Edited by noted York University sociologist William Edward Mann (now emeritus), The Underside of Toronto (McClelland & Stewart, 1970) anthologizes, circa 1970, the city's more derelict or daring neighbourhoods ("Yorkville Subculture", "Rochdale: The Ultimate Freedom"), its sexual practices ("Sex at York University", "Crisis at the Victory Burlesk") and vices ("Toronto's Pornography: Disease or Symptom"), and some of its emerging immigrant and cultural classes ("Blacks in Toronto", "Student Radicals", "The Gay World"). In doing so, the anthology marks a seismic shift not only in the character of Toronto itself in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but in the way the city was viewed and judged by its residents and researchers of the period. Nearly forty years later, The Underside of Toronto is a perplexing and telling read, not so much for the quality or continued relevance of its analysis, but because it is a useful document of the city's fears and desires in an era of change not unlike our own.

As Mann writes in the introduction,

This new Toronto of 1970 is withal a much more vital and dynamic place. It boasts its Bohemia (in Yorkville), its poets and artists, and its clever satirists. It is fast acquiring touches of European sophistication; attractive bars, coffee houses, and foreign restaurants are blossoming, and there are even sidewalk cafes in the summer. Downtown newsstands are overflowing with foreign language papers and magazines, many of the former published locally. In the ethnic areas, stores sell exotic imported foods, and druggists advertise their wares in half a dozen languages. Old "Hogtown" Toronto now advertises avant-garde plays, ragtime bands, Italian song festivals, pizza carnivals, motoramas, pop festivals, stripperamas, and numerous attic and cellar clubs where one can listen to poetry, jazz, and folk music until later into the night.

He adds, "In short, Toronto has begun to mirror every sophisticated metropolis in the world as a centre of many facets". This latter comment is telling in itself, especially given how closely it mirrors our contemporary assertions that Toronto is (or is on the verge of becoming) a "world class" city. Some preoccupations, it seems, do not fade away easily. Perhaps Toronto hasn't changed very much after all.

And perhaps it hasn't. Martin O'Malley's essay, "Blacks in Toronto" explores the subtle racism practiced in Toronto and uses strikingly familiar examples, such as apartments and jobs suddenly "already filled" when applicants show up in person. Merrijoy Kelner's "Changes in Toronto's Elite Structure" underscores the continued insularity of 'old boys' networks, even when they begin to include women and minorities, because (as Kelner points out), "Once they have become members of "the club," they are not likely to break the rules." William Johnson's "The Gay World" describes a gay culture that appears only slightly less integrated into city life than today's version. On the whole, the thing about Toronto that seems to have changed most since 1970 is the way Torontonians respond to the particular 'subcultures' documented in The Underside of Toronto, perceiving them not as subcultures but merely as variants along the city's cultural continuum.

But the idea that Toronto is filled with subcultures, some merely exotic and others potentially dangerous, appears not to have changed. While reading The Underside of Toronto, I kept wondering what a new anthology using the same title would contain. Most likely it would include an article appraising the security threat posed by radicals among Toronto's growing Muslim and Tamil populations alongside an essay exploring the neighbourhood proselytizing of Jehovah's Witnesses. Perhaps one of Toronto's newly legal sex clubs would be evaluated as a threat to morality or local real estate values. The anthology would almost certainly include an ethnographic study of homeless or rooming house life, a geographic inventory of marijuana grow houses, and a drive-by collage of the city's ethnic gangs.

But another group that stands out to me as most likely to be included in a new anthology of Toronto's subcultural or deviant social character would be Toronto's middle-class suburban population, whose values and lifestyles are already singled out as responsible for (or symptomatic of) so many of the city's woes: its pollution and traffic congestion, its band of unrepentant conservativism, and the proliferation of big box retail outlets bordering the city like a ring of sores. The inclusion of this last group would suggest that an interesting inversion has occurred in what we consider subcultural in this city. At a time when Toronto's diversity is celebrated so widely, and in a context where 'subculture' is defined against the culture considered dominant, perhaps the city still requires some 'Other' to define itself against.

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In conjunction with the Imagining Toronto project, Amy Lavender Harris writes about new, classic, and evocative Toronto literature every Tuesday.

[The doorway image was created by Dan Iggers and is used under the aegis of a Creative Commons license.]

1. I’ve only read “The Gay World” chapter in this book a year or two ago, and found it hard to get over the homophobic tone. That particular strain of weird academic homophobia, when the subjects of study are somehow inherently deviant in their practices. It gave me the same feeling as when I read academic pieces from that era that still refer to blacks as “Negros.”

   I think your comment that it’s not too much unlike it is today, except for how that subculture’s relationship with the mainstream is viewed, is about right. But that’s not how it reads (that is, I don’t think that was the intention)—and I wonder how it was read back then.

   Posted by Shawn Micallef  on  01/12  at  04:16 PM

2. Good point, Shawn, and I agree with much of what you say (although I assumed that the author of “The Gay World” was a closeted homo himself—doesn’t the name sound like a cute pseudonym to you?). But the tone of many of the essays included in the book—a combination of curious reproof and sanctimonious acceptance—struck me for their similarity to the way many contemporary writers handle the subcultures of our era.

   It’s as if (indeed as Mann avers in the introduction) marking the presence of such subcultures signals the city’s ascendancy to ‘world class’ status. This hasn’t really changed in the 37 years since The Underside of Toronto was published; only the ‘subcultures’ have changed. But acknowledging or even celebrating the city’s diversity doesn’t mean everybody wants it living next door—and that’s where the hypocrisy comes in.

   A book like The Underside of Toronto provides a glimpse—albeit at a safe distance—into the city’s diversity. But while doing so, it also does something more troubling: while showing that the city was/is filled with interesting subcultures, its tone seems designed to confirm in its circa 1970 readers the need for such subcultures to be kept segregated from the rest of the population.

   Doesn’t that device sound familiar? I am thinking here of the homeowners who bought townhouses near a slaughterhouse in the Junction, and then objected to the sounds and smells emanating from the operation (or that did until it burned, mysteriously, a couple of months ago). Or the people who buy lofts or rent funky apartments in Kensington Market and then go into hysterics when someone shits on their front step. Or Parkdale residents who find the odd syringe or condom in their back alley and snatch up their children in terror. Or Annex residents objecting to affordable housing in a high rise. Or Beach(es) residents pulling out the stops to prevent a shelter program from expanding. Et cetera.

   Come to think of it, these people comprise the same demographic that has so eagerly purchased copies of Coach House’s twin uTOpia anthologies exploring Toronto’s urban and art (sub)cultures—anthologies criticised in some quarters for being insular, downtown, and white. Shawn, you wrote pieces for both volumes, and I’m in the second. Kind of makes you wonder how our contributions will be read 37 years from now, doesn’t it?

   Posted by Amy Lavender Harris  on  01/12  at  09:00 PM

3. Hmmm ya. But i sometimes I wonder about those groups who want to keep subcultures away from them, that strain of suburban mentality or nonacceptance of city-life—sometimes it’s over reported in the media. Like perhaps the Beach folk are getting a bum rap because of a few loud and lawyer-armed nimby’s.

   As for how the utopia’s will read in 37 years—they’re generally not academic pieces, or at least they lean towards being popular writing, so it might be different than this book.

   My favorite writer of all time is Joan Didion, and if you read either The White Album or Slouching Towards Bethlehem, her pieces on Los Angeles and California in the 1960s and early 70s read like they could have been written yesterday. So, there are ways to do it and age well.

   Posted by Shawn Micallef  on  01/16  at  05:01 PM

4. I think that in many ways the uTOpia books are almost exactly like The Underside of Toronto, which also included a mix of academic-ish and popular articles (some of the latter by journalists and/or activists including Robert Fulford and June Callwood). Both books provide a kind of testament to the dominant discourses of their time. Will the uTOpia books enjoy the longevity of Joan Didion’s work? We’ll see.

   As for “those groups who want to keep subcultures away from them”, your own comment seems to slur what you identify as a “suburban mentality” and (if we consider those with a suburban mentality as a subculture) perhaps that makes you a bit judgmental, too.

   But my point isn’t that being judgmental is (necessarily) wrong or bigoted: it’s that I think we need to be more honest about admitting our prejudices, preferences, and/or social limits. I do think that if a new version of The Underside of Toronto was published in 2007, the subcultures discussed in it would likely change, but the patronizing tone might not. My list of some subcultures that might be included this time—crack dealers, the new dangerous neighbourhoods, suburbanites—was meant to be humorous, but my prediction that they would likely be discussed using the same language—judgmental without admitting it—was made with a straight face.

   I’m teaching a writing course at York right now called “The Naked City”, and I’m having my students read Down to This, Shaughnesy Bishop-Stall’s memoir of his year in Toronto’s Tent City. One of the recurring themes of our conversations revolves around questions of authenticity and judgment (whose voice are we hearing, are the stories ‘real’, and what are the narratives being used to show or ‘prove’). In Down to This one of the biggest narrative issues is the unresolved difference in perspective between the Tent City residents and the various social service agencies, activists, and media who are so overly eager to tell their stories for them. Bishop-Stall (a resident) has himself received criticism for appropriating the voices of others. But Down to This is quite clear about its prejudices, and Bishop-Stall’s subsequent journalism (including his recent article on Jamestown in Toronto Life magazine) appears to have experimented with different ways of narrating sub/cultural voices even when their stories are messy and contradictory, and for that I think he deserves considerable credit.

   In my view, as soon as we identify some group as a subculture, we have distinguished it from a dominant culture that—whether we are prepared to admit it or not—usually includes ourselves. That’s probably unavoidable. But if we’re going to write about it, I think we need to be honest about the discourse that underpins our opinions and judgments.

   Posted by Amy Lavender Harris  on  01/16  at  07:12 PM

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