Two weeks ago, I left New York's baking summer heat and headed North to the theoretically cooler climate of my hometown, Toronto, only to find that when I arrived, the mercury was cracking 102 degrees. I stopped by the house of a friend of mine for a cold beer, and as we sat on the stoop bathed in sweat, his middle-aged female neighbor came out to water the lawn — topless.
"She does this about two or three times a summer," he explained, as we watched her nonchalantly spool out the hose, her largish breasts wrinkled and pale under the blistering sun.

Two cops floated by in a car; one of them pointed out the window and laughed. Nobody, it appeared, really gave a shit.
     I've lived in the U.S. for three years, and I've learned from bitter experience — plus countless jibes at cocktail parties — that free-wheeling exhibitionism is not what comes to mind when Americans think about Canada. Hockey, the bleak moonscape of the prairies, Rush's "Fly By Night," sure. Cheerfully unself-conscious self-exposure, not so much. Hell, in Saskatchewan in December, your spit'll freeze before it hits the ground. Forget about letting it all hang out; shouldn't my countrymen be covering it all up?
     Sort of. Except that despite its reputation for sub-arctic chill, Canada has, over the years, developed a surprisingly vibrant topless culture during the summers. It's subtler than the bold nudity of Brazil or Belgium, but more endearingly quirky. In fact, after a series of energetic legal battles in the '90s, Canadian women won the right to strip down in public to the bare essentials — from the waist up, anyway. I'm not talking about nude beaches; I'm talking about the downtown financial core, the shopping mall, the church parking lot. When you whip 'em out in Toronto, you're not just coping with the heat — you're enjoying a legally sanctioned activity that was hard-fought-for by a startlingly well-organized lobby. Indeed, that lobby exists to this day in the form of the charmingly earnest Federation of Canadian Nudists.
     Canada even has its own topless political martyr: a teenager named Gwen Jacobs who is the Rosa Parks of Canadian nudism.
     It all began back on July 19, 1991, when Jacobs was a nineteen-year-old student at the University of Guelph in Ontario. The temperature had risen to a sweltering 104 degrees, and Jacobs — a smart, outspoken feminist — was getting deeply

pissed that so many men were able to take their tops off. So on the way back home from class, she decided to take hers off too, sauntering through the suburban 'hood half-naturel. A local mother freaked out and called the cops, and the next day when Jacobs walked home again topless, an officer handed her a ticket for "indecency."
"You're exposing your genitals," he warned her.
Thus began a singularly mutilated public debate that lasted for five long years. Jacobs took the ticket to court, and an unsympathetic judge slapped her with a seventy-five dollar fine. The story quickly shot around the entire country, and in the identity-politics fervor of the early '90s, people were plenty willing to strip down at the barricades. The next summer saw the beginning of a wave of "topless protests" in major cities: women in activist groups with names like "Naked Iconoclasts Fighting the Yoke" would show up at public parks and government buildings, rattle off a feminist statement condemning social double standards, quote a bit of Catherine MacKinnon and then peel.
As a campus reporter at the University of Toronto, I was sent to cover one such event. It featured one of the hugest media-to-reality ratios I'd ever seen; there were barely three or four women actually taking their tops off, but about hundred photographers — many from major newspapers — carefully documenting the news event. The result was a surreal blend of sober political analysis and Hooters. "This is an important moment in modern politics," one of the

organizers intoned into a microphone, clad in jeans and a women's center T-shirt. "This is on the vanguard of normalizing male-female power differentials. Only when we desexualize the body can we begin to attack things like the discrepancy between wages. We need to raise the consciousness of all . . . "
     "Show us your tits!" a photographer blurted out.
     I scribbled away (thankfully, the editors hadn't asked me to snap pictures), torn — like my native land — between voyeurism and nonchalance. Because despite the hue and cry over Gwen Jacobs, the Canada I had grown up in had always been rather laid-back about nudity. The country simply doesn't have the sort of bug-eyed moral rages that typically convulse the American Midwest. For public nudity, Toronto in particular is a highly tolerant place — not least because of the city's enormous Gay Pride Day parade, which annually brings the entire downtown core to a halt with over a million drag queens, local Bear associations and well-oiled professional dancers. The flesh display is so gorgeously over-the-top that a few years back, the city's hapless mayor, Mel Lastman, attempted to play the family-values card and claimed he was going to boycott the parade unless he was assured there'd be no nudity. However, he swiftly knuckled under, lured by the enormous voting power of the gay community (and the desire not to look like any bigger of an idiot in the public's eyes). Though he later claimed he didn't see "any naked breasts," this was pure sophistry; the Dykes on Bikes were riding right behind the mayor's float, letting their freak flags fly. In fact, one woman that year marched entirely in the nude; while the cops were willing to overlook a few topless lesbians, a bottomless one pushed the envelope — so the next day the Toronto Star eagerly published the inadvertently kinky image of a smiling, butt-naked brush-cut dyke being handcuffed behind her back by a couple of boys in blue.
     The fact is, Canada — for all its cultural similarity to the U.S. — still retains an oddly European influence, which includes a body-positive edge (stereotypes about baggy flannel shirts to the contrary). Almost to a fault: the francophone retirees of Montreal and Quebec are notorious for parading their spectacularly

wrinkled and flabby bodies around Florida each winter, horrifying vacationing Midwesterners with the mind-blowing spectacle of seventy-year-old Quebecois men prancing around in tiny banana-hammock Speedos — butt-cracks on proctological display, filterless cigarettes perched on moist lips. "Quest-ce que la probleme?" they shrug. "You don't like, don't look, assholes."
     So it wasn't entirely surprising when, after five years of appeals, Gwen Jacobs triumphed in court, bringing in psychologists and anthropologists to suggest she'd done nothing wrong. "Bare Breasts Will Not Lead to Moral Decay, Trial Told," the local papers reported. By 1996, a superior Ontario court agreed, and overturned her conviction, making it de facto legal for women to go topless. "The original victory for me was that I took my shirt off. The rest was red tape," Jacobs said, in a statement written — as she pointedly noted — while nursing her sixteen-month-old child.
     Jacob's legal triumph had a catalytic effect. Barely days after the ruling, a thirty-year-old Ottawa woman showed up half-naked for work as manager of an apartment building, collecting rent and vacuuming while clad only in a blue skirt and high heels. "It's been terrible," she told a newspaper that hurriedly dispatched — what else? — a photographer. "So many delivery guys came over today and a carpet guy came too. They claimed they made a mistake and came to the wrong address, but they really just wanted to see my tits." In Trenton, Ontario, a woman began mowing the lawn topless, so enraging her next-door neighbor — who was worried about it corrupting her ten-year-old son — that she leapt over their hedge and assaulted her. One day while on my way to work at a magazine in Toronto, I discovered that several female "squeegee kids" — homeless teenagers who clean car windows at downtown intersections — had decided to work topless. "We're part of the New Economy," bragged one of them when I stopped her (solely for research purposes, of course) to talk.
     But after rocking the Canadian political scene for a few brief, glorious summers, Gwen Jacobs vanished from public life. When I tried to hunt her down for this article, I hit a wall: she had apparently disappeared. A few years back, newspapers stopped quoting her;

when a few activist friends of mine in Toronto asked around, nobody, it seemed, had a number at which she could be reached. (Gwen, if you're reading this, my email is clive@bway.net!) But even during my brief fruitless search, it became apparent that in her absence Jacobs had achieved a mythic folk status in Canada, like a Johnny Appleseed of flashpoint '90s gender relations. A Toronto alternative radio station began running a tongue-in-cheek "Gwen Jacobs Lounge" show a year back; the country's columnists still bemusedly invoke her name whenever the summers turn hot as a convection oven and the sweat pours off everyone in a river. Her whole point was, in fact, to be not sexy, or rather, to desexualize breasts — which despite her legal triumphs, she totally failed to do, and which is in many ways perhaps a doomed experiment here in North America. But that's an argument for another, cooler day. So a belated thank you, Gwen, for lobbying into existence some lasting evidence of Canada's peculiar sexual climate: tolerant, unflashy, ever so slightly jaded, but weirdly hot nonetheless. A place where a gardener can let it swing free as she sprays the hedges, letting the sweat run off, secure in a legal topless paradise above the forty-ninth parallel. Or in the immortal words of Rush, "Whether woman or man, it makes you feel so good/so good . . . I like to please, don't like to tease/I'm easy like that."