Canada’s The Body Politic was, like Britain’s Gay News, born from the anger and energy of the early Gay Liberation movement. And, like Gay News, it had to face many battles during its lifetime.

Produced in Toronto, by a collective largely made up of gay men, the first issue appeared on October 28th 1971. Prior to it hitting the streets a number of potential titles had been considered – including ‘Radical Pervert’! Thankfully, The Body Politic (TBP) won the day.

Like many other cities at that time, Toronto was a very hostile environment for queer people. The local newspaper, the Toronto Star never missed an opportunity to criticise homosexuals. And the local police – who even had a ‘Morality Squad’ –  made it a priority to physically and verbally abuse queer people.This culminated in 1981 when 150 police officers raided four bathhouses and arrested 286 men.

But the folks at TBP refused to be intimidated and published whatever they thought needed to be said at the time. Perhaps unsurprisingly then, it was less than a year before they ran into controversy. In retrospect, this is understandable for, in August 1972, they published an article entitled Of Men and Little Boys, in which the author argued that, “Loving a child and expressing it sexually is a revolutionary activity.”

It wasn’t just the usual critics who were incensed by this article. Queer people too were outraged that the magazine should publish something that seemed to confirm the claims made by our enemies – that we were, in fact, paedophiles.

Incredibly, no legal action was taken against the publishers or the author and the magazine lived to fight another day. And that day arrived in 1973 when they took the Toronto Star to court for refusing to take ads for the magazine. They won the case but, in the process, lost their publishers, Newsweb Enterprises, who just happened to be a printing subsidiary of the Star!

But still they continued. And still the battles continued. In 1975, for example, they were visited twice by the Morality Squad after they published a cartoon strip ‘Harold Hedd’ that featured an episode of fellatio. Despite the visits, no action was taken against them.

Their good fortune was not to last, however. In December 1977 they published Men Loving Boys Loving Men – another article about ‘intergenerational relatonships’. This included an interview with a primary-school teacher in a relationship with a 12-year old boy.

The cover of the Body Politic issue containing the article ‘Men Loving Boys Loving Men’