“Hey, it’s Halloween tonight. Let’s go to Yonge Street and watch the people throw eggs at the costumed queers. They will be going in and out of the St. Charles Tavern. It will be fun. Lots of people do it. Maybe we can splash them with eggs too”! This was what I heard one student say to another while I was waiting in the school hallway. He must have been loud enough for me to hear everything clearly. He had said it as if it was the most natural thing to do for fun...like suggesting going to a movie. It’s 1973, my first year in Toronto. At that age, I am already familiar with English words like queer, fag, faggot, homosexual and gay! I also can tell the difference between people by their choice of which of these words they use in their conversations. But I was not familiar with Halloween night at the St. Charles and did not understand the part about the eggs.
When I asked my best friend Hampar about it, he told me he did not know. My brothers did not know either. In the end it was Harout, another Armenian friend at our school who had been there many years, who explained that people actually went there on purpose to hassle the gays. St. Charles was a popular spot for gays. Not only did they throw eggs and swore at them, but they also chased them, once they came out of the tavern, in the backstreets. They would gang up on them and beat them sometimes. The costumed gays would run for their lives in fright. As Harout was telling all this, a horrible imaginary scene was unfolding in my mind: frightened young boys peeping through a narrow crack of the tavern door to see if the coast is clear and then dashing out to run as fast as they could across the empty Yonge Street towards a safe backstreet where they would hopefully become invisible in the dark. But some tough guys, like the student I had heard in the hallway, are waiting in the dark to chase and catch one of them to beat them mercilessly...just for fun! The beating, along with insults to his manhood, goes on and on even though the young victim is begging for mercy. This imaginary scene that first sent the shivers in my spine, haunted me for months. In fact, it still comes back to my mind sometimes after almost fifty years...the cruel humiliation that the boy must have felt!
Of course, this imaginary scene is close to reality only in some parts, as I found out later. Yonge Street apparently was so crowded with spectators that there was big police presence on Halloween nights. A lot of people came to watch out for curiosity but as many came to harass and insult the gays. Violence would break out often and the police were not always able to control the crowds. But, I say, it does not matter because those are details. What matters is the immensity of human capacity to hate and degrade whatever is incomprehensibly different from the accepted norm. What matters is that on every Halloween night, there were brutes and victims in front of the St. Charles Tavern, whether in reality or in my imaginary scenario. And the horror of the fear...the fear of being cornered, resigning to the mercy of a brutal bully?
Intentional humiliation afflicts a wound that never heals. The humiliated spend a whole lifetime pondering about all the “I should have” and “I could have” thoughts that pester them forever. They live a life full of remorse because of their impotency to defend themselves. They only have the luxury to recreate an imaginary defense scenario. They fight back only in their fantasy, but they wake up from that fantasy accepting the past for what it is...bitter and unfair. Shall I tell you about the Ugandan Sikh refugee who was chased in daylight by teenage hoodlums who cornered him and grabbed his turban off his head? A Sikh without his turban! Go imagine. Where is he now and how many nights and days has he spent in the past fifty years wishing he had never walked on that particular street that day? Or should I tell you about the time I could not defend my older brother who got punched in the face by a gang leader in our neighborhood because of traffic rage? Can I really describe how I still feel today because of my incapacity to defend my humiliated brother? ‘Humiliated’ I say because he got punched in front of his younger brother!
Or, maybe I should tell you about Akhchig Mardig. Akhchig means girl in Armenian. His name was Mardiros. But he was too feminine for my cousin and his friends in Aleppo. I used to see him whenever I visited my (paternal) uncle there in summers. They were all around ten maybe...neighborhood kids. They would gossip about him and laugh. ‘Akhchig’ was always how they referred to him. I wonder sometimes, how strange that at their age they even could make such a big deal out of their own masculinity...I guess some people are born that way! My cousin and his friends did not always include Mardig in their games. He also kept his distance. But on some days one of them would say, ‘let Mardig join the game too’. I guess they felt like having some free fun that day. And the game would start but whatever game it was, it always turned into a physical one. Eventually he always became the one being chased, cornered and getting grabbed, touched or tickled...but everyone did it as if it was a teasing game. He would sweat and become red in the face from the effort to defend himself. Yet, they would go on and on. I remember his furious eyes one time after such a game when he just straightened his untidied shirt and just walked away. How did he really take it all, being a special boy in a neighborhood like that? I wonder. But I know this much...the wound from physical violence becomes a faded memory with time but the humiliation afflicted haunts forever.
