It’s finally sunny in Toronto and we all know what that means; everything is wet, everything is grey and local flower nerd Sakura Steve has finally emerged from his winter slumber to give us all a middle-aged white man’s take on the developmental stages of the Japanese Cherry Tree bloom in High Park. It’s not quite summer, but hey, we’ll take it.
While camping, cottages and even a saucy little Toronto-parks-and-rec grill session are officially still a good month away, the downtown gays with a penchant for parties are already salivating at the prospect of getting their buns ever so lightly toasted at the only nude beach this side of Vancouver’s Wreck. Hanlan’s Point is the place to be when the downtown core turns into a sweltering mess of peeling flesh amid a humidex so saturated the average Torontonian’s shirt requires a dedicated wringing no fewer than four times an hour. Situated on the western edge of the 15 little islands collectively known as the imaginatively named Toronto Islands, Hanlan’s Point has been a place for gays to sun their little buns in the buff since the 40s. Full of fine sand dunes and boasting remarkably swimmable water quality for Lake Ontario, Hanlan’s Point Beach has been a gay haven for generations of cruising beach bums, all oiled and slicked up with that good ol’ vitamin D.
But why there? Who even was this “Hanlan” chap and was he a friend of Dorothy’s? And who was there before all these hunks started spending their summers getting sand wedged up all deep in their oh-so-natural birthday suits?
Mnisiing
Long before written history, Indigenous peoples have been stewarding the land and water of Mnisiing, the traditional name for what is now known as the Toronto Islands. Aptly meaning “on the islands,” Mnisiing has always been and continues to be a significant place for Indigenous people. Before the British Crown pulled a few underhanded moves with The Mississaugas of the Credit during the Toronto Purchase of 1787 and its New and Improved™ version in 1805, the Michi Saagiig (Mississauga Anishinaabeg), alternately known as “the people of the big river mouths” or the “Salmon people,” used the islands as a place of leisure, birth, burial and healing. Settlers quickly noticed the locals enjoying such a nice spot for rejuvenation and relaxation and promptly got in on that situation. In 1986, the Mississaugas opened a land claim dispute with the Canadian government over the fact that the Treaty 13 of that “clarified” 1805 version of the Toronto Purchase explicitly stated that the Toronto Islands were not part of any rental or purchase agreement with the crown. It took until 2010 for the case to be settled; the government forked over $145mil and the Mississaugas formally renounced their claim to the land (not a great deal, honestly).
To learn more about the Indigenous history and continued stewardship of The Islands, check out this excellent short video by the Bawaadan Collective, “Missisakis: On The Indigenous History Of The Tkaronto Islands”
Pleasure Gardens (not actually a sex joke)
Immediately after settlers made themselves nice and comfortable on The Islands, they started putting up garrisons and blockhouses to enjoy a military advantage with the still standing Gibraltar Point Lighthouse popping up in 1809 on the south side of The Islands. The Hanlan family (Mary [née Gibbs], John and their children) were one of The Islands’ first year-round settler residents. Originally setting up at Gibraltar Point in 1862, they moved westward to the beach that now bears their name after a storm washed their house clean off the land in 1865. In 1867, the city of Toronto acquired The Islands from the federal government and set about turning it into a right proper Victorian Pleasure Garden and summer suburb of the city. The city carved out plots of land for cottages and amusement parks to dot the islands and attract visitors. Leasing residents began adopting a nostalgia laden country theme to their properties, viewing themselves as living in a private world of simpler and more, uh, “primitive” times (the proliferation of racist “native” sounding cottage and place names on the Island persists. See: the recently filled in Jim Crow Pond on Snake Island).
In 1878, John Hanlan set up a hotel on the beach, expanding it to 25 rooms by 1880. The area became informally known as “Hanlan’s Point” before the name was officially changed in 1880 as a tribute to son Ned Hanlan’s fame as a world champion rower. By 1897, the city had constructed the Hanlan’s Point Stadium for baseball and lacrosse games along with the Hanlan’s Point Amusement Park. The stadium burned down in 1903 and again in 1908 before the resident minor league baseball team left in 1925. The stadium was torn down in 1937 to make way for the Island Airport. Unable to compete with The Sunnyside over on the mainland, the Hanlan’s Point Amusement Park folded in the late 1920s. With the loss of tourist attractions came the closing of the Hanlan’s Hotel.
The Gays Have Arrived Were Always Here
The history of public bathing, at a beach or in a bathhouse, is a somewhat sequestered one. As Dale Barbour illustrates in his 2022 book Undressed Toronto, when the above subdividing and expanding of The Islands’ land and public offerings was happening, the culture of mixed gender public bathing was actually quite new. As the 1860s began, public bathing was a nude, gender (and racially) segregated activity. As women entered the workforce and pressed for access to men’s spaces, the rise of mixed gendered (i.e. heterosocial) interactions allowed men and women to police themselves through a system of mutual distrust and surveillance. In the 1860s, city councilors were trying to sort out how to separate male and female bathing on The Islands, going so far as to suggest one end for chicks and another for dudes.
Logistically, the confinement method never worked out financially and with the entitlement of men bathing nude wherever they pleased and the financial and social incentive to include women at beach-based amusement parks and pleasure gardens, it was fully impossible to stop the heterosociality. Toronto instituted bathing suit requirements for public beaches in 1880 with nude bathing still allowed between 10PM and 6AM. Building on social reformist ideas of cleanliness and hygiene, bathing as a leisure pastime promoting good health, connections to “primal” forms of masculinity and a simpler time of presexual childhood nudity, beach-based mixed gender bathing became an easy middle class sell.
Snapping forward to the 1940s, Hanlan’s Point on the west side of The Islands was nothing but a nice beach and an underused airport fenced off from the public. On the east side of The Islands, some island infrastructure, a few slightly eccentric residents, and mixed gender beach bathing areas remained. Hanlan’s Point was the easy choice for men wanting a little privacy from the surveillance of mixed gendered life. A wooded walk slipped through the bushes and dunes; a passage into another texture of the call to a “primitive” or primal masculinity lined with the tined nostalgia of presexual codifications of nudity.
Whether gay or not, these men could enjoy the act of being amongst kin; a community of publicly negotiated private contact. And with privacy comes confidence, exploration, and possibility. A world sequestered from the heterosexual imposition of constant rejections of your own desires is hard to refuse. Filtering through the sieves of wildlife, stripping to a place you can only hope ever existed in someone else’s best memory, Hanlan’s Point is a pilgrimage of gay connection, contact and community.
On August 1, 1971, a group of gay activists hosted the first “Gay Day Picnic.” While the demonstrations against the 1981 bathhouse raids by the Toronto Police are typically cited as the start of the Canadian Pride movement, this lovely little beach picnic and the yearly picnics that followed are arguably the first Pride events in Canada.
Check out this short video by amateur filmographer Brian Hardy of a group of gay friends heading to Hanlan’s Point in July 1980.
But Are They Islands?
The Islands weren’t always actually islands (i.e. land masses completely surrounded by water) but sandbar peninsulas composed of alluvial deposits (the fun oceanographic term for sand, silt, and/or clay eroded from one place and transported to another via water) from the Scarborough Bluffs. The flow of the Niagara River to the south creates a wild counterclockwise east-to-west current that slaps at those escarpments and plops all that gunk right at the foot of Toronto Harbour. In 1852, a storm flooded sand pits on the island and created a channel between the easternmost part of the spit and the mainland. In 1858, another storm finished the job to certify the whole island situation permanently.
All the while, that bluffs-to-sandbar pipeline was still going. Technically speaking, the potential to get that walk-on peninsula status back was still in the cards. Or at least it was until the late 1950s when the Toronto Harbour Commission, anticipating a nice big increase in shipping post opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway in 1959, decided to expand the capacity of Toronto’s Outer Harbour by creating a fancy new breakwater, a permanent structure built around a harbour to protect it from currents, tides, and other assorted water related forces. However, the rise in shipping container technology rerouted the expected cargo traffic to East Coast ports, eliminating the need for an outer harbour altogether. Despite shipping traffic dropping by 50% between 1967 and 1973, Toronto kept filling that breakwater in with the excavation and construction waste from its various subway, office tower, and other infrastructural projects. Now known as the Leslie Street Spit, this dumping and dredging is still ongoing.
Is The Beach Getting Smaller or Is It Just Not Happy to See Me?
Five decades of blocking the deposited gunk that flows onto the islands from the Scarborough Bluffs has had a massive impact on The Islands. Water is powerful and water eats away at everything it touches. Without that constant stream of newly deposited sand and silt, the city of Toronto has been actively on deck to infill The Islands faster than the water can erode it all away.
The issue here is where exactly this landfill is happening. For reasons I couldn’t even possibly imagine, the city has put all its landfilling efforts into the easternmost side of The Islands. You know, the furthest it could possibly get from Hanlan’s Point. While the island airport has been operating on the island right next to Hanlan’s Point and doing its own saucy landfilling work, the beach, the actual point of Hanlan’s point, has been steadily eroded along its shoreline without any real help at all for the last 50 years. In fact, according to The Friends of Hanlan’s, a group formed in 2023 to pushback against the city’s 2022 proposal for a redevelopment of the beach that would potentially remove the clothing-optional space altogether:
85,000 square metres of space has been lost in the northern half of the beach, causing an average 35-meter reduction in beach depth overall. In just the last 8 years, the historically queer space has seen a reduction in 75% of space, from 8,500 square meters to just 2,100 square meters.
While the original plans for an event space have been formally rescinded, the process is ongoing and deeply tense to get the city to work on that desperately needed erosion issue while improving access and safety on the beach for Indigenous and queer community members.
Take a look at these excellent infographics from the Friends of Hanlan’s IG page. That erosion is staggering.
Sentimental Wrap-Up
As I sat on Hanlan’s Point last year, helping my painfully attractive partner slather industrial grade sunscreen on their translucent thighs, I felt that twinge of gentle malaise I tend to get when I’m doing anything Gay™. There’s so much pressure to enjoy it before it’s gone, be thankful it’s even here, and think of the people who fought for your right to even have it at all. There’s the looming specter of having maximal fun and making the most of it until you’re so numb you can barely feel the ice-cold water on your brand-spanking-new aerodynamically engineered chest. Honestly, this is all probably because I’m not an outdoor gay. I’m allergic to most things, including other people and several types of sand. Even clean air makes me nervous. But even I, indoor misanthrope with UV phobias that I am, can concede that Hanlan’s Point is a precious place. But bring your own snacks; $9 for a Häagen-Dazs bar is commercial homophobia.
Atticus Hawk (they/he) is a doctoral candidate in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto. His research looks at the role of Leatherdykes in the creation of medical knowledge and harm-reduction practices for fat, trans and disabled bodies in kink.