Tucked in a hidden corner on Toronto’s south shore lies Cherry Beach. It’s known for its seclusion. To lay on its hot sands or test its warm waters, you have to escape down a long, bottlenecked street. Travelling there is a clarifying experience. At the outset, you’re trapped in the concrete labyrinth of the city, where construction sounds fill your ears and carbon fills your nose, becoming a part of you. Then the skyscrapers melt away and the horizon becomes visible. With a jolt, you find yourself truly outside.

Last summer, I wound my way to Cherry Beach not to tan, but to dance. The queer event organization Yohomo was throwing a sunset rave on a Sunday afternoon. Speakers and a bar were erected on the beach, wires strewn everywhere. My community, the people I had grown accustomed to encountering in dark clubs downtown, looked different in the sun’s orange glow. The sweet smell of fresh water wafted through the air as the soft rush of waves mingled with the DJ’s prickly house beats. It felt as if the music had always been there, like the people and the water and the sand and the wires were equally natural. 

Yohomo co-founder Philip Villeneuve makes a point of organizing daytime outdoor events. He wants to get his community out of the city limits and outside and help them access the liberation he experienced growing up by a national park along Georgian Bay. “Don’t come here and do your city things,” Villeneuve says. “Wrap yourself up in the forest and the grass and the beach.” 

Clubs and bars are fun, but dancing under an infinite summer sky expands you. Queer people often have to carve out our own spaces to enjoy a temporary version of the freedom we’re robbed of in our daily lives. Out there, on the beach, the Earth has carved space for us. As Villeneuve puts it, “nature’s not judging us.”

“Nature’s not judging us,” says Philip Villeneuve of Yohomo, a queer events organization that throws daytime dance parties at Cherry Beach. Photo: Christopher Katsarov Luna / The Narwhal

For a long time, queer people gathered outdoors out of necessity. Leaves and bushes and trees provided a shelter where queer people could come together and actualize their sexual desires, away from leering eyes and prejudices. There, in the green, were spaces just as vital as bars — built not from concrete but from the Earth. Cruising was born from persecution but became a powerful statement: if society wouldn’t have us then nature would, because what we want and how we feel is as much a gift from her as the bushes.      

But the same seclusion that makes outdoor spaces ideal for cruising can also offer cover for homophobic and transphobic violence. And that’s not the only threat to queer green space: rising waters are swallowing another quintessential Toronto spot, Hanlan’s Point, while gentrification is driving us out of what’s left. Many of us have grown increasingly divorced from the wild world, perhaps having absorbed the untruth that we’re not “natural” despite the abundant evidence — like gay vulture dads, lesbian albatross moms, non-binary fungi and gender-fluid flowers — to the contrary. 

If queer people understood our strangeness as an intrinsic quality of nature and not a quirk in the order of things, then we might have a more complete understanding of our place in it — and, hopefully, a more rigorous desire to defend it. 

Many queer people have grown increasingly divorced from the wild world, perhaps having absorbed the untruth that we’re not “natural” despite the abundant evidence to the contrary. Photo: Chris Young / The Canadian Press

In the 1980s and ’90s, police violence at Cherry Beach said to be Toronto’s ‘worst kept secret’

“When it comes to the queer community, there are very intense histories of collective trauma and violence,” Loren March says. March is a post-doctoral fellow at the faculty of environmental and urban change at York University, whose holistic definition for “queer” encompasses not just people who identify within the LGBTQ2SIA+ acronym, but anybody from a marginalized group.

“Their connection to natural spaces offers calm and a sense of well-being, which is really important when you’re wrestling with those kinds of realities.”

March is studying the queer community’s relationship to urban outdoor spaces in Toronto, including Cherry Beach. It’s been an important place for decades; hidden away from the city, it’s the perfect place to express yourself in secret. But the bushes could not protect us. Known cruising spots have long been targeted by cops, and Cherry Beach was no exception.

According to the queer news publication Xtra, in the 1980s and ’90s, it was “the city’s worst kept secret” that horrific police violence often took place there — unlawful, vicious beatings carried out on people framed as criminals. Pukka Orchestra had a local radio hit in 1984 with the song “Cherry Beach Express,” which put to music what many already knew: “That’s why I’m riding on the Cherry Beach Express / My ribs are broken and my face is in a mess / And a name on my statement’s under duress.”

Toronto police were said to drive people to the beach to deliver vigilante justice. Xtra quoted a lesbian history project in which women named Peanut and Arlene said police raped queer women there. People without homes also reported being regular victims. In 2000, Stuart Mitchell died weeks after claiming cops had beat him at Cherry Beach. Thomas Kerr accused nine police officers of beating him with boots and fists there in 1996: the case was resolved out of court, with the Toronto Police Service not conceding responsibility but reportedly agreeing to pay Kerr $500,000 before one of the accused cops could take the stand.  

Even those who weren’t assaulted were often harmed. Men charged with public indecency often saw their reputations demolished and their lives ruined. It was understood that Cherry Beach held great risk, and going there meant you might leave with your life irrevocably changed for the worse. And still they went, because it was in their nature to seek satisfaction and community. 

Trinity Bellwoods Park, a longtime cruising site, famously attracted thousands during quarantine. Gentrification has left queer folks, who are also losing their indoor spaces at an alarming rate, with even fewer places to go outside. Photo: Cole Burston / The Canadian Press

I’ve made a pitfall here common to the narrative about queer people and the outdoors — framing these spaces as most precious to cis gay men who use them to cruise for sex. But Toronto’s queer parks and beaches are also vital to the rest of the community. And while our old adversaries, the bigots and cops, may never fully go away, other thorny obstacles lie before us.       

March has identified another major threat to queer people’s ability to access natural space: gentrification.

When COVID-19 restrictions meant gatherings could only be held outside, precious outdoor spaces with special significance for queer folks became overrun. The sudden increase in traffic made them less safe for queer people and that safety quotient hasn’t recovered since, March’s ongoing research shows. 

Trinity Bellwoods Park, a longtime cruising site, famously attracted thousands during quarantine. The park was notably used as a major encampment by unhoused people — an encampment viciously cleared by police in July 2021. Toronto spent $2 million to uproot people without homes that summer and the message was clear: these parks aren’t for undesirables. All of this has left queer folks, who are also losing indoor spaces at an alarming rate, with even fewer places to go outside. 

Binary thought hurts nature: for example, bugs

The moment calls for queer people to take a more active approach to their relationship with nature. One avenue could be a field of study called queer ecology, which considers the natural world through the prism of queerness and centres our special relationships with the outdoors. Emerging over the past half-century, it aims to abolish binary thought from our perspectives on nature.     

Human beings are cultured to cast judgment about what is truly “normal” or “natural” and what’s not. We want to put things in boxes and binaries; we want to understand by reducing living things to patterns and statistics. But time and again, nature urges us to use our minds expansively, to vibe with the Earth’s complex rhythm instead of trying to endlessly simplify it.

Think of our cultural stance on bugs; many imagine them as less than living, as pests to be killed without guilt, overlooking whole ecosystems that hinge on the prosperity of insects. Binary thought is a disease heterosexual thinking has wrought on us, and the climate is faltering as a result. The modern way of understanding our living planet has failed us. It’s time for something queerer.

So Sinopolous-Lloyd, founder of Queer Nature in Washington state, measuring bighorn sheep tracks. Photo: Pinar / Queer Nature

That’s what So Sinopolous-Lloyd was aiming at when they co-founded Queer Nature, a group in Washington state that teaches survival skills and how to study animal behaviour in order to reframe the way queer folks imagine the natural world. “Curiosity and practicing awareness is something healing that we can give to other animals and to landscapes,” Sinopoulos-Lloyd says. “But we might also be listened to and heard by other beings. We might get something back.”

Sinopoulos-Lloyd became fascinated with the idea of queer ecology while working on a Vermont sheep farm. In Western culture, we often think of sheep as brainless, following the flock, lacking individual personality. That idea shifted for Sinopoulos-Lloyd when they met Sydney, a black sheep in more ways than one. 

Most of the sheep avoided Sinopoulos-Lloyd, preferring to cavort with their flock. They seemed to ostracize Sydney, like there was something about her they couldn’t understand. “Sydney was weird:” like a dog, Sydney would approach Sinopoulos-Lloyd in search of affection.      

One day, as Sinopoulos-Lloyd sat cross-legged in the green field, Sydney came up to them, circled around a few times, and plopped down in their lap. “I was totally pinned down by this black-haired Icelandic ewe with these little horns,” they say. “She was curious about me in a way that she wasn’t able to express, that wasn’t super typical.”

Sinopoulos-Lloyd developed a fondness for Sydney, seeing a lot of themself in the strange ewe. And they began to understand that the way they felt, that out-of-place feeling that comes along with being queer, was part of nature’s code. 

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A few weeks ago, I was baptized in Toronto’s most sacred gay waters. I moved to the city in the fall of 2020 — mid-lockdown and pre-vaccine, without any access to the queer culture I’d come for. This spring, as restrictions lifted and the temperature rose, the time had finally come for me to make my pilgrimage to Hanlan’s Point.

A one-kilometre, clothing-optional beach, Hanlan’s is on the Toronto Islands, a short ferry ride from the city’s glistening harbour. It’s one of just two official nude beaches in the country, and the only one created by and for queer people. 

Hanlan’s has been alternately praised and scrutinized for the sexual liberation it facilitates — naked bodies (mainly queer ones) litter the sand, which is hidden behind a wooded area often used for cruising. A site of activism and celebration since the mid-20th century, the beach became officially, legally clothing-optional in 2002 — 20 years ago — and has been something of a holy ground for queer folks in the city ever since. 

“There’s something really utopic about it,” says Peter Knegt, a frequent visitor to Hanlan’s Point. “It represents this ideal of what the queer community could be, where everyone feels like they have a space, even if that space is sitting on a beach.”

Knegt first went to Hanlan’s nearly two decades ago, when he was just 19. At the time, he was freshly out, new to the city, and still uncomfortable with both his body and his identity as a queer person. It’s not news that queer people are often confronted with impossible beauty standards — standards that are uniquely insidious among queer men. 

“Hanlan’s is not like that,” says Knegt, a producer at CBC. “It’s a space where I actually learned to be comfortable with my body.”

Hanlan’s has been that utopia for decades. Toronto’s gay community started congregating there in the 1950s, a decade before homosexuality was decriminalized in Canada. 

Toronto’s LGBTQ2+ community started congregating at Hanlan’s Point Beach in the 1950s, followed by a series of Gay Day picnics in the 1970s that led to the city’s first Pride Week. It’s been officially clothing-optional for 20 years. Photo: Kirk Lisaj / The Narwhal

On August 1, 1971, two years after the Stonewall riots ushered in a new era of queer activism, a few LGBTQ2+ organizations threw the first Gay Day picnic. The event was an opportunity for folks to come together and relish in their queerness in broad daylight. The picnic was held on Hanlan’s, one of the only public spaces in Toronto where gay people could safely gather without the police threats or proximity to hostile straight folks that plagued mainland gay bars. 

That first picnic, which boasted an attendance of 300, is considered the first major display of gay and lesbian solidarity in Toronto. Picnics were held annually until 1974, when they snowballed into Toronto’s first Pride Week. 

“There’s something about being somewhere with such an incredible history,” says Knegt. “There’s a vibe there that’s been passed down from generation to generation.”

The wooded area at Hanlan’s Point. The island’s status as a safe space was shattered after a homophobic attack last year. Beachgoers are also facing the threat of the climate crisis: in recent summers, flooding has cut off access to the beach. Photo: Kirk Lisaj / The Narwhal

At Hanlan’s, you’re surrounded by trees, coated in sand and blinded by sunlight refracting off glistening water.  Both then and now, actualizing your queerness in an environment where you feel in touch with the Earth is deeply affirming, a sun-soaked reminder that queerness is a product of nature, not an abomination against it. 

Although gay rights have come a long way since that first picnic, Hanlan’s remains one of the only places in Toronto where queerness is not only tolerated but normalized, where queer people make up a visible majority. 

Ordinarily, it’s only possible to access that kind of liberation at gay bars, which are far less accessible, far more expensive and often require a proximity to substances that can be alienating for some. At Hanlan’s, all you need is a few dollars for the ferry and a bottle of sunscreen. 

But even Hanlan’s can be touched by bigotry and violence. A gay man was viciously assaulted in a homophobic attack there just last year, rocking the community and shattering the island’s perceived status as a safe space. The police have always been a sporadic presence and are still dinging people for drinking on the beach, trying to assert their dominance over a space that rejects the hegemony they represent. 

Hanlan’s popularity has also grown over the years, attracting an increasing number of straight beachgoers who bring with them a looming fear that the Point might become gentrified and unsafe for the queer people who need it most. Meanwhile, the waters that have held such meaning for my community have risen as the climate crisis has intensified, causing flooding that has closed the beach in recent summers and is slowly submerging our beloved haven into Lake Ontario. 

Regardless of its checkered past and blurry future, Hanlan’s is still a place where queer people like me can find liberation, even if for an afternoon. COVID-19 has robbed us of two summers, two Pride seasons, two opportunities to party and resist, to celebrate how far we’ve come and contemplate how far we have to go. 

In those two summers, the world’s hostility against LGBTQ2+ folks has intensified: American politicians have tabled and passed legislation infringing on the human rights of trans folks, and just last week an apparent white nationalist riot nearly coalesced close to an Idaho Pride parade. Spaces like Hanlan’s haven’t been this urgently needed since the Pride picnics of the ‘70s. 

On the walk to the beach from the ferry, there’s a statue of Edward Hanlan, the rower and hotelier for whom the Point is named. Photo: Kirk Lisaj / The Narwhal

The walk to the beach from the ferry is about 10 minutes. Along the way, you’ll pass an enormous bronze statue of Edward Hanlan, the rower and hotelier for whom the Point is named. He’s depicted as mustachioed, muscled and wearing only (very tight) swim trunks, an omen of what’s to come. 

I was nervous as I walked by Hanlan’s statue. I was entering a space where my body would be about as visible and vulnerable as it could be. But as I arrived at the beach, I was surprised at how immediately comfortable I felt. 

I was pleasantly surprised to see the smorgasbord of bodies on display. Big bodies and little bodies, bodies of all genders, queer bodies and straight ones, muscly ones and fat ones — rolls and fat and muscle and flesh all sharing one beach. Although I did not get fully naked, stripping off my shirt felt natural. I allowed myself to relax, to soak up the heat, to stare off into the waters, and to be at peace with myself, just the way I am.  

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.