any worse. You can’t imagine it. I’m not going to describe it.” This was Ernest Hemingway attempting to speak about Toronto -- in a letter to Ezra Pound -- in 1923. Nothing has changed; the city is still unbearably dull. I lived in Toronto for most of my adult life, and moved to Hamilton in 2003. Remember that Hemingway wrote this when he was a young reporter, and that he would soon move to Paris — the city of love — a real city, where one could find fun, and where he would write many masterpieces. In 1923 he was a very handsome — and I would imagine quite horny — young man, and there never was, and never will be, much fun to be had in ‘Toronto the Good.’ Toronto has always been a puritan stronghold. And in 1923 Hamilton was the town where everyone went to let go; it had the Mafia, clubs, theatres, an opera house, and illegal booze. At one time there were so many theatres in Hamilton that a network of underground tunnels connected them; one can imagine scantily-clad young ladies scurrying along -- hugging sequins to their magnificent breasts -- while horny musicians raced by -- too preoccupied by making it to the next gig to even notice. No one has ever found these tunnels -- but I love imagining them. The only thing I like about Toronto is that there are so many people there that -- well I am bound to find some of my own kind. Otherwise, I agree with Ernest Hemingway. Toronto is terminally boring (and ugly). So, they’re closing The Brass Rail —Toronto’s most infamous strip club. Many say it is highly unlikely that strip clubs in the post-pandemic period (if they even exist) will resemble strip clubs of the past; after all, everything will have to be disinfected. All well and good. Toronto never liked strip clubs, and never liked sex. The city was founded by uptight Brits and populated by United Empire Loyalists — whiter than white, and yellower than Velveeta Cheeze. My ancestors came over on the Mayflower. This means they were hair-shirt-wearing, self-flagellating, pious masochists — too strange even for Early Modern England, where bear baiting and watching human beings get torn apart by horses was mass entertainment. Though my parents were not particularly religious, I somehow learned how to oppress, suppress, and repress my sexuality when I was young, and I have dedicated the second half of my life to attacking puritanism. Toronto’s deadly blandness manifests itself in the embrace of two modern very anti-sexual movements — ‘wokeness’ and COVID-19. Having been myself a victim of Toronto wokeness (through my 2018 'cancellation' by Buddies in Bad Times Theatre) I am not at all surprised to see the eagerness with which Toronto residents embrace COVID-19 restrictions. As Katie Hopkins says -- if you see someone riding alone in a car wearing a mask they are undoubtedly out of their mind. You not only see that in Toronto, but also the endless parade of grim little virtue-signalling COVID-19 lay pastors, striding briskly but purposefully down the sidewalk looking at no one (have you heard —‘looking’ can also be dangerous to your health!) ostentatiously sporting a mask, or a double mask, or a mask with two filters — with nary a soul in sight to infect. If you’d ever been to a real city, then you know, that -- unlike Toronto -- real cities have a passion for pleasure and a passion for passion, which is why people live in them; if they wanted to watch the flowers grow they could be almost anywhere else. At this point in my blog -- if you are Evelyn Parry, or J. Kelly Nestruck -- or almost any other starchy collared Torontonian, you are liable to sigh, shake your head and say ‘why in heaven's name is Sky going on about sex again?' I learned about Evelyn’s distaste for sex way before she decided to ‘cancel me’ at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre. She had invited me into her office to bemoan the fact that my writing was so ‘provocative’ (I think the question she asked me was—‘Why do you always have to be so provocative, Sky?) At which point I told her that what angers me about trans theorists is that they claim to be ‘queer’ and yet wish to shift the locus of the discussion from sex to gender. And Evelyn asked me — ‘Now why do you think sex is so important, Sky?’ (Yeah, she did.) I never know how to answer that question. I think I talked about things like s/m, prostitution, homophobia -- and even more importantly -- the fact that these days most kids get their education about sex from online porn. If nothing else, that should be reason enough to initiate several good discussions on the topic. But I could have said that people are afraid to talk about sex because they are afraid of death, and sex reminds them of death (the orgasm is a ‘little death’) and everybody knows that death must happen to them at one point or another, and they’d just rather not think about it (see Bataille). Also, sex has to do with the body, and the body is just very frightening. Obviously if you live in Toronto, for instance, you would much rather forget you have a body — by exiling the strip clubs to the suburbs (so the poor can enjoy them), staying six feet away from everyone else's body, and shaking you finger on Facebook at those who don’t agree. There is immense safety in being anti-sexual these days. Contrary to popular misconception, our society does not encourage people to be sexual; Miley Cyrus' twerking is not sex — it’s a grotesque approximation of what a sex-hating society imagines sex to be. I should know. Though I think sex is fun --and try to engage it in as often as I can at my advanced age -- I’m just so damn lousy at it, always was. And as I get older, I really just want to kiss men — all the time — different men, strange men, again and again, and bring them to orgasm. There will be no more Brass Rail, but thank God, girls will still be brassy, and Sky will still rail against The Puritans. I will be going on about sex until I die -- quite appropriately I would imagine. Perhaps my lifeless body will be found in a bathhouse whirlpool after being suffocated to death -- with some young man's nether regions pressed 'provocatively' into my face. I mean, there are definitely worse ways to go.
