Gerald Hannon

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Gerald Hannon (born 1944 in New Brunswick, but grew up in Marathon, Ontario) is a controversial Canadian journalist. A recurring theme in his work has been exposing popular culture's use of misplaced child abuse concerns as a socially acceptable cover for homophobia, but his work has itself been portrayed as personally endorsing pedophilia. He has been a subject of numerous police investigations because of these allegations, but none of these investigations has ever found any evidence of criminal activity.

1 The Body Politic
2 Ryerson University
3 Prostitution
4 Further impact
5 External links

[edit] The Body Politic

In 1971, Hannon joined the editorial group that produced the Toronto gay magazine The Body Politic, and was one of its most prolific writers. In the magazine's November 1977 issue, Hannon published an article titled "Men Loving Boys Loving Men", a profile of three men who were having sexual relationships with under-age males. Because the article presented the three men in a relatively sympathetic light, in December of that year Toronto Sun journalist Claire Hoy began publishing columns attacking Hannon and The Body Politic for promoting child abuse.

The magazine's offices were raided by Toronto police on December 30 of that year. Twelve boxes of material, including the magazine's subscription lists, were taken.

On January 5, 1978, the paper and its publishers were charged under Section 164 of the Canadian Criminal Code with "use of the mails to distribute immoral, indecent or scurrilous material". The case reached trial on January 2, 1979, with prosecution testimony by Hoy and Ken Campbell; in six days of testimony, only one piece of evidence—a copy of the issue containing Hannon's article—was entered into evidence.

On February 14, The Body Politic was acquitted of the charges. At the subsequent press conference, Ed Jackson, one of the magazine's publishers, responded to a question about an Ontario Arts Council grant the magazine had received; the comment was misrepresented the following day in the Toronto Star.

The Body Politic subsequently sued the Star for defamation, but on March 6, the Crown appealed the February 14 acquittal; The Body Politic dropped the defamation suit since it could not afford two simultaneous court cases.

On May 31, 1982, the appeal hearing began, and on June 15, the magazine was acquitted a second time. On July 13, the Crown appealed again; that appeal was rejected. On October 15, 1983, the magazine achieved victory when the final deadline for Crown appeals passed.

[edit] Ryerson University

The Body Politic ceased publication in 1987, a few years after its publisher (now incorporated as Pink Triangle Press) launched the tabloid Xtra!; Hannon became a freelance journalist. He also occasionally worked as a sex worker, and was employed as a part-time journalism instructor at Ryerson University.

On July 8, 1994, Hannon reviewed Judy Steed's book Our Little Secret in Xtra!, asserting that the book's portrayal of child abuse bordered on homophobia. Hannon's review was partially responsible for the collapse of a deal to have Steed's book sold as a fundraiser for the National Action Committee on the Status of Women.

On March 11, 1995, The Globe and Mail published Hannon's "The Kiddie Porn Ring That Wasn't", an investigative piece on "Project Guardian", an operation led by then-London, Ontario police chief Julian Fantino into an alleged child pornography ring. The investigation resulted in the arrest of 45 gay men, but the alleged child pornography in fact involved not children but teenaged males above the legal age of consent. All 45 of the arrested men were acquitted by the courts on the child pornography charges, although 12 were found guilty of other offenses not related to the stated purpose of the investigation, such as prostitution and drug-related charges. As a result, Hannon alleged that the investigation was merely a smokescreen for a homophobic witch hunt.

In May, Fantino filed a complaint with the Ontario Press Council against Hannon's article. On November 9, the press council ruled that the article should have been labelled an opinion piece.

On November 11, two days after the press council ruling, Steed, in a conference speech, attacked the chair of Ryerson's journalism program for employing Hannon as a part-time journalism instructor. Steed argued that combatting child pornography was such a pressing social objective that even civil liberties and police accountability should be subordinate to it — to her, any criticism of a child pornography investigation, even one that failed to find any actual evidence of child pornography, was morally equivalent to condoning child pornography.

Steed also noted that Hannon had occasionally written positively of his own consensual sexual experiences with adult men when he was himself an underage youth, but presented no evidence that Hannon had ever had, written about, or even considered having a sexual experience with a minor in his adulthood.

On November 14, Toronto Sun journalist Heather Bird alleged that Hannon had used the press council hearing as an opportunity to prosyletize pedophilia to his journalism students. Hannon responded to the charge, noting that the only time he had ever raised the subject in the classroom was as an example within a discussion of journalistic ethics, to spark discussion on whether or not a journalist has a responsibility to present their subject fairly regardless of their personal views. Nine of Hannon's students wrote a joint letter to the editor agreeing with Hannon and criticizing inaccuracies and false claims in Bird's column.

Ryerson's campus newspaper, the Ryersonian, also interviewed Hannon's entire class, and found that even when offered anonymity, none agreed that Hannon had ever done or said anything inappropriate in the class (although one admitted to some personal discomfort with Hannon's homosexuality), and none agreed with Bird's characterization of Hannon's teaching methods. Two students acknowledged having spoken to Bird; both stated that their comments about Hannon were positive and that Bird had misrepresented them. Even off the record, not a single student acknowledged having said anything negative about Hannon to Bird or any other journalist covering the controversy.

Over the next ten days, Steed and Bird continued to write about Hannon daily, citing both the Project Guardian article and "Men Loving Boys Loving Men" as "proof" that he personally endorsed pedophilia and child pornography. In a letter to the Toronto Star, Steed indirectly implied that Hannon was a member of NAMBLA, stating that he agreed with the group's motto "Sex before eight, or it's too late" (which is not, in fact, the motto of NAMBLA, but of the unrelated and defunct René Guyon Society.) Hannon replied that he did not agree with the motto, criticized Bird for getting the facts wrong, and denied ever having held a membership in any pedophile organization.

Bird subsequently cited a passage in "Men Loving Boys Loving Men", in which Hannon described overhearing a conversation about child sex, and falsely characterized that passage as a personal confession of Hannon's actual participation in a child sex assault, a claim which resulted in a police investigation. That investigation was dropped on November 24, after Toronto police found that there was no evidence of any prosecutable behaviour on Hannon's part.

Michael Valpy, one of Hannon's few defenders in the press, wrote: "Mr. Hannon ... teaches in an adult setting whose purpose is to encourage debate, discussion and challenge. Does freedom to philosophize, however unpopular, necessarily undermine society and conventional morality? Or is a good society impossible without freedom to philosophize?"

[edit] Prostitution

On November 25, the day after the police announcement that criminal claims against Hannon were unfounded, the Toronto Sun ran an exposé on Hannon's occasional prostitution under the headline "RYERSON PROF: I'M A HOOKER". Although Hannon acknowledged that he had occasionally worked as a prostitute, the accompanying photo was a promotional still from a scripted drama film in which Hannon had played a prostitute.

Ryerson suspended Hannon on November 26. On the 27th, the Canadian Union of Public Employees filed a grievance on Hannon's behalf, asserting that there were no grounds for a disciplinary enquiry since no staff or student of the university had complained about any inappropriate behaviour on Hannon's part.

After concluding its investigation and finding no evidence of wrongdoing, Ryerson reinstated Hannon for the winter semester, but terminated his contract at the end of the school year. Hannon sued the university, and an undisclosed financial settlement was reached in September. He has not taught at Ryerson since then. Both of the journalists Ryerson hired to replace him declined their contracts upon learning that it was Hannon's old course they had been hired to teach.

[edit] Further impact

The spring 1996 issue of Ryerson Review of Journalism published an investigative piece on the Hannon controversy, and concluded that the mainstream media's coverage of the Hannon affair was almost entirely based on falsehoods, distortions and selective application of facts. Mainstream media and the RRJ continued to attack each other over the article for several months. Toronto Star columnist Rosie DiManno wrote in one column that "journalism is inherently unethical", and criticized Ryerson students for focusing on lofty ideals like fairness and accuracy instead of the reality of deadlines and other time constraints. In another column, she dismissed the magazine's criticisms of media ethics in the affair as "college-campus cute".

Toronto Sun editor Lorrie Goldstein was quoted in RRJ as saying that "the pressures of putting out a daily paper make it impossible to spend much time verifying information", but subsequently denied making that statement. Michael Coren cited the Hannon affair, and its purported implications regarding the strength of the pedophile movement, as a prime reason for the government not to approve the 1996 amendment of the Canadian Human Rights Act prohibiting discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation.

At least one Hollywood studio reportedly offered Hannon a movie option on his story, with Richard Gere floated as a candidate to play Hannon. Negotiations fell through, however, and no movie was ever made. Hannon himself reportedly didn't believe the story would make a good movie.

A profile of Hannon in the June, 1996 issue of Toronto Life by journalist Sandra Martin began "I've talked to dozens of people and I haven't found anybody who agrees with Gerald's ideas on pedophilia — and that includes Gerald." After grilling Hannon extensively on his sexual practices and confirming that he was interested in the subject of pedophilia purely as a philosophical debate, Martin concluded that the difference between Hannon and most people was that Hannon "refrains from sex with children not because he thinks it is morally or ethically taboo, but because it doesn't turn him on."

Fantino was subsequently appointed chief of police in Toronto in 2000, which was particularly controversial within the city's gay community because of Project Guardian.