The Bad Animal Manifesto: Coyotes, Purple Loosestrife, and Gay Public Sex

• In Event: 63.062 - Queer Eco-Pedagogies: Explorations in Nature, Sexuality, and Education

Abstract

In an effort to map the Toronto Parks System as a contested site, I am assembling an archive of newspaper reports, official policy statements found on City of Toronto websites, and photos and notes gathered from my own routine excursions. For example, there was a flurry of local and national news coverage of a two-month undercover operation in 2016 in which the Toronto police “netted” 72 men for engaging in “lewd public acts” in a large suburban park. There are also numerous reports of gay bashing taking place in the parks, including the 1985 gruesome murder of Kenneth Zeller, a high school teacher who was beaten to death by a group of teenagers. A certain degree of panic has greeted the growing number of coyotes who inhabit the parks. Signs are posted warning of rapacious poison ivy. Similarly, despite the efforts to eradicate purple loosestrife, it continues to expand its influence. And Toronto’s homeless population has long presented a problem for parks personnel charged with the task of seeking out and removing tents and makeshift structures.

This paper includes a collection of journal entries, photographs, and sketches that together constitute a queer ecological guidebook or primer to the Toronto Park System. My intentions in assembling this rambling chapter are fourfold: (1) document the efforts on the part of city officials to police/manage this collection of bad citizens; (2) outline how are these figures frustrate the city and persist as trouble makers; (3) implicate myself by charting some of the prickly queer feelings, affects, and sensations that the parks and these bad animals inspire in me; and (4) arrive at some summations about the Toronto Parks System as a place of unruly critters and queer ecopedagogies.

Author

• Peter Hobbs, York University