Yes, you read that rightly. The famous French philosopher, Michel Foucault, had his introduction to leather SM in Toronto. He discovered bathhouses here too. I learned these two historical tidbits from Edward Shorter’s Written in the Flesh: A History of Desire, which I reviewed here. On page 187, Shorter writes:
Parisian philosopher Michel Foucault, who visited Toronto in 1982, had never imagined anything like the bathhouses he found in Ontario’s capital. The story is a bit more complicated because Foucault discovered the leather SM scene in Toronto as well, which also enchanted him. Yet Foucault later pontificated about the baths as such: ”I think that it is politically important that sexuality is able to function as it functions in the bathhouses. You meet men there who are to you as you are to them: nothing but a body with which combinations and productions of pleasure are possible. You cease to be imprisoned in your own face, in your own past, in your own identity.” Foucault experienced physical abandon in Toronto just as Donald Vining had met it in New York.
Perhaps it is worth noting that Foucault died of complications from HIV/AIDS two years after his visit to Toronto.
