LGBT in Canada

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Although same-sex sexual activity was illegal in Canada up to 1969, gay and lesbian themes appear in Canadian literature throughout the 20th century. Canada is now regarded as one of the most advanced countries in legal recognition of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) rights.

Canada is a relatively gay-friendly country, with its largest cities featuring their own

gay pride
in all major cities, with many political figures from the federal, provincial, and municipal governments. There are a number of LGBT-targeted media outlets. Attitudes to LGBT rights are under debate within and between different Christian churches.

History

Main articles: LGBT history in Canada and Timeline of LGBT history in Canada

Same-sex sexual activity was decriminalised in Canada in 1969. Subsequently, discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation was outlawed in different parts of the country, and during the late 1990s, this was extended to the whole of Canada in a series of legal judgments. Same-sex marriage was recognised in 2005. Gender identity and gender expression were brought under the Canadian Human Rights Act in 2017.

Rights

Main article: LGBT rights in Canada

Since the Supreme Court of Canada's 1995 decision in Egan v Canada, sexual orientation has been considered a prohibited basis of discrimination under Section 15 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.[2] Some provinces enacted protections against discrimination based on sexual orientation prior to the Egan decision, with the first being Quebec's amendments to its Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms in 1977. On June 20, 1996, the Canadian Human Rights Act (CHRA, French: Loi canadienne sur les droits de la personne) was amended to include sexual orientation as a protected ground. The CHRA guarantees the right to equality, equal opportunity, fair treatment, and an environment free from discrimination in employment and the provision of goods, services, facilities, or accommodation within federal jurisdiction.[3]

Society

Demographics

While LGBT people live in both large and small communities throughout Canada, the largest and most prominent LGBT communities are located in major metropolitan cities, such as Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, and Ottawa. LGBT-oriented neighborhoods, or gay villages, such as Toronto's Church and Wellesley, Vancouver's Davie Village, and Montreal's Village gai have emerged as hubs of LGBT culture and tourism.

As the

Alberta oil sands, where some people reported themselves as both married and living with a person of the same sex, but may in fact have been migrant workers, who weren't married to the same person with whom they were sharing accommodation on the census date.[6]

Festivities

Pride parades have been held in various cities throughout Canada since the events of

Vancouver Pride
).

Toronto acted as host city for the international WorldPride in 2014.[8]

As of 2017, at least one annual pride event takes place in every Canadian province and territory. In recent years, particularly in the 2010s, successful pride events have been launched in many Canadian cities much smaller than the traditional gay meccas.

Whitehorse in Yukon; Norman Wells and Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories and Iqaluit
in Nunavut.

In some smaller cities, pride events do not feature the parade that is a traditional part of larger pride festivals; Waterloo Region's tri-Pride, for example, currently centres around an afternoon music festival in a city park. Most pride events are held in the summer, although the cities of Guelph, Ottawa and Whistler also have "Winter Pride" festivals based on programs of winter recreational activities such as skating, skiing and snowboarding.

Many of the organizing committees are members of Fierté Canada Pride, a national organization that fosters collaboration between and helps to promote pride events.[9]

Several major cities also host annual LGBT

Vancouver Queer Film Festival
in Vancouver.

Indigenous

Various Canadian Indigenous Nations have had terms to describe sexual and gender variance, such as the Siksika(Blackfoot) term aakíí’skassi which described men who performed work typically associated with women.[14] Within indigenous communities these differences were seen as occupying a unique third gender role, and were not seen as a difference in sexuality.[14] Today these people are often identified as Two-Spirit, a term put forth by Indigenous queer activist Albert McLeod, to broadly represent these variances within the many North American First Nations.[15] Having a unique term was important as Indigenous queer identity and concerns were distinct from those of non-indigenous LGBTQ+ people.

Religion

While the earliest advocacy for LGBT rights initially came from or was adopted by members of the left-wing milieu of Canadian politics, LGBT-affirmative religious organizations such as the Metropolitan Community Church played an early role in the advocacy for civil rights. MCC pastor Brent Hawkes, rector of the MCC of Toronto, became one of the earliest openly gay advocates for LGBT civil rights in the country, and performed the first same-sex marriage ceremony in the country, eventually participating in the successful legal struggle to have it recognized by Ontario.

The issue of LGBT-affirmative policies has also become a major topic of theological and political discussion in the United Church of Canada, which now ordains LGBT clergy and performs same-sex marriage ceremonies.

On the opposite end, theological conservatives, including those who operate the Roman Catholic Church in Canada and related organizations, officially object to LGBT rights such as same-sex marriage and refuse to perform or recognize them.

Education

Anti-discrimination policies apply strongly to state school institutions throughout Canada. Catholic educational institutions have tended to object to these laws and have entered into controversies with provincial governments over the prevention of

gay-straight alliances
being formed in Catholic schools.

Media

Canada has a significant number of LGBT-targeted media outlets.

The Body Politic and fab
.

Other past and present LGBT publications in Canada have included Esprit, Rites, Fugues, Wayves, abOUT, Outlooks, OutWords, Perceptions, GO Info, Plenitude and Siren, as well as a short-lived national edition of fab.

The television channel

OUTtv, a general interest channel for LGBT audiences, broadcasts on digital cable. Two premium subscription channels, Playmen TV and Maleflixxx Television, air gay pornography
.

The broadcast group Evanov Communications operated CIRR-FM, a radio station in Toronto which aired a mix of contemporary hit radio music and LGBT-oriented talk programming. The company was granted a license to operate a similar radio station, CHRF in Montreal, which was launched in 2015 but converted to an adult standards format within less than a year; the original CIRR, in turn, was shut down in fall 2023.

Nova Scotian comic book shop

self-published
books, zines, toys, DVD and VHS tape videos and other items. Proprietor Jay Aaron Roy also features a safe space in the shop for maginalized, LGBTQ+, disabled and at-risk youth.

Literature

Most contemporary analysis of LGBT literature in Canada begins with three poets,

homoerotic themes in some of their writing,[16] while Gidlow wrote what is believed to be the first volume of openly lesbian love poetry ever published by a North American writer.[17]

Nelligan suffered a

gay cruising spot even in Nelligan's lifetime.[19] Nelligan was also profoundly inspired by writers, such as Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud and Charles Baudelaire, who openly wrote about LGBT themes. Despite the sexual and romantic nature of Nelligan's writing, no records exist to confirm that he ever had a sexual or romantic relationship with anyone male or female;[20] however, later biographers have published some evidence that he may have been the lover of poet Arthur de Bussières.[21]

Analysis of gay subtext in Call's writing rests especially on his 1944 poetry collection Sonnets for Youth,[16] which contains explicit homoerotic themes and is inspired by Greek mythology including the myth of Hyacinth,[19] although his earlier collections In a Belgian Garden and Acanthus and Wild Grape also contain numerous references to male beauty.[19] In addition, all of Call's most explicitly sexual poetry is written in the second person, a common technique of gay writers who wish to disguise the gender of the person they're writing about.[19] However, limited biographical information is known about Call outside of his writing itself, so his sexuality cannot be confirmed.[19]

Despite the uncertainty surrounding their sexual orientations, both Nelligan and Call are included in John Barton and Billeh Nickerson's 2007 anthology Seminal: The Anthology of Canada's Gay Male Poets.[16]

Gidlow and her friend Roswell George Mills also published Les Mouches fantastiques, the first known LGBT publication in Canadian history, between 1918 and 1920.[22]

In 1943, critic

homoerotic themes in his writing, and accusing Anderson of "some sexual experience of a kind not normal";[23] Anderson was married at the time to Peggy Doernbach, and threatened to sue.[16] Sutherland printed a retraction in the following issue.[24] Anderson did in fact come out as gay later in life after returning to the United Kingdom in the 1950s,[16] although he continued to treat his sexuality as a private matter, declining inclusion in an anthology of gay male literature in 1972.[25] Sutherland later published a similar attack on Robert Finch
, dismissing his poetry as the work of a "dandified versifier".

Explicitly

gay male literature by openly gay writers emerged in Canada in the 1960s, with Paul Chamberland's poetry collection L'afficheur hurle (1964), Jean-Paul Pinsonneault's novel Les terres sèches (1964), Edward A. Lacey's poetry collection The Forms of Life (1965), Scott Symons' novel Place d'Armes (1967) and John Herbert's play Fortune and Men's Eyes
(1967) each an important landmark in the history of Canadian LGBT literature.

Several contemporary openly gay writers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, including Timothy Findley, Michel Tremblay, Tomson Highway, Marie-Claire Blais, Douglas Coupland, Wayson Choy and Ann-Marie MacDonald, have been among Canada's leading mainstream literary stars.

Beginning in 2007, the Writers' Union of Canada instituted the Dayne Ogilvie Prize, an annual literary award presented to emerging LGBTQ-identified writers. In 2018, Montreal's Blue Metropolis literary festival created the Blue Metropolis Violet Prize as a complement to honour established LGBTQ writers for their bodies of work.[26]

References

  1. ^ "Ottawa introduces first 'Gay Village'". CBC News.
  2. ^ Egan v. Canada, [1995] 2 S.C.R. 513 at 528.
  3. ^ "Part I – The context: sexual orientation, human rights protections, case law and legislation | Ontario Human Rights Commission".
  4. ^ "Canadian Community Health Survey - Annual Component (CCHS)". Statistics Canada.
  5. ^ a b "Same-sex couples are flocking to the altar, new census data reveals". National Post, September 19, 2012.
  6. ^ a b "Census may have counted roommates as married gay couples". CBC News, September 19, 2012.
  7. ^ "Looking back, moving forward" Archived 2013-06-20 at archive.today. Vue Weekly, June 10, 2009.
  8. ^ "World Pride in Toronto: One-year countdown begins". Toronto Star, July 3, 2013.
  9. ^
    Xtra!
    , June 11, 2013.
  10. ^ "Thompson will become third Manitoba community to celebrate sexual diversity". Thompson Citizen, June 4, 2014.
  11. Sault Star
    , August 19, 2014.
  12. ^ "Pride festivals catching on in northern Ontario". CBC Sudbury, August 20, 2014.
  13. ^ a b "La Fierté s’enracine dans les régions de Sherbrooke et Rimouski". Fugues, September 26, 2013.
  14. ^ a b Filice, Michelle (September 21, 2023). "Two-Spirit". The Canadian Encyclopedia. Retrieved 2023-11-29.
  15. ^ Michelin, Ossie (2023-06-08). "After 30 years, Albert McLeod continues to blaze a trail for queer Indigenous people". Broadview Magazine. Retrieved 2023-11-29.
  16. ^
    ISBN 1551522179
    .
  17. ^ Rexroth, Kenneth (1978). "Elsa Gidlow's Sapphic Songs". American Poetry Review. 7 (1), 20. (subscription required)
  18. ^ "Émile Nelligan, interné parce que gai?" Désautels, January 14, 2011.
  19. ^ a b c d e f "The First Poets, Part 1: “Gaydar Moments”. The Drummer's Revenge, October 13, 2009.
  20. ISBN 0773523189
    .
  21. ^ Gaëtan Dostie, "Nelligan et de Bussières créés par Dantin ?". Le Patriote. Republished by the Saint-Jean-Baptiste Society of Montreal, July 22, 2015.
  22. Xtra!. Toronto: Pink Triangle Press
    . February 19, 2015.
  23. ^ John Sutherland, "The Writing of Patrick Anderson". First Statement, 1.19 (1943): 3– 6
  24. ^ John Sutherland, "Retraction". First Statement, 1.20 (1943): cover.
  25. ISBN 9780802044525
    .
  26. ^ Peter Knegt, "Canadian LGBTQ literature is having a moment, and this Montreal festival is showcasing that". CBC Arts, April 18, 2018.
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