Gerald Hannon paid a high price for speaking truthfully. But he did not stand down and he did not regret it.
Where others would waffle, deny, obfuscate, Hannon, an award-winning writer and early gay rights activist who died May 9, was forthright, even when the result was personal calamity.
“He was a fearless, queer writer, who wrote without consideration of repercussions,” said Ed Jackson, a close friend who was with Hannon, 77, on the day he chose to end his life, five years after symptoms of swift-moving form of Parkinson’s disease first surfaced.
“That made him able to be more truthful, if not incredibly strategic, sometimes, in what he wrote.”
When asked, while he was teaching journalism part-time at Ryerson University (now known as Toronto Metropolitan University) in 1995, whether he was a sex worker, Hannon answered that he was. I have lost his teaching job.
Hannon had previously written sympathetically about intergenerational sex, in an article called Men Loving Boys Loving Men, published in 1977 in The Body Politic, a gay rights magazine. The article featured interviews with men who had sex with teenage boys. One of the men was a teacher who had relationships with her students.
The article raised a furor and Hannon’s name became linked to pedophilia.
“People used to think he was a pedophile. He was not,” said Jackson. “He saw an interesting aspect of sexuality. He wanted to look it in the face and see what he saw.”
Criminal charges were laid against The Body Politic and three officers of its publishing company, following publication of the article. Despite years of legal wrangling, the charges failed to stick, but the controversy surrounding the article dogged Hannon throughout his life. It surfaced again during the Ryerson controversy and helped lead to his dismissal of him. Hannon later reached a financial settlement with the university. He did not return to his teaching job.
Hannon hid from none of it. The article remains on his website from him.
“It was a horrible experience for him — he was so in the eye of the storm,” said Jackson.
“But you know, he would never turn off his phone or change his phone number.”
Longtime friend and fellow writer David Macfarlane said Hannon had no sexual interest in boys, and stood staunchly by his work.
“He didn’t want to make excuses or backtrack on that article, which didn’t help him at the time.”
Macfarlane said Hannon was an exceptional writer, affable and well-liked. Hannon won numerous awards writing for some of Canada’s best-known magazines, including Chatelaine. He was especially well-known for his facility with personal profiles.
“Gerald was a real original. He would pitch stories only he could dream up and write,” said former editor Sarah Murdoch.
Hannon’s honesty made him something of an accidental gay rights activist — he wanted nothing hidden and fought to create a society where gay couples could hold hands in public without fear of violence, marry and have children, or frequent bathhouses and engage in anonymous sex if that’s what they wanted to do.
He also took deliberate action on the frontlines of what was then called the gay liberation movement, participating in numerous demonstrations, to spread acceptance for the truth he grew up having to hide from friends and family growing up in Marathon, Ont.
“It was not an encouraging place to be gay in the 50s or 60s,” said Jackson.
Macfarlane said Hannon was also fun, affable, intelligent and well-liked.
By his own admission, Hannon did like to stir things up a little.
“What frequently constitutes my courage is a mixture of obliviousness and a desire to shock,” he wrote in an article in The Body Politic in 1975.
He said he wanted to make being gay visible, so people in the community no longer had to hide their orientation as he did.
“I am too well acquainted with the 1,000 tiny compromises that it entails ever to endure it again,” he wrote.
Close friend Peter Kingston, 47, was with Hannon in Mexico in 2017 when the first mysterious symptoms of the illness surfaced. Hannon was suddenly seized with uncontrollable fits of laughter. He had trouble smiling. The disease progressed rapidly, and by the end of 2021, he was unable to enjoy the things he loved, including music.
Hannon made the decision to end his own life using medical assistance, before losing control of his faculties, which his friends regarded as another act of courage. I have donated his brain to scientific research.
His memoir, “Immoral, Indecent and Scurrilous: The Making of an Unrepentant Sex Radical,” will be published this summer by Cormorant Books. His friends of him hope to have a memorial for him at that time.
Hannon is survived by two brothers, with whom he was in close contact.
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