Contesting Identity: Politics of gays and lesbians in Toronto in the 1970s: Identidad en Conflicto: políticas de gays y lesbianas en Toronto en los años 1970

Abstract

This article explores a particular moment in the history of Toronto's gay movement politics when the movements' ideological perspectives on the nature of gay and lesbian identities and associated spaces shifted dramatically from the so-called liberationist stance of the mid-1970s to the so-called ethnic minority approach of the late 1970s. This occurred within the context of a particular series of events that prompted gay activists to rework their conceptualization of gay and lesbian identity in order to be recognized as legitimate participants in certain pivotal, public proceedings. Far from being a well-thought-out and deliberate shift in political strategy, the ‘minority’ argument was, in many ways, a reflexive and unexamined response to unanticipated circumstances. Toronto's gay activists, in representing gays and lesbians as a minority fundamentally altered meanings associated with both gay and lesbian identities and with the spaces dominated or controlled by gay and lesbian interests.

Este artículo explora un momento particular en la historia de las políticas del movimiento de los gays de Toronto cuando sus perspectivas ideológicas sobre la naturaleza de identidades gay y lesbiana y sus espacios respectivos cambiaron dramáticamente, desde la llamada ‘perceptiva liberacionista’ de los mediados de los años setenta hasta la llamada ‘perspectiva de las minorías étnica’ de los últimos años de los setentas. Esta cambio ocurrió dentro del contexto de una serie particular de eventos que incitaron a los activistas gay a revisar sus conceptualizaciónes sobre su identidad gay y lesbiana con el fin de ser reconocidos como participantes legítimos en ciertos procesos públicos. Lejos de ser un cambio bien planeado y deliberado en la estrategia política, el argumento de la ‘minoría’ consistía, de varios maneras, en una repuesta no reflexiva no examinada a circunstancias inesperadas. Los activistas gay de Toronto, al representar a los gays y lesbianas como minorías, alteraron de manera fundamental los significados asociados tanto a las identidades de gays y lesbianas como los espacios dominados o controlados por intereses de gays y lesbianas.

Acknowledgements

My thanks to Dr Peter Goheen, Jason Grek Martin and Sue Fitzgibbon for generously giving of their time and energy during the long writing process. I would also like to thank the three anonymous reviewers who provided valuable and insightful comments on earlier versions of this article.

Notes

 1. Tom Moclair, The homosexual fad, News and Views, March 1979, pp. 10–11; Ken Peglar, Pensioners news, News and Views, March 1979, pp. 13–14 (Toronto, City of Toronto Archives).

 2. The words ‘gay’, ‘lesbian’ and ‘homosexual’ designate concepts that are associated with particular social categories of identity seen as culturally and historically variable. In this article, I use the term ‘gay’ to refer to men engaged in same-sex activities and the term ‘lesbian’ to refer to women engaged in same-sex activities. While gay and lesbian organization during this period referred to their constituents as ‘gays and lesbians’, the mainstream interests predominantly used the term ‘homosexual’ in their commentary.

 3. The 1969 Criminal Code amendments were considered only a ‘partial’ legalization of same-sex conduct because the amendment continued to define same-sex activities as ‘grossly indecent’ but exempted such activities from criminal sanction if conducted ‘in private’, between no more than two persons, neither of whom was under 21 years of age (Kinsman, 1996).

 4. The term ‘ethnic minorities’ is employed here in the same unproblematic usage found in public accounts of the period. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, local minority populations in Toronto were beginning to organize around seemingly straightforward representations of ‘black’ or ‘Sikh’ identities which were taken up without comment in mainstream commentary. Academic and social critique of these notions of ‘minority’ identities, ‘ethnicity’ and ‘race’ were yet to come.

 5. Although there is some research on emerging lesbian-identified spaces of the late 1980s and early 1990s, there is little agreement on why a more significant number of lesbians did not locate in gay male districts or on why lesbians have not created their own districts to the same extent or in the same way as gay men. Research suggest that lesbians, as women, are less inclined to be territorial, and have had limited access to the financial and political resources necessary to establish residential and commercial districts (Lauria & Knopp, 1985; Adler & Brenner, 1992; Valentine, 1993a, b; Peake, 1994; Rothenberg, 1995; Bouthillette, 1997; Nash, 2001; Podmore, 2001).

 6. It was not until the early 1990s that there was increasing academic interest in the formation of distinct and separate lesbian residential districts and in the distinctive ways lesbians utilized urban spaces (Adler & Brenner, 1992; Peake, 1994; Rothenberg, 1995; Bouthillette, 1997; Nash, 2001; Podmore, 2001).

 7. The term ‘homophile’ was used by the early assimilationist organizations in both Canada and the United States as a way to deflect attention form the sexual aspect of homosexuality and to suggest that the movement could include heterosexuals who were sympathetic to the homosexual cause (Kinsman, 1996; Escoffier, 1998).