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When a year ago, then-London, Ontario, police chief Julian Fantino was designated, under mysterious circumstances, Toronto's next head cop, the city's gay community thought they were having a bad dream. With a raid in the past month on a lesbian bathhouse event and police claiming to have cracked what they say is a 25-man porno conspiracy, Fantino's regime feels like just the nightmare everyone feared.

On September 15th at 1 am, five plainclothes officers entered Club Toronto, normally a men's bathhouse, but on this evening transformed into "Pussy Palace"-- an event in the course of which some 300 women had enjoyed the hot tub, the pool, and each other. The policemen conducted an two-hour-long tour, questioned revelers, took down names, and took in the view. Organizers had obtained a special-event liquor license and the cops said they were just doing a routine inspection. Charges have been laid against two organizers, for "failure to provide proper security" and "permitting disorderly conduct"-- the peculiarly Canadian sin of nudity in the presence of alcohol. The charges are not criminal, but fall under the liquor code. Still, not since Toronto's infamous 1981 bathhouse raids had police officially stepped foot inside a bathhouse.

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The "Pussy Palace" incursion comes on the wake of what has been increasing police harassment of Toronto gay venues. Last year, 18 men were charged after a series officers paid undercover visits to the Bijou, then a gay bar with a "suck ramp," a wall with purpose-drilled glory holes. After an outcry from the gay community, charges against the men were dropped, but the Bijou had to shut down as a bar and turn in its liquor license. It has since reopened as a bath.

This summer, police dropped by the Barn, a gay dance club which hosted a few nights a month of nude dancing-- no sex-- sponsored by a local nudist club. Police charged the bar owner with allowing "disorderly conduct"-- the crime of flesh and alcohol. The sponsoring nudists thought they brokered a deal with the police, such that the evening of dancing in the all-in-all would constitute a special event, with tickets sold in advance and no one admitted off the street. The next nude night proceeded as agreed, but the cops raided anyway. There's no more nude dancing at the Barn.

Other gay establishments have been pressured by police to end on-premises nudity or incidental sex.

Qui custodiet?

As London police chief, Julian Fantino made a name for himself as a sex-scandal-monger and witch-hunter. The cornerstone of his term was "Project Guardian," a C$1.57 million investigation into a "kiddie porn" ring that never existed. Two men were sentenced to 10 and 15 years for taping a 14 and a 15-year-old masturbating and engaging in fellatio-- acts not themselves illegal under Canadian law. None of the other 59 men arrested in the investigation, which ran from 1993 to 1995, were convicted of porn offenses, most being charged with buying sex from teenage hustlers, or having sex in the presence of more than one person.

Fantino's reputation seemed sufficiently tarnished by a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation exposé on his excesses that many hoped he wouldn't become Toronto chief, just as he was rejected in 1994. His selection last year was mysterious-- Fantino denied he wanted the job, and he didn't make the short-list of candidates.

But in the end, Ontario's far-right Progressive Conservative government plumped for Fantino, his sexual obsessions deemed a feather in his cap. Last January, some 500 people turned out for an open meeting between Fantino and the gay community. "Admittedly, I have a lot to learn," he told the mostly hostile crowd.

But the lesson Fantino seems to have learned best is that it pays to sniff out and hunt down victimless sex. Last month, Toronto police claim to have busted a "sophisticated" kiddie-porn ring, supposedly run from jail by two imprisoned men. Junior Spencer, one of the alleged conspirators, is 23, a few years shy of being a "child" himself under Canada's porn laws. So far there are no arrests, but everyone's waiting for the jackboot to fall.