This was posted on a blog that I read but since I am not too sure about cross readership and as well I would like to hope others that did not hear about this will read this and react.....

Gas attacks in the gay village?

Two incidents at Church Street bars are going strangely unnoticed

Bert Archer
Special to The Globe and Mail

Last Saturday night, a colourless, odourless gas was released into the ventilation systems of two Church Street bars.

«I had just gone in and checked my knapsack,» said Mike Graydon, a graduate student from Ottawa who was at the first bar hit, the Black Eagle, about 11:20 p.m., «and then, wham! I breathed in, and there was this burning. You didn't see or smell anything, then it just hit you.»

Mr. Graydon recalled helping people out the door, and then going back in to see if others needed help, getting a double dose. «This could have been much nastier. ... If you did that in the middle of Woody's,» Mr. Graydon said, referring to a much larger bar a few doors north of the Black Eagle, «and all those people have to get down the stairs into the street, you'd have a panic.» In fact, scores of people were removed, and the gas reportedly burned people's mouths and lungs for hours afterward.

Yet the two attacks, in the heart of the city's gay village, have elicited little response from either the community or the police. Despite the possibility of a hate crime, staff at the Black Eagle did not call police, nor have police decided independently to investigate, dismissing it as a probable joke or accident. Has Church Street really become safe enough to ignore gas attacks?

At Church and Wellesley, the days of regular bashings and drive-by homophobic epithets seem mostly in the past, but there has been some recent violent - though not, apparently, homophobic - activity in the area, including three muggings in the past three months.

Last weekend's incidents inspired so little concern in the area that not even Xtra, Toronto's gay and lesbian newspaper, whose offices are metres away from the two bars, had heard about it this week.

When notified, Xtra's associate editor, Julia Garro, expressed disappointment that the police are not looking into the matter further. Though Ms. Garro said there's a possibility it was just a prank, she adds that it could just as easily have been the work of a homophobe. «You don't want to discount the possibility,» she said.

Toronto Public Health manager Jim Chan is advising everyone affected to see a doctor immediately, calling the incident «suspicious.»

«It's too bad they didn't go through the 911 system,» Mr. Chan said, «because then there would be record tracing, health, police would be informed, and they would send paramedics.»

He said that this long after the incident it would be difficult, probably impossible, to determine what the substance was.

Early reports indicated that the substance was pepper spray, though Mr. Graydon's description seems to point toward something else. When contacted by The Globe and Mail, Corporal Doug Bayley of the West Shore RCMP in Victoria, who recently dealt with a pepper-spray incident in a local restaurant, said it sounded more like something ammonia-based, the sort of thing people find the recipe for online, in terrorist handbooks.

Despite the immediate evacuations, no further actions have been taken to determine just what happened. «I asked the doorman if he'd phoned 911,» Mr. Graydon said. «I said, 'Either something mechanical's gone wrong in the building, or this is a hate crime.' He said they were 'looking into it.' «

Dispelling early rumours that some sort of device had gone off in front of the Black Eagle, Mr. Graydon said the door to the bar was closed when the chemical hit. «I remember looking up, seeing the ceiling fan, then breathing it in,» he said.

O'Grady's, a bar across the street and about a block north of the Black Eagle, was also affected. Staff there called the police, who declined to investigate.

«Somebody just let some pepper spray go in the washroom,» said Staff Sergeant Stan Belza of 51 Division, speaking about O'Grady's. «We were called; people were finding it hard to breathe.»

When asked about any possible further police actions, Staff Sgt. Belza said the case had been dropped, the police assumption being that «somebody probably thought it was funny, or maybe it was an accident.»

But along Church Street a few days later, several passersby thought differently. «You do that in a synagogue or a mosque, there'd be a big scene,» says Jason Cloutier, sitting on the patio of the Churchmouse and Firkin pub. Mr. Cloutier assumed that the event was hate-motivated. Still, he said he wasn't going to start behaving differently. «I have been down here since 1982,» he says. «There was fag-bashing then, and I didn't let it bother me, so I'm not going to let this bother me, either.»