The end of
repression

by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

Everybody knows that any activity is way more fun when it involves breaking some social custom or law. For much of the city’s past, this thrill was easily attainable as a good portion of one’s days were conducted with the constant adrenaline rush of knowing that arrest and imprisonment were potentially imminent. Nowadays cops just want to give lectures at kindergartens, but once upon a time you could barely take your garbage out without fear that an overzealous officer might hammer you over the head as punishment for some obscure contravention.

Politicians have, over the years, made repeated attempts to make our city unlivable, exciting and intoxicatingly dangerous by providing citizens with the arousing notion that any evening out could end up in trouble.

One tool in this effort was a bylaw stating that “all riots, noises, disturbances or disorderly assemblages are hereby prohibited in the city.” From 1870 until a century later, cops used Bylaw 42 to ban everything from handing out leaflets, using megaphones and the Santa Claus parade. Another great longstanding bylaw allowed cops to bust “every person strolling or loitering at night… who cannot satisfactorily account for his presence there or refuses to do so.” Bylaw 333, passed in 1905, also forbade lying in a state of intoxication and owning a slingshot.

If going without slingshots was rough, Montreal youth were also barred from movies following the death of 78 of them at the Laurier Palace theatre fire of January 9, 1927 (they were reportedly watching the film Get ’Em Young, although others insist that the Mary Pickford film Sparrows was playing). The subsequent Boyer Commission banned those under 16 from movie theatres, an insane exclusion that lasted, incredibly, until 1961. So kids were forced to sneak into theatres or hang around the street. Cops figured the brats were up to no good, so in 1942 the city ordered any youth caught outside between 9 p.m. and 5 a.m. to pay a $2 fine.

My aunt used to insist that in those heady days of absolute joyous repression adult males could get ticketed for not wearing a tie. I’ve never found proof of her claim, but a 1950 bylaw threatened a $40 penalty for “the wearing of indecent clothing.” This didn’t stop cops from arresting the well-tailored Mona Desjardins, a 22-year-old woman wearing a man’s business suit, who was fined $400 for slow dancing with another woman in February 1962 at a bar on St-Christophe.

Films were also repressed with a Metternechian abandon until not long ago. The 1937 film Life of Émile Zola, which won Academy Awards for best film and actor, was banned here, as was any film showing divorce or positive views on socialism. Mayor Drapeau had two theatre managers jailed for showing the tame Swedish bonerfeed I, a Woman in July 1968, even though it had already been showing for 22 weeks before he got wind of it. Drapeau also called an emergency meeting during the FLQ October Crisis of 1970 in order to figure out how to bust the viewers of Quiet Days in Clichy at the Cinema V. And thanks to Catholic opposition to backseat necking, drive-in theatres were kept out of Quebec until 1971.

Mayor Drapeau had gone nuts a bit earlier, in 1967 to be exact, when he passed a bylaw forbidding bar employees from mingling with patrons under pains of a $200 fine or two months in jail. The bylaw mainly kept strippers from sitting with customers until overturned a handful of years back. At the time, the Morality Squad was also pushing to have laws forcing bars to be brightly lit, an idea that never caught on.

It’s all over now, though. I recently spoke with a Morality Squad cop who confessed to being frustrated beyond belief at the lack of public support for busting transgressors. The war against repression has largely been won. It’s peace in our time. Hope you can stand the boredom. :