Racism and Homophobia: The Chinese in Victorian Canada

Late nineteenth-century Canada was not exactly a place that welcomed difference or embraced diversity. In fact, thanks to “degeneration” theory and its believers among social scientists and medical experts, both racism and homophobia were growing in the new Confederation.

The theory of “degeneration” suggested that societies could be put into three categories – the “primitive or barbaric,” the “civilized,” and the “degenerate.” This was a one-way process. Barbaric societies could become civilized, and civilized societies could degenerate, but not the other way around. “Degenerate” societies would eventually be overrun by the barbarians or more civilized masters, in a kind of survival of the fittest of societies.

The only truly interesting phase of the process – for the social scientists and doctors and intellectuals that believed in it – was the middle part. They thought that the goal of any society should be to ensure that its “civilized” phase was stretched out as long as possible. Once degeneration reached the heart of society, it would be impossible to reverse the tide. The fall of the civilization would be inevitable.

Throughout the West, educated people were spurred by fear of “degeneration” to see any moral tolerance as the first symptoms of an oncoming plague. And the poor and those from outside the Europe and its colonies were seen as carriers of this plague. “Degenerate” behaviours – gambling, drinking, drug use, prostitution, extramarital sex, a lack of church attendance, an inability to hold a job, a disrespect toward one’s elders, and (of course) homosexuality – were both the symptom and the cause of “degeneration.” The majority of Western intellectuals saw these things everywhere, except of course inside their own white and middle class culture.

These theories still had an aura of respectability in European society when they became the justification for concentration camps and the Holocaust in the first half of the twentieth century, and are still consciously argued by white supremacist groups. In Canada, the panic around “degeneration” resulted in a fierce and deeply entrenched racism directed at the black population, as well as at immigrants from India and Japan. But the two favourite targets of racist intellectuals in 19th-century Canada were the First Nations and the Chinese.

Even at the end of the 19th century, there were still people arguing against degeneration theory – either from an Enlightenment perspective that said that people were equal, or from a Christian one of love of the human race and of compassion. In order to overcome what it saw as naive tolerance, racist intellectuals argued that non-white groups had to be contained, assimilated, or even removed from Canada for the good of the country, and that tolerance put them all at risk.

To make that argument, these intellectuals tended to claim that groups like the Chinese and First Nations had tendencies toward vices even the most liberal weren’t likely to defend. And homosexuality was a favourite charge.

The Chinese in Canada

In the mid-nineteenth century, the first Chinese came north to British Columbia following the tide of gold rush to the Fraser Valley. Pretty soon they were joined by workers imported in large numbers directly from China to make up labour shortages on the Canadian railroad.

The Chinese largely saw themselves as temporary workers. Money was easier to come by in North America than in the drought-ravaged areas of southern China that provided the workers. Whole communities raised the cash to send their men overseas, on the understanding that after they would return after earning enough money to pay off their debts and put their family in a better financial position. Most of these men left their wives in China, and many left children. If the man being sent to Canada didn’t return to China in his lifetime, his remains would be transported back after his death to be buried with his ancestors.

Because they considered themselves temporary workers, the first few generations of Chinese in Canada saw little point in assimilating more than was absolutely necessary. Chinese workers often kept their traditional modes of dress. The community created clan associations that ran temples and assistance programs, to better reproduce life in the homeland.

The Chinese in Canada also tended to hold on to their traditional moral codes, mostly based in Confucian ideas, which Christian social reformers considered much too lax. For example, gambling in moderation was seen as an acceptable way to pass the time by many Chinese, but it had the taint of sin to the Protestants of western Canada. Intellectuals and newspaper columnists claimed that Chinese communities were awash opium, and that they were havens for prostitution. Some social purity groups claimed that white women were being kidnapped and forced into prostitution by Chinese men.

And along with all these other evils, the anti-Asian movement claimed that homosexuality was particularly common among the Chinese.

There was a small grain of truth in the claim. China had no equivalent of the West’s fits of moral outrage or panic around homosexuality. None of China’s gods called for the execution of homosexuals, and no one in China expected cities to be destroyed by fire for permitting it within their walls. Homosexuality, at worst, was seen as something funny, and in certain times and places in China’s history, gay love affairs were even romanticized.

For ordinary people in the areas of China that gave Canada most of its immigrants, sexuality was governed by Confucianist principle that said it was a duty to one’s ancestors to produce children. Confucian morality also suggested that there were certain behaviours that were proper to women and certain that were proper to men. So homosexuality was seen as a distraction from these duties.

But among the elites, homosexuality was featured without judgement in stories and histories, particularly in the histories around the Han emperors (202 BCE to 220 Common Era). Homosexuality went under such poetic names as “the breaking of the sleeve”—after a story about how the Emperor Ai cut his sleeve rather than wake his lover, Dong Xian, who’d fallen asleep on it – and “the bitten peach.” Among the Chinese, certain areas such the city of Quanzhou in the Fujian province had a reputation like San Francisco does today.

In Homosexuality and Civilization, Louis Crompton talks about the many stories in China of the aristocrats and their male lovers:

Clearly, these normative tales, if we may so call them, show an unselfconscious acceptance of same-sex relations, an acceptance that was to persist in China for twenty-four centuries. They contrast strikingly with the myth that dominated the imagination of Western Christendom – the story of Sodom with its supernatural terrors.

A few centuries of travel narratives had already cemented the idea for Europeans that China was a place rife with homosexuality. The Dominican monk Gaspar de Cruz had claimed that the earthquakes that had hit China in the 1550s were caused by the Middle Kingdom’s tolerance of “sodomy.” In 1598, the Spanish put two Chinese traders to death for homosexuality in the Philippines. The traders defended themselves by saying that it was common among men in China.

And right from the early days of the British in Canada, books were available to British settlers that described China like a modern Sodom. A 1732 collection of travel stories that found its way to Canada claimed that “Sodomy is frequent in China,” and said that “In the time of the Chinese [Han] emperors, there were publick stews [brothels] of boys in the imperial city Pequin [Beijing].” This collection also repeated the Chinese view that homosexuality was most common in Quanzhou.

Until halfway the late 19th century, British-Canadians had tended to think of homosexuality as something that only happened in other, more tropical places. And China, India, and even Italy were comfortably far away. The complete denial and silence around homosexuality in Canada had inoculated the colony against anti-gay panics that hit their peak in the early 1800s in Britain, and then began to die down.

But increasingly, homosexuality was being discussed as a problem. Newspapers began reporting sodomy trials in the 1840s, but started talking about it as a social problem in the 1880s.

Edward Gibbons’ Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire had convinced the intellectual classes that homosexuality could help bring down an empire. And Max Nordau’s Degeneration had argued that immorality and “effeminacy” could spread like a disease, both across a society and through a family line. So homosexuality was not only contagious, it was fatal to empires.

And right around the time social reformers were first seriously trying to whip the public and governments into a panic around the “problem” of homosexuality in Canada, the man in charge of finding labour for the national railroad – Andrew Onderdonk – imported 5000 Chinese men (and no women) from Taiwan and Guangdong – the province next door to Fujian.

Political careers could be (and were) made opposing Chinese immigration, especially in British Columbia where the anti-Chinese panic was at its worst. BC politicians Amor de Cosmos and Noah Shakespeare both built their careers on their very vocal anti-Chinese racism. While the railroad was still being built, however, arguments against the Chinese in Canada were balanced out by practical necessity. John A. Macdonald, our first prime minister, said, “”It is simply a question of alternatives: either you must have this [Chinese] labour or you can’t have the railway.”

Once the railroad was out of the way, though, political sentiment turned quickly against the Chinese migrant workers. A royal commission was set up to study the “problem” of Chinese immigration. Not surprisingly, many people speaking at the commission brought up homosexuality.

An American merchant named Thomas King told the commission that “Sodomy was a habit” among the Chinese, and “The practice of shipboard sodomy and pollution is common”:

Sometimes thirty or forty boys, leaving Hong Kong apparently in good health, before arriving here would be found to be afflicted about the anus with venereal diseases, and on questioning the Chinese doctors to disclose what it was, they admitted it was a common practice among them.

There are many reasons to doubt King’s version of things, including his characterization of the migrant workers as boys. Everywhere else, they’re described as young men, and the few numbers I’ve been able to find suggest that they were largely in their twenties and thirties. But this kind of slippage – describing men as boys when talking about homosexuality – was very common in 19th-century Canada whenever the subject came up.

King was far from alone in his views, though. A detective by the name of C.C. Cox from San Francisco said he knew of “one instance” where a Chinese man “cut out the penis of another who refused to submit to his degrading desires.” An Irish businessman named Cornelius Mahony who was working in Peru was somewhat less sensationalistic. He attributed “sodomy” among the Chinese in Peru entirely to the lack of women:

No Chinese women at all were imported ; in fact I only saw one little Chinese girl. The result of this was that crimes of the most horrible and unmentionable kind were common among them which it was found impossible to prevent. They were in point of fact sodomites of the worst kind. They were treated very badly, in many cases, in Peru.

A rare defender of the Chinese at the commission was an E. Stevenson, a doctor from Victoria. He argued that the Chinese migrant workers had been largely maligned with false accusations. Naturally, for him this meant distancing them from charges of homosexuality:

Gentlemen, you have heard several witnesses testify unfavourably on this Chinese question, and they have inferred so and so. And, from the fact that so many Chinese males are here and so few females, it has been inferred by Christian (?) people that – well, I hesitate to say it – that sodomy was by them practiced. I stamp it as a damnable slander. The man who so acts bears the mark of Cain not only on his forehead but all over him.

The 1885 commission concluded that the Chinese were a danger to Canada, especially in large numbers. The result was a series of attempts to stop Chinese immigration through taxes and outright bans that lasted until after the Second World War.

Gay panic and yellow peril fed into each other. To moral reformers, the belief that the Chinese were inclined toward homosexuality meant that their arrival in large numbers in western Canada could trigger the collapse of Canadian civilization into “degeneracy.” The existence of homosexuality in Canada had been denied up to that point, but now moral reformers were saying that homosexuality had arrived on Canada’s shores at last. As carriers of this supposed infection, the Chinese were seen as a particular danger to the country.

For all the panic about the Chinese and homosexuality, though, there doesn’t seem to be a disproportionate number of cases of Chinese men before the courts for “sodomy” or “gross indecency.” The Victorians were kept careful records about their prison populations and the race and place of origin of their convicts, and while the Chinese were charged disproportionately with almost every other crime, they’re nearly absent from lists of people charged with “sodomy” and “gross indecency.”

One curious exception is the case of a man named Ah Hoy, who in 1887 was sent to the British Columbia penitentiary for two and a half years for “Assault with intent to be carnally known.” “To carnally know” and “to be carnally known” were Victorian legal terms and quite precise, and suggests that Hoy was looking for an active, male rather than a passive partner. Sadly, this bland page of statistics doesn’t yield any other details of the case, and my best research has yet to turn up any more facts.

Naturally, the lack of concrete evidence to back up the assumptions of the white supremacists that the Chinese were carriers of homosexual degeneracy. Homophobia shored up and helped entrench a powerful anti-Chinese sentiment in this country that only began to thaw with World War II.

The Chinese weren’t the only group to come under the Victorian microscope because of their supposed inclination toward homosexuality. The First Nations of Canada, too, faced scrutiny from a society that already saw them as a problem to be fixed.

But this will have to wait for my next instalment.

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Sources:My best source for this section was The Report of the Royal Commission on Chinese Immigration, prepared for the federal government in 1885. It includes about 400 pages of arguments, mostly anti-Chinese. I only skimmed it, but I don’t recall ever seeing one Chinese name among the people called to speak before the commission. For background on the Chinese communities in Canada themselves, I found Smoke and Fire by Kwok B. Chan an excellent resource. For attitudes on homosexuality in China, I wasn’t able to locate a good print resource so I relied a little more than I like on Wikipedia, augmented by resources such as Homosexuality and Civilization by Louis Crompton and the Dictionnaire des chefs d’État homosexuels by Didier Goddard. The travel narrative
is “An Account of the Empire of China” by Dominic Fernandez Navarette, in A Collection of Voyages and Travels, 1732, accessed from Early Canadiana Online

The Media and Social Purity in Turn-of-the-Twentieth-Century Canada

“Media” to us means mostly electronic means of communication. In the 19th century, though, news, high art, and low entertainment were carried mostly in print. Novels filled the place of movies, serial short stories and articles in newspapers filled the place of sitcoms and TV news programs, and pamphlets filled the space of blog and forum posts online.

Poetry, meanwhile, was still a form of mass communication, and it was everywhere. It appeared in newspapers, was passed around and read at parties, and religious and political poetry would be handed out at meetings. Ordinary people read it, and it was used to advertise products. Politicians had to write poetry to prove their political street cred – much in the same way they might attend barbecues or rodeos to prove they’re just ordinary people today.

Social purity activists were very good at using the media. They mastered the use of newspapers, journalistic exposés, novels, and poetry to push their moral agenda and work toward the exposure and eradication of “degeneracy.” And even those who weren’t purity activists were happy to play the game of bringing “light on dark corners” – scandal, after all, has always sold papers.

Social Purity in Newspapers

Social Purity activists greatly influenced – and often owned – the newspapers. They spread their ideas through editorials, and influenced what news stories were covered and how they were covered. In 1897, a Presbyterian clergyman named J.A. Carmichael forced a major Winnipeg newspaper called The Leader to run his sermon criticizing the paper for its insufficient coverage of the evils of prostitution.

Interestingly, though, it was the French and Catholic Press that first called for moral crusades against homosexuality. It was the Irish Canadian that first broke the story of Francis Widdowes arrest (in very sensationalist terms). It was La Patrie that fretted that sex between consenting adults in the case of William Gray and John Pettigrew might corrupt “young boys.”

And it was the best-established French Montreal paper La Presse which first called for a police crackdown on gay cruising, in its June 30, 1883 edition:

A great gathering of “friends” yesterday evening behind the Palais de Justice. From the twilight until midnight, one could see gliding among the poplar trees long, lanky beings with tapered legs swishing by with an effeminate air, coughing, and calling to one another in sugary tones.

The fresh air and beauty of the evening had attracted to this privileged place twenty of these hooligans, men-women who hold there their ignoble Sabbats. Many times, these brutes, fashionably dressed, had been brought before our courts of justice for having given passersby a view of their dirty pastime. Light sentences permit them to return to the pleasures of their race.

Yesterday evening, Clovis Villeneuve, a “dandy” affiliated with this nocturnal association, approached a citizen sitting at that hour on the steps of the Champs-de-Mars, chatted in a honeyed voice and…was seized by Lafontaine, constable of the central patrol.

The unlucky one was only sentenced to pay a $20 fine, or spend two months in prison.
The sentence was very light. Why not send this hooligan to the penitentiary?”

Protestant Social Purity activists were not far behind, however, in using the papers to push their agendas. Soon, every paper was reprinting sermons on Sodom and Gomorrah, and every Canadian city was being compared to it. Cases of “gross indecency” were finding their way into articles on the courts.

There had been finger-wagging about the morality of individuals brought up on sodomy charges before, but the call for mass arrests was something new. So was the description of gay spaces – the club in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, or the cruising ground in the Champs-de-Mars.

The press, it seemed, had discovered the informal networks that constituted the gay community in those days – brought to the public’s attention meeting places, modes of dress, and ways of speaking that characterized a previously invisible subculture. And now that “degeneration” was on everyone’s mind, the guardians of morality in the press called for the eradication of this subculture, lest it spread and corrupt what was seen as a new country.

The Journalistic Exposé

Christopher St. George Clark was not a moral purity activist. He was a reporter with the Toronto Publishing Company, and seems in his work to be rather cynical.

Nevertheless, his most famous work — Of Toronto the Good: The Queen City As It Is — played well to the Social Purity movement, which could never quite get enough dirt to satisfy its appetite. Indeed, the cover of the book advertises that it was “brought prominently before the world” to the International Social Purity Congress at Baltimore, Maryland, by the women’s Christian Temperance Union.

Of Toronto the Good is a journalistic exposé by a seen-it-all reporter talking to the city’s marginal citizens – its poor, its barely employed, its criminals – and the people who worked with them. Although he sometimes mentions “sinners” of the “Somerset” and “Oscar Wilde” variety, he only devotes one paragraph to the subject:

If saintly Canadians run away with the idea that there are no sinners of Oscar Wilde’s type in Canada, my regard for the truth impels me to undeceive them. Consult some of the bell boys of the large hotels in Canada’s leading cities, as I did, and find out what they can tell from their own experiences. A youth of eighteen once informed me that he had blackmailed one of Canada’s esteemed judiciary out of a modest sum of money, by catching him in the act of indecently assaulting one of the bell boys connected with a hotel in that city.

Clark then goes on to enumerate a number of cases of both same-sex sexual propositions and rape (making little distinction between consensual and forced sex) and mentions two prominent merchants who were well known among the city’s young men. After describing how open a secret homosexuality in Toronto is, he concludes, “this fact serves to demonstrate how little is actually known to the police of what is taking place right under their noses, while these very men and their acts of indecency are the talk of all the boys of the city.”

One thing that’s interesting to note about Clark’s descriptions that’s mirrored in the newspaper coverage of “gross indecency” of the time: journalists always went out of their way to describe sex between men as if it were an act of paedophilia. A sixteen year old or eighteen year old would generally be a “young man” in any other article, but becomes a “boy,” in these descriptions almost inevitably.

It’s worth noting here that the age of consent for heterosexuals was fourteen in Canada, and at that age a person could be convicted of “sodomy” or “gross indecency” themselves if they were a consenting partner. They could be sent to adult prison. By infantilizing the younger partner, though, the Social Purity activists and the journalists who catered to them were able to make homosexuality seem more predatory.

The Poem

It’s difficult to think of poems as having once been mass media. But poetry once filled the place that electronic music now has in Canada. It wasn’t yet the private exercise of bohemians at odds with their society.

Still, poetry was considered a more respectable mass art form, and so there were fewer things you could get away with. Bible stories, however, were always allowable. Homosexuality is frequently hinted at by references to the “cities on the plain,” Sodom and Gomorrah.

By focusing on the Sodom story, poetry tended to make homosexuality seem to be a thing of the past, extinct in the modern world. One exception is in the work of Nova Scotia’s most prominent poet, Moses Hardy Nickerson, who put out a great number of morally uplifting poems. In his poem “Cupid’s Career,” he gives one of the only descriptions of homosexuality in the modern world in Canadian poetry of the time.

In “Cupid’s Career,” the god of pure love comes to an unnamed modern city. Nickerson’s city is a twisted, soulless, degenerate Gotham of a place. After meeting as number of “rivals” – love of gold, love of finery, love of empty sophistication – Cupid encounters yet another “false” love:

Soon he met another rival,
Painted [with makeup] to conceal a stain
‘Twas that lightning scarred survival
From the Cities of the Plain.

The image of the man in makeup seems to echo the effeminate gay men cruising the Champs-de-Mars in the La Presse article. If these portrayals are accurate, they seem to suggest something like the molly culture of England, which largely celebrated effeminacy. When the first first-person descriptions of gay life appear in the early twentieth century, such men – usually referred to even by themselves as “fairies” or “queens” – are a prominent part of the community.
As for Nickerson’s poem, it might be interesting to note that a previous stanza names Cupid’s homeland as “The Land of Delight,” and describes it (using a line from the bisexual poet Lord Byron) as “Where burning Sappho loved and sung.” The irony will probably not be lost on a modern reader, but clearly it was for Nickerson.

Social Purity and the Novel

Unlike poetry, the novel was not quite a respectable form of media in 19th century Canada. Novels were often cheap, lowbrow entertainment for the middle class and literate working class, and filled a niche like the Hollywood movie does today. They were often adventure stories of romance-bordering-on-pornography with absolutely no pretence toward a moral message.

Like with the debates among evangelical Christians now on the subject of video games, Social Purity activists argued whether their children should be allowed to read novels at all. Many Social Purity leaders advocated only reading non-fiction.

Other Purity activists argued that the novel could be a powerful tool of what they called “moral uplift.” One of these was Presbyterian minister Charles W. Gordon, better known by his pen name Ralph Connor. When Gordon wasn’t preaching fire-and-brimstones sermons against prostitution in Calgary – and urging citizens to publicly “out” the johns who went to the brothels – he was writing morally correct adventure stories for children that were intended to entertain while they taught the finer points of Presbyterian theology.

Gordon’s best-known book is The Man from Glengarry. Published in 1901, it was an international bestseller, and Canada’s most successful novel until Anne of Green Gables came out seven years later. In 1922, it was even turned into a made-in-Ontario silent movie.

For our purposes, what’s really interesting about The Man from Glengarry is that this 107-year-old novel contains what appears to be the first gay character in Canadian fiction. “Little Merrill” is an aristocratic and effeminate man whom the main character – the unfortunately-named Ranald “Glengarry” Macdonald – has managed to reform.

The name was likely inspired by George Merrill, whose status as the poet Edward Carpenter’s lover was England’s most open sexual secret. Gordon’s Little Merrill belongs to the gentleman’s club that the self-made businessman Ranald is now rich enough to join. Interestingly, although Merrill is supposed to be an ex-gay, his conversion seems to have been about as successful as that offered by modern ex-gay programs – that is, not at all:

The club-rooms were filling up; the various games were in full swing.

“Hello, little Merrill!” Young Merrill looked up from his billiards.

“Glengarry, by all the gods!” throwing down his cue, and rushing at Ranald. “Where in this lonely universe have you been these many months, and how are you old chap?” Merrill was excited.

“All right Merrill?” inquired the deep voice.

“Right, so help me—” exclaimed Merrill, solemnly lifting up his hand. “He’s inquiring after my morals,” he explained to the men who were crowding about; “and I don’t give a blank blank who knows it,” continued little Merrill, warmly, “my present magnificent manhood,” smiting himself on the breast, “I owe to that dear old solemnity there,” pointing to Ranald.

“Shut up, Merrill, or I’ll spank you,” said Ranald.

“You will, eh?” cried Merrill, looking at him. “Look at him vaunting his beastly fitness over the frail and weak. I say, men, did you ever behold such condition! See that clear eye, that velvety skin, that – Oh, I say! pax! pax! peccavi!”

“There,” said Ranald, putting him down from the billiard table, “perhaps you will learn when to be seen.”

“Brute,” murmured Little Merrill, rubbing the sore place, “but ain’t he fit?”

There are a couple of oddities of this portrayal – aside from the fact that Merrill is variously characterized as a pagan (“by all the gods”), and atheist (“lonely universe”) and a Catholic (“Peccavi”) in a few lines.

Firstly, Merrill is a young man going after an older man – a reversal of the older-predator, young-boy stereotype that had flooded Canadian papers. Secondly, Gordon seems aware of something that the ex-gay movement is still in denial about – that religion can’t make gay men into straight men. These two surprising bits of realism, plus the relative sympathy of the portrayal by a Social Purity leader, make me wonder if Merrill is based on someone Gordon really encountered in the course of his mission work.

Thanks to the climate of homophobia generated by the Social Purity movement, though, these portrayals were overwhelmingly negative. Yet the period just prior to World War I saw the first response to the negative images of homosexuality pushed by the Purity movements activists. For the first time, queers began to speak back through literature. The late 19th century and early 20th witnessed the first flowering of homoerotic art, of writers popularly perceived as gay, and finally – in the 1910s – a gay writer and his openly lesbian protégée.

Their story will have to wait for a future instalment. For now, we’re going to turn to how homophobia and racism became closely linked in the late 19th century, and how charges of homosexuality were used to demonize both the Chinese.

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Sources: The La Presse article appears in their June 30, 1886 edition. Christopher St. George Clark’s Of Toronto the Good: The Queen City of Canada As It Is came out in 1898, and is now probably the most-referenced book on sex crimes in 19th-century Canada. Moses hardy Nickerson’s Carols of the Coast was published in 1892, and – “Cupid’s Career” notwithstanding – many of his poems are quite good. Last I checked, The Man from Glengarry was still in print from the New Canadian Library, which lists it as by “Ralph Connor,” Charles W. Gordon’s pseudonym. Gordon couldn’t publish under his own name because it would’ve damaged his credibility as a minister. The details about Carmichael’s crusade against The Leader and Gordon’s sermons against prostitution can be found Red Lights on the Prairies by James Gray.

Election 2008: LGBTQ Candidates and the Election

For those who are keeping track of the out candidates and how they did in the election, I’m pleased to say that — in the election no one else is happy with — we did fairly well. The NDP managed to elect two of its six queer candidates, the Liberals elected three of their four, and Réal Ménard of the Bloc held on to his seat.

Every queer person who ran for re-election won — the Bloc’s Raymond Gravel has quit politics. Even the well-known closeted Conservative cabinet minister held his seat, though whether that’s a victory or not I leave to the reader to decide.

Here’s a breakdown, party by party.

NDP

Bill Siksay won his tightest race yet against Conservative challenger Ronald Leung in Burnaby-Douglas. That’s good, because Siksay has been the loudest voice in the House of Commons for LGBTQ rights since the retirement of Svend Robinson. He is the only critic for LGBTT issues in the House of Commons (the other parties don’t have one), and he has been tireless on the issues of same-sex marriage, queer refugees’ right to asylum in Canada, and trans rights.

Vancouver East’s Libby Davies was the first queer woman MP to come out, and is the NDP’s joint deputy leader. She is more focused on anti-poverty issues than on directly queer ones, but she was one of the passionate voices for same-sex marriage when the issue finally came to a head. One of her main goals now is keeping the Insite needle exchange program alive, which helps slow the spread of HIV infection. She won by her usual massive landslide.

A special mention should go to Thomas Mulcair. Though Mulcair is straight, anyone who becomes uncontrollably enraged by Conservative homophobic policies on immigration — as he did when the Conservatives decided not intervene in the deportation of Kulenthiram Amirthalingam — ought to have a place on this list, and an honorary place in our community.

Special mention, too, should be made of Megan Leslie, one of the NDP’s new MPs — a straight woman who co-founded the queer group OUTlaw at Dalhousie, who’s done work on trans rights, and worked with a number of queer organizations. She was misidentified as a queer woman in Xtra.ca before voting day, though it doesn’t seem to have hurt her in the Halifax election.

Liberal Party

In the 39th Parliament, the Liberals had matched the NDP two out MPs for two. In the 40th parliament, the Liberals have exceeded that number, and now have three.

Scott Brison is a fiscal conservative who’s always been socially liberal. When he came out in 2002, he said he was “not a gay politician, but a politician who happens to be gay,” and his career has mostly focused on business issues, on industry, and technology.

Still, being gay has changed the course of his career. Way back in 1999 — when the Liberal Party voted en masse against same-sex marriage — Brison was a Progressive Conservative who voted for it. When the Canadian Alliance party devoured the old Progressive Conservative one, Brison no longer felt comfortable in the homophobic atmosphere of the Harper Tories, and found a more natural home as a purely fiscal conservative in the Liberal Party.

He was the first openly gay cabinet minister in Canadian history, being named Minister of Public Works in Paul Martin’s government.

By contrast, Mario Silva has a much lower profile. Silva is a cabinet minister that most Canadians have never heard of, although he’s been recognized for his progressive views on environmental, labour rights, and immigration issues.

He hasn’t been lacking on queer issues, however, since he came out. He spoke out in favour of same-sex marriage, and quietly tried to use his influence in the Liberal Party to get the Immigration Officer to permit Juan Camacho to stay with his male common-law Canadian partner, in the days before universal same-sex marriage in early 2005.

Still, of all the LGBTQ MPs currently in the House, Silva is the most controversial. His first election in 2004, he was not yet out, and yet ran an against openly-gay social worker in the NDP, Rui Pires. Some in the riding have claimed that Silva was running a homophobic campaign against Pires, and making his sexuality an issue. If that’s true, I can’t find a solid trace of it in newspapers or in cyberspace.

What is certain is that Harper Conservative Theresa Rodrigues was running a homophobic campaign against both for their parties’ support of same-sex marriage, and most likely Pires — who was out — suffered the brunt of the damage as a result. Silva only came out of the closet after his election — he refused to answer questions about his sexuality until after he arrived in Ottawa.

A new face among the Liberals is openly gay United Church minister Rob Oliphant, who beat the Conservatives in Don Valley West. Again, he’s mostly an unknown quantity on the federal political scene, but he’s been deeply involved in both Toronto’s gay community, and a strong supporter of their community centre, the 519. He’s also been involved behind the scenes in the Liberal Party since the 1970s.

The Bloc Québécois

The Bloc had two out members last session. But pro-choice, gay Catholic priest Raymond Gravel was refused the right to run by the church, even though he abstained on all LGBTQ votes like same-sex marriage.

Réal Ménard was the second out MP. He came out in 1994 in parliament, speaking against Liberal backbencher Rosenanne Skoke’s objections to including “sexual orientation” in Canada’s hate-crimes law. His background is political science, and he’s been shuffled into every position in the Bloc’s shadow cabinet, from immigration to health care to defence to public housing.

He’s also the Bloc’s unofficial spokesman on all LGBTQ issues. In 2004, when Montreal’s Gay Chamber of Commerce invited all the candidates for the area to debate issues affecting queer people, Gilles Duceppe — who represents the riding — didn’t go personally but sent Réal Ménard as his representative. During the same-sex marriage debates, it was Ménard who led the attack for equal marriage on the Bloc side.

Green

Of course, the Green party didn’t win any seats. But the Green’s one out candidate, Andre Papadimitriou, did increase his party’s share of the vote in his Toronto riding from 3.75% to 5.1%.

Conservatives

In my last post, I mentioned there was a fiscal conservative cabinet minister whose homosexuality was an open secret in Ottawa, but that I wouldn’t out him here because his record on LGBT issues was good. Well, he too retained his seat.

It does make me wonder, though — would he still be with us if he’d come out in the last parliament? Would the ultra-conservative base of his party abandon him? Or would they have put partisanship and policy over personal disgust?

The Conservatives have run openly gay candidates, usually in urban ridings with large gay populations where they’re considered to have little or no chance of winning. These are usually fiscal conservatives who try to soften their party’s image for gay voters. Lorne Mayencourt and Chris Reid both come to mind. Chris Reid was primarily known for wanting looser gun control laws, while Mayencourt’s focus is lower taxes, and law and order.

I mentioned a debate held by the Gay Chamber of Commerce above. This was in Gilles Duceppe’s riding of Laurier-Sainte-Marie, which includes Montreal’s Gay Village, in 2004. I was at that debate, and that year the Conservatives were running an openly gay candidate in the riding named Pierre Albert. Albert’s defence of his choice to run for the Conservatives gave me some insight into the mind of an openly gay Conservative.

Albert was attacked from all sides throughout the debate. Put on the defensive for running for the Conservatives, Albert admitted that his party had an atmosphere of homophobia and a dangerous number of social conservatives. He argued that this was because the party was western-province dominated, and that the solution was for more socially liberal people from other parts of the country to join the party and change it from the inside.

He explained that as a fiscal conservative, he couldn’t join the Bloc or the NDP, and that while the Liberals espoused fiscal conservatism in theory, in practice they tended to make money disappear — frequently to their friends. He didn’t consider that fiscally responsible, so he felt he had nowhere else to go.

Albert’s arguments struck me, and I present them here because I’m still fascinated by the idea of gay fiscal conservatives trying to change the party from the inside. I wonder sometimes if this is what Mayencourt and Reid imagine they’ll one day be able to do.

If so, given their support outside the party — and the evangelical Christianity deeply entrenched within the party — it seems unlikely they’ll be able to transform the Harper Conservatives anytime.

The Records of the Major Canadian Parties on LGBTQ Issues

Since we’re looking at a federal election in this country on Tuesday, I thought it might be a good time to look at the records of the parties.

The parties’ platforms are discussed at length on other sites. But platforms during an election are airy things — anyone can promise the moon. I personally believe that past performance is the best predictor of future behaviour, when it comes to party politics.

NDP

It will likely come as no surprise that the New Democratic Party has by far the best record of any sitting party on LGBTQ issues. This started forty-one years ago, in 1967, when party founder and Baptist minister Tommy Douglas became the first parliamentarian to call for the legalization of homosexuality. This support became official in 1976, when the party was the first to make support of the gay liberation movement a part of its platform.

The party has most of “firsts” of LGBTQ politics. It ran its first openly gay candidate in 1988 (Douglas Wilson). After the 1988 election, the NDP’s Svend Robinson became the first member of parliament to come out publicly. In 2001, Libby Davies of the NDP became the first queer woman parliamentarian to come out. In 2004, Bill Siksay became the first MP to come out before he was elected and still win his seat.

The party was also the first to propose same-sex marriage — Robinson had been arguing for this throughout the 1990s. It regularly whips LGBTQ-related votes in our favour, such as the vote to add us to the human rights code, and to add violence against us to the hate-crimes provisions. It has “affirmative action committees” made up of LGBTQ members of the party that drafts its policies on queer issues.

The NDP was the only party to whip the most recent vote on same-sex marriage. One NDPer voted against it — Bev Desjarlais — and was remove from the shadow cabinet as punishment. She later lost the nomination for her riding. In an earlier free vote on the definition of marriage in 1999, eleven of fourteen New Democrats in the House of Commons voted not to keep the heterosexual-only definition of marriage.

On immigration issues, the NDP’s newest MP Thomas Mulcair made a name for himself fighting the deportation of Kulenthiram Amirthalingam to Malaysia, where he has already suffered violent persecution as a gay man.

Some activists have taken the NDP to task on the age-of-consent crime bill, as the party whipped the vote in favour of it. Age of consent laws are known to be enforced unevenly to control the sexuality of gay teenagers, and there’s a different age of consent for anal sex.

Still, it should be noted that Bill Siksay was the only MP of any party to vote against the bill, and unlike Bev Desjarlais when she voted against marriage, he remains a member of the shadow cabinet and a candidate. Not one Blocquiste, Liberal, or Conservative voted against it.

The NDP is also only party to put forward bills to prevent discrimination against trans people.

At the time parliament was dissolved last month, the NDP had two out MPs among its thirty — Bill Siksay and Libby Davies. The news site Xtra.ca claimed that the party is running seven out candidates across Canada in 308 ridings, but one has since written to me to inform me that she is not queer — she was misidentified by the newspaper — so that makes six.

Bloc Québécois

The Bloc has the second-best record of the four parties in parliament. It was the second party to have an openly-gay MP — Réal Ménard, who came out in 1995 when Liberal Roseanne Skoke was fighting against our inclusion in the hate crimes bill.

On the majority of LGBTQ issues, most Blocquistes have voted with the NDP — same-sex marriage, hate crimes legislation, the human rights code. Bloc MPs have spoken passionately on issues ranging from same-sex marriage to unfair immigration laws.

Its voting record has been good overall — although it nearly stopped same-sex marriage in its tracks by voting against a Liberal budget bill at a crucial moment — but the party is hampered by the fact that’s it’s a nationalist party first and foremost, rather than a left-wing party. For this reason, votes on things like same-sex marriage are never whipped in the Bloc. Seven MPs voted against same-sex marriage, and were never punished in any way.

Louise Thibault — one of the ones who voted against same-sex marriage — quit the party in 2007 over pressure to vote against re-opening the same-sex marriage debate. Thibault issued a statement a week into this election with five other former Bloc MPs, saying that the Bloc no longer represents Quebec’s interests. The five ex-Blocquistes lamented that the Bloc is now just another left-wing party.

Duceppe shrugged off criticism. But Conservative support has been rising for years in rural Quebec, and the Bloc now has to fight battles off its right flank — and from its own former right-wing MPs. Duceppe says he represents the consensus of opinion in Quebec, but as the province polarizes between an increasingly left-wing Montreal and the rest of the province, a real consensus will become harder and harder to find.

The Bloc had had two openly-gay MPs at the time the election was called — Réal Ménard, and a left-wing Catholic priest named Raymond Gravel. Gravel (who was pro-choice and pro-same-sex marriage) was ordered by the church not to run again, so Ménard is their only out candidate in all of Quebec’s 75 ridings.

The Liberal Party

The Liberals are the oldest party still going — the Harper Tories really are a new party, after all — so they have the longest record to look at. Sadly, the Liberal Party shines its brightest the farther back you go.

Way back in 1892, a Liberal named David Mills actually asked if homosexuality should be punishable with jail time. He thought whipping was sufficient. Even Wilfrid Laurier — then leader of the Opposition — managed to express some criticism over the vagueness of the law.

Fast-forward sixty-five years, and Pierre Trudeau was calling the legalization of homosexuality — though only after the NDP had raised the subject. The Liberals rightly deserve credit for legalizing homosexuality. Trudeau famously statement that there is “no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation.”

In 1978, the Liberals also passed legislation allowing openly homosexual people to immigrate to Canada.

When the torch passed to Jean Chrétien, though, the Liberals’ star began to dim. Chrétien was much more prepared to move with political winds than Trudeau had ever been. And the political winds in the 1980s and 1990s were the rising clout of the religious right.

The Liberals’ lowest moment on LGBT issues came on June 8, 1999, when they voted overwhelming in favour of the one man/one woman definition of marriage. Only three new democrats voted in favour, to eleven against, and none of those are still involved in the party. By contrast, the 131 Liberals — the majority of the 216 votes — voted in favour of the heterosexual-only definition of marriage. Only ten Liberals voted against.

It would be easy to dismiss this as ancient history, but many of the names on the list are people who are still very much involved in the Liberal Party — including some very disappointing ones. Seeing Marlene Jennings’ name on the list of those who voted for this piece of homophobic legislation, you’d never suspect she now frequently marches in Montreal’s gay pride parade.

Of all the members of the 2008 Liberal Shadow Cabinet who were sitting MPs back in 1999, only three did not vote in favour of keeping marriage unequal. Hedy Fry didn’t show up that day. Scott Brison was a Progressive Conservative. Colleen Beaumier — critic for multiculturalism — was the only Liberal who voted no to the homophobic bill and still manages to hold power in the party.

Even more worrying is the Liberal leadership. Jean Chrétien, Paul Martin, and Stéphane Dion all voted against in favour of the homophobic definition of marriage. In fact, the only Liberal leader (past or future potential) since Turner who could claim credibility on the issue is Bob Rae, who tried to extend benefits to same-sex couples way back in 1994 when he was an NDP premier of Ontario. Michael Ignatieff’s views at the time are unknown.

It’s not surprising then that the Liberals appealed all three supreme court decisions requiring the government to extend the definition of marriage to same-sex couples. To my knowledge, no one has counted how much it cost the taxpayers to engage in this stalling game.

When the Supreme Court of Ontario finally gave up on the government and made same-sex marriage available immediately, many Liberals followed the prevailing wind and experienced an instantaneous conversion. Those who’d voted no — like Jennings and Dion, Chrétien and Martin — suddenly set themselves up as champions of equality. I have never heard one of these converts apologize for the vote, nor even heard a reporter ask about it, but they did vote in favour of same-sex marriage when the bill came up again.

Not all the Liberals got the message that things had changed though. When the vote came up for the government to confirm what the courts had already done on same-sex marriage, just over one-third of Liberal MPs voted against equal marriage. They were, of course, never punished, as the Liberals didn’t want to split the party.

Not wanting to split the party has generally been the post-Chrétien Liberals’ mode of operation when dealing with LGBTQ issues. This is why when Liberal MPs Roseanne Skoke and Tom Wappel were never punished for attacking their own government, when it tried to introduce stiffer penalties for homophobic violence back in 1994.

This may also explain why the Dion Liberals do not have a plank about LGBTQ rights in their official platform — it could cause internal problems.

When the election was called, Scott Brison and Mario Silva were the party’s only two out members. It’s running a total of four out candidates this election in 307 ridings.

The Conservative Party of Canada

What can I say about this party? Its evil on LGBTQ issues is so well-known as to be proverbial in our community. When a study was released this year saying that only 7% of gay men and 10% of lesbians voted for Harper last election, the only shock was that the numbers were that high.

Still, it’s helpful to go over the reasons why there’s so little support for this party in our community, in case you’re ever in an argument with a gay Conservative — most of the ones I’ve talked to believe that Harper’s homophobia is a media invention:

• Harper’s Conservatives have overwhelmingly opposed same-sex marriage, homosexuality, LGBTQ human rights, and our culture. They’ve been the main engine of the religious right in making itself heard in Canada — and with 70 evangelical Christians among its 129 in the last parliament, it’s easy to see why.

• It gives its most extreme evangelicals positions of power — like handing Stockwell Day the job of Minister of Public Safety, and giving Focus on the Family’s Darryl Reid a place next to Harper in the Prime Minister’s Office. Of course, the most powerful of these evangelicals is Stephen Harper himself, who is a member of an extreme church called the Christian and Missionary Alliance.
• Its voting record is atrocious on all LGBTQ issues — on the same-sex marriage vote, for instance, 93 voted against same-sex marriage, while 5 voted in favour. Harper also killed the Court Challenges program, which we had used to fight unjust laws like unequal marriage.
• Sometimes its members slip their leashes and say things we suspect most of the party is thinking, as when Tom Lukiwski was caught telling a camera that homosexuals spread disease. The seminars run by Preston Manning and Tristan Emmanuel — aimed at helping evangelicals to disguise themselves as fiscal conservatives — don’t help the party’s image as a Trojan horse for puritans.
• Harper led the crusade against same-sex marriage. He tried to play cultural communities off against our community in a move that managed to insult everyone.
• He’s made war on LGBTQ culture, attempting to deny film credits to our movies, and cutting funding to queer cultural events like Montreal’s Black & Blue because they aren’t “family friendly” enough.

This list is by no means exhaustive, of course. But then space is limited.

To be fair, not every single Conservative MP is homophobic. The party does include a few purely fiscal Conservatives. Jim Prentice is one who has real credibility on the issue — he voted in favour of same-sex marriage. But the Prentices are a very tiny minority within the party.

The Conservatives are only running one out candidate — Lorne Mayencourt in Vancouver. Another out candidate named Chris Reid in Toronto dropped out of the race after saying that the passengers of a Greyhound bus who witnessed a decapitation should have fought back. Reid said, “This is where socialism [has] gotten us folks, a castrated effeminate population.” For many gay men, the statement resonates with homophobia.

There is at least one more gay man in the Conservatives race, as keen observers of Ottawa political culture know. But as he’s one of the fiscal conservatives with a decent record on LGBTQ issues, I won’t be outing him on this page.

None of its MPs were openly gay at the time parliament dissolved, though one as I said was an open secret.

Green Party

The Greens are an unknown quantity, having never held power and not regarded as a serious contender for any seats until this election.

They do get credit for having elected the first gay leader of a Canadian party — Chris Lea, the party’s longest-serving leader from 1990-1996.

Since then, however, the party’s taken a swing toward the centre. And while the official platform of the party is very much in favour of LGBTQ equality, leader Elizabeth May’s personal social conservatism has some worried. Until recently, her boldest statements in favour of equality were that the Bible didn’t require her to fight against same-sex marriage, and that there were more important issues to worry about.

This election, though, she’s taken aim at the culture of homophobia inside the Conservative Party, and presented a very progressive platform ranging on issues from reinstating the court challenges program to protecting trans rights.

Without a record, though, it’s difficult to know how the Greens would vote on LGBTQ issues. They are running only one out candidate — Andre Papadimitriou in Toronto.

I hope I’ve done something to help Canadians make up their minds this election. Our issues have been largely pushed to the side this election — an in the case of the Liberals and Conservatives, not even in the party platforms.

It’s important to know where the parties really stand when the elections are over and the real business of politics begins.

The Social Purity Movement and Homosexuality

Volunteer educators wearing ribbons and going into public schools – often over the objections of parents – to talk about sex with pre-teens and teenagers. Doctors addressing the topic of STDs and disease prevention in the media. Pamphlets and books urging parents and teachers to talk about sex with their children.

For the readers of this column, I suspect these images would more likely conjure up the work of the post-AIDS education movement than anything that happened a century ago. This, though, is the social Purity movement, Canada’s most powerful movement in the late 19th century and the first decades of the 20th.

And while AIDS educators often had the secondary role of fighting homophobic bigotry, the Social Purity movement used similar methods to fan the flames of that homophobia to a panic level.

Degeneration

Before we can talk about the movement, we have talk about the concept of “degeneration,” which was popularized by an Austro-Hungarian intellectual by the name of Max Nordau and which was the basis of the idea of “social purity.” Canadian sociologist Mariana Valverde describes his major work, Degeneration:

Nordau claimed that fin-de-siècle decadence seen in such writers as Nietzsche and Oscar Wilde was rooted in physiological nervous-system decay and would lead to harmful evolutionary consequences, such as “hereditary hysteria,” if allowed to flourish. The artists and writers despised by Nordau were characterized as emotional, melancholic, and generally feminized; Nordau’s plan for regeneration thus involved both the purification and masculinisation of “the race.”

The theory went that immorality – as defined by the respectable Christian classes and their religious leaders – caused the brain and the rest of the nervous system to break down. Drinking and gambling could be a cause, and so could a lack of personal hygiene, but sexual immorality was what most interested the theorists of degeneracy.

Once the brain had begun to break down, they claimed, it would lead to further immorality – and a hardening of attitude that turned into contempt for conventional morality. This would cause the brain to break down further. This process would eventually cause the “degenerate” to turn to the most vicious of sexual crimes, by which was meant prostitution among women, and rape, incest, and – at the bottom of the list – homosexuality among men.

Worse, this was a Lamarckist theory. Lamarckism was the pre-Darwin form of evolutionary theory, and held that acquired traits could be inherited. The children of a man who’d developed his muscles, Lamarckists claimed, would grow muscles more easily than their father had. And the child of degenerates would begin life in a state of advanced degeneration, and would likely produce children even farther along the line – unless someone (such as a well-meaning Methodist) stepped in to intervene.

Since degeneration was considered easier that regeneration, and since it worked through temptation, it was thought that it would spread quickly and swallow whole cities, regions, and nations unless there was a constant effort to stop it. If degeneration were left unchecked, human civilization would rapidly crumble.

It’s easy to laugh at such ridiculous theories now, but this was considered mainstream science at the time. Even the most progressive organization at least paid lip service to it, and those who questioned it entirely were seen much as creationists are seen today.

Laughing at it might also be disrespectful to the millions of lives destroyed by this theory. “Degeneracy” was the kernel of belief at the centre of Nazi Party ideology. It also formed the theoretical underpinnings behind the residential school system here in Canada.

The Social Purity Movement in Canada

While the basic theory was taken as fact, there were many quibbles about the details. Were poverty or uncleanliness causes or symptoms of degeneration? Which races were the most degenerate – it being taken for granted that Anglo-Saxons were the most pure, thanks to generations of sexual repression. Were there any races that could not be regenerated?

The Social Purity movement was never a unified group. It was a series of organizations that occasionally came together to fight for specific causes or share information. Each had its own ideas, its own agenda, and its own theories around the causes and cures of degeneracy.

For this reason, they’re extremely hard to pin down on a modern political map. Social Purity groups fought for better conditions for the poor, better wages for women, and running water and sanitation in the slums. But they also fought immigration, and sometimes worked to bring an end to the influx of immigrants from China. They set up education programs, taught cooking and languages, but pressed for longer jail sentences for sex crimes and abortion. They promoted personal hygiene and the use of soap. They pioneered sociology in Canada. They set up missions to convert Catholics and non-Christian immigrants. They fought for (and in BC and Alberta, won) the forced sterilization of the mentally impaired. In short, they defied easy categorization as left- or right-wing or apolitical, and it was only after 1920 that the movement would divide strictly along left-versus-right lines.

The value system that linked all these things was the fear of “degeneracy.” Whether trying to get soap and clean water and good food to the desperately poor, or trying to keep so-called “degenerate races” out of the country, their goal was to prevent Canada from “degenerating” further, and to “regenerate” – through personal cleanliness, sexual repression, and Christian morals and prayer – those parts of society that had already begun to degrade.

The major players in the game were mostly Protestant churches – mostly the Presbyterians, the Methodists, and a theatrical Methodist breakaway group, the Salvation Army. Catholicism often had to defend itself from charges that the church was degenerate, and the church and the Catholic press frequently tried to demonstrate that they more pure that the Social Purity types.

Social Purity activists operated through organizations that ran the gamut from the moderate National Council of Women (which controversially broadened the fight against degeneracy to allow Catholics and Jews into the movement) to the extreme Lord’s Day Alliance (which fought stores opening on Sunday, and which considered the adding of Saturday to the weekend to be a Jewish plot). They included the Methodist-run Social and Moral Reform Council, and the YM- and YWCAs. They included many doctors and medical organizations, and their ideas were promoted in medical journals.

Social Purity and Homosexuality

Although it took up a number of issues, the movement is now often best remembered now for its focus was sex. In particular, its activists were obsessed with prostitution and incest and pornographic images of women. “Purity workers” went into schools to teach “sex hygiene” classes, or what we would call abstinence-only sex education. They raised panics claiming that secret, underground rings of forced prostitution formed a web across the country.

Most of the literature focuses on “degenerate” women, usually described her worst form as a “fallen woman,” or prostitute. Degeneration was thought to cause its victims to deviate from gender norms, and the “fallen woman” was usually portrayed as lacking in feminine modesty and delicateness.

Female homosexuality, though, was almost never even hinted at. I did find one 19th-century Canadian medical journal in French that warned against “tolerated houses” – legalized houses of prostitution – claiming that Paris’s tolerated houses were practically “schools of tribadism.” “Tribadism” was the old word for lesbianism, and – dating to 1893 – it’s the first unambiguous mention of lesbianism I’ve found in any Canadian source.

Male homosexuality, meanwhile – though rarely mentioned directly – was universally present as the subtext of all fears of male “degeneration.” It’s no accident that Nordau’s archetypes of degeneracy were Oscar Wilde (who was not yet Europe’s most famous sodomite, but who was suspiciously effeminate) and Friedrich Nietzsche (the German philosopher whose love of young men were already the stuff of rumour in his lifetime). It’s also no accident he singled out artists as “degenerates,” and gave “effeminacy” as a primary trait of degeneracy.

Nor did these associations always remain on the level of subtext. One wing of the Social Purity movement talked openly of sexual “deviance,” fearing that if young people didn’t know about it, degenerate predators might take advantage of their ignorance. The movement’s most popular sex education textbook, an American work published in 1894 called Light on Dark Corners, speaks about homosexuality openly and puts it at the top of its list of “Startling Sins”:

“1. Nameless Crimes.—The nameless crimes identified with the hushed-up Sodomite cases; the revolting condition of the school of Sodomy; the revelations of the Divorce Court concerning the condition of what is called national nobility, and upper classes as well as the unclean spirit which attaches to “society papers,” has revealed a condition which is perfectly disgusting.

Another section of Light on Dark Corners lumps “Sodomy” in as one form of Satyriasis – male sexual obsession – and describes it as a physical disease that can be transmitted along with gonorrhoea and syphilis. This fits more with the descriptions of other forms of degeneracy.

What’s interesting about the first description, though, is how it associates homosexuality with the upper classes. Virtually all the literature the Social Purity movement produced around “degeneracy” focused on the slums. Prostitution, alcoholism, and incest were believed to be exclusively or almost exclusively working-class traits.

Homosexuality, though, was different. The homosexual degenerate could infiltrate the halls of prestige and power through its salons, and find an audience to spread its degeneracy and corrupt the populace.
Not that the idea of homosexuality as a corrupting influence was new. Edward Gibbons had claimed that it had helped bring down the Roman Empire. Now, though, degeneracy theory claimed to show the scientific (and medical) process that caused homosexuality to bring down Rome.

If it could happen to Rome, it could happen anywhere. Canadian Social Purity activists were determined not to let it happen in their new, pristine nation. After all, not only were hey building a moral, Christian nation, but degeneracy was thought to cause physical deterioration as well as mental collapse, and large strong men were needed to clear the trees, work the farms, and operate the machinery in the factories. In short, sexual immorality was thought to dissolve muscle tissue and leave one less energetic.

One wonders what the Purity activists might have thought of today’s bodybuilders at a gay gym.

Again, these ideas were very much mainstream. A major medical journal — The Canadian Practioner — mentioned in 1895 that several medical journals were calling for castration of homosexuals and other sex criminals. It added, “The arrest and imprisonment of Oscar Wilde for a ‘nameless crime’ and the recent exposure of the perverted sexual sense among many of the British aristocracy has awakened a feeling among many that imprisonment or fine is too mild a dose for such moral debauchees.”

Social Purity’s Legacy

In many ways, this movement is the thread that tied together the growth of homophobia in different areas of Canadian society. The Social Purity movement helped turn the tide of tolerance that the Enlightenment had encouraged by giving a veneer of science to homophobic neurosis. Arguments that homosexuality should be a religious and not a legal problem were silenced by making it seem instead like a threat to civil society.

The movement as a whole was ambivalent about politics, which seemed corrupt. But Social Purity activists had no problem accepting government funding, or lobbying governments for changes to the law. It was in part the influence of the movement that put “gross indecency” in the criminal code in 1890 and 1892, and strengthened the maximum sentence – when the law was questioned, after all, Minister of Justice John Thompson defended it on the grounds that it was necessary to stop homosexuality from spreading.

The Social Purity movement also helps explain why the Canadian Secret Service had to get involved in the first police raid on a gay space. If “degeneracy” could eat up Canada from the inside, then it was certainly a matter of national security.

Social Purity’s insistence on talking about sexual “deviance” in public, meanwhile, meant that homosexuality began to get covered in outraged news articles and editorials demanding a cleaning up in the streets. It was the topic of journalistic exposés, moral poetry, and in the novels of some of the country’s best-known authors.

In my next entry, we’ll turn to the growing number of discussions of the “problem” of homosexuality in the media – in newspapers, non-fiction books, poetry, and novels.

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Sources: My best source is The Age of Light, Soap, and Water: Moral Reform in English Canada, 1885-1925 by Mariana Valverde – this is, in fact, the best on the social purity movement in Canada out there. It has one odd flaw – though written as recently as 1991, it never once mentions the moral reformers’ obsession with homosexuality. This I reconstructed myself from primary sources – such as Light in Dark Corners, legal debates and newspaper articles previously cited and those that will be cited in the next article. This is especially strange, as she lists all their other obsessions exhaustively. Among the primary sources used here are Shedding Light in Dark Corners by B.G. Jeffris and J.L. Nichols, Max Nordau’s Degeneration (an 1895 edition in English with uncredited translation), the 1893 journal of L’Union médicale du Canada (Vol. 22, no. 11), and the September 1895 issue of the Canadian Practitioner (Vol. 20, no. 9). My interpretations have also been influenced by the readings sourced in the last three articles. As always, I turned to Wikipedia to flesh out details, and find names and dates.