Queer Progress: From Homophobia to Homonationalism

By Tim McCaskell

How did a social movement evolve from a small group of young radicals to the incorporation of LGBTQ communities into full citizenship on the model of Canadian multiculturalism?

Tim McCaskell contextualizes his work in gay, queer, and AIDS activism in Toronto from 1974 to 2014 within the shift from the Keynesian welfare state of the 1970s to the neoliberal economy of the new millennium. A shift that saw sexuality —once tightly regulated by conservative institutions—become an economic driver of late capitalism, and sexual minorities celebrated as a niche market. But even as it promoted legal equality, this shift increased disparity and social inequality. Today, the glue of sexual identity strains to hold together a community ever more fractured along lines of class, race, ethnicity, and gender; the celebration of LGBTQ inclusion pinkwashes injustice at home and abroad.

Queer Progress tries to make sense of this transformation by narrating the complexities and contradictions of forty years of queer politics in Canada’s largest city.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Between the Lines
• Release date: Jul 12, 2018
• ISBN: 9781771132794

Tim McCaskell

From 1974 to 1986 Tim McCaskell was a member of the collective that ran The Body Politic, Canada’s iconic gay liberation journal. He was a founding member of AIDS ACTION NOW!, and a spokesperson for Queers Against Israeli Apartheid. He is the author of Race to Equity: Disrupting Educational Inequality.

Book preview

Introduction

How did we get here from there?

Once again, the Israel lobby was attempting to prevent Queers Against Israeli Apartheid from marching in Toronto’s Pride parade. The summer of 2012 was the fourth installment of what seemed to be an annual crisis. QuAIA fought and won on the terrain of freedom of expression. But the process revealed something queer going on.

In the early days of gay liberation, political speech was tolerated, no matter how outrageous. It was always sex that got us into trouble, both doing it and talking about it. But in 2012, we were told that Pride was about celebrating sex in all of its outrageous manifestations. It was political speech that was unacceptable.

That is when I was moved to start working on this book.

My involvement with the politics around QuAIA introduced me to the debates about homonationalism, a concept coined by Jasbir Puar in her book Terrorist Assemblages. As a social movement, gay rights had been successful beyond its early strategists’ wildest dreams. From a reviled, quasi-criminal class, we were now included in the constellation of minorities valued by Canadian multiculturalism. Our sexual orientation was no longer a barrier to full legal citizenship. We were recognized in a developing international human rights architecture.

But this progress had been rather queer. We had come a long way but hadn’t exactly ended up where we expected. First, such progress hadn’t affected all of us in the same way. Some parts of our community were just as disenfranchised as ever, while others had become identified with the status quo. As we moved from the peripheries to the mainstream, there was a remarkable transformation in dominant LGBT politics, from one aimed at social transformation to one that celebrated social inclusion. Toronto’s Pride parade now featured many of our traditional antagonists: the Conservative party, churches, some of the biggest corporations and banks, the police, and the military.

In terms of the rights struggle, Canada has consistently surpassed the United States in our gains in an imagined liberal and tolerant nation. But in doing so, we have also strengthened that bright image that hides the reality of the lives of Aboriginal, racialized, and marginalized people, regardless of their sexual orientation. Further, we find ourselves implicated in some very unsavoury politics. Our rights are used to portray Alberta oil sands crude as ethical oil, as compared to that coming from homophobic Arab countries. We are caught up in the pinkwashing campaign that justifies Israeli apartheid as liberal and democratic. We are deployed to stoke Islamophobia and racism. Under Stephen Harper’s Conservative government, Canada’s acceptance of gay Iranian refugees was used as a propaganda weapon to isolate Iran and to extend U.S. strategic interests in the Middle East—interests that are about money and power, not social justice. Inclusion comes with consequences.

That same year I critiqued a manuscript by Andil Gosine that brought a historical and institutional analysis to the question of queer politics in a post colonial world.¹ Gosine explored queer organizing in the Caribbean. He praised the Trinidadian group CAISO (Coalition Advocating for Inclusion of Sexual Orientation), which he felt successfully managed to embed queer politics into the national imaginary of Trinidad and Tobago. He contrasted it with efforts in Jamaica that had become embroiled in the Stop Murder Music campaign, and ended up being situated as a foreign threat.

But if, as Gosine suggested, the successful strategy for the development of LGBT culture and rights was to integrate into a national imaginary, then wasn’t homonationalism the same thing? As described by Puar, homonationalism is the integration of gay rights into the hegemonic values of American imperialism. The relative success of CAISO in Trinidad and Tobago and that of the U.S. gay movement would then both be cut from the same cloth. But integration into the national imaginary in the two countries has very different consequences. Trinidad and Tobago is a small, post-colonial society. Its major cultural export is Carnival. The United States is the world’s leading imperial power. Its global cultural reach is as much resented and feared as emulated around the world. To resist the empire has often become to resist its acceptance of homosexuality.

I have been intimately involved in the Canadian and international gay liberation movement since 1974. From 1975 to 1986, I was a member of the collective that ran The Body Politic (TBP), Canada’s iconic gay liberation journal. I chaired the Public Action Committee of the Right to Privacy Committee (RTPC), the group that spearheaded the response to the massive police raids on Toronto gay bathhouses in 1981. In 1985, I was a founding member of the Simon Nkodi Anti-apartheid Committee (SNAAC), doing anti-apartheid solidarity work in the LGB communities. At the end of the decade, I helped start AIDS ACTION NOW! (AAN!), the activist group that put AIDS on the national agenda. In the 1990s, I was involved in the integration of anti-homophobia work in the Toronto Board of Education’s anti-racism and anti-sexism efforts, including the establishment of the Triangle Program, Canada’s only free-standing secondary school program serving vulnerable LGBT youth. In 2009, I became a spokesperson for QuAIA, a group that challenges the pinkwashing of the Israeli state. Simultaneously, I was involved in the struggle against HIV criminalization.

When you are plowing forward in such immediate, daily struggles, there is little time to look back at your path or at where it is leading. Now that we are being told that we have arrived, I felt it was time to do some looking back.

Since I experienced much of this history first-hand, I have structured this book around a personal narrative. This is not to inflate my importance in the process—this movement has had more leading actors than can possibly be named—but to make the account more vivid and accessible. For that reason, much of this book focuses on events in Toronto, while recognizing how those events, while singular, reflected national and global social changes. That approach also entails other limitations. For example, my experience of these changes has been from the standpoint of a cis, white male. I don’t have the same first-hand experience as women, trans people, or people of colour. Many stories could be written about the last forty years from many standpoints. This is only one of them. And even within the parameters of my particular embodiment, I have selected events to illustrate a particular trajectory, from a homophobic nation to homonationalism.

A shortcoming of many of our histories has been to paint the gay liberation struggle against a static social canvass. Yet in the forty years this account covers, society—both national and global—has undergone profound transformation. Gay liberation was born into a world of national economies but today finds itself in a globalized market. Most of those national economies were organized around Keynesian or socialist principles that called for wealth redistribution to minimize class disparity. Neo-liberalism has now largely dismantled the welfare state, and class disparities have predictably deepened. Gay liberation emerged at the height of the Cold War and anti-colonial movements. It witnessed the collapse of the Socialist Bloc, the rise of neo-colonialism, the emergence of the United States as the world’s superpower, and now serious challenges to the U.S. empire.

From a time when long-distance phone calls were expensive and people sent letters through the mail, we find ourselves in an environment of instantaneous, almost costless global communication. In the 1970s, we still went to libraries to look up facts in encyclopedias. Today, the world is drowning in factoids at the click of a mouse. From a time when any talk about sex was risqué and unseemly, and sexual imagery was routinely the object of legal sanctions, we find ourselves in a society that incessantly talks about sex and where media of all types is saturated in sexual imagery. The rise of homonationalism has been deeply influenced by these forces.

Since I will reference how gay politics has been shaped by such broader social changes, let me introduce some key concepts that underlie my approach.

Materialism

I will begin with the rather common-sense assumption that people’s ideas, thoughts, and beliefs are conditioned by their experiences. Our experiences are not of our own choosing; they come from the material world around us. From what we are formally taught and learn, largely as children. From what we have to do to earn a living as adults. From the way other people act and treat us, and the way we are encouraged to act and treat others by the law, media, and culture. Repetition is a form of pedagogy, and day-to-day life repeats its lessons over and over.

This does not mean that changing environments will automatically produce a different consciousness. Materialism has sometimes been understood to mean that everyone’s behaviour is governed by sober economic calculation. Our decisions are seldom so rational.

Values

Karl Marx wrote that the tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.² Behaviour is often based not on a considered calculation of interests, but on deeply held beliefs and values.

Do we value equality or hierarchy, obedience or freedom, the individual or the collective? Values are basic notions of what is right and wrong, good and bad, what is important and what is not.

Cognitive scientist George Lakoff reduces values to synaptic connections in the brain that are learned, and that are reinforced by social messages and experiences.³ We can similarly think of values as basic concepts that are linked to positive affective responses. Does the notion of family make us feel warm and fuzzy, or queasy? Those responses will affect how we value the family.

Values shape the logic that people bring to decision-making. For those who associate the family with a strong positive affect, family will be important to defend or to be included in. Those, on the other hand, who value the individual will be more likely to focus on personal development and happiness. Their behaviour will be more oriented to individual success and gratification. Family will not have the same resonance, and family relationships that are a barrier to success and gratification will be more easily abandoned.

Common Cause,⁴ a 2010 document by a coalition of U.K. environmental groups, draws on social psychology research to propose a model of relations among different types of values. Related values trigger each other, while others are diametrically opposed. Common Cause points out that most people have learned a range of conflicting values, and that different values can be triggered by different kinds of messages.

Constellations of values are associated with political philosophies, and people are likely to be attracted to politics congruent with their values. Conversely, the discourses of political philosophies are likely to activate particular values.

Liberalism

Traditional or conservative value systems tend to value the group (religious group, family, tribe, nation) over the individual. They tend to value hierarchy over equality. And they tend to value received knowledge from the past. Such values reflect and reinforce traditional social arrangements.

Cultural theorist Raymond Williams reminds us that liberal is derived from a Latin word meaning free man.⁵ Liberalism developed in the European Enlightenment in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It evolved as a critique of, and in opposition to, traditional social arrangements and values.

Liberalism saw the free individual rather than the group as its basic unit, and maintained that individuals had the right to Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. It opposed hereditary privilege and asserted that all men are created equal. And it justified this vision with reference to rational or scientific knowledge, rather than received knowledge from the past. In our case, Alfred Kinsey’s studies of sexual behaviour trumped the Bible.

Capitalism and Liberalism

Liberalism was closely linked to the rise of capitalism, an economic system where property is considered private rather than bound by communal obligations. Feudal lords and peasants, although they were by no means equal, had obligations to each other. The lord could no more sell his land than the peasant could leave it. Under capitalism, on the other hand, everyone is free to sell their labour on the free market (or starve). Capitalists are free to employ people or dismiss them, depending on how profitable that may be.

As capitalism emerged, business owners, manufacturers, traders, and entrepreneurs outside of the feudal hierarchy became increasingly dissatisfied with a social order that excluded them from the status and power they felt they deserved. Liberal ideas were therefore attractive. They challenged aristocratic privilege and argued that it wasn’t birth but individual success that should determine one’s place. Radical liberals challenged the religious dogmas that justified acceptance of one’s station. Liberalism was a revolutionary philosophy for which people were willing to fight, die, and kill.

While the feudal world tried to keep trade, religion, and personal life under the thumb of traditional elites, capitalism and its liberal philosophy promoted freedom. Individual freedom, free trade, free markets, and eventually, free elections, freedom of (and even from) religion, freedom of the press—in short, freedom from government interference in the economy and personal life. If everyone was left alone to pursue their own interests, it was argued, the market would sort things out to everyone’s mutual advantage.

Conflicting and Coexisting Values

Capitalism grew slowly in a garden of conservative institutions and the values they promoted. As this new social system became established, traditional values that encouraged accepting things as they were became more important to the new capitalist elites. Liberal ideas, when extended to the working class and the poor, could be a problem. What if slaves demanded their liberty? What if workers wanted to elect their bosses? What if women wanted to be paid as much as men?

Traditional institutions like the church helped maintain order in the face of growing dissatisfaction with the new capitalist order. So the new system and its liberal philosophers accommodated themselves to pre-existing institutions and their values in different ways. Slavery was essential to the early capitalist accumulation in the Atlantic Triangle, and liberalism accommodated itself to notions of racial inequality. Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness was the prerogative of white males only. American capitalism dispensed with the monarchy for a republic, and established a division between church and state. Capitalism in Britain developed happily alongside a traditional monarchy and an Anglican state church. The French Revolution decriminalized sex between consenting adults, regardless of gender, in the eighteenth century, but Britain and the United States failed to do so until the twentieth.

Despite such accommodations, ideas of individualism, equality, and rational knowledge continued to corrode conservative institutions and philosophies. Slave revolts and the abolition movement finally ended slavery. The right to vote was extended beyond property owners. Workers demanded their right to organize unions. Women’s entry into the workforce undermined the patriarchal organization of the family. Urbanization concentrated populations, allowing those disadvantaged by hierarchies of gender or race, or with non-hegemonic sexual desires, to find each other and attain the critical mass to develop identities and demand change.

Western society originally accommodated itself to the regulation of sexual behaviour by family, religion, and the state. Bodies were parts of groups, and sex was a social responsibility. But as the body became more and more conceptualized as private property, and sex as individual expression, a sexual liberation movement could emerge. Developed liberal capitalist countries were therefore more fertile ground for early gay rights efforts in the twentieth century.

Socialism

Between the Russian Revolution in 1917 and the fall of communism at the end of the twentieth century, a large part of the world declared itself socialist. Socialist movements of different stripes were also often important in the capitalist West. The Cold War was ostensibly about which system—socialism or capitalism—would dominate the world.

Socialism challenged capitalism itself. But as an Enlightenment philosophy, it accepted most of the basic liberal values, reconfiguring them in different ways. Socialist societies valued equality between individuals but went beyond formal legal equality to work towards substantive equality: equal wages, guar anteed employment, universal access to education and health care. Socialism claimed democracy but argued that democracy needed to be extended to the economy. That could only take place when production was under control of the people rather than a small group of capitalists.

The Socialist Bloc also supported anti-colonial movements as a vehicle for social transformation. The capitalist West, which benefited from colonialism, helped sustain the racist colonial system, despite its ostensible support of liberal values of equality.

Whereas most capitalist countries still supported—and in turn were supported by—religious institutions, socialism saw religion as irrational and the opium of the masses. Socialists expected religion to die out in societies not based on exploitation.

In this context, many early 1970s gay liberationists linked homophobia to capitalism and were influenced by socialist and anti-colonial theories and practice. But although socialism shared some basic values with liberalism, it was not just liberalism in a hurry.

Liberalism valued individual competition; socialism valued solidarity and spoke of classes rather than individuals as the main actors in history. Its stance on the individual and the collective was therefore ambiguous. It was often less concerned with individual rights and willing to sacrifice them for the social good. Socialist democracy often displayed little toleration of dissent. Other traditional values crept in. The great leader was regularly idolized and entrenched for life. Received knowledge from the writings of Marx, Lenin, or Mao could replace rational social analysis. Such contradictory values within socialism led to contradictory responses to homosexuality. Same-sex sex was decriminalized in 1917 after the Russian Revolution, but recriminalized in the 1930s when more traditional nationalist values came to the fore.

Feminism

First-wave feminism, in the early twentieth century, focused on equality—legal personhood, the vote, and so on. By the 1960s a second wave of feminism had emerged. It analyzed patriarchy and sexism in their most intimate manifestations, arguing that the personal is political. The notion of sexual liberation was tied up with the cutting loose of sex from reproduction, bolstered by women’s ability to control their fertility.

There were many currents of feminism—liberal, radical, socialist. Nevertheless, like socialism, feminism generally shared basic Enlightenment values. The personal is political focused on the individual but grappled with the individual’s immediate social context. Just as socialism proposed solidarity along class lines, feminism proposed solidarity among women as a group. Feminism demanded legal equality between men and women, which sat squarely within liberal parameters. But it also demanded substantive equality, in this case in the most mundane spheres of life—housework, personal and sexual relations. Such politics was an important part of the environment that gave birth to gay liberation and was certainly the core of lesbian political organizing.

Keynesianism

After the disaster of the Great Depression and the Second World War that it spawned, the liberal idea that each individual working to maximize their own gain would produce the maximum common good was revealed as deeply flawed. Wealth disparity, depression, and war were far from being in everyone’s best interest.

John Maynard Keynes argued that the boom and bust cycles of capitalism and inequality had to be controlled by state management. Government should spend when the economy was slow, and cut back to cool things down when it was overheated. Banks needed to be regulated to protect investors. Workers’ rights needed to be respected. Keynesian economies developed institutions to redistribute wealth and produce a more equal society—social welfare, public pensions, public medical care, public education—and developed progressive taxation systems (where the wealthy paid more) to support those initiatives.

During the Cold War, Keynesianism was seen as undercutting socialist demands. It was therefore accepted by the dominant capitalist elites. Just as capitalism had accommodated itself to traditional institutions such as the church, it now accommodated itself to the socialist challenge. Keynesianism was far from socialism; it was more about saving capitalism from its own excesses. But it reinforced values of social solidarity. Everyone had a debt to society and a responsibility to support the most vulnerable.

After the Second World War, capitalist democracies like Canada largely adopted Keynesian economics and Keynesian-inspired social liberalism. In a society where class disparities decreased, identity politics could emerge. The Keynesian social safety net provided a cushion for early lesbian and gay activists who risked careers and family support by coming out.

Setting the Stage

Although North American women had been drawn into the workforce during the Second World War, when the soldiers came home they were abruptly pushed back out. But the genie was out of the bottle. Women resisted the post-war conservatism. In a buoyant economy they continued to work, and more rejected dependence on men. By the 1960s, birth control meant that women’s sexuality was no longer haunted by the spectre of pregnancy. Conservative notions about sexual obligation to the family and reproduction were being undermined by liberal ideas of sex as an individual’s rightful pursuit of happiness. By the 1970s, women’s liberation was demanding equality in all social spheres. Sexual liberation had begun, and under its logic, the persecution of varieties of sexual attraction was just as unreasonable as persecution of varieties of religion or discrimination on the basis of race.

In the United States, encouraged by Third World struggles against colonialism, the black civil rights movement and Black Power challenged racial hierarchies and demanded equality. Black is Beautiful would be the template for Gay is Good.

Young people challenged the authority of their elders. You couldn’t trust anyone over thirty. The 1968 Paris student revolt had paralyzed France. The Vietnam War was in its final brutal stages, and the anti-war movement spread from campuses onto streets around the world. Phil Ochs sang, It’s always the old who lead us to the wars, it’s always the young who fall.⁶ In China, the Cultural Revolution encouraged a younger generation to question authority and bombard the headquarters. The counterculture promoted a general rejection of conformist and consumerist values.

The world was in great turmoil, and into this unstable constellation of political forces and conflicting values, gay liberation would be launched.

Gay Lib

In June 1969 the patrons of the Stonewall Inn in New York responded to a police raid with three days of rioting. The gay liberation movement sparked by Stonewall emerged in the 1970s. It was based on the liberal notion that sexuality should be an individual expression rather than a social obligation. But the movement also drew from the social solidarity promoted by socialism, Keynesianism, feminism, the civil rights movement, and anti-colonial struggles to produce the notion of community. This allowed it to project political power to combat the moralizing discourses of law, religion, and psychiatry.

In the end, we largely wound up challenging conservative institutions and values that had been accommodated within liberal capitalism. In a certain way, our movement became the cutting edge of the ongoing corrosion of the power of traditional, pre-liberal, pre-capitalist institutions and the values they promoted. Our effort was later buoyed by a neo-liberal economy that deployed sex as a marketing tool, and in particular, cultivated a gay market in order to spur lagging consumption, even as the dismantling of the Keynesian welfare state was accompanied by a neo-conservative reaction.

This story begins in 1974 when I came out in a Keynesian world. It finishes in 2014 when Toronto hosted World Pride in a neo-liberal one. It attempts to make sense of the emergence of homonationalism, and how, over a period of forty years, a social movement adapted itself to a radically changing environment. It tries to understand how broader social forces selected particular strategies from the confused primeval muck that was gay liberation and reshaped the character and significance of LGBT communities.

Part I

A New World in Birth

1

Invisible

John

I have a clear memory of visiting my grandparents. They lived in Orillia, Ontario, a mid-sized town about twenty-five miles from the little village of Beaverton, where I grew up, in cottage country north of Toronto. I must have been four or so. It was spring. For some reason I ran upstairs and darted into my grandfather’s bedroom, where I found myself face to face with a young man in my grandfather’s bed.

Dappled sunlight was coming in the window through the fresh leaves on the trees. He was sitting up, reading a book, the sheet pulled up to his belly button. He wasn’t wearing pajama tops. He had bright eyes, muscles on his arms, and his chest was covered with thick black curly hair. Transfixed by his chest, I wondered what it would be like to climb up on the bed and touch it, to feel the hair between my fingers.

He said, Hello, Timmy. How are you?

My mother rushed into the room behind me and took me by the hand. She explained that John was boarding with my grandparents now and that I couldn’t just run into people’s bedrooms without knocking. She told John she was sorry. By this point, he had pulled the covers up to his neck. He just smiled again and said, No harm done, Mrs. McCaskell. How are you?

Fine, thank you, she replied, and then hustled me back downstairs.

Louis

Louis was skinny and pale with wavy blond hair. His voice was high, like a girl’s, and he always walked as if he was wearing high-heeled shoes. Everyone said he acted just like a girl. He would have played with the girls, too, except that the schoolyard was divided into boys’ and girls’ sides, each with a separate entrance and separate playground. The invisible line that divided the two was not to be crossed. At first, when we were both in grade one, Louis would try to sneak over to the girls’ side, but the teacher on duty always caught him and sent him back. Then the boys would punish him for crossing the line. A new term entered our vocabulary: sissy.

There was great speculation about why Louis was a sissy. The rumour was that his parents had really wanted a girl and, when he was young, dressed him like one and let his hair grow. It turned him that way. Then they sent him away to live with his grandparents, ’cause who’d want to have a kid like that?

Before class, at recess or after school, the rough boys would sometimes gather around Louis and call him Louise and other names. Louis didn’t know how to fight. He would get red in the face and pick up little stones to throw at his tormentors, but he threw like a girl and the stones would go up in the air and fall harmlessly on the ground. Then the boys would split their sides laughing and Louis would turn red to the roots of his blond curly hair. He would start to cry and run home with his funny wiggling run.

As he got older, it got worse. Louis’s voice got even higher, his walk even wigglier. He didn’t play with boys his own age at all, only with the little kids in grade one who didn’t know better.

I generally kept as far away from Louis as I could. Sissy was a dangerous word. It could be contagious.

A Shy Boy

I was shy. And I hated hockey. Every winter all the boys in Beaverton Public School were supposed to play hockey in a league at the rink. I devised schemes to get out of it. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that a bunch of boys with sticks slashing away at a lump of plastic on a hard, slippery surface would not end well. I’d rather stay home and read a book. I didn’t even like watching hockey on TV.

My father was a hockey fan. He was disappointed. I felt guilty.

I also wasn’t any good at baseball. Sometimes there would be after-school baseball games. Everyone would have to participate. Captains would pick their teams in class. Once I was the second-last picked. There was just me and Louis left. It was humiliating.

Soccer was okay. It was mostly just running around and tripping people. Since my feet stuck out, I was good at tripping, so people wanted me on their team. I was suspect as a boy, but not hopeless.

Sutcliffe

The morning of June 6, 1962, decorated war veteran Major Herbert Sutcliffe went to his Ottawa office. It was to be his last day before moving to Washington, DC, to take up a prestigious posting at the Pentagon. But as he sat down at his desk, he received a call asking him to report immediately to the director of military intelligence.

Sutcliffe walked down the hall to his superior’s office. He was told, You are not going to Washington, there will be no luncheon for you. The RCMP has advised us that you are a homosexual. You’ll be out of the military in three days. Return to your apartment and wait for me to contact you.¹

It was the end of his military career. Sutcliffe considered suicide that afternoon, but finally decided that he wasn’t going to let the bastards kill him.

That same spring morning I would have been riding my bike to my grade six class at Beaverton Public School, looking forward to summer holidays. I had no idea of a massive national security campaign to purge homosexuals from the army and the civil service. I had no idea what a homosexual was. I was unaware that police and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police were entrapping and blackmailing hundreds of gay men and lesbians and demanding they give up their friends and contacts.

It would be another twenty years before I met Herb Sutcliffe.

Shenandoah

One night during my first year in high school, I went to Beaverton’s only movie house to see Shenandoah, a movie about a large family in a border state during the American Civil War. There were a few slaves, but they were more like family, and the youngest son, a thin blond boy, was best friends with a slave boy about his age.

Although they didn’t care about the war, it soon wrecked their lives. The family was split up. Several of the sons ended up fighting or killed. The daughters were raped and murdered. The youngest son somehow ended up in the Confederate army. Near the end it looked like he, too, would be killed in battle.

But in the climactic scene, back on the homestead, as the gruff father was trying to say a thanksgiving prayer with what remained of the family, the door opened. At the threshold stood the young former slave in a Union uniform. In his arms he carried his wounded young former master/friend. He had saved him.

In the dark of the theatre, I realized I was crying.

I walked back home over the bridge across the river. There was a skiff of snow on the ground. I felt so lonely. I wanted a friendship like that. A friend that I could have adventures with, who would save my life and whose life I could save. A friend I could hold in my arms. A friendship that would withstand anything, even war.

Diefenbaker

John Diefenbaker was the head of the Progressive Conservative party. My father was a Conservative, and our next-door neighbour was a bigwig in the party. So when there was a leadership convention at Toronto’s Maple Leaf Gardens in September 1967, he got observer passes for my friend Bob and me. We would take the train to Toronto and stay in the YMCA. It was my first overnight trip on my own.

Bob got good marks in school, like I did. He did better in math and science, and I was better in English and history. He was quiet like me, and didn’t have a girlfriend or play a lot of sports. So we were a good match.

I was packed and ready to go when my mother took me aside. She seemed upset. She said she had been talking to a friend who told her that homosexuals sometimes lurked in the YMCA showers. I was shocked. I had never heard her use the term before. When she said the word, her voice dropped to a whisper and she glanced around as if she was afraid someone might hear her swearing. A friend of dad’s had actually been attacked by a homosexual in Toronto. That kind of thing happened down there. He was lucky and had managed to escape. But who could have ever imagined that they might be in a Christian association of all places. She told me to be very careful, and made me promise not to go to the showers, just to wash in the sink in the room.

At night in our little room in the YMCA I lay awake in the dark, wondering about the showers. I got a hard-on. Bob was breathing quietly in his bed beside mine. I wondered if he was awake and if he had a hard-on, too.

Trudeau

In 1968 the world was changing. Rebellion was in the air. So was Trudeaumania.

At Brock District High School, except for the diehard Tories, we thought that Pierre Trudeau was cool. He was different from other politicians. He spoke his mind. He made jokes. He travelled the world and had been to Red China. He even wore sandals and turtlenecks.

As minister of justice he introduced a bill to reform the Criminal Code to liberalize laws on divorce and abortion, and to decriminalize homosexuality. He said the state had no place in the bedrooms of the nation. This was all about sex, and as teenagers, we were all interested in sex—especially since it seemed to scare the wits out of our parents.

It was the decriminalization of homosexuality that drew the most heat. Even in high school most of us weren’t completely sure what it was. It had to do with sissies, certainly, or as they were now called, queers. Some said it was a sin, and they would all go to hell. Some said it was dangerous for society and children, and they should be put in jail. Others said they were sick and needed treatment. Still others said that they didn’t care what they did as long as they kept it to themselves and weren’t obvious. That seemed to be the most liberal point of view. The bottom line was that it was really creepy. A couple of times one had actually been interviewed on TV, on the edgy adult news program This Hour Has Seven Days. The voices were distorted and they were always backlit so you couldn’t see their faces. Certainly homosexual was not something anyone in their right mind would want to be.

Normally, I was very engaged in politics and always ready to argue an opinion. But whenever the discussion about homosexuality came up, I got nervous and didn’t say much. I wasn’t sure why.

Stephen

Nineteen sixty-nine was my first year away from home at Carleton University. I was eighteen. I joined the university’s Young Socialist Club. We protested the Vietnam War, called for lower tuition, and argued with the Maoists about Stalin. It was great fun. One afternoon I went to help out on a picket line to support the local strike célèbre. There was a guy taking pictures for the student paper. He was the most beautiful man I had ever seen in my life.

It turned out we lived in the same residence building. When I rode up the elevator with him afterwards, I felt indescribably happy. We were soon friends. I wanted to spend as much time with him as I could. I thought about him all the time. I wanted him to be that friend that I had always longed for.

When Stephen didn’t have his shirt on, his muscles moved like oil under his velvet skin. I found myself imagining what he would look like, naked, in a forest, with dappled sunlight playing on his chest. Then, in a flash, I thought to myself, oh shit! This is what love is supposed to feel like. There was a ball of fear in my stomach. What did this mean? All my life I had worked at not being a sissy. I wasn’t one of those faceless homosexuals that couldn’t be shown on television. I wasn’t one of those mincing, preening, bitter creatures with a cigarette dangling from a limp wrist that I’d seen in the movies. I didn’t even smoke. I was normal. But I was in love with a man.

Pride

Saturday, August 17, 1974, was a bright sunny afternoon. I was walking towards Allan Gardens, a park in downtown Toronto. My stomach was in a knot. I saw a handful of people on the north side of the park and a pile of placards.

I was just back in Toronto after two years in South America. I had followed Stephen there, like a needy puppy. I even screwed up the courage to tell him I loved him one night. We were both stoned. He said he loved me too and gave me a hug. We were learning Spanish, but in English, we were obviously not speaking the same language. Soon his girlfriend came to join us. I finally left them in Cali, Colombia, where we had been teaching English, and continued south.

After hitchhiking around South America for a year, I had come back to Canada knowing I had two options: deal with this shit, or jump off a bridge.

The Boys in the Band, a 1969 movie about self-hating homosexuals, was playing at a local rep cinema. I sat in the back of the theatre, in the dark, watching the drama unfold. It was not a pretty picture. But as the movie let out, I noticed two young men who had also been in the audience. They were talking happily and for a minute, one took the other’s hand. I felt a flood of warmth in my heart. I followed them for several blocks.

I had heard about a newspaper called The Body Politic. It was about gay liberation. The word gay seemed to be a slightly effeminate term that served to take the edge off homosexual. But liberation had been my stock-in-trade in the Young Socialists, so I was into that.

I screwed up my courage, went into a store, bought a stack of magazines including a copy of TBP, and took them to Riverdale Park. The park spans both sides of the southern end of the Don Valley divided by a highway. The floor of the valley is flat and treeless, with a running track on the east side. I sat in the middle of the track. There, I could see anyone coming within a quarter mile. I figured if someone came too close to where I was sitting, I could stuff the paper in my bag and run away.

The front cover of that issue displayed a line drawing of two young men lounging naked on a carpet, staring into each other’s eyes against a romantic background of gladiolas, ferns, and snapdragons. It was beautiful.

I opened the pages tentatively and stepped into an ongoing conversation. Letter writers were upset about articles in previous issues. One attacked a piece that had claimed personal solutions and alternative lifestyles had no place in the gay movement. The writer asserted that one of the most crucial messages of the feminist and gay movements had been that the personal is political. Someone from Calgary wrote his thanks for an article about rural gay youth. Another called for gays to abandon the small towns and congregate in large cities where they could constitute majorities and gain economic and political power. It concluded: Separatism offers us true liberation, while integration with heterosexuals offers only the oppression we have already experienced for 2000 years.²

There was a great deal of back and forth about an interview with a doctor called Edgar Friedenberg, whom someone described as a person elevated by the mechanisms of the ruling class to the position of intellectual authority. That writer was in turn accused of dogmatism and shrill obsessions in his own claims of superiority.

I felt at home. This was just like the left that I knew and loved.

I also learned that the Toronto Star was refusing ads from gay organizations (the word gay could not appear in a family paper). Support was building for inclusion of sexual orientation in the Ontario Human Rights Code. And a downtown school, Oakwood Collegiate, had prohibited students from inviting a gay speaker to class.

There was a feature article on Roger Casement, an Irish freedom fighter executed by the British in 1916 who, it turned out, was gay. My grandparents were Irish. It had never occurred to me that an Irish revolutionary could be gay. Finally, there was a long interview with Dennis Altman, an Australian who had written a book called Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation. Altman talked about the potentially revolutionary nature of being homosexual, but cautioned that he was no longer sure that it wasn’t possible for modern western capitalist societies to assimilate them.

A month later a new issue came out. This time the outside cover made me feel queasy. It wasn’t romantic. It was a picture of a paper doll, like the ones little girls played with, but this one was of a man alongside a pin-on leather outfit. I felt the woman at the cash register looking at me. Worse, when I unfolded the paper, the startling full-page inside front cover was a caricature of Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, leader of the opposition Robert Stanfield, and New Democratic Party (NDP) leader David Lewis, all naked, with large, engorged, and differently shaped penises. I was relieved that I was once again in the centre of the track and no one could see over my shoulder.

Moving quickly to the letters, there were criticisms the paper was too male oriented, dry, and intellectual. In the news, a printer had refused to publish the issue (no wonder, I thought); a new gay church called Metropolitan Community Church (MCC) had been chartered; a lesbian mother was fighting for custody of her kids; and a provincial gay rights coalition was being formed. And TBP and the Gay Alliance Toward Equality (GATE) had just opened a storefront office on Carlton Street. That wasn’t far from where I was staying. I was thinking about walking past on my way home when I saw, on page seven, an article about Chilean fascists terrorizing gays. I was stunned. Someone in Canada actually knew about what had just happened in Chile.

Chile had been the great beacon of hope for Latin America when the socialist government of Salvador Allende was elected in 1970. I had been in Peru heading south when the coup happened in September 1973. I heard Allende’s last broadcast over a crackling radio in a cafe in Cusco. Minutes later he was murdered by Pinochet’s soldiers as the air force bombarded the presidential palace. I managed to cross the border into Chile a few months later when things had settled down. I saw the ruins of the palace. There was still a dusk-to-dawn curfew. At night I heard shooting outside my cheap hotel room in Santiago. People I talked to were terrified, if they would talk at all. There were armed soldiers everywhere.

But when I returned to Canada no one seemed to know or care. It was just another coup in some far-off banana republic. TBP, however, was covering it. And it was affecting gays. They cared. Then at the bottom of the same page, my eyes fell on an ad for an Ontario Gay Pride March.

Reading the paper had gotten me used to the term gay. It no longer made my stomach twist like homosexual. But I didn’t actually know any gay people. There were ads for bars and baths in the paper, but the thought of going to a gay bar conjured up terrifying images of drag queens or leather men. I had no idea what a bath was.

But I’d been on my share of marches and demonstrations. I knew what you were supposed to do at that kind of thing.

Still, that hot Saturday afternoon in Allan Gardens, I hung around at a distance for a while before moving closer. None of the folks who were gathering were wearing drag or leather or chains. In fact, most of them seemed relatively normal. I didn’t hear any of the sinister music that always came on when a homosexual appeared in the movies. So when they were almost ready to go, I quickly walked over and picked up a sign that said Gay Liberation Now and started marching down the sidewalk thinking, if there’s a TV camera I wonder if I can induce a heart attack and die by holding my breath?

But there were no TV cameras. Fifty people walking down the sidewalk with hand-drawn placards was hardly newsworthy, even in 1974. Another advantage of there being only fifty people was that I was recognized as a new face in the crowd. When the march was over, I was snapped up, taken home, had sex with for the first time, given a bunch of gay liberation literature, and told to come back for more when I had finished reading.

I was a quick reader. And was soon back for more. Suddenly it seemed a million pounds that I didn’t know I was carrying disappeared. Suddenly I knew that I had always been gay but just hadn’t known it. I found out I had been in the closet. The whole thing was exhilarating. For the first time in my life I had a way to address who I was, emotionally, sexually, politically, as part of a community. For the first time in my life I could be honest. I came out. I was liberated.

Community, A Guide

The community that I came out into was still a small space in the summer of 1974. In time for that year’s Pride celebrations, the Community Homophile Association of Toronto (CHAT) published Gay Directions: A Guide to Toronto. The booklet is a snapshot of gay Toronto four decades ago.

At three and a half years, CHAT was the city’s most established gay organization. It maintained a volunteer-run, twenty-four-hour distress and information line to give comfort to the lonely, referrals to those who need legal or medical assistance, and information about homosexuality to both gays and the general public.³ It was able to maintain an office, thanks to Local Initiative Project funding aimed at reducing youth unemployment in the recession sparked by the Arab oil embargo. CHAT held weekly meetings on Tuesdays, a drop-in on Wednesdays, women’s night on Thursdays, and often dances on weekends.

Eight other groups in Toronto were listed: ANIK (the Inuktitut word for brotherhood), The Body Politic Collective, GATE, the Lesbian Collective, MCC, the Unitarian Universalist Gay Caucus, and Homophile Associations at the University of Toronto and York University.

There was a commercial scene largely catering to gay men, most of it straight owned. Eight bars were listed, with the warning that all bars in Toronto were closed on Sundays. The Club Manatee (men only), however, was open for dancing on the weekends, including Sundays, since it had no liquor licence. There were five steam baths, and a sixth, the Barracks, was scheduled to open before Labour Day. Gay Directions was financed by ads from a number of these bars and baths.

A page on Pleasant Places to Stroll indicated the major gay men’s cruising and outdoor sex locales: David Balfour Park in the north, Philosopher’s Walk on the University of Toronto campus, Queen’s Park behind the provincial legislature, and St. Joseph Street downtown. That section was followed by a Word to the Wise, reminding readers of legal prohibitions against sex in a public place.

The last eight pages of the thirty-six-page booklet were dedicated to Answers to some of your questions about homosexuals and homosexuality, followed by an annotated bibliography of some of the best and most recent non-fiction on homosexuality and gay liberation.

It might seem odd today that a community guide should give up so much space to a basic Q&A and a booklist. But Gay Directions was meant to orient those just entering a new community—a community that was in early formation. This was outreach to people like me, emerging from isolation, struggling with fear and self-loathing, in desperate need of information about who we were supposed to be. The booklet was not just an orientation to a new city; it had a political goal to reassure and to encourage each of us. Dare to be yourself, advised an André Gide quote that stood alone on the final page.

And daring to be yourself, the quintessential motto of liberal individualism, was part of the 1970s zeitgeist of questioning traditional authority.

The Sociology of Community

Gay Directions, other than alluding to differences between lesbians and gay men, imagined a community that was homogenous. CHAT was predominantly male, white, and English speaking and oblivious to other differences. But in fact, Toronto was much more homogenous at the time. According to the 1971 census, almost 96 per cent of the population of greater Toronto was of European ancestry.⁴ Canada’s whites-only immigration practices had begun to change only in 1967, and Toronto’s complexion in the early 1970s reflected that racist history.

Those of us on the left talked about class differences and the need for workers to rise up. But the same census data found 66 per cent of Torontonians living in middle-income neighbourhoods. About 15 per cent were high-income, leaving only 19 per cent in lower than average income areas.⁵ Most of the population found itself part of a large middle class, based on the salaries of adequately paid working people. This was an age when even unskilled (albeit male) workers could aspire to save, support a family, and own their own homes on a single wage. Their children could aspire to go to university and to upward mobility. Most were not rich, but neither were they poor. The national imaginary was reflected in the winning slogan of the Trudeau Liberals’ 1969 election campaign—The Just Society.

The post-war Keynesian experiment had established a social safety net supported by progressive taxation. Labour legislation such as the Rand Formula helped facilitate unionization. Post-secondary education was subsidized. Even though my family had entered the middle class, I received a grant to go to university. Despite the 1974 recession, there were still jobs, and most provided a living wage.

This meant that young people were able to strike out and establish independent lives before marriage. And for those of us uninterested in marriage, it was a way of escaping the heterosexual pressures of our small towns and suburbs. My trajectory was not unique. Few of the people I met in my new community were actually from Toronto. We had moved to the big city to find ourselves and others like us. Petula Clark’s anthem Downtown had a special resonance for us.

Toronto’s processes of urbanization concentrated us. A building boom of new high-rises in the city centre, sparked by the opening of the subway system in the 1950s, provided affordable single-person apartments in the Church-Wellesley area. I soon learned that the phallic, round high-rise at Alexander and Church streets was referred to as KY Towers, after the popular lubricant. This was the nucleus of what in the 1970s we called the gay ghetto.

Since gay people were drawn proportionally from the rest of the population, more than 80 per cent of us, the men at least, would have enough disposable income to participate in a gay commercial scene. Since anyone who participated was vulnerable to discrimination, there was a tendency to feel that if we were gay, we were all in the same boat.

That is not to say that there were no disparities. Women in the workforce earned approximately 60 per cent of what men earned. Lesbians, independent of men, tended to be poorer. The commercial scene’s orientation to men reflected this difference in disposable income. It also reflected the cultural prohibitions against, and actual dangers for, women out on their own after dark.

Toronto was also the country’s major immigrant reception area. Immigrants earned about 80 per cent of what Canadian-born workers did. Although most were of European origin and assimilation was realistic, the ghetto could be a very Anglo place. Social divisions and sexual stereotypes proliferated. Aboriginal communities faced much more serious economic and social marginalization, and at the time, tended to be all but invisible in Toronto gay spaces.

Although this Keynesian world was far more egalitarian than what had come before, or would come after, Canada still had its 1 per cent. Wallace Clement profiled this group in The Canadian Corporate Elite (1975). Canada’s elite had a clear ethnic character at the time. Anglo Canadians predominated (86.2 per cent), 8.4 per cent were French Canadian, and only 5.4 per cent belonged to other ethnic groups. Although one no longer had to be a member of the Orange Lodge to advance in Toronto the Good, the city’s elite was still mostly old money and overwhelmingly Protestant. That class of people were unlikely to frequent the often seedy downtown gay establishments.

Toronto was the second-largest city in a white settler state that involved the exploitation of immigrants, discrimination by the Anglo majority, a social hierarchy among Catholics and Protestants and Jews, overarching sexism against women, and ongoing racism against Aboriginal people and non-whites. All of these relationships were reflected in the lesbian and gay community.

Essential Reading

The man who picked me up at Pride that August afternoon was Jearld Moldenhauer. Still in his twenties, Jearld was already a community elder. He had been a founder of the University of Toronto Homophile Association, the city’s first post-Stonewall gay group. He had just completed a cross-Canada speaking tour, helping establish gay liberation groups in cities across the country. He had also been a leading member and writer in TBP, although by the summer of 1974 there had just been a serious falling out.

Jearld’s passion now was Glad Day Bookshop, which he had founded a couple of years before. Glad Day was a political project. It aimed to make available the suppressed history, culture, imagery, and literature routinely denied to us. Glad Day would feed the hunger for knowledge and nourish the intellectual foundations of our movement for liberation. Jearld took me home to his gay men’s communal house at 139 Seaton Street after the Pride march. (Such communes were the way we would all live after the revolution). Glad Day consisted of shelves of books on the wall of the main hallway. It was from those shelves that he helped me select my essential reading.

Homosexual Behavior among Males

Of the stack of literature that I took away that day after getting and giving my first blowjob, the book that had the deepest immediate effect on me was Wainwright Churchill’s Homosexual Behavior among Males.⁶ It described itself as a cross-cultural and cross species investigation, although it probably wouldn’t pass muster on either of those accounts today. There wasn’t much zoology, and the only cultures he looked at were the modern United States, classical Greece, and Rome. Nonetheless, the book clearly and powerfully laid out most of the founding arguments of gay liberation.

Homosexual Behavior maintained that same-sex sexual activity was a common component of mammalian sexuality, and that the motive for all sexual behaviour was an undifferentiated release of sexual tension. Churchill insisted that response to different sexual objects was learned or conditioned behaviour, and that there was no such thing as a sexual instinct among humans.

But, he argued, all societies have a sexual mystique—the dogmas and taboos that evolve in the interests of a society’s aims for sexuality. He divided the world into sex positive and sex negative societies, and excoriated modern American society as particularly sex negative. Its sexual mystique failed to recognize any function for sex other than procreation. He detailed the deleterious effect this had on young people not ready to procreate, those too old to procreate, women, families, and anyone involved in same-sex sexual activity.

A full chapter was devoted to Kinsey’s notion of a sexual continuum. Alfred Kinsey had published two groundbreaking studies, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953). Churchill repeatedly referenced the Kinsey findings as evidence of the widespread persistence of same-sex sexual activity, even in the face of a sex-negative mystique. In fact, he argued, sex-negative societies were paradoxically more likely to produce sexual minorities. The suppression of particular sexual responses isolated and therefore reinforced specific sexual behaviours.

For Churchill, a society’s sexual mystique was essentially cultural. The acceptance or rejection of homosexual behaviour could not be correlated with any known circumstance related to geography or the complexity of a given society.⁷ He laid the blame for what he called America’s erotophobia and homoerotophobia squarely on its Judeo-Christian tradition. The Hebrews, he argued, developed one of the most prohibitionistic sex codes ever known in history, and Christian sects such as Calvinism amplified that negativity. Modern psychiatry had given a scientific gloss to such moralistic prejudices. Churchill argued for a liberal approach to sex; each individual had the right to express their sexuality however they might want.

Churchill helped establish what would become two of the major axioms of gay liberation: Heterosexuality was not natural, just common. And the problem was not homosexuality but homo(eroto)phobia. His focus on conservative institutions—religion, psychiatry, and law—as enforcers pointed to the battlegrounds where the struggle for gay liberation would be fought.

But Churchill’s stance challenged one tenet of the gay movement, collective identity. While calling for a cultural shift to a more sex-positive society, he insisted, in reality there is no such thing as a homosexual.⁸ For Churchill, homosexual identity was the unfortunate by-product of oppression. Especially for those who have an extensive amount of homosexual experience, it is almost impossible within our society not to be pressured in one way or another into a minority status, and within this status, in a great many cases comes the assumption of a ‘homosexual way of life.’⁹

Churchill considered the homosexual way of life as a definitely inferior emotional adjustment. But, he conceded, for those who cannot and those who will not abandon their homosexual interests, there must be some recourse to social life with others like themselves, and it is entirely understandable that these people will tend—like all minorities—to create a little world of their own.¹⁰ He went on to dismiss the political expression of that identity, the so called homophile movement, as weak, very poorly organized, largely intellectual, very unpopular even among those who might be expected to rally around it, and downright humorous in some of its aspects.¹¹

By the time I read Churchill in the summer of 1974, however, gay identity was common sense and was not about to be overturned. The contradiction between the sweeping goal of sexual liberation for all versus the practical liberation of our minority had already been settled. The new movement took Kinsey’s continuum and arbitrarily drew a line between homo- and heterosexual at the 10 per cent point, thus producing the minority that Churchill decried. It followed that as a people, we needed a history, tradition, culture, visibility. We needed leadership. We needed allies. The task of gay liberation was to make this minority one that was consciously aware of itself and organized to advocate for itself.

Homosexuality among Males was widely cited. Many of its arguments became the bread and butter of gay liberation discourse. But Churchill’s inconvenient passages on identity were ignored or dismissed as self-oppression. After all, we rationalized, the book had been written almost two years before Stonewall. What could you expect? Churchill was