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Queer Canada & The Police
Why do we have both Gay Marriage and Homophobic Police?
The True North
Canada is in an odd situation. In a lot of ways we’re getting more conservative. We’re caving in to US pressure on issues such as exports, border security and drug policy. We’re losing some of our universal medical care, and conservatives have organized themselves into a significant political force. On the other hand, we do have some pretty liberal laws, and we’re one of the few countries in the world to have same-sex marriage. How did Canada end up being one of the countries where same-sex marriage is possible? I could explain it as part of Trudeau-mania. Enough time has passed that we’ve idealized our hippest and most queer-friendly prime minister. Same-sex marriage is partly the result of the ball he set rolling when he decriminalized homosexuality in 1969. But other places where it’s legal to be gay don’t have marriage. Why do we? I suggest three reasons.
1. Regionalism keep conservatives at bay.
Canada is a patchwork quilt of regions. We’re spread out over a huge area, so frequent travel between provinces is expensive and impractical. Some of our provinces speak French and some refuse to acknowledge they remember any French. In addition, we have geographic divisions: a mountain range separates British Columbia from the rest of Canada. Two of our provinces are islands, and a third is almost an island. Several of our provinces have arctic climates while others are far south enough to grow peaches.
Canadian politics is are varied as our geography. We have national and regional parties, crossing the political spectrum: liberal on some issues, conservative on others. Only recently have conservatives managed to form a strong national presence, in the Reform Party. But the Reform Party emerged from Alberta, a province whose oil-based wealth, ranching, and bible-thumping have gotten it nicknamed “Texas North.” Their image as a party of wealthy white men from Alberta has hurt their attempt to gain support in other provinces. To make matters more complex, Alberta is sandwiched between British Columbia (a cleaner version of California) and Saskatchewan, the province who brought us much of our socialist programmes. Quebec, a strong force in national politics, has traditionally been as liberal on sexual issues as Alberta has been conservative. The Maritimes is sexually conservative, but small enough to be friendly, so they sometimes back gay rights if they’re pitched in terms of marriage or pension benefits.
Although our geography enables regionalism to flourish, it also makes it difficult to forge national movements. This affects both radical and conservative groups. Focus on The Family reports finding Canadian christians generally apathetic toward issues. As a queer organizer, I can tell you that “our side” has the same problem.
2. Canadians are pretty laid back.
It’s not just the pot; we’re laid-back as a general rule. I’m tempted to suggest it’s because we’re a nation of immigrants. Most Canadians (or their ancestors) came here from somewhere else. Even my ancestors, who are considered indigenous, probably came here on the land bridge from Asia. I could suggest that this immigration mindset means that we’ve learned from the violence of our homelands and are now just looking for a quiet place to settle in. But the US is also a nation of immigrants and they’re hardly easy-going. Perhaps the cold makes us lethargic. Perhaps it’s the security provided by our healthcare, or the relaxing drone of the Canadian Boadcasting System. Perhaps it’s our school system’s de-emphasis on competition between individuals.
More likely, it’s an historical accident. Unlike the Untied States, Canada did not wage a war for our independence. Our methods of social change have tended to be slow, steady and bureaucratic. We seem to think that patience and plodding do more to change things than revolt. We tend to be strangely optimistic. As a result, it’s difficult for liberals and conservatives to get people fired up, even about an issue like same-sex marriage. Both sides seem to think it will all work out in the end.
Since we’re not easily riled up to support a cause, it’s difficult to get things changed. Changing Canadian law is a long-term project. Politicians (particularly gay parliamentarian Sven Robinson) pushed for including sexual orientation in the human rights code for 16 years before it finally passed into legislation. Early attempts failed because parliament and the Canadian public were insufficiently primed for them. Putting a human face to the issue ultimately proved to be more persuasive than early attempts at arguing for equal rights on principle. Sven Robinson came out publically and continued to be re-elected.
3. Gay men with money win court cases.
The reality of it is that we have same-sex marriage because a certain brand of gay man spent enough money and time to fight a case in our slow-moving courts. And on the basis of several other advances previously made by activists who worked within our slow-moving system the judges hearing the marriage case decided in favour of the gay men.
For the most part, these activists are liberals, not radicals. They own suits and have government jobs. They go to gay-friendly churches or temples and own small lap dogs. The Michaels at the heart of a key same-sex marriage case in Ontario are an example of this. Michael Leshner is a crown attorney. Michael Stark is a project manager for a graphics design firm. Leshner has been pushing gay issues in the courtroom for years, and volunteered to be a plaintiff in the case that brought gay marriage into the spotlight in Ontario. It’s unclear what Stark’s motivations were, because Leshner does a lot of talking and interviewers rarely seem to get to Stark. I’ve read that he’s quiet, was raised Catholic and likes to cook. But these are the sorts of men with enough resources, time and knowledge of the system to get things changed. They made the commitment to plow through the unglamorous bureaucratic warren of paperwork. It’s only when they win that it makes the headlines.
Canada's Police: Blue, not Pink
Toronto's gay bath raids in February of 1981 were a touchstone for emerging queer activism in Canada. Some have called this our Stonewall. This history was rediscovered by many queer women when the women's bathhouse night, Pussy Palace, was raided on September 14, 2000. It was personal for me as well; I had been at the Pussy Palace that night, but missed the raid itself. I went home at 11 p.m. with menstrual cramp, missing the raid by two hours. The long drawn out court case over the "liquor violations" and their investigation revealed a deep-seated homophobia within individual police officers, as well as an institutionalized anti-queer police culture.
Why, in such a laid-back country, with our pot and our gay marriage, do our police keep raiding our bathhouses? A better way to put this might be to ask why do we have a police force that’s so out of touch with the government’s position on personal rights? I suggest that’s partly due to the nature of the job, and to the kind of people attracted to that job. But it's also partly due to queers.
Being a police officer isn’t something a normal person wants to do. It’s stressful. People shoot at you. Regular citizens are afraid that you’ll challenge them on the myriad of small crimes most of us commit every day. So they don’t let their guard down with you. They don’t invite you to their parties.
And it’s a mutual suspicion. Police view every citizen as a potential criminal, so they’re never sure when they’re safe, unless they’re with other cops. This encourages them to think in terms of us (the cops) and them (everyone else). The kinds of people attracted to a high stress job filled with paranoia and an us/them mindset are the kinds of people that already experience the world this way. Submitting themselves to a group ego gives them a sense of belonging they never had. Also, these men tend to be insecure about their masculinity, so they’re drawn to carrying a gun and they don’t like queers. Upon reflection, the question shouldn’t be “why do we have such a homophobic police force,” but “can’t we come up with a better system for social maintenance than using people most of us can’t stand as babysitters and cannon fodder?”
Personally, I think one of the reasons queers have put more energy into organizing circuit parties than we have into changing the police is that a homophobic police force serves a function. Much of the queer culture we have today rose in response to police harassment of gay mens baths in the late seventies and early eighties. Overt actions by the police help us to make our case that yes, we really are oppressed. It’s easier to establish oppression when you have something grievous to point to than when you have an accumulation of ambiguous neglect, inequities, erasures and snubs.
Police harassment provides a uniting force that helps us overlook many of the fractures of our community. The GLBTTIQ community isn't one big happy family, and the ever-increasing acronym is a symptom if this. I disagree with the people who pine for the days when everyone pretended they were happy being called “gay.” Yet I recognize that even the most inclusive acronym is hiding real differences. I find myself more than a little peeved, for example, when I find that gays and lesbians are not as willing to fight biphobia as they are to have bisexuals fight homophobia. The problem Toronto’s bi community is having getting city hall to proclaim Celebrate Bisexuality Day is just one example of this.
Liberals are, as a whole, easily sated. It’s not that we’re lazy exactly, but it’s difficult to get us burning with the kind of zeal that seems to fuel the religious right. Without religious fervour to rely on, we need another source of energy. I’ve found that a good righteous indignation or an infuriating incident can keep me going through tedious paperwork for months. A homophobic police and a stubbornly ignorant city hall do a good job of pissing me off enough to boost my queer activist production.
With police being such homophobes, many of us are reluctant to seek their services. As a result, many issues that might be taken to the police in a straight context get handled "in house" in a queer context. Gay bashing gets under-reported, as does domestic violence and other crimes. We're short changing ourselves in that we pay for a service we aren't using very much. On the plus side, we may be developing new ways of keeping the peace so we don't have to call 911. There are issues with this kind of community policing (just as there are with similar systems in native or muslim communities), but they're at least offering an alternative model of justice.
Despite the outreach the police have attempted, most queers are reluctant to consider a career in uniform (the police uniform, anyway). Many of us, having experienced police harassment, find it hard to believe that we would be welcome as insiders to police culture. The us/them mindset needed to belong in the service would separate us from our queer cultural identity. There's also a conflict between upholding the law and cultural traditions some queers value (like park sex).
For more on the Pussy Palace: http://www.pussypalacetoronto.com/
Alison L Bain and Catherine J Nash, "The Toronto Women's Bathhouse Raid: Querying Queer Identities in the Courtroom," Antipode 39, no. 1 (February 2007): 17–34.
For more on the 1981 raids:
Gary Kinsman, "Toronto Pride 1981 - setting the historical record queer," Upping The Ante: A Journal of Theory and Action (June 22, 2005). http://www.uppingtheanti.org/node/1434
The Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives, http://www.clga.ca/ Material/Records/docs/flitchro/81.htm
