The ongoing history of kissing in Toronto
Toronto is as much a city of romance, heartache, and passion as of skyscrapers, sewers, and roads.
The following is an excerpt from The Toronto Book of Love by Adam Bunch, published by Dundurn Press.
Chris Kay Fraser was riding the Queen streetcar when the idea came to her. It was a miserably grey spring day in 2011. She was grumpy and cold; the ride was slow and frustrating. But as the streetcar rumbled and screeched along the tracks, Fraser suddenly found herself transported back in time.
“I glanced out the mud-splattered window and realized that we were passing a street corner … where I’d had a ground-shaking kiss years and years earlier. I felt my whole body soften, remembering the tenderness of that moment. God, I thought. If only I could always see the city that way.”
That night, the writing teacher began a new project. She created a Google Map, using it to document her most memorable kisses in locations across the city. When she was done, she opened it up to others — anyone who wanted to contribute was welcome. The Toronto Kiss Map quickly filled with hundreds of anonymous entries: first kisses, last kisses, hot and heavy make-out sessions. It became an interactive romantic survey of the city, tying stories of love, lust, and heartbreak to the places where intimate moments were shared.
“Escalator to the Subway,” one entry begins, pinned to Bloor-Yonge station. “After our first date. I wasn’t sure if you were going to go for it, so I rose up on my toes, leaned in and kissed you first. It was quick and electric. Then I skipped off through the turnstile, grinning like mad, and excited for what the future might hold.”
Another kiss is pinned to the big hill in Riverdale Park. “I had no idea where this thing between us was going. I liked you. I could tell you liked me. But we were stumbling over stories and small talk with plastic takeout trays piled between us in the grass. Nervous. The sunset was just starting when you leaned in and whispered ‘Wanna roll?’ and then your arms were around me and we were careening down, down, laughing uncontrollably while the pink sky somersaulted over us again and again. At the very bottom, you kissed me. Soft and wild and perfect.”
The city is covered in kisses. As the map shows, nearly everyone has their own mental atlas of romantic landmarks from their past: the bars, bedrooms, parks, and bus stops where their breath grew quick and their stomach fluttered as they leaned in for a kiss. It’s the psychogeography of love. And it’s nothing new. It’s been happening ever since the city was founded, and for thousands of years before that.
Even the most famous public landmarks are intensely personal places; they’ve been the sites of tender moments for countless couples and become part of the romantic architecture of their relationships. Take Old City Hall, where the sex worker and petty criminal Lizzie Lessard was put on trial for the umpteenth time in 1905; on this occasion, she’d stolen a fur muff and some hats from the Eaton’s department store. As she was led out of the courtroom for yet another stint behind bars at the Mercer Reformatory, she delivered a resounding smooch on the lips to one of her fellow prisoners: a kiss so prodigious it left the Toronto Daily Star amazed.
“There are kisses at weddings, there are kisses of farewell as the train is pulling out — but louder and more fervent than all of these was the smack to-day in court,” the newspaper told its readers. “Some kisses are sweet as cider fresh from the bunghole, some kisses are like the report of an elephant pulling a foot out of the mud. Of the second variety was the kiss to-day in court. Smack!”
The staff inspector was startled by the sound; he looked around as if a gun had just been fired.
“But there was no gun — Lizzie Lessard had simply kissed her prison companion, John Kelly, as she bade him farewell in the dock, before leaving for the Mercer.”
Just down Bay Street, Union Station may have witnessed more kisses than any other building in Toronto since it opened nearly a century ago. It’s the busiest transportation hub in Canada, with hundreds of thousands of travellers passing through it every day. As a place of arrival and departure, it has been the scene of many joyful greetings and teary farewells. During the Second World War, soldiers gave their sweethearts one last kiss before their train headed off to Halifax, where a ship to the battlefields of Europe was waiting for them. And while some of them would never come home, many of those who did returned to Union Station, where their sweethearts were waiting to kiss them once again.
Those returning troops were soon followed by trains filled with young women: “war brides,” most of them British, who’d fallen in love with Canadian soldiers and married them overseas. The Canadian Wives’ Bureau was created to assist them, and the Red Cross was waiting for them at Union Station to give them a cup of tea and help them find their husbands. Some of the women didn’t recognize their new Canadian spouses as they searched for them among the crowds, never having seen them out of uniform before. But when they were finally reunited, they must have kissed them with a potent mix of excitement and trepidation.
Some kisses have changed the city. During the winter of 1976, two men were arrested for kissing on the corner of Yonge and Bloor streets. Tom Field and Bill Holloway were being photographed for a newspaper article about homophobia when the police showed up. The men were found guilty of committing an indecent act and obstructing the sidewalk. When the verdict came down that summer, a “kiss-in” was held at the same intersection: twenty gay and lesbian couples marched and kissed in protest. A few years later, activists were thrown out of the provincial legislature at Queen’s Park while kissing and holding hands in the public gallery as part of a “mince-in” for gay rights. Two decades after that, the Michaels were featured on the front page of the Star, kissing at the press conference where they got engaged.
Romances have helped shape the city we live in. They’ve changed the course of its history. And the Toronto Kiss Map is a reminder of the fact that that history is still being written. More than two hundred years after John Graves Simcoe tried to ensure that only Anglicans could get married in his new province, the evolution of attitudes toward romance and sexuality continues.
Toronto is now a place where many couples choose not to get married, where dating apps have changed the way people meet, where some are becoming more open about polyamory and open relationships, where there’s a growing awareness of asexuality, and where the vital importance of consent and the dismantling of rape culture have become major topics of public discussion. More than ever before, people are recognizing that romance and sexuality mean something different to everyone. Everyone has their own unique love stories.
You can add your own kisses to the Toronto Kiss Map. You can share your own intimate memories of the places where your heart beat quick as your lips pressed up against someone else’s. Your own love stories can take their place among those shared by hundreds of others. Everyone’s tales of infatuation, devotion, and heartache are part of the romantic landscape of Toronto.
A city is a collective endeavour. And it’s made of more than just bricks and mortar; it’s also built of much more ephemeral things. It’s made with high-school crushes and first dates, with Valentine’s Day cards and anniversary gifts, with a swipe to the right on a dating app or a flirtatious text, with hands nervously inching toward each other over a movie-theatre arm rest and the thrill of an undone zipper or an unclasped bra.
“Imagine how it would create a new view of this city,” Fraser wrote when she was just beginning her map, “not of cold and concrete, but as a place of connection, softness, and tiny moments of love.”
Toronto is as much a city of romance, heartache, and passion as of skyscrapers, sewers, and roads. Newlywed Wendat villagers, lovestruck politicians, and adulterous movie stars have all left their mark. The city stands as a towering monument to the loves and lusts of those who’ve called it home. And it is still being built today, by millions of people, not just with cranes and bulldozers, but with every held hand, with every love letter, and with every kiss.
Excerpt from The Toronto Book of Love by Adam Bunch. Published by Dundurn Press. Copyright 2021 by Adam Bunch. Reprinted with permission.
Code and markup by Kyle Duncan. ©Torontoverse, 2023