Tag Archives: bisexual

Get out there and heart YYC Gay History

Posted on February 1, 2018 by Kevin Allen | Leave a comment

In the next few weeks, you can express your love for our City’s LGBTQ2 history in a couple of ways.

Firstly, this Saturday, there is a design charette for the Calgary’s YYC Legacy Project. This is moving the community consultation process forward. The first phase gathered feedback from over 400 participants and generated a dynamic Story Map. The design charrette will have architect facilitators to help participants share their ideas for the future creation of a commemorative LGBTQ2S+ public plaza in Calgary.

Design Charette Poster

Secondly, Sage Theatre is launching the world premiere of a new play called Legislating Love, by local playwright Natalie Meisner about the life of Calgary bus driver, Everett Klippert. The production will run from March 22nd-31st and was created in collaboration with Third Street Theatre and the Calgary Gay History Project.

The play synopsis is: “Everett Klippert was the last person to be tried, convicted, and jailed for homosexuality in Canada. Maxine, a young historian, discovers Everett’s case. She becomes consumed with finding out who he really was, past the headlines. This is the story of the struggle to define Klippert, beyond what history wants and needs him to be.”

Legislating Love Poster

We are excited to see one of our most momentous gay stories turned into art! Please join us; you can find tickets online: here.

{KA}

Backdating queer cinema in YYC

Posted on January 25, 2018 by Kevin Allen | Leave a comment

The Calgary Gay History Project is very cognizant of the various queer film fests that have stampeded through town in years past. Our contemporary Fairy Tales has by far the longest staying power: the 20th annual festival launches in May 2018.

Previous incarnations include The Fire I’ve Become Film Festival and repertory cinema programming at the Plaza. However, at the Glenbow Archives last week, we stumbled across the Calgary Film Society, a non-profit society which ran art film programming from 1946 – 1987, screening their international film series at the Jubilee Auditorium in their later decades.

The Calgary Film Society’s fall 1981 program, had a unique screening series called the Celluloid Closet, which they projected at the University of Calgary’s Boris Roubakine Theatre. The series only cost $12 and featured five gay films from the 1970s.

Calgary Film Society’s 1981/1982 program

1981 is relatively early for publicized gay cultural programming in the city. Consequently, the Calgary Film Society could be considered edgy in its programming. Yet, Fortune in Men’s Eyes, which had been adapted from the stage, might have been familiar to Calgary audiences then, due to its staging by the also edgy Loose Moose Theatre Company in March 1980 at the Pumphouse Theatres.

Promo Film Still from Fortune and Men’s Eyes (1971)

{KA}

Attention Calgary Queers Achtung!

Posted on January 18, 2018 by Kevin Allen | 1 comment

It is with some dismay that we learned about the City’s cancellation of the naked swim scheduled for this week at the Southland Leisure Centre. The outrage, disgust and threats of violence reached a fever pitch on social media. The City then capitulated to those threats under cover of a security review.

“The outcome of that review has suggested that it’s not prudent for us to proceed at this point in time, out of concern related to the safety of all users,” said James McLaughlin, from Calgary Recreation Services, last Thursday.

Calgary’s LGBTQ community has experienced the same moral outrage and acts of threatened and real violence in its history. In fact, the verbiage these anti-nudist thugs are using is eerily similar.

Opponents vowed to bring baseball bats to perform acts of violence. We know that threat.

Opponents vowed to publicly shame event goers. We know that threat.

Opponents labelled nudists, “paedophiles.” We know that threat.

Pre-internet social media: posted on the door of Gay and Lesbian Academic Students and Staff (GLASS) office at U of C in 1992 – the culprits were never found…

One person shockingly wrote on the Southland Leisure Centre’s Facebook page: “Hopefully, people like this will be invited to enter the ovens.” We sadly know that threat too. In the Holocaust, an estimated 15,000 gay men were “invited” to concentration camps to be exterminated.

Perhaps unwittingly, this author evoked more complicated German history than they intended. Early 20th century Germany saw a dramatic blossoming of naturism, the nudist cultural movement, that continued through the Weimar Republic of the 1920s, eventually gaining 100,000 members. (The Weimar state also tolerated homosexuals which the rising National Socialist (Nazi) Party claimed was decadent and immoral).

In March 1933, Hermann Göring, one of the highest ranking members of the Nazi Party passed laws limiting mixed sex nudism, as a reaction to the “immorality” of the Weimar Republic. In January 1934, Wilhelm Frick, Reichmeister for the Interior, passed edicts restricting naturism due to fears that it bred communists and homosexuals.

If we want our right to live in a society free from discrimination and bias, we must protect others whose liberties are attacked. Calgary Nude Recreation, the organization who planned the cancelled event, calls their modern day opponents, “terrorists.” They are accepting donations to challenge the City going forward: here.

We will be making a donation.

{KA}