Tag Archives: Calgary

Placard-Waving Homosexuals Picket City Hall

Posted on August 15, 2013 by Kevin Allen | 4 comments

The City of Calgary for the longest time did not like Pride Parades. One of the earliest confrontations between City Hall and the gay community happened in 1980. Gay Information & Resources Calgary (GIRC) was hosting a national gay rights conference at the University of Calgary. These conferences in the 70s and 80s moved around the country as the gay rights movement gathered a critical collective mass. Calgary’s conference was the 8th annual event: at each conference, the organizers would stage a human rights parade.

However, City of Calgary Police Chief, Brian Sawyer, refused the permit for the parade citing that “confrontation was a possibility.” Organizers decided to march anyway.

Photo: Calgary Herald, June 30, 1980

40 of the conference delegates, marched silently for half an hour, ending at City Hall with their placards of protest. Bob Harris, a member of the GIRC collective, and conference chair, spoke at the protest. He said, “We do know how to conduct ourselves – we’re not running through the streets screaming and yelling.”

The delegates later moved to a rally in Centenary Park on St. George’s Island. One of the speakers at the rally was Alberta Federation of Labor representative Ken Neal who expressed his disappointment that the parade permit was denied. “Gays are constantly harassed,” he said, “we object to such unfair and discriminatory treatment.”

Protests, rallies and marches were springing up all over North America in this period and became an important platform for the gay rights movement, creating visibility for a relatively unknown community. GIRC was located in the Old Y Centre for Community Organizations; Calgary Outlink today is a direct descendent of that 70’s incorporated non-profit society.

[KA]

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Posted in Gay history

Tagged Alberta Federation of Labor, Bob Harris, Calgary, Calgary Outlink, Calgary Police, City of Calgary, gay, Gay history, Gay Information & Resources Calgary, GIRC, history, human-rights, lesbian, Old Y, queer, University of Calgary

Gay History Walk Revisited & Other News

Posted on August 8, 2013 by Kevin Allen | Leave a comment

The queer history project has some exciting news. The province has come on as a project sponsor through the Alberta Historical Resources Foundation – thank you province’o’mine, and thank you Culture Minister Heather Klimchuk, who wrote us a kind congratulatory letter.

Since the project launched at last year’s Pride Week, there have been more than 7000 readers on the site including visitors from over 55 countries. We have had two incredibly well attended public presentations, and one amazing gay history walk as part of the international Jane’s Walk movement supported locally by the Calgary Foundation.

Many of you who missed the walk last May, have been asking for a repeat, and I am happy to report we have one scheduled for the evening of Wednesday, August 28th from 7:30 – 9:00 PM. [I suspect that we will retire to a local pub afterwards for any who want to mingle and chat!]

The walk will commence from CommunityWise (formerly the Old Y) at 223 12 Avenue SW – an important building that was a focus for our city’s fledgling gay right’s movement in decades past. A current tenant there is Calgary Outlink, our queer community support organization, who also is an ongoing sponsor of the queer history project.

Finally, we will have a table at this year’s Pride Street Festival, Sunday, September 1st. Come by, pick up a project postcard, and talk to us about queer history in Calgary – we would love to meet you.

p.s. If you have not seen it, Stephen Fry’s open letter to U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron, calling for a ban of the Sochi Olympics is powerful. Closer to home Alberta queer right activist, Kristopher Wells, called for a similar ban in an Edmonton Journal editorial.

p.p.s. For links to more queer news sites, check out blogger Joseph Atkins
“Top 50 LGBT Google+ Pages Worth Following“.

[KA]

Lesbians, Softball and the Cecil Hotel

Posted on August 1, 2013 by Kevin Allen | 2 comments

Sports, and specifically softball, provided an important outlet for the development of lesbian subculture and identity in North America. Sally Munt writes in Heroic Desire: Lesbian Identity and Cultural Space, “any sample of publicly identifiable US lesbians from the period 1960-1968 would have likely been corralled from the local softball team.” Calgary was part of this trend and in the 60s had a couple of women’s teams that were predominantly lesbian in their make-up.

After a game, teammates would go to their favourite watering holes, which for many was the backroom of the Cecil Hotel. Lois Szabo remembers being really excited when she discovered the Cecil. “We stumbled upon it by accident – all these women – it was like finding mecca,” she remembers.

Photo Credit: Del Rath

Carolyn Anderson’s 2001 Lesbian Oral History Thesis (available from the University of Calgary: here), contains more conversations about softball. She recounts one story,

“I wanted to be involved with all these women but I didn’t particularly want to play softball. I actually thought it was a pretty boring game so I became the team doctor. It seemed to suit everybody just fine. I would always take something to read like my medical books or whatever lesbian stuff I was getting in the mail and I could just be around all the neat dykes. The coach still remembers me and how she would look up into the stands and there was this woman reading through this whole game. After the games, some of the women tended to frequent the bars.”

The Cecil Hotel had a notorious past as a saloon and boarding house, and was always described as a blue collar bar. Built in 1912, the building became a locus for prostitution, drugs, murder in modern times. The City eventually revoked its business licence in 2009; police were called to the Cecil 1,700 times in its final year of operation.

Jen Gerson, in the National Post quotes Leo Silberman one of the Cecil Hotel’s owners. “When I bought the place [in 1968], the women were worse than the men,” he told the Calgary Herald before he passed away in 2007. “They fight like heck every day. Very, very rough.”

Lois concurs, “I remember that some of the women would get into fights, particularly the butch women if someone looked at their femme in the wrong way.”

However tough, softball and the hotel bar provided much needed gathering places for Calgary’s lesbian community in the 60s. Another quote from the oral history thesis explains, “With the ball teams, you had your north side gang and your south side gang. We were the south side gang and we all went to the Cecil [hotel]. We liked the Cecil because there was a nice private backroom there. It was marked for Ladies and Escorts and we’d laugh because we didn’t know which we were! God, we used to have a lot of fun there. They used to cater to us because we were the best part of their business.”

[KA]