Up until the raids, baths were popular because, in those early days of the gay pride movement, the other options (bars, public restrooms) were riskier and seemed more liable to infiltration by the police. Legal Brothels? Officers sat on the sunny patio and fielded questions from passersby. I've been looking, but have up till now only gotten mixed messages when it comes to it's legality; just a jumble of legislative actions, court rulings, and public statements all wrapped in a confusing multi-year timeline and many vague/assuming articles in … In my experience, it is indisputably true that “indecent” acts take place in a gay bathhouse—though unlike Ackroyd and the authors of the Criminal Code, I don’t use the word pejoratively. Far from operating as havens for the closeted or ashamed, bathhouses seem to thrive in places where the gay community has by and large already been liberated. Peaches is on the House computer, logged in on the brothel boards. “Customers who want a little extra can now go to the brothel.”Another dancer named Julia hopes to make more money as the business becomes a “one-stop sex shop.”“I am only doing this for the money and I hope I can earn more,” Julia says.Toronto Police Const. "This is Life" airs Sundays at 10 p.m. ET/PT. Up until the Supreme Court intervened in 2014, a place like Steamworks was, in the eyes of the law, a bawdy house. Yet visit one of the city’s gay baths on a Friday or Saturday night and you will find that these establishments still do a brisk business. The scene is funny, it is bawdy, but it certainly does not feel as though it should be illegal.The police now agree, though relations between TPS and the LGBTQ community have already improved significantly. In the early morning hours, after the bars let out, there is often a wait list for rooms. The entire space is kept immaculately clean, a far cry from the stereotype of the sketchy or grungy bathhouse.The baths have endured despite repeated predictions of their imminent demise, prompted first by the HIV-AIDS crisis in the 1980s and 90s, and then by hook-up apps like Grindr in the 2000s. This bit of legalese was, at the very least, etymologically apt: outside the Criminal Code, the adjective “bawdy” describes the humorously indecent, a manner of dealing with sex in a comical way. “The shifting has turned from Toronto having a red light district to finding professionally run businesses that are properly licensed, inspected and zoned.”Tim Lambrinos, of the Adult Entertainment Association of Canada, said there are 15 clubs in Toronto that can be converted into brothels. Please try again© 2020 Toronto Sun, a division of Postmedia Network Inc. All rights reserved. I thought of those little red dots when I visited Steamworks on a Thursday night, when the lights are dimmed even lower than usual and visitors are given keychain lasers whose pointillist rays can be aimed at prospective suitors. “It will be up to them to get their own girls.”He said the brothels will be clean, well-inspected and customers issued a receipt after they’ve paid for using a prostitute.“Perhaps others with legitimate body rub licences in good standing could be part of the conversation,” Mammoliti says. They remain keen as the federal government has confirmed it will take the matter to the Supreme Court.The push for the sex dens in Toronto has intensified as some advocates call for a downtown red light district. They came wielding crowbars and sledgehammers, smashed through walls and doors, and herded hundreds of men wearing only their towels into front lobbies. But by and large, these are establishments by and for gay men, and they have always been so. Undercover cops who were already in the baths when the raids transpired wore tiny red stickers to identify themselves to their fellow officers. One officer dubbed “the Animal” singled out men wearing wedding rings, and warned them, “This is going to be the biggest fucking mistake of your life.” To others, he said, “You guys are lucky this isn’t Germany.” Men were made to bend over, grab their ankles and cough, a humiliating test that is typically only administered to inmates in jail. The scene inside a place like Steamworks—teeming masses of men, naked but for a towel and sometimes not even that, all there for the singular purpose of getting laid—is nothing if not bawdy.Under the now-abolished sections of the Code, the bawdy-house provisions allowed police to raid any establishment where “indecent” acts were taking place. On a recent summer afternoon, the Toronto Police LGBTQ Community Consultative Committee held an open house at Second Cup on Church, just around the corner from Steamworks.