In June, I went to Toronto for the Gay Pride Parade. I spent a lot of time in the Gay Village. The first afternoon I was there, a friend took me aside and told me to be careful because people were going missing from the Village.
“Okay,” I agreed. No questions, no surprise. I went to Pride. My friend and I had a great time. We went out. We stayed out. And we were careful.
I was in Toronto visiting friends over Christmas. On New Year’s Eve, my girlfriend at the time and I decided to head to the Village with some friends and hang out at a drag bar.
When we made plans, we were all keenly aware of the fact that there were rumors of a serial killer operating in Toronto’s gay village. We knew because we are queer, and we have queer friends, and we spend time in queer spaces.
In other words, we knew because we had to know.
It took me an afternoon of Googling to piece together how many people had gone missing in Toronto. The articles I did find generally came from the families of some of those who had gone missing, desperately searching for information, or from queer voices out of the Village, wondering why no one had bothered to take notice of a serial killer targeting a specific demographic of Toronto.
It was a rhetorical question. We all know why.
To make matters worse, a strong element of racial bias undergirds the entire investigation. The outcry from Toronto’s LGBTQ community details a sickening degree of racism and willful ignorance.
I should disclose that I live fulltime in Montreal. But my best friend lives in Toronto. I had a girlfriend there for several months. Two of my closest friends visit their parents in the city regularly. I made it my business to know when my friends were headed to the Village, and to make sure they checked in with me at the end of the night. There are some things that you don’t, as friends, always acknowledge openly. As a gang of queers in our early twenties, we tacitly agreed to keep an eye on another as best we could. Certainly no one else does. We knew that, too.
Toronto had a particularly intense cold snap at the end of December, and the city was offering free public transit for New Year’s Eve, so we gladly avoided walking when we could— we stayed warm, and, I thought, avoided ridiculous Uber fares.
“I wouldn’t want to take an Uber anyways,” one of the local girls remarked as I expressed fascination at the efficiency of Toronto’s streetcar system.
“Why not?” As someone who grew up in a small town with minimal public transit, and pitiful taxi service, I couldn’t imagine not taking advantage of [carpooling services].
“Well, they think the guy abducting people from the village has been posing as an Uber driver,” my friend told me nervously. “So I don’t really want to take an Uber to the Village and back. Just in case.”
By this point, 7 people had gone missing from the village since 2010. The latest victim had disappeared only a month prior, on November 25th, 2017.
On New Year’s Eve, I smoked a joint on Bloor and paraded my drunken self up and down the street with no problem. I did not see a single police car or officer.
Toronto’s police force has been under fire for months for abandoning previous investigative projects regarding the missing men. Despite outcry from the LGBTQ community, Toronto police declared last year that there was no evidence of a serial killer at work in the Village.
Between 1975 and 1978, 14 gay men went missing from the Village. Police suspected a serial killer at the time, but half the cases—in which 7 gay men were brutally and violently murdered—remain unsolved today. McArthur was in his mid-twenties at the time.
It took me a fair amount of research and time and reaching out to put together enough information to realize the scale of silence and avoidance on behalf of media across Canada and the Toronto police department. I don’t wonder why. Dead queers are not headline news. Especially if they aren’t White. Or they’re queer women. I suppose, in the end, a serial killer is only as interesting as his victims.
And so this is Toronto—Canada’s largest city, where the crosswalks are painted in rainbow colors. And this is homophobia. This is transphobia. This is racism. And this is Montreal. New York. Every small town, big city, or backwater village in North America. Rainbow flags in storefront windows do not mean a damn thing when we are being picked off and abandoned. We cannot be quiet. I will not be quiet and pretend like this is not happening merely because it is happening to people condemned to expendability by virtue of their sexuality, ethnicity, or gender.
I’m done hearing things about living in a “post-gay” moment. I’m sick of listening to people whine about tolerance and inclusivity and bathroom policies. “It’s 2018,” people sigh at me. “No one cares about this stuff anymore.”
I’m going to start telling people that they’re right. No one does care about this stuff anymore.
I’m just not sure they ever did.
I wish all the victims and all those affected by the atrocities in Toronto–friends, families, fellow queers, and LGBTQ folks alike—peace, wellness, and justice. Don’t sleep on this. We cannot be silent.
Skandaraj “Skanda” Navaratnam
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