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.

Happy Pride 2008!

I just wanted to wish a Happy Pride to those here in Montreal!

As of last July, gay sex has been legal only 39 years in this country. In that time, we’ve secured most of our basic fundamental legal rights. And while there’s a lot still to do on the government/legal front — not to mention working to change the social climate — it’s a good day to reflect how far we’ve come.

Thirty-nine years is nothing in historical time. We’ve come a long way in a short time.

The Media and Homosexuality in the 19th Century, Part 1 – Two Celebrity Trials

Toward the end of the 19th Century, the traditional silence of the Canadian media on the subject of homosexuality began to crack. The media had previously maintained a constant state of denial around homosexuality – claiming that it did not exist in Canada, at least not among Europeans, when it was mentioned at all. Gradually, though, newspapers began to cover sodomy and gross indecency trials.

Trials for sodomy had been mentioned in passing as far back as 1841, but only in a few newspapers. Details other than names and sentences were rare, though, and buried in among long columns reporting other trials. Most newspapers did not report them at all.

The first sodomy trial I’ve found in-depth coverage for was that of Francis J. Widdows, a Franciscan monk whose sodomy trial helped fuel anti-Catholic sentiments in a religion-divided Canada. It’s one of two of what I call “celebrity trials” for homosexuality covered by Canadian papers of the period. The other one – that of Oscar Wilde – received very different coverage.

The Queen versus Francis J. Widdows

The first arrival of Widdows on the public stage was in the pages of a newspaper called The Irish Canadian, though he is never mentioned by name. The Irish Canadian was a staunchly Catholic newspaper, and was possibly hoping to avoid the wave of anti-Catholic feelings the coming trial was likely to provoke:

We deem it our duty to put all men and lads, especially of the Christian Associations, on their guard against a corrupt monster, who takes a diabolical pleasure in singling out, and destroying the modest instincts of youth. This scoundrel is 26 years of age, hails from England, has dark hair and beard, shaven, and very black eye-brows meeting heavily over his nose, wears half a clerical suit. His height is about 5 feet 6 inches; he haunts theatres and other places of amusement where he singles out his prey, and the pursues it. When he tries to smile a certain strange and fearful grin distorts his face. He is such a figure as one would be supposed to meet in a back lane of Sodom and Gomorrah.

We feel bound to protect our youth and pursue this incarnate demon of impurity. We beg of our contemporaries to pass around, that all may be warned against this wretch. He has been for some time around Perth, and has lately turned up in Toronto where his hypocrisy and iniquity have been discovered. He pretends the convert, now from Catholicity and again from Protestantism. There is a warrant out for his arrest.

Given the tone – this demon cloaked in human flesh, haunting theatres and devouring the young – one might expect the article to be discussing a paedophile who’d attacked a string of little boys. Actually, the warrant brought the monk up on charges of gay sex with another adult in the crypt of a church, and it was most likely not a case of rape.

The The Globe (now The Globe & Mail) has the only complete coverage I’ve been able to find of the trial. It is one of our few looks at gay life in Canada prior to the 1890s. Widdows was being charged with have had “sodomy” with a man named James Rodgers, who was also at the monastery.

Their relationship had begun with a conversation about England. At some point in the trial, Rodgers admitted that it was he who first propositioned Widdows, saying, “I would like to have you in my bedroom.” Widdows said he would like that, too. Under cross-examination – Widdows represented himself – Rodgers admitted that he’d had sex with men “on many occasions both in England and Canada.” Widdows, meanwhile, was probably younger, and this seemed to have been his first time.

They had sex in the crypt of the church. Rodgers clearly must have felt guilty immediately after, because Widdows told him he would be “a fool to confess anything of that kind to the priest, as it was no harm.”

Rodgers went to the priest anyway. Widdows suggested Rodgers had been threatened into coming forward, but Rodgers said, “I was told only that it ought to be done.” Widdows then claimed that his views on the Fenians made him unpopular in his church, and that the charges had been fabricated to get rid of him.

The judge didn’t buy it. Widdows was convicted of, as the judge put it, “an outrage on humanity so repulsive and abominable, that in the language of the indictment, it was not fit to be named by Christian people.” Rodgers got off with a warning – probably because he had come forward – but Widdows got “five months’ imprisonment in the common gaol, with hard labour.”

If Widdows was a victim in this first case, he becomes an increasingly less sympathetic figure as his story continues, even to modern eyes. His conviction began Widdows’ very public crusade against the Catholic Church. Still claiming that the charges had been fabricated, he launched a lecture tour, claiming to reveal the dark secrets of the church from an insider’s perspective. In Toronto in 1881, he called his speech “Monkish Impostures, Ancient and Modern.”

This was the same period that had produced the memoires of Maria Monk, full of lurid (and false) accusations of seminaries linked to convents by secret tunnels, and of graveyards full of nuns’ babies. It was also a time in which men died in riots between Catholics and Orangemen. Not surprisingly, Widdows’ lectures were as popular then as the Da Vinci Code has been in more recent years. In Ingersoll, Ontario, alone in 1878, he packed the town hall to its capacity at 150 people.

In 1877 – in a Protestant church Dundas, Ontario – Widdows had not yet begun his lecture when a group of young men hurled rocks through the windows. One nearly hit Widdows, but he went on with his speech anyway, in spite of heckling and shouted reminders of his time in prison from his attackers. The Dundas Banner, one of the three papers to carry this story, seemed more upset that his fans might encourage “his endeavour to stir up religious strife and discord,” than that his enemies had assaulted him.

By 1885, Widdows had fled the country for New Orleans, prompting The Toronto World to say “Widdows is of many nationalities.”

In 1888, Widdows was charged again, this time in Scotland. The papers are vague about the specifics of the crime, but Widdows seems to have played a secondary role and was only convicted of a misdemeanour. His friend received a life sentence for something non-consensual he’d done with a young man, but Widdows only got ten years in prison. He turns up in 1898 in Cardiff, Wales, again preaching on the anti-Catholic circuit, prompting a paper named The Victoria Nation to say “there is enough vileness in Widdows’ corrupt composition to pervert the morals of the whole British Empire and provoke the Lord to rain brimstone and fire on the offending city of Cardiff.”

Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde appeared in Canadian newspapers before his trial quite frequently. He was considered a trendsetter of the British Empire, and newspapers reported his wardrobe around the globe.

When Wilde went up on trial for gross indecency in London, however, it wasn’t mentioned in most Canadian papers. A notable exception was The Globe, which devoted a great number of front-page columns in the trial – beginning on April 24, 1895, when Wilde was called before the court. The paper mentioned that the writer was expected to “plead guilty to one offence.” On May 2, it announced that the jury was hung. On May 20, it announced a new trial. Two years later, as Wilde’s sentence was coming to a close, it published an interview with him, and an open letter by Wilde decrying abuse of children in the prison where he’d been confined.

The reporting in these articles is meticulous for the most part. However there is one small detail missing — The Globe never once mentioned what Oscar Wilde was charged with. Not is only is the phrase “gross indecency” absent, but so are the usual euphemisms like “unnatural offence” and “abominable crime.” To anyone outside of the reach of London gossip, it would be impossible to determine what Wilde was convicted of.

Only once did The Globe come close to admitting the nature of the trial. Reviewing five published poems by Wilde’s boyfriend Lord Alfred Douglas (whom the paper describes as “his friend”), it notes that in the poems “Lord Alfred Douglas calls for ‘his love’ to return to him.” It then publishes a poem by Douglas wishing death upon his father (the man who got Wilde charged).

Though Wilde’s trial was only covered by one English-language paper, the phrase “the Oscar Wilde type” – meaning homosexual – would begin to make its appearance in newspapers and other media. These began to report local cases with increasing frequency. With the trials of Widdows and Wilde, the silence had ended in Canadian media, and a public moral crusade had begun.

In our next instalment, we’ll look at the instigators at that moral moral crusade, the Social Purity movement.

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Sources: All my sources this month are newspapers. My best source for both trials is The Globe. The Widdows trial is covered in July 24 1875, while information on Wilde can be found on a number of dates in 1895 (April 24, May 2, May 20, and June 26) and 1897 (March 8, march 18, May 21, May 31, and December 6). Lord Alfred Douglas is mentioned on June 9 1896 and December 1 1899 as chief mourner at Wilde’s funeral. For the Widdows trial, I also used The Irish Canadian June 9 1875, The Perth Courier May 4 1877, April 20 1888, May 18 1888, and April 15 1898; Toronto World March 10 1885 and December 8 1881, and The Woodstock Review March 15 1878. Some of these stories were reprints from other papers – I have mentioned the names of the original paper in the body of this article, but I’ve sourced them by the name of the paper where I found them.