Tag Archives: Body Politic

Pride 2016: A Visual Wrap

Posted on September 8, 2016 by Kevin Allen | Leave a comment

Last week was busy with lots of Pride Programming throughout the City. One of our highlights was the Downtown Gay History Walk. We had a warm evening and an even warmer crowd of 60, who were keenly interested in hearing stories of our past. Our group had an interesting visual resonance with the first Pride Parade held 25 years ago in 1991.

Pride History Walk 2016, Photo: Tereasa Maillie

Calgary Pride Parade 1991, Photo: Luke Shwart

Then on Friday the Calgary Herald published a Pride article putting the Calgary Gay History Project front and centre (thank you Val Fortney). After doing a phone interview, Val asked if they could send out a Herald photographer (ummm…). Thankfully photographer, Elizabeth Cameron, was professional and kind.

Calgary Gay History Project’s Kevin Allen at CommunityWise, Photo Elizabeth Cameron/Calgary Herald

And finally, Parade day – we were worried about the weather, but it proved to be less cool than we thought, and the sun even came out in the Pride Festival grounds that afternoon. We ran out of our historical button reproductions, and talked to hundreds of interested festival-goers about why Our Past Matters.

Historic Button Reproductions that were given away at 2016 Pride

Project Volunteers, Ayanna Smart & Kevin Allen, Sept 4, 2016.

Thanks to everyone who stopped by. We appreciated the comments, questions, donations and kind words. We are looking forward to Pride 2017 already!

{KA}

Infighting in 1980

Posted on August 11, 2016 by Kevin Allen | 6 comments

Gay Information and Resources Calgary (GIRC) hosted the 8th Annual National Conference of the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Rights Coalition (CLGRC). Typically all of the cities who had hosted the conference in years prior also had coordinated a parade. However, factions in Calgary’s gay community were opposed to having a gay rights march here. The most prominent voices against were gay club owner Vance Campbell and Reverend Lloyd Greenway of MCC Calgary.

At a feisty public forum, sponsored by GIRC on April 7th, the parade’s opposition was strongly manifest, forcing GIRC to reluctantly cancel the planned march and propose a rally instead. The critique against the march centred around fears of property damage as well as religious, homophobic backlash.

Vance Campbell, who owned the Parkside Continental and who also was a part owner of Myrts and the Backlot, sent a letter to Mayor Ross Alger regarding the parade, stating: “The remarks attributed to GIRC are not fully representative of the gay community, but of a small group of persons interested in creating a problem where previously there had not been one.” He copied his missive to Calgary’s Chief of Police, Brian Sawyer.

Rev. Lloyd Greenway said, “We’ve had it good here for so long. There are other ways to get rights than be going out and marching. Calgary does not need a bunch of eastern radicals – and believe me I’m from the east and I know what they’re like – marching through downtown.”

The Imperial Court of the Chinook Arch was on the record saying: “the minute you start flaunting yourself, you’ve got a problem. [The march] is an embarrassment to the entire community.”

There was also a petition, whose source was unknown, circulating in local gay clubs, addressed to the Mayor and Chief of Police to thwart any proposed gay rights march.

The divisive debate was widely covered in local press, and saw several gay sources make controversial statements such as suggesting that there was no discrimination in Alberta, and that gays have it good in Calgary. GIRC, and the rest of the activist community in Calgary (as well as across the country), strenuously disagreed. The Body Politic, Canada’s gay liberation journal, wrote an editorial decidedly in support of a march.

By mid-May GIRC’s Board of Directors decided to obtain a parade permit – just in case – should the conference delegates decide to hold a march on their own accord. However, Chief Sawyer refused to sign a parade permit and told GIRC that participants in an unauthorized march would be arrested and charged with creating an unlawful public disturbance.

GIRC President Bob Harris talking to Police at City Hall Rally, June 28, 1980. Photo source: Body Politic, Issue 65 August 1980.

In the end, about 40 angry conference delegates massed on City Hall on June 28th, for refusing to issue the parade permit. They silently picketed for about 30 minutes: purposefully silent so as “not to create a public disturbance.” They then sang, “O Canada,” and headed off to their planned gay rights rally on St. Patrick’s Island. Ironically, the assembled group marched over there without any trouble.

Calgary Activist Stephen Lock at City Hall Protest. Source: Body Politic, Issue 65, August 1980.

{KA}

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Posted in Gay history

Tagged bisexual, Bob Harris, Body Politic, Brian Sawyer, Calgary, City Hall, City of Calgary, gay, Gay history, GIRC, history, human-rights, lesbian, Lloyd Greenway, MCC, queer, Ross Alger, St. Patrick's Island, Stephen Lock, transgender, University of Calgary, Vance Campbell

35 Years Ago The Bomb Dropped!

Posted on July 7, 2016 by Kevin Allen | 1 comment

This week in history, medical journalist Lawrence Altman in the New York Times broke the story of what would become AIDS into public consciousness. The alternative New York paper, the Village Voice immediately complained calling it “the despicable attempt of The New York Times to wreck the July 4 holiday break for every homosexual in the Northeast.” AIDS NYT 1981 It did indeed wreck the mood for a generation and caused significant panic, fear and anxiety in those early years of the epidemic. According to epidemiologists, Canada saw a two-year time lag in the progression of the disease, “or epidemic curve” relative to the United States. As if on cue, Calgary’s first AIDS death was in early June 1983. One Calgarian, who has been living with HIV for 28 years, describes the pervasive mood in the gay community then as one of hopelessness and hysteria. He feels his generation of gay men, at some level, still carry that fear inside themselves today.

AIDS tore apart the closet for many in the gay community. Society at large could no longer ignore the queers who were dying in their midst. And as the disease spread into the heterosexual community a diffuse AIDS panic caused widespread hostility towards the LGBTQ community, creating both martyrs and activists in droves.

Only now, from a generational distance, are we seeing the long-term effects of the bomb that was AIDS in the 80s. Sexual behaviour became a lightning rod for tension within the gay community. The Body Politic, Canada’s gay newspaper that was founded on gay liberation principles, had an editorial approach to AIDS coverage that was: “skepticism of scientific and media authority; the need to resist panic and hysteria both within and beyond the gay community; the need to seek information on which we can make informed judgments about sexual practices; and, most recently, the need to preserve what is best and most distinctive about gay erotic culture in the face of a disease which apparently threatens its very roots.”

The Body Politic (cover), December 1983

Other voices, confronted liberation politics, entreating gay men away from promiscuity and towards pursuing a gay equality human rights agenda. Some academics, connect AIDS activism to the rise of the equality movement, whose ultimate manifest came in the form of same-sex marriage.

And this is the lasting legacy of AIDS. A heady combination of militant gay action, tragic loss, medical ingenuity, and public sympathy accelerating gay rights far faster than anyone could have expected in July 1981.

{KA}