Tag Archives: Ross Alger

Pride and Pre-justice (a recap)

Posted on August 25, 2016 by Kevin Allen | 1 comment

Proclaiming your gay pride in Calgary used to be hard. In previous years, homophobia and transphobia were actively practiced in our city. We had both an unsympathetic society and an unjust state. Here is the speediest of recaps.

1980 – Calgary gay activists host a national gay rights conference that ends in a controversial rally and march. Then Mayor Ross Alger and police Chief, Brian Sawyer are decidedly unsupportive.

1981 – Newly elected Calgary Mayor Ralph Klein proclaims he is a mayor for everyone including the gay community, then quickly distances himself from gays due to public outcry.

1987 – Delegates from many of Calgary’s gay and lesbian organizations come together to form an umbrella organization called Project Pride Calgary. Inspired by the Stonewall Riots, they produce a Pride festival locally to celebrate community. Their first festival in 1988 includes a concert, workshops, a dance, and a family picnic – but no public rally or protest.

1990 Pride Rally Poster

1990 – the Calgary Lesbian and Gay Political Action Guild (CLAGPAG), one of the Project Pride partners, organizes the first political rally, which they internally described as a media stunt. 140 people muster at the Old Y to pick up lone ranger masks, and then gather at the Boer War Statue in Central Memorial Park.

1991 – CLAGPAG more ambitiously, holds its first Pride Parade. 400 people at City Hall cheer gay Member of Parliament Svend Robinson, who gives an inspiring speech despite gloomy weather and even gloomier protesters, three of whom were arrested. 1991 is also the year Mayor Al Duerr famously proclaims gay pride week in Calgary but then denies future proclamations due to public pressure.

Svend Robinson, June 16, 1991. Photo: Luke Shwart

1998 – Vriend vs. Alberta. The Supreme Court decision forces Alberta to include sexual orientation as a prohibited ground for human rights discrimination. Alberta Premier Ralph Klein blusters, and stirs up his socially conservative base, but in the end capitulates.

2001 – Former Conservative Prime Minister, Joe Clark, agrees to be Calgary’s Pride Parade Marshall and solicits scorn from social conservatives everywhere, including the Westboro Baptist Church. “We might have a big crowd preaching against those fags up there Sunday,” Reverend Fred Phelps says from Topeka, Kansas but then fails to show up.

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Joe Clark, June 10, 2001. Photo: Grant Neufeld

2002- Calgary Police raid Goliath’s Sauna, and charge operators and found-ins under antiquated bawdy house laws, provoking legal challenges from the gay community. (The Crown eventually drops charges in 2005 citing changing community standards)

2005 – Same-sex marriage becomes legal in Canada. The Alberta Government remains officially opposed and threatens to invoke the notwithstanding clause to negate the law in Alberta, but doesn’t.

2006 – Parade marchers tussle with protestors carrying signs “no pride in sodomy.” One marcher is arrested. Police Chief Jack Beaton says publicly he disapproves of the protestors.

2009 Pride Board Members, Dallas Barnes & Sam Casselman. Photo: Kevin Allen

2009 – Pride Calgary moves the parade from June to the September long weekend, and transitions from a grassroots collective to an incorporated non-profit society.

2011 – Mayor Naheed Nenshi is the first Calgary mayor to march in our Pride Parade, and is parade marshall that year, making national headlines.

Mayor Naheed Nenshi, September 4, 2011 Photo: Todd Korol, The Globe and Mail

2016 – Protestors are hard to find and politicians are seemingly everywhere – it has been an amazing journey.

(KA}

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Posted in Gay history

Tagged Al Duerr, Alberta Government, bisexual, Brian Sawyer, Calgary, Calgary Police, CLAGPAG, Fred Phelps, gay, Gay history, Goliath's Sauna, human-rights, Jack Beaton, Joe Clark, lesbian, Naheed Nenshi, Pride Calgary, Pride Week, queer, Ralph Klein, Ross Alger, same sex marriage, transgender, Westboro Baptist Church

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

Pride Proclamation Declined Twice by Mayor Alger

Posted on August 7, 2014 by Kevin Allen | 2 comments

Keeping with the Pride theme this month in Calgary, we would like to take you back to 1980, when Mayor Ross Alger wrote to Gay Information Resources Centre (GIRC), president Bob Harris.

Mayor Alger declined Harris’ request to formally declare June, 27, 1980 Gay Pride Day in Calgary. Unlike other politicians in his day who tended easily to casual homophobia, he wrote, “I fully respect the rights and freedoms of your organization and its members.”

Obviously, a political hot potato at the time. Alger in 1979 dodged Harris’ previous request for a proclaimed Gay Community Day on November 24th by alleging a crowded calendar, booked up into December of that year. Mayor Alger’s Executive Assistant, John Gray, was on the record saying “if GIRC resubmits its request at a later date the mayor’s office will be pleased to consider it.”

Alger’s diplomatic letter on April 2, 1980 was the conclusion of that consideration. Ross Alger died in January, 1992 from cancer. His obituary in the Globe and Mail praised him as “a gentleman politician who never stooped to low blows.”