The Gerald Hannon Affair, 1995-1996

Appx 1,200 words

Kid-sex hooker prof scandal!
The Gerald Hannon Affair, 1995-1996, as told in two contemporary websites

Introduction
Rick Bébout, May 1997

In November 1995, freelance writer Gerald Hannon became the focus of media attention after author Judy Steed learned that he held a part-time job as an instructor in the Department of Journalism at Toronto's Ryerson Polytechnic University. This discovery -- new to Steed, if not otherwise news -- led to a sudden and classic media-generated moral panic.

Hannon had been author of the 1977 article "Men Loving Boys Loving Men," published in The Body Politic and leading to a prolonged legal battle that ended -- in victory for the paper -- only in 1983.

That battle had also begun as a media panic. In fact, the 1995 "Hannon Affair" seemed almost history repeating itself, many of the same players reprising roles from nearly two decades before. But the Toronto Sun's revelation of Gerald Hannon's other career, as a prostitute (also not news), gave this later rendition a distinct spin -- often nearly comic. In time we would even see Gerald Hannon jokes.

Just as people came together to defend The Body Politic in the late '70s, so too did people -- some of the same people -- rally round in 1995. An ad-hoc "Committee to Defend Gerald Hannon" was set up. Attending a strategy meeting on November 25 (the same day the Sun broke the "hooker" story) were: artists Lisa Steele, Kim Tomczak, and Richard Fung; academics Nancy Nichol, Maureen Fitzgerald and Ian Lumsden; media critic Max Allen; Rachel Giese and David Walberg from Xtra; and some of Gerald's erstwhile colleagues at The Body Politic: Mariana Valverde, Ken Popert, Ed Jackson, Gerry Oxford, and myself.

But if not all the players were new, one of the political tools we now had at hand was: the Internet. Within a few days of that meeting, a website had been set up to alert people to the story. Soon afterwards Jeff Lindstrom, with Xtra's parent company, Pink Triangle Press (also publisher of The Body Politic until its end in 1987), began adding related pieces to the wide-ranging material he gathered on his personal site.

This page leads you to the story of the Hannon Affair as told by those two websites. Together they hold more than 60 separate documents.

About the sites

The first site, titled Gerald Hannon Case, was set up by Gerry Oxford in late November 1995. The address of its initial page was: http://www.io.org/~goxford/hannon.html

That page originally contained an essay followed by a chronology -- neither designed for easy on-screen reading. In time a new "home page" was added (the one included in the site as archived here) with links to this and other material. Key documents on this site:

• A chronology going back to 1977 -- drawing parallels with the "Men Loving Boys Loving Men" case -- and concluding on November 30, 1995. It is linked not from the home page but from the essay, called "Gerald Hannon, the media and moral panic, 1977-1995."

• More than 30 related media pieces -- news stories, columns, editorials, press releases, and letters (some unpublished) -- all appearing with the permission of their original writers or publishers and all linked from the chronology. You can follow the saga as it happened in the media.

  (Hint: If you do, it's much quicker to move back to the chronology from these related pieces by using the "Back" button of your browser, not the "Chronology" link offered on each page.)

• "Back to the Future" -- the full text of earlier, relevant pieces, all of which appeared in The Body Politic's 1982 anthology, Flaunting It!: "Men Loving Boys Loving Men," "Another Look" (a later reflection on responses to the article and the issues it raised), and Jane Rule's 1979 essay "Teaching Sexuality."

That site was not much updated after mid-December 1995. But later material got picked up on
Jeff Lindstrom's Hotlist: The Gerald Hannon Case. This was part of Jeff's much larger and still-active site, at: http://www.ncf.carleton.ca/~au834/ .

Documents from this part of Jeff's site are listed on its initial page. They include:

• A later (and more web-friendly) updated introduction, with a further chronology to late January 1996.

• Seventeen more related pieces -- not linked from the chronology, but listed on the initial page -- including a few connected to events well beyond January 1996.

• A much more detailed chronicle of The Body Politic's trials, along with some contemporaneous events from 1977 to 1985, including bath raids and other trials.

  (Warning: This is a big piece I did in late 1995 and never got a chance to clean up -- it and its related "Sources" document still even include notes I made to myself. However, to preserve the integrity of material as it appeared on Jeff's site, I have made only a few annotations in this version, mostly to explain potentially cryptic local references.)

Jeff also added many links (listed on his initial page) to material on the site first set up by Gerry Oxford -- which in turn had links to Jeff's site, for the later chronology and for pieces post-dating November, 1995. Jeff last updated his site in September 1996. (For more on developments to that date and beyond, see The final chronology (so far), a separate document that was not part of either of these two websites).

Files from both sites were downloaded for "archiving" in the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives website on May 15, 1997.

Websites as archival records

Websites -- notoriously fluid and ephemeral -- are only beginning to be valued as historical records in their own right. In deciding to tell the story of the Hannon Affair through two "archived" sites, we were conscious of them not just as sources of data but as integral parts of the story.

So we applied the archival principle of respect des fonds (see Terms and concepts): both sites have been preserved intact, each in its own subdirectory, and modified as little as possible. Here are the only changes we made:

• On the initial page of each site a note has been added at the top, giving both its original and current location. A link to the page you're reading now is provided, letting you move back here into the Archives site proper -- but only from that initial page. No new links have been added to any other pages -- but for a few that didn't have any link back to their own "parent" page.

• URLs in each site that link to material on the other (of which there are many) have been corrected to reflect each site's current location -- making these links work just as they did when the two sites were on separate file servers. Original file names have been preserved.

• Original links have been maintained -- even if no longer active. "Dead" links are noted. Links at the bottom of Jeff Lindstrom's pages which originally led to other, unrelated parts of his site have been deactivated but still appear as text. Jeff's "Your comments are welcome..." line was originally an e-mail link; I have deactivated it to avoid potentially mis-directed mail. But his visible e-mail address, shown on all his pages, is still active.

• One piece listed on Jeff's initial page, the November 30 chronology, duplicated material on Gerry Oxford's site -- so it has been deleted. The link is still active, but leads to a note explaining the deletion and linking to relevant files on the other site.

• Any changes or additions, where made, have been made obvious: they appear in smaller type, inside brackets, usually on separate lines, and are initialed and dated.

So take a tour through a modern media panic, presented -- and confronted -- on the Internet as it happened.

[Gerald Hannon Case] (Gerry Oxford site)

[Jeff Lindstrom's Hotlist: The Gerald Hannon Case]

[The final chronology (so far)]

[List of online documents] [General periodicals: Related documents]

[TBP / PTP Inventory: Archival resources] [TBP / PTP Inventory: Legal defence]