Unsurprisingly, they were raided by the Morality Squad who took away large amounts of material including subscriber lists and financial records. Three people were charged with using the mail to distribute obscene material and possessing obscene material for the purpose of distribution.

On February 14th, 1979, the three were acquitted – but this was far from the end of the matter. The Attorney General appealed, then appealed again when the three were acquitted again. This went on until 1983, by which time the defendants had been acquitted three times. The Attorney General was planning to appeal again but public opinion had turned strongly against him so he finally dropped the issue.

In the meantime, they also found themselves in court in April1982. On this occasion they were facing obscenity charges following the publication of Lust With a Very Perfect Stranger – an article about fisting. Yet again, they were cleared.

Of course, the early 80s brought a new issue that was to become a constant topic of discussion – HIV/AIDS. TBP was in there right from the beginning, with news updates and regular articles about what this mysterious new disease meant for us. (See, for example, the illustration below from the October 81 edition.)

TBP were in right from the start when it came to coverage of the AIDS crisis

I think this is when I started buying it because it was distributed far beyond Canada. I got mine from Gay’s the Word bookshop in London. And, despite the unfortunate articles on ‘intergenerational relationships’ (which, thankfully, were before my time) TBP proved to be a great source of informative and thought-provoking articles.

And so it continued, until late 1986 when they reviewed its purpose as well as that of its spin-off, local paper Xtra. A decision was taken to ‘phase out’ TBP and replace it with new publications targetting specific markets. The first step was to ‘suspend’ publication after the February 1987 issue. As we know, to our great loss, TBP never came back.

The final cover of The Body Politic, featuring an image of the first cover