Beyond Stonewall: Canada's Path to Decriminalization

Uh, good evening, everyone. Welcome to the West Vancouver Memorial Library. My name is Karen Erhardt. I'm the Arts and Special Events Programmer here. And thank you so much for joining us in person. Great crowd. And for those joining at home, I know we also have a great crowd at your home. So, tonight I'd like to begin by acknowledging that the West Vancouver Memorial Library library resides within the traditional ancestral and unceded territory of the Squamish Nation, Tsleil-Waututh Nation, and Musqueam Nation. We recognize and respect them as nations in this territory, as well as their connection to the lands and waters around us since time immemorial. Tonight's program is presented in conjunction with Love in a Dangerous Time, the Canadian Museum of Human Rights traveling exhibition currently on display in our main hall. Um, the exhibit will be with us until September 15th, so you all have lots of time. Uh, we do close at 8:00 tonight. You're always welcome to view it after the show. Um, but feel free to come back anytime before the 15th. Uh, Love in a Dangerous Time explores the history of the campaign in which thousands of members of the Canadian Armed Forces, the RCMP, and the federal public service were investigated, harassed, and in many cases dismissed because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. And as we gather tonight, I'm reminded that our history includes times when people were judged, excluded, and persecuted simply for who they were and who they loved. The LGBT Purge reminds us of the harm caused when fear and prejudice shape our institutions and communities. I believe that uh libraries have an important role in ensuring these stories are not forgotten. They are places where history is preserved, respectful conversations take place, and everyone is welcome to learn and share. Through listening, learning, and sharing our stories, we can build stronger, more compassionate communities. So, thank you for being here tonight. Now, with that, uh it is my pleasure to welcome tonight's speaker, Kichelle Feezan. Not only do I get to work with Kichelle as part of the comms team, because she is our communications coordinator, but she is also, in her spare time, I don't know when she has time to do this, pursuing her MA at Royal Roads University, with a research focus on the importance of local queer histories. Uh a believer in the importance of local stories, Kichelle works to make queer history more accessible, and several years ago she curated the West Coast stop of 69 Positions, Decriminalization of the Queer Canadian and Quebec archive. So, thank you so much for being here. I can't wait to hear what you have in store. >> You're welcome. Oh, excellent. Thank you so much. Uh thank you everyone for being here tonight. It's nice to see such a full room, and hi everybody at home. I hope you can hear me well. Um I'm here to talk about history today, but I'm not a historian. As Terrence said, I'm a communications professional. So, what I'm really interested in is how information gets shared, where we're learning history, and more importantly, where we aren't learning history, and what that means for us. My research focuses on the importance of access to local queer history, and I've also done several archival projects where I have gone through the BC Gay and Lesbian Archives, amongst others, to find ways to bring queer history to the public, because archives are not always the most accessible way to learn history. I also said I'm a professional queer, uh not just professional uh Monday through Friday, but uh that I used to work for the Vancouver Pride Society while I was on the board of the Vancouver Dyke March while serving as the queer students liaison for my university while I was doing research for 69 Positions, a queer archival project. And working with all these queer organizations at the same time meant that I often was hearing lots of discourse and discussion from the community. And something I found really interesting was that people would be arguing on all different sides of an argument, uh most notably the decision on whether or not to remove police and pride. And people on different sides of the argument would say, "Remember Stonewall. Remember Stonewall." And I was thinking how interesting it was that so many people were referencing an American uh story when talking about change happening in Canada. And so I started asking people around me, "What do you know about Canadian queer history?" And often the answer was absolutely nothing. So, while I was doing this research, I was working with Ron Dutton, an inspiration of mine who is the founder of the BC Gay and Lesbian Archives. And I asked him why he thought it was important for queer people to be telling queer histories. And he said, "Well, we know when we have left it to straight institutions and to straight academics, this has not been benign. So, that's something I've kept in mind through this project." So, uh can folks raise your hand if you're familiar with Stonewall? And keep it up if you're familiar with the Brunswick Four. Okay, so far less. >> [laughter] >> Uh so, this is what I'm interested in is making Canadian and local queer history more accessible. So today I'm going to give a little bit of a run of what happened pre-decriminalization in Canada, talk about a couple of the key players and events, and then talk about what came next. So if you'll travel with me to 2019, folks were celebrating across North America the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, an event most of you are familiar with. So on June 28th, 1969, police came in to raid the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village in New York City. Police raids were very common against gay bars at the time, and often when people were arrested, their names would be published in the papers, and so they would be estranged from their families, they might lose their jobs. Being outed like that was uh quite a double time for folks. And so people would run and scatter when the police came, and this night at Stonewall, people decided enough is enough, something's going to change, people fought back, and that turned into five days of riots against police violence. The next year in San Francisco, in New York, in Chicago, and Los Angeles, people had a commemorative march, and those birthed the modern-day pride parades, and the Stonewall uh riots became a huge catalyst for change in the gay rights movement. Also in 2019, the federal liberal liberal government uh was celebrating 50 years of the anniversary of decriminalization. You'll note that decriminalization happened on June 27th, 1969, one day prior to Stonewall riots, when Bill C-150 received royal assent. The federal government, led by Justin Trudeau at the time celebrated what they called the decriminalization of homosexuality. They did so by putting over two million dollars into educational projects which included films and the Canadian Mint created a one and ten dollar coin. So a lot of funding was put behind this. That year I was hired to curate 69 positions, the West Coast Stop, an exhibition revisiting the partial decriminalization of sodomy. When we look at the realities and myths surrounding decrim, for example, you'll note that this exhibition title references decriminalization only being partial and about sodomy, not homosexuality. You've got to wonder why the language changed. Why does it matter? While curating this and watching various decrim anniversary events being planned across the country, I often thought back to what Ron Dutton had said about it not being benign to let others tell our stories. A conference popped up that year, Anti-69, that sprung up against the mythologies of the 1969 Criminal Code Reform, challenging the idea that decriminalization was bestowed by benevolent government onto queers, rather than something hard-fought and hard-won by activists over time. While I believe decrim was a very significant and pivotal moment in our queer history that was achieved through many brave moments by gay activists, it fell short in many ways of delivering real change. So let's talk about that and talk about crimes of the worst kind, a euphemism that was used for homosexual acts. Time traveling back to 1648, when it was not only illegal, but punishable by death to engage in sodomy, a military drummer was convicted and sentenced to death. And Jesuits intervened on his behalf, and he was spared the death penalty, but he was forced to become an executioner himself for engaging in the act of sodomy. Fast forward a bit to 1869, the government decided that sodomy was no longer punishable by death. We actually don't know if anyone was actually sentenced to death in Canada for engaging in sodomy. There's no record of it. We do know that people were whipped and imprisoned, but it was very hard to convict because it required an eyewitness, and if you were an eyewitness, maybe you were engaged in weren't telling the government about it. This brings us up to 1890, when the House of Commons introduced a new offense called gross indecency, which became part of Canada's first criminal code in 1892. Gross indecency was never defined and remained very vague. They knew it covered more than sodomy, and it was generally understood to indicate any interaction that indicated attraction between men. Women weren't included in this, and the language made it very easy to criminalize and convict people because it wasn't very specific. Fast forward again to 1953, and women got the inclusion they never asked for with the word added to gross indecency laws. And around the time that women were being included in gross indecency, immigrants were being excluded from the country when a immigration act was passed to uh homosexuals to prohibited class of immigrants due to their probable inability to become readily assimilated. Throughout this time, there were various vagrancy laws that prohibited wearing clothing of the wrong gender, and people wearing clothing of the wrong gender were arrested and charged with vagrancy. This brings us to June 27th, 1969, when Bill C-150 decriminalized gross indecency between adults over 21 in private. So, what set the stage for decrim? I want to talk to you about a few influencers, not the kind we find on Instagram. And while there were many people who contributed to helping decriminalization pass, I'm going to be talking about a few local and semi-local heroes, Jim Egan, Ted North, and Douglas Sanders. >> [snorts] >> First up is Jim Egan, a man some of you might recognize as being one of the very first openly gay politicians in Canada, or for his 19 uh '95 challenge uh against the household allowance benefits under the old age security act, which he did win uh with in Egan versus Canada. Now, Jim was really interested in biology and had experience in farming, which helped him get employment in biology labs, and so he actually helped with uh typhus, polio, and cancer research. And this enabled him, after the war, to open up his own biology um materials supply business. And having his own business enabled him to take some risks. These risks were immense at the time. He wrote hundreds of letters, articles, and op-ed pieces to magazines and newspapers starting in 1949 saying that he was gay, standing up for gay rights 20 years before decriminalization passed when it was very much illegal to be gay. He started This is him and his husband um by writing letters to local newspapers and talking about homosexuality being a natural orientation. This was a very radical idea at the time. He tried to write into mass-market magazines in America, but wasn't able to get published. He wrote later in a book about his life, "There was never any articles published from the gay point of view, which in my mind equaled a conspiracy of silences on the true nature of homosexuality." Here we have a couple tabloid uh paper headlines. "Queers flushed from love nest." "10,000 homos in Toronto." Um homosexuality started coming under the spotlight, but it was often described as a sickness or very sensationalized. In 1951, Jim was able to get a seven-part series uh Aspects of Homosexuality published in one of these tablets, The True New York Times. And it was the first published long articles from a gay point of view in Canada. This was followed up with two different series in Justice Weekly, and he used these to publish overviews of same-sex desire throughout history, legal and scientific aspects of homosexuality, and the need for more societal tolerance. He also pushed back against lies in the press and discussed current events impacting gays, and these articles were reprinted and were considered integral to a lot of gay communities across Canada. Then in 1963, Jim broke through and got into Maclean's magazine uh with journalist Sidney Katz. Katz was a controversial journalist who had taken on many uh controversial at the time topics, including taking LSD under supervision under the name of journalism. When he was assigned the article by Maclean's, he uh Katz didn't really know anything about homosexuals, but reached out to Jim due to his letter writing. The gay community told Jim not to speak to him, really worried that such um a big magazine with so much press would expose the gay community and make their secrecy harder, um and that their lives might come under scrutiny. But Egan said that educating the public would help in the long run, and he felt it was really important to get more of a spotlight. So he went out with Katz, he took him on a bar crawl, and uh Katz was like, "Wow, a lot of these people are people that I would hang out with. They're not anything like I've been reading in the papers." And uh Egan also pointed out the male sex workers that were near the bars, and observed that if they were arrested, they would be sent to jail for 2 years, but women would uh largely get off with a fine. And so gay male sex workers were being criminalized uh far more punitively than women. Katz wrote the article, two of them. These were the very first positive full-scale articles in a mainstream Canadian magazine, which was a pivotal moment in queer Canadian journalism. Before this point, homosexuality was only discussed in association with crime. This was the very first time people were depicted as having a regular lives and being regular people. And these articles helped begin to change the discourse around homosexuals in Canada. Next up is Ted North, a local hero. We now have a street named after here in Vancouver. Uh Ted North was a drag queen, a civil rights activist, and empress of Canada. Ted was one of the very first openly gay man in Vancouver in the '50s, again before decriminalization happened. And he was incredibly inspired by the black civil rights movement that was happening in America and borrowed tactics. He also brought the Imperial Court System to Canada and established the first chapter here in Vancouver in 1971 and was crowned Empress of Canada. The Imperial Court System is a series of organizations throughout North America that work on building equality and they raise money through annual gala coronation balls. On August 18th, 1958, Ted hosted the very first protest on the steps of the Vancouver Courthouse with four others. If you've ever been to a protest at the Art Gallery with thousands of people, you can imagine the difference standing there with just four others. They were referred to as the Lavender Hill Mob in the Vancouver Sun, a name which I think sounds very cool, but I think was meant to be quite derogatory. And they were chased away by police. As you recall us talking about earlier, there were vagrancy laws. It was illegal to be in drag. And so, to get around this, drag queens would wear three articles of the correct gender. So, Ted did this by stuffing his bra with each cup with a pair of men's socks and wearing men's underwear in order to not be charged with vagrancy. Um >> [clears throat] >> This is a reenactment of the protest and anniversary. Ted held up a sign saying, "I am a human being." At this first protest in Vancouver. Ted then began an 11-year letter writing campaign. No emails to do this with. To all government officials at all levels of government in Canada. And he caught the attention of the then Justice Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau and NDP leader Tommy Douglas. And he used this attention to start advocating for the decriminalization of homosexuality. Once decrim passed, Prime Minister Trudeau called Ted and addressed him as your majesty, acknowledging both his contributions to decriminalization and his drag queen title. Next up is Douglas Sanders, both a human rights lawyer and president of ASK. And Douglas um used his profession to advocate for the advancement of gay rights. Some of the uh things that he did in 1966, he worked alongside another lawyer to help relax laws concerning homosexual acts between consenting adults. Uh this unfortunately failed in 1966. In 1968, he made a submission to the Royal Commission on security arguing against denying homosexuals government employment and security clearance during the LGBT purge. And in 1968, he forwarded a resolution from the North American Conference of homophile organizations to Prime Minister Trudeau criticizing the age of consent limitations proposed in Bill C-150. As I said, Douglas was the president of the Association for Social Knowledge or ASK, which was the very first homophile or gay rights organization in Canada. They circulated the very second queer periodical in Canada and ran the first gay community center in Canada. Um, significantly and quite unusual for the time, the organization included lesbians right from day one rather than having them join later on. ASK would hold discussion groups and they would invite in speakers to talk about various issues impacting gay people and I was reading an article about how they were so desperate just to hear anything because there was such a lack of information that they actually would sometimes have doctors come in and have the doctors tell them that they were sick and wrong, but at least it was information and they were getting it. So, the speaker series wasn't necessarily all positive, but it was what was available at the time. They also started a group called Gab and Java where people would get together over coffee and brandy so that they could discuss the gay politic and maybe find someone to hook up with. A fun little story about ASK is that um, and Douglas is that at the time uh, gays often met at bottle clubs rather than bars and you could pay a membership fee and bring your own bottle and have the bartender serve your own liquor back to you. And this was a way to circumvent liquor laws and avoid police raids. And Douglas came up with a plan that if they were raided, um, that he was going to they were going to offer up a lesbian member of the collective to be arrested. And then as a lawyer, he would defend her in court. And he went to the morality squad of the police and told them that if they were raided them that he was going to make a human rights case. They avoided being raided, but he had a plan on what he was going to do. The ASK newsletter started with a circulation of 75 using a mimeograph and a lesbian couple's brand new electric typewriter, quite exciting for the time, to distribute their newspaper. They ended up having a circulation of 150. And ASK called on the community to write their MPs over the legislation of homosexuality. So ASK was another player in convincing people to reach out and make some noise about decrim. Now we're going to travel over to Great Britain with the Wolfenden report. By the end of 1954, there was over 1,069 men in prison for homosexual acts. And then, terribly awkward for all the proper folks in Great Britain, several well-known and wealthy and respected men were recently convicted of homosexual activities. And this created a lot of problems because you couldn't have wealthy, respected men in jail for being gay. So, led by Sir John Wolfenden, a committee was put together to interview men on their experiences. But it turned out to be very hard to find gay men who were willing to admit to this and be interviewed. They ended up finding three men, one who who previously already been convicted, uh who were able to give their testimony. >> [clears throat] >> The report of the Departmental Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution, bit wordy, otherwise known as the Wolfenden report, um recommended that homosexual behavior between consenting adults in private should no longer be a criminal offense. This led to decriminalization in Great Britain. Unfortunately, the report also discussed the role of boys in sex work, which it described as weakening the family and can causing community instability, leading to a violent police crackdown on street-level sex work. The Wolfenden report um did influence discussion over in Canada, but it did not immediately lead to the decriminalization of homosexuality over here. Now, prior to 1961 in Canada, you could be designated a dangerous sexual offender and subjected to preventative detention, otherwise known as a life sentence in jail, if you were considered to be likely to cause injury, pain, or other evil to another person through a failure to control your sexual impulses. Uh then Prime Minister John Diefenbaker toughened these laws, adding or if you're likely to commit a further sexual offense. Now, they talked about causing injury, pain, and evil, but what they meant was that a gay man who is considered likely to continue being gay could be sentenced to a life in prison due to being gay and being likely to continue to be gay in future. Enter Everett Klippert. Dangerous sexual offender, incurably homosexual. Clippert was a mechanic who in 1960 was charged with over 18 counts of gross indecency and sentenced to 4 years in prison. Uh here you can see a picture of Clippert being released from prison in 1964. He moved to the mining community of Pine Point in the Northwest Territories and worked there as a mechanic's helper. But in 1965 an arson happened and he was a newcomer in town with a previous criminal record. He was brought in by police and questioned about the fire and they determined that he had absolutely nothing to do with it. However, during the questioning he admitted to having sex with four men and pled pled guilty to four additional counts of gross indecency and was sentenced to another 3 years in prison. Since these were repeat offenses and these laws had recently been changed, the Crown attorney concluded that Clippert would likely continue to have sex with men in the future and applied to have him designated as a dangerous sexual offender and subject to indefinite preventative detention. Life in prison. Clippert's sister uh brought this uh case to the Supreme Court of Canada, but it was upheld three to two that Clippert would stay in jail for the rest of his life. This case sparked a national discussion uh falling on the ears of politicians who had been primed over the past decade by a letter-writing campaigns um by the letters of activists, by folks like Ted North, by associations like ASK. And uh they'd already really kind of had these seeds planted. So, this case sparked this national discussion and Bud Orange Klippert, MP, objected to his treatment in the House of Commons. Now, at the time, even though people were against someone being put in jail for life for being gay, it's not because they thought it was okay to be gay. As Bud Orange said, it was ridiculous that any man would be put into jail because they are affected by a social disease. Um so, it was cruel to put someone who was mentally unwell into jail. In 1967, as Justice Minister, Pierre Elliott Trudeau introduced Omnibus Bill C-150. And a different version of the bill became law in 1969 when he became Prime Minister. Uh a lot of us might be familiar with this quote. >> To contemporary society, I think, take this thing on on homosexuality. I think the the view we take here is that there's no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation. And I think that you know, what's done in private between adults doesn't concern the criminal code. >> [clears throat] >> A fun fact is that this was actually originally said by journalist Martin O'Malley in the Globe and Mail, but it's been attributed to Pierre Elliott Trudeau. So, the bill passed. But, what did this bill actually do? Bill C-150 is often referred to as the decriminalization of homosexuality. Yet, it actually only enabled exceptions for buggery or sodomy and gross indecency in a very narrow set of circumstances. It said that it this couldn't happen in public, and the word public was left broad and ill-defined, and included anything more than two people. So, threesomes were out. And as we recall from earlier, gross indecency wasn't necessarily sex. It was interactions that indicated attraction between men. And so, any interaction between two men that indicated they might be attracted to each other that happened in front of another person was criminalized still. Also problematic was that the age of the consent widely differed from heterosexual sex. The age of consent at the time was considered 14 or 16 for heterosexual sex and 21 for gay men. The higher age of consent for two men was based on the idea that young men needed special protections from scary homosexual advances. The Anti-69 Conference pointed out that being gay itself was never criminalized, but that various provisions in the criminal code were used to criminalize queer sex acts pre- and post-1969 decrim. For instance, the crimes which Everett Klippert were charged with, gross indecency and buggery, weren't repealed until 1988 and 2019. Of note, buggery was renamed anal intercourse in 1988 and was only repealed in 2019 along with vagrancy. That's pretty recent. Other provisions that have been used to criminalize queerness, like indecent acts and obscenity, remain on the books today. So, here we have a chart of bathhouse raids in Canada post 1968 showing that charges for crimes actually escalated post 1969 with 61 charges for gross indecency and 53 charges for indecent acts in bathhouse raids alone. In Vancouver, the language around in private led to an increased surveillance and brutality from police. In Vancouver, clean up the street campaigns targeted gay men, trans women, and sex workers. Entrapment cases soared in the '70s and '80s. Police would solicit attention from gay men, and when the men responded, they would be arrested and often beaten. Vigilantes, wanting to help the police, would roam in gay areas beating up gays in order to help the police clean up the streets. Some [clears throat] types of same-sex sex had been decriminalized, but did gays actually achieve more rights through decrim? Karen, help me. >> I can't. >> Oh, here we go. It wasn't clicking. Oh, now it's clicking everything. Oh, [laughter] no. Okay. It was slow. Um >> [clears throat] >> In response to the failures of decrim, 12 LGBTQ groups across Canada sponsored We Demand with a list of 10 points. They were looking for the drop of gross indecency and indecent acts from the criminal code, the removal of gross indecency and buggery as grounds to be labeled a dangerous sexual offender, a uniform age of consent for homosexual and heterosexual acts, amendments to the Immigration Act that barred homosexuals from entering Canada, a right to equal employment and promotion at all government levels, amendments to the Divorce Act which placed sodomy and homosexuality in the same categories as physical and mental cruelty, bestiality and rape as grounds for divorce. They wanted the deciding of child custody on the merits of the parents irrespective of their sexuality as courts often denied gays and lesbians custody of their own children for their sexual orientation. To know if it was the RCMP practice to spy on and identify gays and lesbians in the federal workforce and to purge them. And if so, to end this practice. It was the case and you can learn more about the purge in our exhibit upstairs. That gays, lesbians and bisexuals had the right to serve in the armed forces and amendments to human rights laws so that they enter extended the same privileges and freedoms to gays, lesbians and bisexuals. Notably absent from We Demand is anything about gender identity and the rights of the trans community. Progress on We Demand was very slow. Everett Klippert, the case that sparked the national debate and led to decrim, wasn't released from prison until 1971 despite being the test case that pushed for decrim. The only national victory in the 1970s from We Demand and the passage of the Immigration Act which ended the prohibition against homosexual was the end of the Immigration Act which ended the prohibition against homosexual immigrants. There were some city-wide bans put in place against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation followed by the province of Quebec in 1977. Then on February 5th, 1981, Toronto police conducted violent bathhouse raids and arrested hundreds of people. This led to large and angry protests in Toronto, which attracted national attention and sympathy leading to further protests. These protests united a large section of the LGBT community that had previously not worked together there in Canada in such large numbers that it inspired a new era of activism that led to the repeal of all the laws and policies that were targeted by We Demand in the 1980s. Looking back at Decrim, we can see it's not as simple as the 50-year celebrations made it out to be. Was Decrim momentous? Yes, it was a pivotal moment in queer Canadian history that was not handed down by a benevolent benevolent federal or royal government, but achieved through the tireless work of activists, and the work of these activists should be remembered and celebrated. At the same time, Decrim didn't actually decriminalize homosexuality and fell short in many ways, including in how it completely omitted two-spirit people, transgender people, and lesbians. Not only did it fall short, but decriminalization led to the increased surveillance and violence policing of queer lives, more charges, and vigilante violence. But despite this, the failures of Decrim spurred increased activism, which eventually led to large-scale wins on a national level and led to the civil rights that we are afforded today. So, moving forward, something that comes up a lot in my research is the absence of knowledge of queer Canadian history. And a lot of young people feel that they don't have a blueprint to know how to make change in Canada when the only stories we have are imported from the states. So, I think it's really important that we are able to share these stories and also that they're shared accurately. Um that they're not whitewashed uh or changed by institutions or things like celebrating 50 years of decriminalization without telling the whole story. So, I really appreciate you coming out today to learn a piece of our story and I would love to take any questions. Thank you. >> Okay, especially me who knows all those best things. So, thank you so much for taking the time for your gorgeous presentation. Thank you. Uh any questions for Shaw? We don't have any yet at home, but please uh type them in. Yes. >> So, you get data on the number of arrests and prosecutions. How does that compare to the number of raids and the number of violent smacks from police on people's heads? >> Is the question how many raids were there? >> And how many individuals were hit by police for their sexuality? >> I don't have numbers specifically about um how many police raids happened, but if you go back through um the archives, there are so many different um pieces of information from people organizing against police violence, protests against police violence, um putting together walking groups so that people feel safe when they're leaving their homes. And folks organizing against that. I don't know if there are formal records on how many experiences people had with police. And I would imagine that it wasn't reported. >> The word homophile shows up a few times in your talk. >> Yeah, so homophile organizations were the first gay rights organizations. And that was um kind of an earlier word that happened kind of pre-1969 when activists moved to having a gay rights or a gay liberation perspective, homophile organizations were often um had different tactics. They did letter writing. If they did protest, they might dress in a respectable way, in a way that they were trying to humanize themselves. And then that pivoted post-Stonewall to folks taking different tactics saying, you know, we're here. You need to respect us. So it was a different form of gay rights organizing. >> Michelle, someone from home, Leah, thanks very much for the fascinating presentation. Do you know when there was a shift from the word homosexual to gay? >> I don't actually. >> [laughter] >> Well, we'll find out, won't we? We'll do a deep dive. >> Um in your research what's been the up evolution or the similarities of organizing for queer rights? Um I mean letter writing is still a big >> [laughter] >> part contacting government but you know what are some of the changes or that you see? >> So the thing that I've been really fascinated by in my research has been reading things that come from the 60s and 70s and doing a double check on the date and seeing if it was actually written today because it feels like the community is having the same arguments, the same discussions, the same problems that we've been having for several decades. So I found that really interesting. Um definitely there was a switch from more letter writing campaigns and social discussion groups to things like protests and rallies. However, the Canadian tradition of change has always included um at least in queer organizing a lot of things like letter writing, um speaking to politicians and doing things maybe in a less flashy way that doesn't get blockbuster movies but has been a way of enacting change here. >> I have someone Knox from home. Any res- resources for further research on Canadian queer history? Books, archives, etc. Uh brackets curious for the fight around vagrancy repeal but I will take everything I can get. >> Ah. I have so many and I'm currently putting together a big reading list. So I'd be happy to give it to Taran to send out to everybody with a list of so many resources. >> I'd be happy to do that. So Knox, check your inbox in the coming days. >> I'm curious what you see as like the most important issues that we should be working on now as the queer community. >> Maybe [laughter] >> Do you have a question? Yeah. >> Where do I start? Yeah. >> Um I think what we're seeing right now in the United States, but uh being exported everywhere including in Vancouver is um horrible harm against transgender communities. Um It's absolutely a canary in the coal mine for everybody's rights. Um But we are seeing laws being passed um in the United States, in the UK, in neighboring provinces, um here in British Columbia. Um a law was passed that prevents certain people um from having their names changed, uh which is a human rights violation that's taking place here in BC. Um I think that has to be probably the most pressing issue right now. Mhm. >> At what point do you think that the actual joining of like lesbians specifically joined the movement when you said that for a long time they were left out of both movement by all queer people and like from like the legal frame? Like at what point would they At what point were they recognized as part of the gay community from like a legal standpoint as being prosecuted and at what point would the gay community consider them as like part of the fight? >> I think that's a complicated question with a few different answers. Um like I said in the 1950s um is when lesbians were added to gross indecency laws. And so um that's kind of legally uh when they started to be considered. It's really going to depend on the community and where you are. If you do some reading from lesbians in the 60s and 70s, they often didn't necessarily want to consider themselves part of the gay community and felt that they had more in common with their heterosexual um, women fighting for women's rights than they necessarily did with gay men. Um, but then ask the organization had lesbians in from the beginning who considered it an important to be there fighting alongside um, gay men. Um, the protests in the 1980s uh, really started bringing together different facets of the community that hadn't worked together and also the AIDS crisis um, in which um, many gay men were dying and a lot of lesbians stepped in in order to be caretakers taking care of gay men who were dying when um, their families or health care workers wouldn't help them. But every community is going to be a little different. I don't know that I would put a definitive date on that. Yes. >> I'm curious about the education in school with LGBT. Um, I have some friends who are very pro and they think it's great and some friends who think, well, it's a little bit too early. Is there an age where it's too early? And what has history showed us about education in school and how that has that evolved? >> I mean, something uh, that I have found really interesting. Um, I started my research in 2020 and then I got sick and couldn't work on my research until more recently, and when I started my research, there was no um formal queer history lessons in schools, and now there is. Um so, that's been a big change in the past several years. Um there is a grade 12 course on local queer history that you can take if you're at the one school that offers them in the Vancouver school board. Um some of the younger people that I interviewed in my research talked about learning a little bit about queer history in their social justice 11 and 12 classes. And I also interviewed a kindergarten teacher who talked about how they teach the history of Stonewall in their kindergarten classes. Um but it's all done at ages that are appropriate. So, I think, you know, um kindergarten students reading a picture book about the history of Stonewall is different than grade 12 students that are learning about civil rights and activism. >> [gasps] >> Um I think teachers probably do quite a good job of knowing what's age-appropriate for the students that they're teaching. And I think kids are a lot smarter and able to think through things a lot better than we give them credit for. >> [clears throat] >> Uh part B, so you know, uh SOGI has been a bit contentious in West Vancouver. People here may be a bit more conservative. Uh SOGI brought us this education of this in school, uh primarily, you know, somewhere in grade school age. And what I've seen them frame it as now is rather than this is education of how people can develop in different ways, but it's more an anti-bullying force. And I don't know if that framing is good for the cause, bad for the cause, or, you know, is it getting to the root of the problem? I am I'm not sure. It's just that, you know, one is education and then you frame it as anti-bullying just so you can get it in there. And I don't know if that's the way that the optimal way. >> I'm not an educator, so I can't I can't speak to what I think might be the best way to include SOGI in all the curriculum, but I do know that there's a lot of misinformation about SOGI. SOGI is basically a set of resources that teachers are able to use in their classrooms, and I think that it's been kind of picked up a little bit as indoctrination or a way of teaching children how to be when they're actually just optional resources that teachers have the ability to use in classrooms if they would like to. I do think anti-bullying is an important reason to include things like SOGI in the curriculum. I don't know I don't know that I know enough about education to have a definitive opinion on the best way to have folks include that. >> You can't mention everybody in the history. I came to Canada in 1987 from the US, and my first MP was Svend Robinson. And that was that made a big impression on an old time American because that would not have happened in the US. And I'm interested that you didn't mention that name because he was right. >> Yeah. >> Is there a particular reason for that? >> Simply I think time and not being able to include everyone. It's often my desire to uh teach folks about names that they might not have heard of before and Sven is quite the household name. Um, and I think some of these other folks are maybe maybe Jim Egan more more people know, but I think a lot of time when I'm talking to younger people they're very unfamiliar with some of these other folks and so I'd like to kind of highlight those stories that are maybe not told as much. >> Um, how do you see the sex worker movement as positively and adversely affecting queer activism? >> Ooh, that's a challenging one. I think um it got tied up a lot. Um, so frequently when people were talking about um the kind of distasteful unmentionables, they were lumping together. Yeah. Um often gay men, trans women, and sex workers were kind of put together in this category of people that we needed to protect cities from. I think also a lot of queer people have done sex work to survive and these are often not distinct groups but overlapping groups and the fight for rights of one group are often so tied up in the fight of rights for another group. And so when you have one group that is being um oppressed and discriminated against, uh, it it's not it's not a nice tidy little silo. It ends up impacting everybody. >> Thank you. >> Um, I wonder if your research has um if you've been able to ascertain if if uh homosexual acts being illegal meant that people were doing them less, like do you think that the that it being technically illegal meant that fewer people were looking at them then than after? >> I feel like I can't give you a correct answer on that. I don't know if there's any anything that I could point to that would give me a clear truthful answer. But I think the fact that we have so much in history showing that these communities existed and that people were gathering shows that regardless of legality queer and trans people have always been here, have always been gathering, have always been loving each other. Um have always been organizing and whether or not um certainly it's easier now to come out and to know yourself and to find your community. Um but I'm not sure that legality has ever stopped us. >> [laughter] >> Well, we're coming to an end of our program tonight. [snorts] Thank you so much for the excellent questions. Thank you for your thoughtful answers. You're like we're so lucky to have this person at the library who's just this fountain of knowledge. And she works with us. So thank you again, Michelle. Thank you all at home and here. >> Mhm.