Tag Archives: human-rights

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}

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Posted in Gay history

Tagged AIDS, bisexual, Body Politic, Calgary, gay, Gay history, history, human-rights, lesbian, New York Times, queer, transgender, Village Voice

Homophobic Hoteliers Created Activists

Posted on June 30, 2016 by Kevin Allen | 6 comments

The catalyst for the formation of the Calgary Lesbian and Gay Political Action Guild (CLAGPAG) came out of an act of discrimination. In the Autumn of 1988, a group called Project Pride was arranging a special fundraising event to help send a Calgary contingent to the 1990 Gay Games in Vancouver. They had just completed Calgary’s first Pride Festival that June and were on a roll.

The event was to be a banquet at a downtown hotel with high profile Member of Parliament Svend Robinson as the keynote speaker. Robinson had recently come out as gay, which was a precedent setting first for a Canadian MP.

The Delta Bow Valley Hotel happily entered into a contract with Project Pride to rent their hall and provide a banquet dinner for 70 people. In February 1989, Project Pride’s Co-Executive Director Cheryl Shepherd went into the hotel to make the final arrangements and informed the hotel about her organization’s constituency: lesbians and gays. She was then told that there had been a “misunderstanding” and that the Delta was not prepared to rent to such a group.

The Family of Man statue in front of the Delta Bow Valley Hotel in Calgary

Sexual orientation was not a protected ground under the Alberta Human Rights Act then, so the Delta’s decision was completely legal. The rejection prompted outrage among a couple of movers and shakers in the gay community. Dr. Ruth Simkin, an outspoken physician often labelled a lesbian feminist in the media, and John Steen, a gay man who was a Liberal Party Organizer, aimed to tackle the injustice.

Both Ruth and John were members of Calgarians Networking Discretely (later the Calgary Networking Club, an organization for gay and lesbian professionals), which was a partner to Project Pride in organizing the banquet. As neither Project Pride nor Calgarians Networking Discretely had any appetite to be political, Ruth and John thought an organizational name behind their protest would be advantageous: a working title of Calgary Lesbian and Gay Political Action Guild was created.

They sent protest letters to the Calgary press, the Delta Hotel’s head office in Toronto, federal MPs, the provincial and federal human rights commissions and the provincial Labor Minister Rick Orman, who was responsible for human rights. They got an immediate response and a flurry of excited local and national media coverage.

The president of Delta Hotels, Daniel Oberlander, called Ruth from Toronto to apologize personally and sent a complimentary bottle of wine. Local Delta general manager, Tom Matthews, was on the record calling the incident a misunderstanding. He said, “If we offended this group or any other group, that was not our intention and we apologize.” The Delta then made a cash donation to CLAGPAG, which turned out to be seed money for the organization.

The Palliser Hotel stepped into the breach and offered to host the banquet, which they did, and as the controversy died down, CLAGPAG became an official entity, with a 15-person steering committee by May, 1989. CLAGPAG was active for ten years and had many achievements, not the least of which was organizing the first Pride Rally and first Pride Parade in Calgary.

{Note: the Delta Hotel of the past is not the same Delta today. This year, the hotel hosted the sold out, 40th Anniversary Coronation of the Imperial Sovereign Court of the Chinook Arch}

{KA}

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Posted in Gay history

Tagged bisexual, Calgary, CLAGPAG, Delta Hotel, gay, Gay history, history, human-rights, John Steen, lesbian, Palliser Hotel, queer, Ruth Simkin, Svend Robinson, transgender

The OK Campaign

Posted on June 23, 2016 by Kevin Allen | 5 comments

Calgary Outlink, our community hub, has been in Calgary in one form or another since 1975.

{The Calgary Outlink AGM is tonight and open to the public!}

In the late 1990s, the organization was called GLCSA (the Gay and Lesbian Community Services Association). In 1998 they embarked on an awareness initiative called the OK Campaign, spearheaded by a resourceful volunteer and former board member, Brian Crawford. The campaign literature explained that it “was designed to promote personal reflection specific to gay and lesbian issues in the mainstream media.” In reality it was a not-so-subtle political statement and outreach tool.

Screen Shot 2016-06-22 at 4.01.45 PM

The campaign ended up targeting 98% of Calgarians through bus, billboard and poster ads throughout the city. The campaign ran in September of 1998 and 1999, and was the first of its kind and magnitude in a Canadian city. In 1998, the World Wide Web was still emerging as a communications force. The GLCSA crisis and information phone line was heavily used. In that year the organization logged 3700 calls, and utilized over 10,000 volunteer hours. Just over a third of the people who used the phone service were under 25.

GLCSA aggressively fundraised in advance of the OK Campaign: the campaign budget being $56,000. The community delivered: many pledging a regular monthly contribution in support of the initiative. One fundraising dinner netted $27,000. The local office of Pattison Outdoor Group were hired to coordinate ad placement, and like many other gay advertising initiatives before the OK Campaign ran into troubles.

Screen Shot 2016-06-22 at 4.01.10 PM Some local shopping malls protested having the text only ads in their facilities. Worried that the ads could offend shoppers, they demanded the ads pulled. Mortified Pattison Account Executives gave bonus advertising of $15,000 to the Campaign to compensate for mall owners who had insisted the ads be taken down. Eventually the GLCSA wrote critical letters to those mall owners but were restrained in lodging a formal human rights complaint by the “public education only” nature of the campaign.