YUFA
Equity
Gerald Hannon - Former Ryerson Professor
Speaks out on his Academic Freedom Case
In the Spring of 2001, YUFA sponsored an event entitled "Academic Freedom, Equity & Union Issues." Gerald Hannon, a former professor at Ryerson, spoke on his experience of being fired because of his activities outside the classroom - he is also a prostitute. What follows is a transcription of his speech.
I'm here today because I was involved in a case related to academic freedom.
The first thread is that I'm a gay activist. Back in the 70s I was associated with a radical magazine called The Body Politic. In 1977 I wrote an article for it called "Men loving boys loving men" and got into a lot of trouble. I was charged with immorality, indecency and scurrilousness, and eventually was acquitted of those charges - of course, it would almost be worthwhile to be found guilty of scurrilousness. So, that's the second thread: I'm a writer and that's the political activist role that I could exercise. When The Body Politic died, I became a free-lance writer. I've been successful, I've won national magazine awards. Then the third thread is prostitution, which I took up before I began to work as a free-lance writer. I thought I couldn't become a prostitute - I'm not young, well-hung and full of come - but there is a niche market for older men to work as prostitutes and therefore I was doing that for pocket money.
I was teaching an extension course at Ryerson, that is, a night course, and then I was hired to teach in the daytime as an instructor of free-lance magazine writing. I was never a professor, though the media said I was. I was a popular teacher, I think: I received high recommendations from students.
The whole case began in November 1995, when I was speaking at a conference on women in the media. Judy Steed, who was there, was someone whose book I had given a bad review. She has written on incest and child abuse and knew of the men-loving-boys case. She said it was a problem that I was teaching at Ryerson. My Chair thought it was ancient history, but a Toronto Sun reporter smelled a story. The Sun turned it into a sensational article, saying that I was promulgating pedophile views in class - though I was not - and this reporter phoned students until he found one who was willing, anonymously, to say it was a concern. It turned into a story about "a pedophile professor who is making students say pedophilia is ok." The department said, let's look at the facts, and it all would have died away...
But for that I had never made a secret about the prostitution. It was irrelevant to my work at Ryerson, so I didn't talk about it there, but I had been asked by a friend to be in a small-budget film about prostitution. This friend sent stills from the film to the papers. So this photo of me in bed with an 18 year-old ended up in the Sun. Now I'm a whore, but I've never been a media whore. When the Sun asked me, "is this the case?", I thought to myself, I don't like to lie, I hate it when I get "no comment" when I'm working as a journalist. So I said, yes. Then the Sun came out with a three-inch headline about a "hooker prof" and Ryerson suspended me with pay while investigating. I had to stay off campus and out of touch with students. This led to some ridiculous situations. A secretary had to bring students' papers to the border of Ryerson for me to pick up and when I was finished with them I had to return to the border and meet her to drop them back off. You really do feel like an infective agent.
In the interviews for the investigation they found that none of the students had a problem and so I was back in class for a second term. But my contract was then up for renewal and in a vote of 2-1 it was decided not to invite me back because of "conduct unbecoming to an instructor at Ryerson."
In a way I lost, but in a way I won. I lost, I lost my job. But I was struck by the importance of the connections I had to activist groups concerned with academic freedom, who attempted to get petitions going, who organized press conferences, who wrote support statements. I couldn't have done what I did without them. I had a lot of support from students who knew me. The union was extremely important to my survival. They got me a lawyer and they were always there in extremely difficult times. There were death threats, campus security was at the door of my classroom, the blinds of the classroom had to be drawn in case there was a sniper on the roof of the adjacent building.
It sort of was a gay issue but not really. If I had simply been gay I probably would still be teaching there. But what happens when you put "gay" into a non-discrimination clause? There's that general cultural notion that gayness just means "Sam will bring Joe to the faculty party and we can cope with that", not the notion that there's a gay culture, a queer culture, that doesn't fit mainstream expectations and can be called "conduct unbecoming".
You open a marvellous can of worms by including "gay and lesbian" in the contract.
Ryerson failed because this was a grand example of bad journalism turning an innocent person into a pariah, of media distortion. I told Ryerson, you have a great opportunity here. Here's a gay prostitute instructor who's popular, who's winning awards, but they chose to be bullied. But Ryerson fled from this, and it's to their shame.