“Alive & Kicking”: Queer Cultural Memory Of

“ALIVE & KICKING”: QUEER CULTURAL MEMORY OF TORONTO’S GAY AND LESBIAN LIBERATION MOVEMENT THROUGH PHOTOGRAPHS OF VIOLENCE AND PROTEST IN THE BODY POLITIC (1971-1987)

Jessica Anne Wilton

A thesis submitted to the Department of History

In conformity with the requirements for

the degree of Master of Arts

Queen’s University

Kingston, Ontario, Canada

(April, 2021)

This thesis examines the collective memory of Toronto’s Gay and Lesbian Liberation

Movement (GLLM) in the 1970s and 1980s through queer cultural memory. This queer cultural memory is informed by photographs and articles of protest and violence in the gay liberation magazine, The Body Politic (1971-1987). The thesis first develops the theory of queer cultural memory as a type of collective memory specific to queer communities. This memory takes a redemptive form and is informed by “figures of memory” including texts and photographs which have a unique relationship to ephemeral records in queer community archives. Crucially, these texts and photographs inform different queer cultural memories; the texts communicate the textual metanarrative (dominant narrative of the GLLM), while the photographs show the visual narrative. Both comprise the movement’s collective memory. To analyze these photographs, this thesis establishes a visual methodology based on techniques in cultural history and visual anthropology. Using these techniques, it performs a quantitative analysis of 165 images and qualitative analysis of 40 images to establish the visual form of queer cultural memory.

Subsequently, it compares the visual narrative to the textual metanarrative in order to reveal the obscured and excluded narratives. Overall, it argues that in the queer cultural memory, the textual metanarrative of the movement differs from the visual record in the magazine.

Furthermore, it contends that queer cultural memory, as a tool, can be used to reveal voices and experiences obscured by the dominant narrative, which is largely a reflection of white, cis, gay, men.

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my deep gratitude to my advisor, Dr. Caroline-Isabelle Caron, for her countless hours of advice and assistance, as well as her unyielding encouragement despite these unprecedented times. Her guidance and reassurance has proven invaluable, and this project would be nowhere near its level of analytical acumen without her input.

I am also extremely grateful to Dr. Laila Haidarali and Dr. Amitava Chowdhury who have also supported me during my time at Queen’s University through letters of recommendation and feedback. As well, I send thanks to Dr. Mona Holmlund, at Dalhousie University, for first introducing me to visual methodologies, supporting my undergraduate explorations into memory studies, and leading me to pursue a graduate degree.

I am thankful for the unrelenting encouragement and love from my partner, Matthew

Marshall, as well as my family Margaret, Mark, and Jonah Wilton. I would also like to give special thanks to Cordelia Payson and Carlie Visser for acting as my confidants, editors, and sounding boards. Thank you all for keeping my head above water throughout this degree.

Finally, I would like to acknowledge the incredible work of activists and academics alike in fighting for queer liberation and documenting queer history. This work has not only laid the foundation for this thesis, but it has also allowed me to write this work as an openly queer woman. Special thanks are owed to The Body Politic’ editorial collective and those at The Pink

Triangle Press for their work in documenting this history visually and textually, as well as the

ArQuives in Toronto who helpfully pointed me towards the online repository of The Body Politic issues provided by the Canadian Museum for Human Rights.

Table of Contents

Abstract ...... i Acknowledgements ...... ii List of Figures and Tables ...... iv List of Abbreviations ...... v Chapter 1 Introduction ...... 1 Histories, Not History ...... 4 The Body Politic and Toronto’s Gay and Lesbian Liberation Movement ...... 6 Historiography ...... 11 Chapter 2 Queer Cultural Memory and Ephemeral Archives ...... 20 Queer Cultural Memory ...... 20 Memory, Archives and Community Identity ...... 28 Ephemeral Records ...... 34 Chapter 3 Definitions and Visual Methodology ...... 40 Towards a Definition of Violence ...... 40 Toward a Definition of Protest ...... 46 Visual Methodology ...... 47 Chapter 4 Remembering the Movement ...... 62 A Chronology of Toronto’s Gay and Lesbian Liberation Movement ...... 63 Themes of the Metanarrative ...... 68 Obscured Narratives ...... 76 Visualizing the Movement ...... 82 Chapter 5 Snapshots of Memory ...... 93 Signs of Liberation ...... 95 Agency: Never the Victim ...... 105 Proud to be Seen ...... 121 Threads of Solidarity ...... 126 Chapter 6 Redemptive Patchwork ...... 133 Separation of Desire ...... 135 Appendix A Codebook 1 ...... 141 Appendix B Codebook 2 ...... 142 Bibliography ...... 144

iii

List of Figures and Tables

Table 1 Proportional distribution of photographs in the representative sample ...... 60 Figure 1 Articles and images of protest and violence over time in The Body Politic, 1972 to 1987 ...... 83 Figure 2 Articles and images of violence and protest over time in The Body Politic by data type, 1972- 1987 ...... 85 Table 2 Total number of articles and images per type from 1971 to 1987 in The Body Politic ...... 87 Figure 3 Total instances of violence versus protest in The Body Politic ...... 88 Figure 4 Total images of violence versus protest in The Body Politic ...... 89 Figure 5 Photograph of GATE Members at Green Paper Protest in Toronto. Photographed by Gerald Hannon. In Issue 19 of The Body Politic. July-August 1975...... 97 Figure 6 Staged cover image dramatizing the Barracks raid on the cover of issue 50 of The Body Politic, February 1979. Photographer by Gerald Hannon ...... 111 Figure 7 Photograph of the 1986 Pride Parade in Toronto in issue 129 of The Body Politic, August 1986. Photographed by Gregory A. Wight...... 124 Figure 8 Photograph of the Brunswick Four in Issue 12 of The Body Politic, March-April 1974. Unknown photographer...... 129 Figure 9 Photograph of Toronto Kiss-in protest in issue of 26 The Body Politic, September 1976. Unknown photographer...... 137

List of Abbreviations

2SLGBTQ+: Two-Spirit, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and other sexual minorities

CGA: Canadian Gay Archives (formerly)

CGLA: Canadian Gay and Lesbian Archives (now the ArQuives)

GLLM: Gay and Lesbian Liberation Movement

LOOT: Lesbian Organization of Toronto

NCH: New Cultural History

NPIA: Non-Protest Article with Protest Article

NVIA: Non-Violent Image with Violent Article

OHRC: Ontario Human Rights Council

PA: Protest Article (no image)

PI: Protest Image (no article)

PIA: Protest Image with Article

QTBIPOC: Queer Trans Black Indigenous People of Colour

TBP: The Body Politic

TGP: Toronto Gay Patrol

VA: Violent Article (no image)

VI: Violent Image (no article)

VIA: Violent Image with Article

Chapter 1

Introduction

“It was the night the main street of Canada’s largest city belonged to us, and nobody— not even the police—seemed to be able to do anything about it.” – Gerald Hannon, Issue 71 of The Body Politic, March 19811

Lighting Toronto’s streets with rage, 3000 people mobilized beneath the shroud of winter’s darkness on the night of February 6th, 1981. Only 24 hours earlier the city had been alight with a different rage: that of brimming homophobia, hatred, and violence.

Before midnight, on February 5th, 150 members of Toronto’s police led a coordinated operation against four gay bathhouses.2 Citing indecency (a statute historically used to target gay men), these raids resulted in 286 arrests, property damage in the tens of thousands, and innumerable accounts of physical and verbal harassment at the hands of the police.3 This was not the first bathhouse raid that reeked of homophobia, nor would it be the last, but the massive public backlash against the events of February 5th, 1981— later known as Operation Soap—was unprecedented and marks a turning point in

Canadian queer history. 4

Sometimes called “The Canadian Stonewall,” Operation Soap, and the subsequent protest, is a key event in Canada’s Gay and Lesbian Liberation Movement (GLLM).5

This social movement took place throughout the mid-1960s until the late 1980s or early

1 Gerald Hannon, “Take to the Streets,” The Body Politic 71, March 1981, 9. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid.,9-11. 4 Tim McCaskell, Queer Progress: from Homophobia to Homonationalism (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2016), 125. 5 Graham Slaughter, “’The Canadian Stonewall’: Toronto Police ‘expresses its regret’ for gay bathhouse raids,” CTV, June 23, 2016.

1990s when queer people mobilized to fight for social equality and legal rights.6 Queer- led activism manifesting in protest, court cases, press coverage, and pride celebrations occurred throughout the country, even in small towns and the rural countryside.7

However, the liberation movement had three major urban hubs: Toronto, Vancouver, and

Montreal. This urban-centric movement is remembered through books, articles, and memoirs, largely written by activists and some scholars. However, the historical memory of the movement remains contested and largely understudied. These texts are key to compiling the memory of Canada’s GLLM, and the photographs that recorded these events, activists, and organizations are integral to its creation. Yet, these images have gained even less recognition in academic and activist settings, except as a way to punctuate or decorate written works.

This thesis intends to explore the visual record and collective memory of

Toronto’s Gay and Lesbian Liberation Movement through photographs of protest and violence in Canada’s most famous gay liberation magazine: The Body Politic (1971-

1987). Collective memory is an umbrella term denoting the memory of a group, while cultural memory is a type of collective memory specific to communities.8 Since the queer community is not a monolith, this study is based on the premise that collective memory of the GLLM is composed of diverse queer cultural memories. Crucially, queer cultural memories are created through texts and images which are essential to community formation and identity. Since the photographs of the movement are understudied, an integral key to the memory of the movement is missing from its previous compilations.

6 Tom Warner, Never Going Back: a History of Queer Activism in Canada, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 61. 7 Ibid., 50. 8 Aleida Assmann, “Transformations Between History and Memory,” Social research 75, no. 1 (April 1, 2008), 52. 2

Significantly, as a hub of Canada’s movement and the home of The Body Politic (TBP),

Toronto has a robust number of photographs recording the movement, making it ripe for study. Furthermore, the movement’s key events, such as Operation Soap, predominantly revolve around a form of protest or violent backlash, hence the decision to focus on images of protest and violence.

This thesis argues that the visual narrative tells a similar, but distinct, story from the textual narrative in the collective memory of the GLLM. The textual narrative contains many similarities; they form the “metanarrative” that has had decades to crystallize and evolve with the benefit of hindsight. In contrast, the images recorded in

TBP reflect the urgency and necessity of the time in which the photographs were taken and published. These two narratives together comprise a queer cultural memory of

Toronto’s Gay and Lesbian Liberation Movement. However, this is only one version of collective memory within a multiplicity of memories and histories experienced and remembered by the many segments of Canada’s queer community. In this case, the cultural memory shaped by The Body Politic is largely reflective of the experiences of gay white men and some white lesbians whose activism and desire have tended to exclude and obscure the experiences of queer and trans, Black, indigenous, and people of colour (QTBIPOC) from both the metanarrative and visual narrative. This thesis cannot rectify these exclusions, but it intends to shed some light on these missing intersectional identities and experiences while exploring the importance of photographs in forming the collective memory of Canada’s movement. Through qualitative and quantitative analysis of 165 photographs of violence and protest in Toronto in the full run of TBP (1971 to

1987), the visual record produces its own knowledge which, at times, contradicts,

corroborates, and adds nuance to certain aspects of the metanarrative. Together, the textual metanarrative and the visual narrative, as forms of queer cultural memory, meld to produce a version of collective memory of Toronto’s Gay and Lesbian Liberation

Movement that hinges on the themes of liberation, agency, visibility, desire, and solidarity.

Histories, Not History

The language in this thesis both reflects the reality of the movement’s predominant membership and the intent of revealing hidden histories rather than relaying an exclusionary narrative. The name of the movement, the Gay and Lesbian Liberation

Movement, reflects the predominance of self-identified gays and lesbians in their fight for liberation in Canada. Changing the language to Canada’s Queer Liberation Movement or even LGBT Liberation Movement would be more inclusive, but it would also misrepresent the dominant metanarrative and, crucially, the language its major activists used themselves. For the most part, this movement did not focus on the social or legal liberation of bisexual, transgender, two-spirit, or queer people. As they always have, these latter community members certainly existed, but their sexuality or gender was not specifically outlined in most documentation of the movement. To rename this movement would indicate more inclusion than actuality and risk adding rose-tinted glasses to the movement’s history.

At the same time, this thesis uses the word “queer” to describe those community members taking part in the movement as a way to denote members of the 2SLGBTQ+ community. This word choice acknowledges the intersectionality and representation this

thesis is striving for—matching the futurity of queer memory—as well as the complexity of identity and self-identification. On one hand, the use of queer relies on the redemptive aspect of queering and queer memory, developed further in Chapter two, which allows for these exclusions to be somewhat rectified and projected into the future. However, it also allows for space of identity beyond those explicitly outlined in the title of the movement. The term acknowledges the fluidity of identity in queer contexts,9 particularly where those who participated perhaps did not have the language, or safety, available at the time to identify as anything other than gay or lesbian. Although, as Amy L. Stone’s article “Flexible Queers, Serious Bodies: Transgender Inclusion in Queer Spaces” reveals, at times the term queer is equated with fluidity and inclusion can also specifically exclude transgender bodies.10 Thus, while the term queer can allow for the inclusion of fluidity and the possibility of diverse identity within the GLLM, it also risks replicating the exclusion of a further marginalized subgroup of the 2SLGBTQ+ community.

As the fourth chapter of this thesis will show, Canada’s Gay and Lesbian

Liberation Movement rose from a specific moment in time and follows a long history of queer existence, community formation, and activism in Canada and across the world.

However, the history of this movement is a multiplicity; there exists no one “true” history that can encapsulate every experience, every event, or every voice. This thesis cannot represent the entirety of this history, nor does it intend to. Instead, it reflects one version of the ever-evolving queer cultural memory informed by the articles and images in an

9 See Ethan H. Mereish’s work “We’re Here and We’re Queer: Sexual Orientation and Sexual Fluidity Differences Between Bisexual and Queer Women” which sheds light on the correlation between identifying as queer and sexuality. Also, see Wendy Peters work on “Rupturing Identity Categories and Negotiating Meanings of Queer” which looks at the root of the term in the 1990s as overturning restrictive categories and the binary to allow for “fluid and unstable categories.” 10 Amy L. Stone, “Flexible Queers, Serious Bodies: Transgender Inclusion in Queer Spaces,” Journal of Homosexuality 60, no. 12 (2013), 1647. 5

important, though flawed, magazine: The Body Politic. This work analyses a facet of the movement that has become the dominant face of Toronto’s GLLM, while bringing attention to the obscured, ignored, and excluded narratives through the redemptive quality of queer cultural memory and the power of images.

The inability to represent all voices, experiences, and identities is both a limitation to this work and a reflection of the importance of critically ascertaining queer cultural memory. This memory derives from the texts, images, symbols, and events (figures of memory) a community considers important to community formation and identity. Thus, it condenses a complex narrative and risks furthering the divisions and exclusions in those figures. However, with proper analysis, it can also be redemptive as a tool for finding and acknowledging those exclusions. Ultimately, as a form of redemption, this thesis intends to explore the complexities of queer cultural memories and collective memory of

Toronto’s Gay and Lesbian Liberation movement through an analysis of the images of protest and violence in The Body Politic.

The Body Politic and Toronto’s Gay and Lesbian Liberation Movement

The Body Politic, as the central source of this thesis, has a complex and contested relationship to the history and memory of Toronto’s Gay and Lesbian Liberation

Movement. Established in November, 1971, in Toronto, as a “radical tabloid,” The Body

Politic became “one of the most visible gay institutions of Canada.”11 In its early days, the magazine operated out of the Glad Day bookshop run by Jearld Moldenhauer,12 who

11 Edward Jackson and Stan Persky, Flaunting It! : a Decade of Gay Journalism from the Body Politic (Vancouver: New Star Books, 1982),1-2. 12 Gordon Richardson, “What`s in the Archives? The Body Politic,” The ArQuives (Canada's LGBTQ2 Archives, April 17, 2013), https://arquives.ca/newsfeed/news/whats-archives-body-politic/). 6

was also the founder of the University of Toronto Homophile Association (1969).13

Former contributor, Tim McCaskell, describes the early years as “put together in a backyard shed by an ad hoc group,” but by 1976, when McCaskell was a member, it was being distributed nationally and internationally, had coverage of news stories and major features, and was run by a true collective with 11 members and nearly twice as many contributors.14 TBP ran from 1971 and 1987 and published 135 issues, which span the majority of the GLLM. 15 Today, scholars and activists alike consider TBP “the paper of record for gay liberation in Canada”16 and “an important incubator of l/g/b/t thought and activism in North America.”17 As both a paper of record and an incubator, the magazine had an important role in both the development of the GLLM and the archiving of key events. Not only did TBP create and inspire dialogue around liberation, but it recorded this discourse for 17 years, like an archive. In fact, in November, 1973, the newspaper’s backfiles became a bonafide archive.18 The relationship between this archive and The

Body Politic sheds light on the importance of the magazine in the archival practices of queer history in Canada and reflects the exclusions inherent in the narrative put forward in its pages. However, as a reflection of TBP, this archive mostly recorded the stories of white, cisgender, gay men. Formerly the Canadian Gay and Lesbian Archives, in 2018-

2019 the archive’s name was changed to the ArQuives, which reflects their inclusive membership.19 By renaming themselves the ArQuives, it draws attention to the previous

13 Warner, 59. 14 McCaskell, 59 15 Richardson, “What`s in the Archives? The Body Politic.” 16 Michael Connors Jackman, “Receptions of the Past: Commemoration, Racism, Desire,” Somatechnics 7, no. 2 (2017), 289. 17 Marilyn R. Schuster, Jane Rule, and Rick Bébout, A Queer Love Story: the Letters of Jane Rule and Rick Bébout (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2017), XIV. 18 Richardson, “What`s in the Archives?” 19 “Historical Inequities Statement,” About Us. The ArQuives, March 4, 2021. https://arquives.ca/about. 7

historical erasure of trans, non-binary, bisexual, women, disabled, and QTBIPOC histories reflected in its initial existence as “an archive of white gay liberation.”20

The importance of The Body Politic in the recording of Canada’s Gay and

Lesbian Liberation Movement is undeniable. With 135 issues over 17 years, it recorded hundreds of major protests as well as advances in the legal recognition of queer

Canadians. It also catalogued expressions of gay desire across the country, and sustained bonds of solidarity with other gay presses across the Anglo-American world. Its representation of the dominant narrative has had lasting influence on the way historians, activists, and scholars write about it today and how the liberation movement is remembered. Its narrative has shaped the textual metanarrative of the movement later published in books and articles, many of which use TBP as a primary source. However, despite the many photographs in the magazine, the visual record of Toronto’s GLLM remains largely understudied as a whole. Images and articles in The Body Politic have the unique ability to shed light on queer cultural memories, both the textual metanarrative and the visual record, that make up the collective memory of Toronto’s Gay and Lesbian

Liberation Movement.

There are three major limitations to this thesis beyond those already mentioned.

The lack of access to archives and sources, the reliance on quantitative analysis, and the narrow temporal scope all affect its content. These limitations are interconnected and guided my choices throughout the conception and creation of this thesis.

Like many, the COVID-19 pandemic greatly restricted access to physical archives and sources. Unlike previous years, my sources were limited to those I could access

20 “Historical Inequities Statement,” About Us. The ArQuives, March 4, 2021. https://arquives.ca/about. 8

online or directly throughout the library. Unfortunately, many queer history books are only available through interlibrary loan, which was suspended for most of my research time. This is especially true of newer texts that have not been purchased by the library yet and of older ones with limited availability. The most crucial pandemic restriction was that

I was unable to go to the ArQuives in Toronto and study the backfiles of The Body

Politic. Beyond containing all 135 issues, the Arquives also house meeting minutes, layout boards, and even unused content.21 Many of these records include the discussions between collective members about the type of content that should, or should not, go in the magazine, as well as the kind of messages they wanted to promote or avoid in the publication. These discussions would have provided further context to the images studied here, and likely have brought stronger light on the construction of TBP’s narrative of the

GLLM’s narrative. With no access to these records throughout my research period, I had to rely on more speculative and quantitative evidence.

This lack of access to sources and archives is one of the reasons for my heavy reliance on establishing a methodology and quantitative evidence. With so little access to sources that discuss the context and creation of the magazine and its memory, the shift to quantitative exploration allowed for more evidence and different types of conclusions.

These conclusions instead point towards a trend or a broad overview. The quantitative approach, when paired with a qualitative approach, provides important statistical evidence that illustrate larger phenomena or signal an area of interest.

The third limitation is the time-frame chosen for this research. Cultural memory does not solely exist at the moment its source is active. This research is limited to the

21 The online database of The Body Politic fonds held by the ArQuives shows 3384 records including “columns” “monitor material not used” “subscription correspondence,” among others. 9

time-period of TBP’s publishing, 1971-1987, but this does not imply that TBP’s importance on the queer community, nor that queer cultural memory ended in 1987.

TBP’s influence is still felt today. As previously mentioned, the ArQuives grew out of

TBP’s backfiles, and continues its legacy of making and recording queer history in

Canada today. Additionally, the image images studied here are still owned by the Pink

Triangle Press, now publishing Xtra Magazine, and continue being included in articles and books on Gay and Lesbian Liberation in Canada. Most importantly, the magazine’s legacy itself is being continuously examined and contested. In 2016, a symposium was held at the University of Toronto in memory of the 45th anniversary of The Body Politic, where various speakers analyzed the legacy of the magazine, particularly the exclusions of QTBIPOC.22 Even in academia, newer works that focus on TBP often look at contestations of the magazine and its legacy, rather than simply chronicling its history.

The legacy of the magazine and its images, particularly the way the photographs continue to play a role in queer cultural memory to this day, is crucial to the creation and evolution of memory now and going forward. The choice to limit this research to only the years of publication was difficult, but necessary, given all other limitations. It allowed me to focus on a broader understanding of the visual history within the magazine during its publication. Future work should be able to use this understanding as a baseline to research its long-lasting contributions to queer cultural memory. There must be no doubt that TBP and its images live long beyond its published pages.

22 Arshy Mann, “The Body Politic Failed Black LGBT People, Symposium Hears,” xtramagazine (Xtra Magazine, June 9, 2016), https://xtramagazine.com/power/the-body-politic-failed-black-lgbt-people- symposium-hears-71205.

Historiography

Most scholarship on Canada’s GLLM was written during the 1990s and 2000s, with studies appearing as early as 198723 and as recent as 2020.24 Notably, many of the authors who have addressed the global, national, and local contexts of the GLLM are activists as well as academics. For example, Tom Warner, author of Never Going Back: a

History of Queer Activism, is first and foremost a prominent queer activist, but also has a degree from the University of Toronto and takes an academic approach to his work through footnotes and academic research.25 As well, Tim McCaskell, author of Queer

Progress: from Homophobia to Homonationalism, is a long-time activist-historian in

Canada.26 Authors of more recent works, many published during the 2010s, tend to be academics within the disciplines of history, sociology, and political science. For example,

Juan Carlos Mezo-González, author of the recent article “Contest Images: Debates on

Nudity, Sexism, and Porn in The Body Politic” is a doctoral candidate at the University of Toronto.27 The numerous occurrences of activists in the scholarship and written work on the subject are essential to the historiography of the movement as it speaks to the motivations and biases of the authors. However, since many activist writers are also academics or straddle the line between the two, separating the sources into categories of academics and activists could inadvertently create a false dichotomy. Instead, the sources fall into two broad categories: general studies and case studies. General studies tend to tackle the whole of the GLLM and use wide or long frames, such as those in global

23 Gary Kinsman, The Regulation of Desire: Sexuality in Canada (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1987). 24 Juan Carlos Mezo-González, “Contested Images: Debates on Nudity, Sexism, and Porn in The Body Politic, 1971–1987,” Left history 23, no. 1 (2019). 25 Warner, front matter. 26 “Queer Progress: an Archival Workshop with Activist-Historian Tim McCaskell on the Toronto of Post- Decriminalization, 1969-1974,” The ArQuives, February 17, 2019. 27 Mezo-González. 11

history. Case studies focus on a particular slice of the movement, often choosing to expand on a certain organization, year, or part of the community.

Sources that fall under the general studies category look at Canada’s Gay and

Lesbian Liberation Movement as a whole, both in its chronology and themes. An example of this would be Tom Warner’s work, which looks at Canada’s GLLM from the

Homophile movement in the 1960s to its continuation into the 21st century.28 Similarly,

Donald W. McLeod has written two chronologies to create an “authoritative reference guide to the origins and development of lesbian and gay liberation in Canada.”29 Gary

Kinsman’s two editions of The Regulation of Desire: Homo and Hetero Sexualities take a broad historical look at gay and lesbian liberation politics in Canada by investigating the

“social forces that have both organized our oppression and made it possible to resist.”30

As well, Catherine Miriam Smith’s Lesbian and Gay Rights in Canada: Social

Movements and Equality-Seeking, 1971-1995 takes a political science perspective, but covers the entirety of the GLLM and uses a wide framework of social movements as structures.

Similarly, sources that take a global view, but feature Canada, also fit into the general studies category, such as Barry D. Adam’s article “Winning Rights and Freedoms in Canada” in Evert van der Veen’s 1993 The Third Pink Book: A Global View of Lesbian and Gay Liberation and Oppression. Adam’s article looks at the broad strokes of the movement as it fits into a global understanding of the GLLM, rather than focusing on a

28 Warner, x. 29 Donald W. McLeod, Lesbian and Gay Liberation in Canada: a Selected Annotated Chronology, 1964- 1975 (Toronto: ECW Press/Homewood Books, 1996), viii. 30 Kinsman, 15. 12

specific year, event, or theme.31 Scott De Groot’s unpublished thesis “Out of the Closet and Into Print: Gay Liberation across the Anglo-American World,” looks at the social actor networks of gay press during the liberation movement, including TBP.32 Despite the more specific focus on TBP, this thesis examines wide frames of transnational networks and contextualizes the work within the Anglo-American world. These general studies tend to rely on The Body Politic for information on many of the key events that characterize the highs and lows of the movement. For example, Warner uses articles from

TBP to outline many of the magazine’s controversies in his book.33 These sources are essential to the metanarrative of the movement as they provide a general shape of the movement. However, in using broad frames to capture the entire movement, these sources tend to be the most exclusionary because only the loudest voices are heard. There is only so much space in one book or article, and therefore those with the most documentation of their stories and experiences tend to overpower those with less documentation.

Sources that fall under the case studies categories are often about a subsection of the movement and tend to focus on certain cities or areas, subgroups of the community like lesbians, or one particular theme such as memory or images. For example, Becki L.

Ross’ The House that Jill Built: a Lesbian Nation in Formation explores Toronto’s movement through the eyes of lesbian-feminist organizers in the Lesbian Organization of

31 Barry D. Adam, “Winning Rights and Freedoms in Canada” in The Third Pink Book: a Global View of Lesbian and Gay Liberation and Oppression, eds. Aart Hendriks, Rob Tielman, and Evert van der Veen, (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1993), 25-37. 32 Scott de Groot, “Out of the Closet and Into Print: Gay Liberation Across the Anglo-American World”, 2015. 33 Warner, Never Going Back. 13

Toronto (LOOT).34 McCaskell’s Queer Progress takes Toronto as its centre.35 Catherine

Jean Nash’s article “Toronto’s Gay Village (1969-1982): plotting the politics of gay identity” not only focuses on Toronto, but a specific area of Toronto through historical geographies.36 Studies frequently rely on The Body Politic, many explicitly focusing on the magazine. Several of Michael Connor Jackman’s articles include a specific focus on

The Body Politic in relation to issues of commemoration, memory, and community.

These include “Receptions of the Past: Commemoration, Racism, Desire,” “The Horizons of a Queer Counterpublic: Intended Audience in Sexual Liberation Activism,” “Media

Legacies: Community, Memory, and Territory” and “Ethnographic Spectres: represent the recent past of sexual liberation.”37 Similarly, Cameron McKenzie’s “Love, Lust, and

Loss in the Early Age of AIDS: The Discourse in the Body Politic from 1981 to 1987,” not only takes the magazine as its focus, but only examines articles about AIDS over seven years of the magazine’s run.38 Particularly relevant to this thesis is Juan Carlos

Mezo-González’s 2020 article “Contested Images: Debating Nudity, Sexism, and Porn in

The Body Politic.” This article looks at how “sexual and erotic imagery play a key role in the paper’s community-building project.”39 It is the only work, prior to this thesis, to specifically look at the images in the magazine. Overall, these case studies tend to include

34 Becki L. Ross, The House That Jill Built: a Lesbian Nation in Formation, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995). 35 McCaskell, Queer Progress. 36 Catherine Jean Nash, “Toronto’s Gay Village (1969–1982): Plotting the Politics of Gay Identity” Canadian Geographer / Le Géographe canadien 50, no. 1 (March 2006): 1–16. 37 Michael Connors Jackman, “Receptions of the Past: Commemoration, Racism, Desire,” Somatechnics 7, no. 2 (2017): 288–303; Michael Connors Jackman, “The Horizons of a Queer Counterpublic: Intended Audience in Sexual Liberation Activism,” in American Counter/Publics (Universitätsverlag Winter, December 2019), 284; Michael Connors Jackman, “Media Legacies: Community, Memory, and Territory” in Reclaiming Canadian Bodies Visual Media and Representation (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2015; Michael Connors Jackman, “Ethnographic Spectres: represent the recent past of sexual liberation,”Ethnography (2019). 38 Cameron McKenzie, “Love, Lust, and Loss in the Early Age of AIDS: The Discourse in the Body Politic From 1981 to 1987,” Journal of Homosexuality 63, no. 12 (December 1, 2016): 1749–1763. 39 Mezo-González, “Contested Images.” 14

more voices than those in the general studies category; their specificity and in-depth outlooks allow for more of the overlooked stories and voices to be included in detail.

Some case studies take intersectionality and obscured or excluded voices as their centre. Wesley Crichlow’s article “Buller Men and Batty Bwoys: Hidden men In Toronto and Halifax Black Communities” in Terry Goldie’s collection In a Queer Country, reveals the understudied stories of gay Black men in Canada by exploring the tensions of race and sexuality alongside desire and identity.40 Marvellous Grounds: Queer of Colour

Histories of Toronto, edited by Jin Jaritaworn, Ghaida Moussa, and Syrus Marcus Ware, specifically seeks to “tell the stories that have shaped Toronto’s landscape but are frequently forgotten or erased” by focusing on the activism of Toronto’s QTBIPOC.41

Not every story in Marvellous Grounds takes place in the GLLM’s time frame, but several chapters about or written by intersectional identities do. The 2017 collection Any other way: how Toronto got queer makes great strides in telling a local history of

Toronto’s queerness with many stories from QTBIPOC and queer women. Edited by

Stephanie Chambers, Jane Farrow, Maureen Ftizgerald, Ed Jackson, John Lorinic, Tim

McCaskell, Rebecka Sheffield, Tatum Taylor, and Rahim Thawer, this collection takes a non-linear look at the queer history of Toronto. Therefore, its focus is not, specifically,

QTBIPOC stories like Crichlow’s works or Marvellous Grounds. However, Kristyn

Wong-Tam’s foreword and Steven Maynard’s introduction together contextualize the collection within a framework of intersectionality by emphasizing Toronto’s

40 Wesley Crichlow, “Buller Men and Batty Bwoys: Hidden men In Toronto and Halifax Black Communities” in In a Queer Country: Gay and Lesbian Studies in the Canadian Context, ed. Terry Goldie (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2001), 69-85. 41 Jinthana Haritaworn, Ghaida Moussa, and Syrus Marcus Ware, eds., Marvellous Grounds: Queer of Colour Histories of Toronto (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2018). 15

“hyperdiversity and immense intersectionality,”42 as well as the “Black-trans past” of

Jackie Shane, whose song “Any Other Way” provides the collection’s title.43 Before these latter two publications, from 2018 and 2017 respectively, many of the stories of these

QTBIPOC histories had garnered little recognition.

Other sources take the form of activist memoirs or letters by Jim Egan, Jane Rule, and Rick Bébout, notably. There are also outliers, including Flaunting it! from 1982, which compiles several articles from The Body Politic and touts itself as neither history of the movement nor of the magazine.44 These memoirs and collections, perhaps, have a narrow focus, but illuminate themes of the liberation movement and queer activism in

Canada. As well, they often relay important stories and voices involved in the fight for liberation.

The majority of publications have a major commonality: the predominance of urban centres. The history of 2SLGBTQ+ people in Canada varies from coast to coast, but is often focused on three major hubs: Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver. Even general studies tend to take Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver as their focal points, with little mention of rural areas, smaller cities, or northern communities. For example, Barry

D. Adam’s work predominantly relies on Ontario and Quebec events in his articles and books on the global GLLM and Canada’s intersection with the global movement.45 More recently published texts address the previously unrepresented areas such as Valerie J.

42 Kristyn Wong-Tam, “Foreword” in Any other way: how Toronto got queer, eds. Chambers, Stephanie, Jane Farrow, Maureen Fitzgerald, Ed Jackson, John Lorinic, Tim McCaskell, Rebecka Sheffield, Tatum Taylor, and Rahim Thawer, (Toronto: Coach House Books, 2017), 8. 43 Steven Maynard, “‘A New way of Lovin’: Queer Toronto Gets Schooled by Jackie Shane” in Any other way: how Toronto got queer, eds. Chambers, Stephanie, Jane Farrow, Maureen Fitzgerald, Ed Jackson, John Lorinic, Tim McCaskell, Rebecka Sheffield, Tatum Taylor, and Rahim Thawer, (Toronto: Coach House Books, 2017), 10-11. 44 Jackson and Persky, Flaunting it! 45 Barry D Adam, The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement, revised edition (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1995). 16

Korinek’s 2018 Prairie Fairies: a History of Queer Communities and People in Western

Canada or journalist Rebecca Rose’s 2020 Before the Parade: a History of Halifax’s

Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Communities.

Evidently, the historiography of Canada and Toronto’s Gay and Lesbian

Liberation Movement reflects a predominance of urban centres and the stories of gay, cis, white men. Crucially, this predominance is also reflected in and, arguably, derived from the narrative communicated by The Body Politic. Publications often rely on The Body

Politic as a primary source, which skews the narrative away from QTBIPOC stories that have been traditionally forgotten, overlooked, or obscured. Notably, even the histories that focus on or include underrepresented voices, such as Any other way or Marvellous

Grounds, take Toronto as their centre, which leaves out country and coastal queers. Later scholarship takes a more critical view of the magazine, but runs the risk of either overly criticizing or relaying the same whitewashed, exclusionary history.

This thesis studies the GLLM’s memory in Toronto with a focus on images and

The Body Politic. As such, it relies directly on previous works exploring Toronto, memory, commemoration, and The Body Politic. It must take care not to also exclude

QTBIPOC voices like the discourse it studies. As this specific narrative, often by and for white gay men in Toronto, is the explicit focus of this thesis, this exclusionary narrative takes up a significant portion of the metanarrative in Chapter four. However, this thesis aims to emphasize the nuances of the visual narrative that reveal the exclusions and obscured narrative of the common metanarrative of the movement. With the focus on these absences through the power of images and memory, this thesis aims to avoid relaying this exclusionary narrative. Ultimately, this thesis intends to examine the

collective memory of Toronto’s Gay and Lesbian Liberation Movement through queer collective memory informed by The Body Politic through its images and articles of violence and protest.

To do so, in Chapter two, this thesis begins with an exploration of its theoretical methodology: queer cultural memory as informed by scholars of collective and cultural memory, queer studies, and work in community archives. It argues that queer cultural memory is a type of memory closely related to Jan and Aleida Assmann’s concept of cultural memory. The chapter shows how, in this study, queer cultural memory is uniquely queer in its formation through its ability to radically subvert heteronormative ideals, and its attachment to ephemeral archives. The chapter also explores the many nuances of this concept as it relates to community archive production and queer memory in order to establish a working definition of the theory.

In Chapter three, this thesis outlines the visual methodology and definitions used to select, compile, and analyze the photographs. This visual methodology outlines how this thesis captures queer cultural memory through images of protest and violence. The chapter begins by establishing working definitions of violence and protest. The second half of the chapter focuses on concepts used in visual anthropology and content analysis in order to further develop the data collection and analysis processes. It concludes with an explanation of the total selection process and the creation of the codebooks, the results of which are used in subsequent chapters.

Chapters four and five, together, present the queer cultural memory of the movement. These two chapters draw from the theoretical and visual methodologies from

Chapter two and three in order to analyze collective memory of the movement. Chapter

four explores the description and analysis of the textual metanarrative by emphasizing the semblances in the texts, books, articles, and memoirs remembering the movement. It establishes the generally accepted chronology and dominant narrative of the movement and shows how these textual sources overlap with the themes of liberation, visibility, pride, desire, and agency. It then presents the data, from the images and articles in The

Body Politic, to visualize the metanarrative and to emphasize the differences between the metanarrative and visual narrative. Chapter five presents the visual narrative of the memory by analysing the visual record of protest and violence in The Body Politic. It analyses 40 selected images of violence and protest from TBP and shows how the visual narrative at times contradicts, corroborates, or adds nuance to the metanarrative. Using the visual frameworks and techniques outlined in Chapter three, it analyses the themes of liberation, agency, visibility, and solidarity as communicated through visual representation of violence and protest.

The conclusion outlines how the textual and visual memories together underscore the many silences left in the narratives of the movement.

Chapter 2

Queer Cultural Memory and Ephemeral Archives

The central theoretical concept of this thesis is queer cultural memory. This theory will be used throughout the work to encapsulate the collective memory of

Toronto’s Gay and Lesbian Liberation Movement produced, mediated, and communicated by images in The Body Politic. The primary objective of this chapter is to define and situate the concept of queer cultural memory within the broader collective memory, the role it plays in creating community archives, and the way it is communicated by the ephemeral records found in those archives. As this chapter demonstrates, it is a theory of memory greatly indebted to scholars and writers in queer studies, collective memory studies, and grassroots community archival work. The chapter begins by developing queer cultural memory as it relates to “queering” and is informed by the concepts of collective and cultural memory. Subsequently, it establishes the specific context and particularities of queer archives and community archival practices as well as their unique relationship to memory production. Finally, this chapter outlines ephemeral, or fleeting, records as an essential aspect of queer archives and transitions into a discussion of The Body Politic as an archive deeply rooted in the politics of the queer community and the ephemeral.

Queer Cultural Memory

No longer simply a slur, the term “queer” has long been reclaimed by the

2SLGBTQIA+ community to denote an identity that does not heed to heteronormative

ideals or demand pedantic and sometimes divisive labels. This emphasis on inclusivity alongside a radical rejection of the homophobic roots of the slur grants the term strength in its other new conception: “queering.” Since the 1990s, the concept of “queering’ has been adopted by queer theorists and academics alike; from queering history,46 to queering philosophical ideas of freedom47 and even queering high school biology textbooks,48 this move to queer theory can be found across the disciplines. Importantly, to queer a topic does not only mean that the research will focus on LGBTQIA+ participants, practices, or histories, but instead “suggests a disruptive, transformational, or oppositional practice designed to challenge normalizing systems and structures."49 As well, like the reclamation of queer as identity, “queering” is rooted in being “oppositional, unruly, and coalitional” as both terms ultimately reject heterosexual norms, classification, and division.50

Recently within this wave of queering, Ingrid Ryberg, a scholar in cinema studies, identifies a new, but growing trend of scholarly, archival, and artistic interest in something she terms “queer cultural memory.”51 Citing the works of prominent queer theorists Marita Sturken, José Esteban Muñoz, and Elizabeth Freeman, Ryberg defines queer cultural memory as attending to “the construction, politics and meanings of remembering and popular history-making," while intersecting with queer world-making,

46 Jonathan Goldberg and Madhavi Menon, "Queering History," PMLA 120, no. 5 (2005): 1608-617. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25486271. 47 Shannon Winnubust, Queering Freedom, (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006). 48 Vicky L. Snyder and Francis S Broadway, “Queering High School Biology Textbooks.” Journal of research in science teaching 41, no. 6 (2004): 617–636. 49 Alana Kumbier, Ephemeral Material: Queering the Archive (Sacramento, CA: Litwin Books, 2014), 3 50 Kumbier, 7. 51 Ryberg, Ingrid. “Queer Cultural Memory.” Lambda nordica 25, no. 1 (June 15, 2020), 122. 21

and collective fantasies.”52 Ryberg’s own definition does not indicate only queer as subject, but instead owes to the meanings of “queering” by focusing on the transformational construction and creation of memories and world-making in queer past.

Crucially, she identifies the urgency underpinning these new explorations into queer cultural memory: the "historically accumulated sense of fear that the stories, knowledge, and belongings of LGBTQI+ people will be lost and forgotten by history, due to neglect, silence or violent eradication."53 This urgent drive for the preservation of histories that were previously excluded from the dominant culture and are now in danger of disappearing into the ether is prominent in most projects of queering, including this thesis.

Though Ryberg identifies some important touchstones of queer cultural memory, the length of her article prevents any exploration into the foundation of this concept, including its theoretical basis of collective and cultural memory. Maurice Halbwachs is often considered the “founding father of contemporary memory studies,” though there are several theorists predating and contributing to his work,54 including Henri Bergson and

Émile Durkheim.55 Introduced in the 1930s, Halbwachs describes “collective memory” as memory drawing from the multiplicities of the social realm where it is “individuals as group members who remember.”56 At its most basic conception, each individual is a member of numerous and complex combinations of groups, and it is through those many

52 Ryberg, 123. 53 Ibid. 54 Jeffrey K. Ollick, Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi and Daniel Levy, eds. The Collective Memory Reader, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 5. 55 Ibid., 16. 56 Maurice Halbwachs, excerpt from The Collective Memory, in The Collective memory reader eds. Jeffrey K. Ollick, Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi and Daniel Levy, 142. 22

social attachments that collective memory—the memory of a group—arises.57

Halbwachs’ works, and many others’ since, have catalyzed a major “memory boom” in recent decades. Many scholars of this “memory boom” have explored the varied relationship between memory and history, both in theory and method. For example, Allan

Megill has addressed issues of identity,58 while Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz have explored the intersection of media, memory and history.59 Similarly, Alon Confino in his article “Collective Memory and Cultural History: Problems of Method” has surpassed the theoretical conceptions of collective memory and instead establishes the issues of its actual applications, specifically in the field of cultural history.60 Confino defines collective memory as the “exploration of a shared identity that unites a social group, be it a family or a nation, whose members nonetheless have different interests and motivations."61 He acknowledges the importance of using collective memory frameworks in cultural history, but identifies a worrying trend of carrying out cultural history where a certain “vehicle of memory” is chosen and conclusions are drawn directly from its representation or perception.62 This problem of method results in a facile history that ignores the “transmission, diffusion, and, ultimately, the meaning of this representation.”63 Harkening back to the ideals of Halbwachs’ initial conception, Confino argues for a comprehensive view of collective memory that considers not just the

57 Aleida Assmann, “Transformations Between History and Memory,” Social research 75, no. 1 (April 1, 2008), 52. 58 Megill, Allan, “History, Memory, Identity,” History of the Human Sciences 11, no. 3 (August 1998): 37– 62. 59 Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz, Media Events : the Live Broadcasting of History( Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). 60 Alon Confino, “Collective Memory and Cultural History: Problems of Method.” The American historical review 102, no. 5 (1997): 1386–1412. 61 Confino, 1390. 62 Ibid., 1388. 63 Ibid., 1395. 23

representation of memory, but the “multiplicity of memory” which acknowledges representation, but also reception and contestation as intermingling.64

The majority of Confino’s work is applicable to the application of memory frameworks within cultural history, but he also identifies an issue in memory studies as a whole which he considers too often "lack a clear focus and have become somewhat predictable."65 Aleida Assmann in her article “Transformation Between History and

Memory” highlights a similar issue as the underpinning for distinguishing cultural memory from collective memory. She writes that collective memory is too vague of a term to be critical since it is "an umbrella term for different formats of memory that need to be further distinguished."66 Wife and husband Aleida and Jan Assmann, in their respective writings, detail the difference between collective memory and cultural memory. Jan Assmann establishes cultural memory by distinguishing it from

“communicative memory” which is derived from everyday communications.67 He writes that this type of memory is maintained through “figures of memory” which include cultural formation, such as “texts, rites, monuments” and institutional communication such as recitation or practice observance.68 Aledia Assmann works from these assumptions and furthers the connection between cultural memory and the creation of identity. She writes: "institutions and larger social groups, such as nations, governments, the church, or a firm do not "have" a memory—they "make" one for themselves with the aid of memorial signs such as symbols, texts, images, rites, ceremonies, places, and

64 Confino, 1399. 65 Ibid., 1387. 66 Aleida Assmann, 55. 67 Jan Assmann, “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity,” trans. John Czaplicka, New German critique 65, no. 65 (1995), 126. 68 Jan Assmann, 129. 24

monuments. Together with such a memory, these groups and institutions "construct" an identity."69 Both the Assmanns relegate their discussions of cultural memory to its definition, differences, and theoretical underpinnings. Cultural memory has been applied to historical case studies. For example, Marta Karkowska, in her 2013 article, establishes the usefulness of this concept of cultural memory for studying the collective memory of the small Polish town of Olsztyn.70 Though her article focuses only on Poland,

Karkowska touches on the relevance of cultural memory in studying smaller or local communities, because the concept prioritizes a unique sense of identity built on reference to a shared past and belonging to “place and group,” and allows for fluidity between types of memory that might occur simultaneously in a community.71 Queer communities share some similarities to the local communities Karkowska refers to, but also differ from most types of community which tend to be based only on proximity. Though regionality and proximity do play a role in specific formations of queer community, like the Toronto queer community, and there are various studies addressing queer space as the basis of community,72 there remains a key difference because queer communities are also largely based upon identification. However, much of what Karkowska points to remains relevant because like local community, queer community can, to some extent, be “linked not only by their place of residence, but also by their manner of viewing the past, which fulfills the requisites for cultural memory.”73 This manner of viewing the past is essential to the

69 Aleida Assmann, 55. 70 Marta Karkowska, “On the Usefulness of Aleida and Jan Assmann’s Concept of Cultural Memory for Studying Local Communities in Contemporary Poland—the Case of Olsztyn” Polish sociological review, no. 183 (January 1, 2013), 376. 71 Ibid., 385. 72 See Natalia Oswin’s “Critical geographies and the uses of sexuality: Deconstructing queer space” and Christopher Reed’s “Imminent Doman: Queer Space in the Built Environment” 73 Karkowska, 377. 25

development of queer cultural memory, specifically in the context of this thesis as TBP, informs much of this manner.

To summarize, in answering Ryberg’s call, queer cultural memory is a form of memory based on queer past within a framework that rejects the dominant and institutional memory imposed by heterosexual society. Informed by collective memory, this theory encapsulates Halbwachs’ social frame, but collective memory is far too broad and meant to encapsulate many different functions of memory. Instead, queer cultural memory owes to cultural memory, as coined by the Assmanns, which is a type of collective memory that manifests between groups of people beyond everyday communicative memory and is instead based on “figures of memory.”74 Crucially, these figures, such as texts, images, or symbols, aid and transmit the creation of memory by a community with a shared past as a basis of identity. This relationship of memory figure and cultural memory is vital to this thesis, but crucially it also heeds Confino’s call for multiplicity of memory by also considering reception and contestation as integral to the production of memory.

An example of queer cultural memory with a historical lens is Christopher

Castiglia and Christopher Reed’s book If Memory Serves: Gay Men, AIDS, and the

Promise of Queer Past.75 Trauma and ideas of looking back while simultaneously looking forward pervade conceptions of queer memory. These principles do not conflict with the ideas of collective memory, but rather illuminate the role of forgetting and unremembering in the formation of memories within a community, while also insisting upon a unique non-linear temporal mode as its frame. Christopher Castiglia and

74 Aleida Assmann, 55. 75 Christopher Castiglia and Christopher Reed, If Memory Serves: Gay Men, AIDS, and the Promise of the Queer Past (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012). 26

Christopher Reed further this point in their book. They write of a mass amnesia that swept through the gay communities in the wake of AIDS, erasing spaces and rituals and weakening “our ability to imagine, collectively and creatively, alternative social presents and futures for ourselves.”76 In this way, Reed and Castiglia emphasize a pronounced connection between queer past and potential future. By unremembering the vibrancy of community before AIDS, the queer community lost its ability to imagine a future, underlining the inextricable nature of past/present/future in memory. Namely, they write of the corrective or reparative nature of collective queer memories where a culture’s collective memories can represent those who may have been previously excluded77 or

“repair the present rather than faithfully to restore the past.”78 By underlining the reparative nature of memory and the contested nature of the past, Reed and Castiglia’s work highlights the shared manner of viewing the past that underlines identity and the transmission of cultural memory. Though restoring the past “faithfully” is not a priority, the manner of viewing the past as “unremembering” is shared between members of the gay community separated by the trauma of AIDS. Importantly, many of Reed and

Castiglia’s examples are drawn from cultural examples or as the Assmanns would argue

“figures of memory,” including television shows such as Will and Grace or the film

Chuck & Buck (2000).79 The analysis of these figures— as places of contestation, reception, and representation for a community connected by a shared struggle and manner of viewing the past—is a direct example of the application of queer cultural memory in a historical context.

76 Castiglia and Reed, 1. 77 Ibid., 12. 78 Ibid., 13. 79 Ibid., 115, 175. 27

Ultimately, queer cultural memory is memory communicated through “figures of memory” in the queer community in order to radically rectify a historical discourse subjugated by traditional and heterosexual memory production. For queer communities, these figures of memory are also informed by the repositories that collect, store, and curate records: queer archives. The next section will outline these repositories and their connection to identity, shared past, and memory.

Memory, Archives and Community Identity

In recent years, archivists, community volunteers, and historians alike have researched, written about, and participated in the creation and management of community or grassroots archives. Scholarly works—for example the works of Joanna Newman,

Marika Cifor, Anne Gilliand, and Michelle Caswell—have tended towards several prominent themes including the problems and promises of community ownership; the intersections of memory, shared past, and identity; and the records’ often ephemeral characteristics.80 Though queer archives are generally listed under the umbrella of community archives, few sources focus their attention exclusively on this group. Though many aspects of the more generalized approach to community archives are applicable and shared by queer archives, there are certain aspects particular to, or at least more pronounced in, queer archives that distinguish them from other community archives.

Integrally, these archives contain the figures of memory at the heart of queer cultural memory. For this reason, this section outlines the particularities of community and queer

80 See Joanna Newman’s “Sustaining Community Archives,” Marika Cifor and Anne Gilliand’s “ Affect and the archives, archives and their affects” and various works by Michelle Caswell, including “Record and their imaginaries: imaging the impossible, making the possible imagined” and “Seeing yourself in history: community archives and the fight against symbolic annihilation.” 28

archives as repositories of figures of memory, largely informed by the few scholars who do focus on queer archives such as Kate Eichhorn and Alana Kumbier.

One major discernible trend in community archives studies is a focus on community-led grassroots creation and community ownership. For example, Andrew

Flinn in his work on community archives, tackles the complexities of community archives and defines them as “grassroots activities of documenting, recording and exploring community heritage in which community participation, control and ownership of the project is essential.”81 Queer archives, in particular, resonate with this understanding of community archives due to their almost exclusively grassroots beginnings and explicit turn from mainstream and traditional types of archiving. In fact,

Kate Eichhorn in her chapter on queer archives, writes that queer communities’ interest in archiving their own stories actually began decades earlier in the 1960s and 1970s, before the broader “archival turn” which occurred in the mid-1990s.82 Notably, many of these queer archives began in the private sphere: at the homes of queer activists and collectors.83 To illuminate her argument, Eichhorn uses the Lesbian Herstory Archives as a case study for this as their mandate demands the archives always be overseen by lesbians, for lesbians.84 The Canadian Gay and Lesbian Archives (CGLA) has also placed importance on queer ownership; in 1975, then known as the Canadian Gay Archives

(CGA), the collective decided against giving holdings to Archives of Ontario because they wanted “members of the queer community itself to decide what the ultimate fate of

81 Andrew Flinn. “Community Histories, Community Archives : Some Opportunities and Challenges.” Journal of the Society of Archivists 28, no. 2 (2007), 153. 82 Kate Eichhorn, “Queer Archives: From Collections to Conceptual Framework,” on The Routledge History of Queer America, 1st ed., Don Romesburg ed., (New York: Routledge, 2018),123. 83 Ibid., 124. 84 Ibid., 126. 29

its records would be.”85 As Marcel Barriault writes in his article on the CGLA in

Community Archives, “the traditional archival institutions in Canada have not been accountable to queer people and to researchers interested in the historical construction of sexuality.”86 Like ethnic and diasporic communities, queer people have not been included in traditional archives due to political repression, social stigma, and lack of access to traditional forms of record-keeping.

Alana Kumbier, in her book Ephemeral Material: Queering the Archive, highlights this “ground up” creation of community archives as well, but also emphasizes that these archives are created in line with the community’s politics.87 She notes that the community creation is integral because of the impact that archival choices have on the archival and historical record; she writes that when archivists make choices about record collection, preservation, or destruction they "fundamentally influence the composition and character of archival holdings and, thus, of societal memory."88 When these choices are made by—or at the very least informed by—the community whose historical recordings are at stake, the archives are able to better reflect the social and political values held by the community. In the case of queer archives, Kumbier compellingly writes that there is “no neutrality here” in the archiving queer communities because the creators “have stakes in community documentation, and are clearly trying to shape a

85 Marcel Barriault, “Archiving the queer and queering the archives: a case study of the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives (CLGA), in Community Archives: the Shaping of Memory eds. Jeannette A. Bastian and Ben Alexander, (London: Facet, 2009), 101. 86 Ibid. 98. 87 Kumbier, 24. 88 Ibid., 53. 30

queer historical (and specifically material) record that reflects a diversity of experiences."89

Another reason community led-organization and ownership are integral to the creation and management of community archives, including queer archives, is the often violent or discriminatory contexts that led to their creation. Flinn emphasizes the importance of community archives because they “challenge the legitimacy of the mainstream sector,” which he writes is particularly important for queer and Black communities since there is a long history of institutional mistrust.90 In many ways these community archives were created because the community’s stories were left out of traditional and mainstream archives, so a community archive helped to fill their explicit exclusion. In the case of queer archives, Kumbier explains that these archives are created not just in lieu of representation but respond “to a historical record that is limited because of violent and oppression contexts."91 Communities other than the queer community have certainly experienced violent and oppressive contexts which have led to or influenced exclusion from the historical or archival record; in this way Kumbier’s observation is not exclusively unique to queer archives. However, this characteristic is integral to the creation of queer archives, which are also informed by the political values of the communities.

Besides discussion of ownership, discussions of archives as the basis of shared past, identity, and memory, abound in scholarship on community archives. One such prominent scholar is Jeanette A. Bastian, the primary editor of Community Archives: The

89 Kumbier, 196-197. 90 Flinn 167. 91 Kumbier, 46. 31

Shaping of Memory and a contributor to several other works on archives and memory.92

In her chapter “Documenting Communities Through the Lens of Collective Memory” in

Identity Palimpsests, she explores ways for archivists to utilize a collective memory lens when documenting “peoples and communities outside the societal mainstream.”93

Integral to Bastian’s analysis of community archives is the idea that "documenting the memory of a group or community involves understanding the community in its collective sense, recognizing, appraising and describing its records comprehensively in ways that acknowledge the community as records creator.”94 Her focus on community as “records creators” and the archivist’s role in characterizing and preserving these records is analogous to many of the points made by Flinn, Eichhorn, and Kumbier in their respective discussion on ownership and control of community and queer archives. 95

More uniquely though, Bastian dedicates much of her article to an investigation of collective and cultural memory and identity in community archives. She begins with a concise literature review of collective memory and community beginning with

Halbwachs, but also covering the contributions of Barry Schwartz, the 1980s Popular

Memory Group, Aleida Assmann, and Jan Assmann.96 One thread of argumentation is that memory is crucial to forming and maintaining group identity, which is why studying collective memory is not only suitable but necessary for many marginalized communities.97 This discussion of collective memory parallels the previous discussion on

92 Jeannette A. Bastian “Documenting Communities Through the Lens of Collective” in Identity Palimpsests: Archiving Ethnicity in the U.S. and Canada, eds. Dominque Daniel and Amalia S. Levi, (Sacramento, CA: Litwin Books, 2014), 15-31. 93 Ibid., 16. 94 Ibid., 23. 95 Ibid., 22. 96 Ibid., 18-19. 97 Ibid., 19. 32

cultural memory as a more specific facet of collective memory, especially with Bastian’s reference of the Assmanns’ works on cultural memory. As well, without mentioning memory explicitly, Eichhorn touches on the contestations of queer past and future, but also emphasizes the role of the archive in cultural memory. She writes:

"to speak of the queer archive is to speak of a collective history that exceeds the bounds of representation or preservation. It is to evoke all the excess, trauma, struggle, and passion that is synonymous with queer lives. Queer archives are the places where the material residue of queer lives reside and spaces where future queer materialities not yet realized continue to be imagined."98 Eichhorn’s emphasis on futurity and imagination perfectly aligns with Castiglia and

Reed’s conception of queer past being connected to queer future and queer potential.

Furthermore, her discussion of “material residue” that informs this queer future and potential evokes the idea of “figures of memory” prominent in cultural memory as a facet of collective memory. Crucially, Eichhorn connects these figures, here called residue, to the “queer archive” thus emphasizing the importance of the archive to cultural memory.

Similarly, Kumbier writes "the archive is not simply a repository; it is also a theory of cultural relevance, a construction of collective memory, and a complex record of queer activity."99 Though Kumbier uses the catchall term collective memory, this quotation resembles the Assmanns’ construction of cultural memory. This archival repository recording queer activity, full of “figures of memory,” acts as evidence of a shared past from which collective memory can be made and identity constructed. Ultimately, not only are queer community archives tangled with conceptions of cultural memory, but they are firmly saturated with queer memory. This saturation implies that the queer

98 Eichhorn, 133. 99 Kumbier, 19. 33

community archives are repositories for the “figures of memory” that inform queer cultural memory.

However, this discussion of the archive sheds little light on the often uniquely ephemeral nature of the figures. The following section discusses the importance of ephemeral records in queer archives and The Body Politics’ characterization as an archive rooted in the ephemeral.

Ephemeral Records

Ephemeral archives, as the name suggests, are records considered fleeting, temporary, or transitory. Often these records were mass-produced, and, in most cases, these archives were not meant to be saved, cherished, or documented in the fashion they were. Kumbier, following Ann Cvetkovich, writes that the ephemeral material found in queer archives include productions of mass culture, camp, pornography, flyers, sex toys, condom wrappers, and political rally posters, among other items.100 Using zines101 as one example of the ephemeral in queer archives Kumbier writes that "the materiality that renders zines vulnerable is central to their charm, and their ability to connect creators and readers across time and space."102 As well, drawing from the works of authors in the leather communities considering the collection of ephemeral material as part of everyday life “will help community members get a sense of history as it emerges, and will help the

100 Kumbier, 16. 101 Zines have a long history in feminist discourse as well as the LGBT liberation movements, but they also have a complex relationship to history itself. See Elke Zobl’s “Cultural Production, Transnational Networking, and Critical Reflection in Feminist Zines” or Lucy Robinson’s “Zines and History: Zines as History.” 102 Kumbier, 194. 34

material retain its contextual value."103 Similarly, Bastian explains that studying memory through non-traditional archives or cultural ephemera is a good way to focus on the undocumented histories of communities whose stories cannot be told through traditional archives.104 In the absence of traditional archives—or proper representation within those archives—these ephemeral archives can access a more personal, and representative, facet of community history.

In some respect, certain queer histories can be found in traditional archives.

Barriault, in his work on the importance of the CGLA, describes such an approach; he argues that the social and political repression of queer folk has meant that many queer histories have had to be told by “brushing against the grain” of sparse or biased records, including using criminal records from before the decriminalization of homosexuality.105

Nevertheless, this usage of the traditional archives, while important, only allows certain types of stories to be found. Thus, important stories of queer community members who slipped through the cracks of documentation—or were purposely expunged—remain untold, which speaks to the importance of using ephemera and non-traditional records that would not be preserved in an institutional archive. Kate Eichhorn, in her article

“Queer Archives,” furthers this point by underlining the importance of ephemera to queer lives by explicating the “extrinsic value” queer people often place on documents and artifacts where the “detritus of queer lives is imagined to gain a value that it was hitherto denied.”106 In this way, non-traditional records within queer archives are often the most

103 Kumbier, 202. 104 Bastian, 18. 105 Barriault, 98 106 Eichhorn, 123 35

appropriate way to access the histories of queer lives that exist outside of traditional documentation.

Markedly, the content of the CGLA’s records is broad and wide-ranging in medium as the archive adopted a “total archives approach” 107 meaning it collected a variety of source types including documents, images, digital and oral records, among others.108 Flinn writes that the content of community archives has been in flux, but many

“use the broadest and most inclusive definitions possible,” including “the personal ephemera of individual lives.”109 Eichhorn emphasizes that the format, content, and funding of queer archives have manifested in a myriad of ways, but she also highlights that these collections “have often taken shape under the unique constraints of queer life.”110 Not only do these constraints differentiate queer archives from other community archives, but they also provide a possible explanation for why the inclusion of non- traditional archives is essential. Eichhorn notes that buying and storing queer items carried a degree of risk due to stigma and threat of violence. Therefore, publications like a gay magazine or lesbian erotic novel, whose straight counterparts likely would not have been preserved, were meticulously taken care of and housed in community archives.111

Clearly queer archival practices are deeply entangled with conceptions of queer memory and ephemeral material. Queer archives, as a type of community archives created as a result of and informed by violent political and social persecution,

107 According to Laura Milliar’s article “Discharging our Debt: The Evolution of the Total Archive Concept in English Canada,” the total archives approach arose in the 1970s and detailed the collection of records from all media across government and private sector instead of keeping public and private records separate from state or national records like other countries (104). 108 Barriualt, 101. 109 Flinn, 153. 110 Eichhorn, 123. 111 Eichhorn, 123. 36

predominantly rely on ephemeral records to tell the stories for whom traditional archival records do not exist. These ephemeral records are examples of “figures of memory,” which represent a shared past and act as a basis for creating cultural memory and establishing community identity. Furthermore, these records cannot be dissociated from conceptions of queer past which are shaped by trauma, liberation, and desire and inherently intertwined with queer future and imagination. These fleeting materials are often evidence of queer desire or trauma, such as queer pornographic materials meant for private consumption establishing sexual desire or a poster from a rally protesting police brutality. But, the mere fact that these materials were saved at all also clearly indicates a drive towards historical preservation. This drive is both for the benefit of the future and in order to preserve representation in a space where representation has been limited, mitigated, and contested. Perhaps, if standard archival materials properly represented the queer community, the need to preserve mass-produced ephemera would be less. But in the absence of any other options these ephemeral records represent an act of reaching for the quickly withdrawing past in order to bring the politics and values of trauma, desire, and identity into the present and the future before it is too late.

The Body Politic, as a gay liberation magazine, sits on the edge of ephemeral and traditional archival records. Much of the magazine adopts a newspaper format with researched news articles, photographs, and letters to the editor, which evokes a more traditional approach to archiving through newspaper clippings and journalistic photographs. However, interspersed among and bracketing these more traditional examples, are raw depictions of intercourse, cruising, violent encounters with the police, photographs of genitalia and sexually explicit comics, and ads seeking sex or instructing

proper condom usage. These types of materials cannot be separated from the news articles and photographs because they show two sides of the same coin; liberation and violence are inseparable from the politics of sexuality and sexual desire which the latter materials are explicitly and shamelessly representing. Furthermore, though TBP can now be seen as act of preservation and documentation, at the time it appears to have been more focused on creating, maintaining, and connecting a community that had only recently been given federal “permission” to exist without legal persecution after Bill c-

150 in 1969 which decriminalized homosexuality.112 TBP’s result was long-lasting, but its creation is deeply rooted in the ephemeral. In this way, the entirety of TBP can be considered ephemeral even though some of its materials follow a more traditional format.

Ultimately, the complex theory of queer cultural memory lies at the heart of this thesis as it describes the fleeting essence that arises from images in The Body Politic.

Queer cultural memory is a theory indebted to a variety of scholars and their work on collective memory, cultural memory, community archives, queer archives, and ephemeral records. In essence, it points to the memory that arises from the figures of memory, such as images and objects, that populate community-led queer archives. These archives have an important relationship to cultural memory as a basis of identity. The figures in these archives are, crucially, ephemeral in nature, which directly connects to the photographic focus of this project. In this way, this chapter established the way queer cultural memory functions as it communicates its ideas through ephemeral archives, many of which can be found in The Body Politic as a curated archive filled with figures of memory. This

112 This idea of decriminalization due to this bill is debatable. As Tom Hooper’s article “Queering ‘69” argues, this also acted as a recriminalization and actually negatively impacted queer people in Canada. Nevertheless, the myth of decriminalization still carries on and, regardless of its actual effects on the lives of queer people, did mark a public federal recognition of queer existence. 38

chapter outlined the objective of this thesis, but the following chapter explains how the images in The Body Politic will be collected and analyzed in order to capture the queer cultural memory of Toronto’s Gay and Lesbian Liberation Movement.

Chapter 3

Definitions and Visual Methodology

The previous chapter defines explores the complexities of queer cultural memory and of community archives and how they intersect in the unique space that is The Body

Politic. This chapter details the collection and the framework needed to analyze the images that produce the queer cultural memory of the GLLM. Beginning with an exploration of violence, both culturally and in an anti-gay context, this chapter explicates a definition of violence in order to both identify violent images and articles in the magazine and contextualize the violent images in the proceeding chapters. This is followed by a definition of protest, though in a more simplistic fashion. Subsequently, this chapter establishes a methodology of visual anthropology and content analysis owing to multimodal, hermeneutic, and postpositivist frameworks, which inform the data collection processes. Finally, this chapter builds on these definitions with a presentation of the corpus selection process and the creation of the codebooks used to perform quantitative and qualitative analysis in subsequent chapters.

Towards a Definition of Violence

The term violence rests in a liminal space caught between narrow definitions of direct and harmful physical actions, and broad conceptions of the political, social, and private spheres. Delineating this threshold, various theorists from across the disciplines have sought to decipher violence in terms of its causes, expressions, and representations.

More often than not, these definitions of violence are derived from, and specifically apply to, particular events of violence or types of violence, including the Holocaust, genocide,

colonization, or domestic violence. In this sense, an all-encapsulating theory of violence does not exist because, as Bruce B. Lawrence and Aisha Karim write, “there is no general theory of violence apart from its practices.” 113 For this reason, definitions of violence must be flexible and mutable to avoid stripping particular manifestations of violence from events or equating the violence of one instance to the violence of another.

Literature on violence spans various disciplines including philosophy, political science, media studies, peace studies, and gender and women’s studies. However, few definitions have been created to specifically characterize acts and experiences of anti-gay violence. Surveys of anti-gay violence do exist, but they are primarily contemporary studies that look to assert the existence and causes of violence against queer people.

Though helpful in establishing a sense of the types of violent acts experienced by gay people, though primarily gay men, they almost exclusively use restrictive definitions of violence, which exclude non-physical violence and prioritize the experiences of gay men over lesbians and bisexuals. For example, Greg Kelner’s 1983 study Homophobic

Assault, which analyzes the contemporary situation of anti-gay violence in Winnipeg, uses “direct physical attack” or “queerbashing,” meaning physical attacks on people for appearing queer, as its “operational definition of violence.”114 Though this definition captures many instances of anti-gay violence, it also limits any forms of violence beyond direct physical harm, and centres the experiences of gay men over others in the queer community. Similarly, though not quite as restrictively, Gary Comstock’s 1991 research on anti-gay violence in America in Violence Against Lesbians and Gay Men uses a

113 Bruce B. Lawrence and Aisha Karim, eds., On Violence: A Reader, (North Carolina: Duke University Press Books, 2007), 7. 114 Kelner, Greg. Homophobic Assault: a Study of Anti-Gay Violence (Winnipeg: Published for Gays for Equality by the Council on Homosexuality and Religion, 1991), 3. 41

definition of violence that emphasizes physicality. Comstock outlines several

"subcategories for physical violence” including “objects thrown,” “punched, hit, kicked or beaten,” and “spit at” among others.115 Importantly, Comstock expands his definition beyond that of Kelner to include “chased or followed” and “vandalism and arson” under the category of violence,116 which allows recognition of experiences of violence beyond that of queerbashing. In turn, this helps centre the experiences of queer women for whom vandalism or arson is more common than physical assault.117 Though Comstock incorporates a more inclusive definition of violence, and his research notably includes analysis based on race, gender and area, his categories do not include verbal assault or account for the intention of violence. Most recently, Christine Hanhardt’s Safe Space:

Gay Neighbourhood History and the Politics of Violence locates violence contextualized by queer theory within American gay and lesbian political social movements, including the liberation movement of the 1970s and 1980s.118 Hanhardt’s focus is on urban development and neighbourhood, but she offers an interesting definition of violence drawing from Frantz Fanon’s works; though she equates violence to “immediate bodily harm” and places language or non-physical acts under “victimization,” she does so to

“avoid levelling particular harms into universalized claims of shared vulnerability.”119 As well, she emphasizes the association between violence and safety, often used interchangeably, and how they have acted as the “not-always-spoken-about yet defining

115 Gary David Comstock, Violence Against Lesbians and Gay Men, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 38. 116 Ibid., 38. 117 Ibid., 40. 118 Christina B. Hanhardt, Safe Space: Gay Neighborhood History and the Politics of Violence, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), 4. 119 Ibid., 29. 42

motors of mainstream LGBT political life since the 1970s.”120 This recognition of safety is integral to any analysis of violence against the gay community, particularly during the liberation period since street patrols in the name of safety led by gay activists were a common response to street violence.121

Another inclusive definition of violence, though not specific to anti-gay violence, is put forth by Jessica M Fishman and Carolyn Marvin from the University of

Pennsylvania in their article “Portrayals of Violence and Group Difference in Newspaper

Photographs: Nationalism and Media.” Fishman and Marvin, in their exploration of the depiction of U.S. Agents versus non-U.S. agents on the front page of the New York

Times, make use of a “trimodal definition of media violence.”122 Specifically, this definition includes instances of physical force, alongside depictions of coercion and objects used to coerce, and “the physical consequences of violence” such as damage to persons or buildings.123 Despite the emphasis on physicality, this definition also identifies

“latent” violence as opposed to direct violence which emphasizes the role of intention, even if not carried out, as an act of violence.124 Overall, this definition is suitably specific to address portrayals of violence, but also broad enough to avoid gendered restrictions on the experience of violence since physical assault is only one aspect of violence. As well, despite Fishman and Marvin’s application of the definition to media studies, this definition can also be easily extended to written depictions of violence alongside visual representations. However, since it is outside of the scope of their article, the authors do

120 Hanhardt, 31. 121 Ibid., 82. 122 Jessica Fishman and Carolyn Marvin, “Portrayals of Violence and Group Difference in Newspaper Photographs: Nationalism and Media” Journal of communication 53, no. 1 (March 1, 2003), 32. 123 Fishman and Marvin, 33-34. 124 Ibid., 34. 43

not recognize the ways in which these acts of violence interact with the larger processes of violence, namely institutional and cultural violence. Since the liberation period of gay and lesbian politics was largely concerned with liberation from cultural and institutional norms, it is essential to also include these larger processes of violence.

Johan Galtung, a prominent scholar in peace studies, outlines three different categories of violence: direct, structural and cultural. For Galtung, direct violence includes actions taken by an actor against a subject, while structural is a “structure at work,” and cultural is a “culture at work when used to legitimize direct and structural violence.” 125 Most of the definitions of violence put forward so far can be encapsulated by “direct violence,” including actions like “killing” and “maiming,” 126 but certain aspects also fall under cultural violence, such as “the material damage to buildings, infrastructure,” which encapsulates “vandalism.” 127 Going beyond these previous definitions is structural violence, which includes terms such as “marginalization” functioning by “keeping the underdogs on the outside,” as it “will impede mobilization.”128 Significantly, Galtung highlights the way these types of violence function together where “cultural violence makes direct and structural violence look and feel right, or at least not wrong.”129 This is centrally important to instances of anti-gay violence, and institutionalized anti-gay violence, as it highlights that the culture of the

1970s and 1980s in Canada largely reinforced and normalized such acts.

This thesis considers violence as a multiplicity of coexisting and interconnected processes where acts of violence are ways that the processes manifest in specific

125 Johan Galtung, Pioneer of Peace Research 1st ed, (Berlin, Heidelberg: 2013), 35. 126 Ibid., 36. 127 Ibid., 40. 128 Ibid., 38. 129 Ibid., 39. 44

instances and contexts. Lawrence and Karim write that "as process, violence is cumulative and boundless…violence as process is often not recorded because it is internalized; it becomes part of the expectation of the living.”130 In this way, an act of street violence is direct violence or institutional violence and a product of the larger process of cultural violence. The destruction of, or significant damage to, prominent spaces for the community (including bookstores, gay bars, or bathhouses) by police will also be included under the broad process of “violence.” However, it is, specifically, an intersection of structural and cultural violence, which both seek to prevent mobilization, and normalize violence against the community. To summarize, the definition of violence that this thesis will use to approach recordings of anti-violence within The Body Politic, both in image and written form, is a definition formed within the framework of Galtung’s distinctions of direct, cultural, and structural violence, but derived from previous definitions within media and queer studies. Specifically, the term violence includes all instances of direct physical assault to body or building, depictions or descriptions of the results of physical damage, and indirect “latent” harm with intention including threats, verbal and psychological abuse characterized by overt anger, or the use of slurs. This definition is the working definition of violence for the subsequent chapters and necessary for the selection process. However, the definition of protest is also essential to this discussion as the focus of this thesis also pertains to photographs of protest.

130 Lawrence and Karim, 12. 45

Toward a Definition of Protest

Though protest comes in many forms, it requires less exploration than violence. In their introduction to Discourses of Disorder: Riots, Strikes and Protests in the Media,

Christopher Hart and Darren Kelsey explain that "riots, strikes and protest serve to highlight fissures in society, express discontent, and stimulate public debate. Ultimately, riots, strikes and protests aim to challenge and effect change in existing social and economic structures and policies.”131 Like violence, protest intersects with peace studies, but unlike violence, its definition is not altered by morals or types. While the exploration of violence classifies each type, from psychological to verbal to physical, with intersections of cultural, institutional, latent or active, the collections of Hart and Kelsey do not even include a descriptive definition of protest because its meaning appears to be largely assumed.

Though some sources do address specifics of protests, they are often relegated to perspectives as informed by morals or politics. For example, the 2013 International

Handbook of Peace and Reconciliation includes a chapter called “Perspectives on Protest in Great Britain, Northern Ireland, Canada, the United States and Australia” which includes qualitative and quantitative survey data from Anglo-dominant countries on the topic of protesting.132 Though specific formations, such as the difference between a march versus a sit-in, are not explained, types of protest justifications including social

131 Christopher Hart and Darren Kelsey, Discourses of Disorder: Riots, Strikes and Protests in the Media (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019), 1. 132 Andrea Mercurio, James Page, Alyssa Mendlein, Emily Bales, John Davis, Carol Davis, Michael Whitely, and Doe West, “Perspectives on Protest in great Britain, Northern Ireland, Canada, the United States and Australia” in International Handbook of Peace and Reconciliation, eds. Kathleen Malley- Morrison, Andrea Mercurio, and Gabriel Twose, (New York: Springer, 2013), 172. 46

justification, moral responsibility, and humanization are detailed.133 For the purposes of this study, protest will be defined as a public demonstration of disagreement to communicate discontent or advocate for change. Though this will often take the form of traditional marches or picketing, this broad definition also leaves space for non- traditional forms of protest including kiss-ins or bike-a-thons.

Visual Methodology

With these definitions of violence and protest established, the focus now lies on the visual methodology underpinning the qualitative and quantitative analysis of photographs in The Body Politic. Like the understanding of queer memory from the previous chapter, this visual methodology can also be understood under the umbrella of cultural history. However, the vagueness of cultural history in this case asks more than it answers in terms of using images in the field. Peter Burke, in What is Cultural History, classifies four phases of cultural history, with the 3rd and 4th phase most relevant to this project: the 1960s rise of popular culture studies (phase 3) and the New Cultural History

(NCH) which arose around 1980s (phase 4).134 NCH includes a wide definition of culture informed by anthropology where both artefacts (like images or objects) and practices

(like celebrations) are encapsulated by the term culture.135 Two important aspects of the

New Cultural History, as a departure from earlier cultural histories and both intellectual and social history,136 are the rise of the history of memory137 and the usage of material

133 Ibid., 174. 134 Peter Burke, What Is Cultural History? 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Polity, 2008), 6. 135 Ibid., 29-30. 136 Ibid., 51-52 137 Ibid., 67. 47

culture, including the materiality of texts. 138 Though Burke’s exploration of cultural history helps conceptualize its relationship to the broader discipline and the way modern anthropological definition of culture has informed the creation of New Cultural History, his discussion remains vague in relation to the use of sources and images in particular.

Thus, we must come full circle and borrow tools from a closely related field that has already rectified this gap by developing specific tools and frameworks to utilize the visual in both qualitative and quantitative research: anthropology.

Anthropologist Marcus Banks, in his book Using Visual Data in Qualitative

Research, identifies two standard strands of visual research utilized by social researchers.

Though they are not mutually exclusive, the first strand is documentation, which involves the creation of images in order to document social aspects of a culture,139 while the second strand refers to “the study of images produced or consumed by the subjects of the research.”140 In the case of The Body Politic and this study, both strands are necessary to consider since the magazine itself could be considered a form of self-documentation, while this thesis is evidently researching the images produced by the community.

Notably, Banks underlines that documentation, regardless of its aim or intention, “can never be a neutral enterprise.” 141 This arguably remains true even in the case of self- documentation, but particularly in the case of TBP as its aim is underlined by liberatory and political ideals without claiming neutrality. Regardless of the research strand, Banks emphasizes that one’s approach to researching these images must include their “full external narrative” meaning production alongside consumption without arbitrarily

138 Ibid., 71. 139 Marcus Banks, Using Visual Data in Qualitative Data 2nd edition, ed. Uwe Flick, (London: SAGE, 2018), 6. 140 Ibid., 7. 141 Ibid., 73. 48

assigning meaning.142 Following this assertion, and considering the research as a combination of the first and second strand, it demands a combined approach that encapsulates the images’ many layers of mediation. Beginning with the production of the image, both the aim of the photographer and the context in which it was captured, to its inclusion in the magazine and its material context on the page and, finally, its current interpretation in this thesis. It is within the meshing of these mediated layers that memory arises and can be conceptualized. Each of these layers are mediated in different ways and by diverse factors with a distinctive relationship to cultural memory, and thus must be analysed with different or new tools.

Banks contextualizes his work within the broader field of cultural studies, but notes that researchers in anthropology and cultural studies tend to consider visual sources in the same manner, with the same tools and frameworks, as a traditional textual resource; this is a phenomenon his volume attempts to rectify.143 Luc Pauwels and Dawn

Manny in their introduction to the 2020 edition of the SAGE Handbook of Visual

Research Methods also contextualize their discussion of visual sources within cultural studies, particularly visual culture studies. Visual culture incorporates the material and the immaterial facets of visual expression of culture; the immaterial side, also known as

“visuality” put simply encompasses “‘what’ we see and ‘how’ we see it.” 144 Pauwels and

Manny underline three often interrelated aspects of visual culture: the “production context,” the “visual phenomenon,” and its “utilization context.”145 These align with

Banks’ assertion of considering “the full narrative”, but provide a more detailed

142 Ibid., 38. 143 Banks, 40. 144 Luc Pauwels and Dawn Manny, “Introduction” in The SAGE Handbook of Visual Research Methods Second edition. (Los Angeles, CA: SAGE Publications, 2020), 1-2. 145 Ibid., 2. 49

explanation as to what that narrative is. Since both Banks’ work and the SAGE

Handbook are deeply intertwined with the social sciences, they emphasize present-day, and often active, research as opposed to historical research. However, Jeremy Rowe and

Eric Margolis specifically address methodological approaches to historic photographs in their addition to the SAGE handbook. Rowe and Margolis begin their discussion from the premise that people tend to consider historical photographs, defined as at least 50 years old, as “accurate, indexical reflections of reality" and thus scholars lack the tools for proper analysis.146 To combat this assumption, they identify two approaches, the hermeneutic and the postpositivist evidentiary, which they contend should be used in tandem holistically consider the nature of the historic photograph.147 The hermeneutic perspective considers photographs as texts and depends on deriving meaning from symbolism and the photographs cultural context.148 On the other hand, the postpositivist perspective underlines the characterization of photographs as representations by centring on the impact the photographer’s own perspective has on the composition and content of the image.149 Rowe outlines the three strategies to photo research: evidence, interpretation, and speculation. 150 Evidence relies on information visible in the photograph or its immediate context. Interpretation uses deductions and circumstantial evidence, while speculation uses inferences based on information usually exterior to the image.151 Each of these strategies depend on considering both the explicit and implicit

146 Jeremy Rowe and Eric Margolis, “Methodological Approaches to Disclosing Historic Photographs,” in The SAGE Handbook of Visual Research Methods Second edition. (Los Angeles, CA: SAGE Publications, 2020), 434. 147 Ibid., 435. 148 Ibid., 436-437. 149 Ibid., 436. 150 Ibid., 437. 151 Ibid., 437. 50

context the photograph appears in and was created in, including composition and exterior information. This differs from the approach many visual ethnographers take since they tend to focus on the researcher-subject relationship as opposed to the photographer- imager relationship. 152 Rowe and Margolis’ approach, combining the hermeneutic and the postpositivist evidentiary, succeeds in emphasizing various facets and roles of the photograph: both its symbolic and representative stances.

These approaches do not directly align with Banks’ identification of two strands of research, but they do respond to some of the questions that arise from them and ensure the full narrative of a photograph will be explored. For example, documentation with its false assumption of neutrality, requires a focus on composition and the relationship between the documenter, which the postpositivist purports. In contrast, the hermeneutic and its focus on symbols allows for the second strand of production/consumption and the magazine’s role as symbol and the meaning and memory it creates can be acknowledged.

However, neither Banks, Rowe or Margolis explicitly address a framework that considers the integration of text and image (like a magazine), but rather differentiate between

“image as text” and “image as evidence.” Thus, while a combined hermeneutic and postpositivist approach is valuable when addressing a project combining the two strands of visual research, they must also be encapsulated by a broader framework that considers not just the image (or not just the text), but both text and image and their complex relations. One such framework is that of multimodality.

As Theovan Leeuwen explains, multimodality (originally used in psychology while studying perception) has more recently come to “denote the integrated use of

152 Ibid., 438. 51

different communicative resources such as language, image, sound, and music in multimodal texts and communicative events."153 Additionally, it is two-fold; it is both an aspect of communication and an analytical practice used in the exploration of multimodal communication.154 A magazine, like TBP, which includes images and texts integrated in various forms including captions, headings, articles combined with photographs, background images, and drawings, is a form of multimodal communication, but can also be analyzed using a multimodal framework. Leeuwen relies heavily on the work of

Roland Barthes to inform his conception of multimodality. As an exception to the Paris

School of thought, which looked at popular culture, his 1977 text focused heavily on the text-image relationship both in understanding their integration and how they are culturally and historically informed. 155 Per Leeuwen, Barthes outlines three categories of image-text integration: illustration, anchorage, and relay. The first two indicate when text and image present the same information but differ in primary versus secondary. Relay is where the image and text are not redundant, meaning they do not repeat each other, but rely on one another for the entirety of content.156 Leeuwen furthers Barthes’ conception by putting it in conversation with the work of Martinec and Salway, who also explore the relationship of image and text; they look at exposition, exemplification, extension, enhancement and projection.157 In essence, exposition is when image and text express the same level of generality or focus, while exemplification occurs when one is more focused, or general, than the other. Extension refers to addition, such as adding details not

153 Theovan Leeuwen, “Multimodality and Multimodal Research,” in The SAGE Handbook of Visual Research Methods Second edition. (Los Angeles, CA: SAGE Publications, 2020), 549. 154 Leeuwen, 551. 155 Ibid., 550-551. 156 Ibid., 551. 157 Ibid., 553. 52

related to content of image, such as the creator, and enhancement is for circumstantial elements like timing, while projection refers to the relationship between creator and image."158 Ultimately multimodality, largely contextualized in the works of Barthes,

Martinec and Salway, seeks to analyze images and their close relationship to texts. This does not negate the hermeneutic and postpositive approach, but rather alters their application to apply not simply to images, but to multimodal works as a whole. Though as Rowe and Margolis explanation of the two approaches shows, many of the same features, including composition and framing, are essential to both a multimodal framework and the two visual approaches, so it remains relevant. Through these works it is evident that the analysis of images in cultural history and visual anthropology is complex, particularly when the images are to be explored in a multimodal document.

However, by combining multimodality, hermeneutics, and postpositivism the various facets of these photographs as multimodal, documentation, and reflective research can be analyzed.

Significantly, content analysis is common to all three aforementioned frameworks and approaches to visual research. Following the work of several theorists including

Bernard Berelson and Asa A. Berger, Katy Parry, in her contribution to SAGE’s latest handbook, describes quantitative content analysis as a systemic, numerical, and aggregated tool used to describe communicative content, including images, in a representative sample; this content is not limited to the more obvious examples such as a symbol or particular person, but could also measure the amount of violence present in a

158 Ibid. 53

set of images.159 Though Parry mostly includes tactics for a predominantly quantitative content analysis, she does leave space for a qualitative consideration of data in order to select categories or examples of representative data, which relies on principles from

Siegfried Kracauer’s qualitative content analysis.160 She writes that Kracauer’s addition

“allows for the recognition of various meanings in on text” including both “surface

(manifest) and hidden (latent)” discourse.161

Parry describes various limitations to this tool, particularly the issue in connecting content to meaning, but also that emotions and expressions are difficult to quantify.162

Similarly, as Rowe and Margolis point out, one major issue in utilizing content analysis for historic photographs is that content analysis depends on representing a total population; results can be extremely skewed by sample bias due to certain images being more available to researchers.163 However, in the case of The Body Politic, the number of images is finite and limited to its total 135 issues. Although it should be noted that while these images are representative of the category of protest and violence-laden images in the magazine, a degree of bias necessarily remains because these images are not automatically representative of Toronto’s GLLM as a whole because they were mediated by the photographers and TBP’s collective. While this corpus cannot speak to the entirety of Toronto’s queer community in the 1970s and 1980s, it sheds light on The Body

Politic’s mediation and their usage of these images. To some extent, it also represents a

159 Katy Parry, “Qualitative Content Analysis of the Visual,” in The SAGE Handbook of Visual Research Methods Second edition. (Los Angeles, CA: SAGE Publications, 2020), 354. 160 Parry, 355. 161 Parry, 355. 162 Ibid. 163 Rowe and Margolis, 444. 54

specific subsect of Toronto’s GLLM who were the most represented by the magazine: white gay men.

In using content analysis, as informed by an initial qualitative approach, Parry described various systemic rules including coding and the creation of the codebook. The codebook, and the process of coding a sample, is made up of the variables and values being used to sort the sample into categories and derive the numerical information for quantitative analysis.164 The use of a codebook hinges on reliability and replicability with the underlying principle that the same results will occur if a different researcher were to approach the corpus with the same codebook.165 However, this reliability and replicability standard does not allow for any instances of subjectivity. As a study of memory and representation, subjectivity allows for the multiplicity of memory brought up by Confino in his discussion of cultural history. This subjectivity means the results of this study will be one facet of historical memory amongst various others, but as it does not imply a false sense of objectivity it does not risk being overly simplistic in its analysis.

This study requires two selection processes and two separate codebooks in order to collect the qualitative and quantitative data. The first codebook is largely numerical in nature, and thus follows the ideals of replicability and reliability closely. The second codebook makes up the backbone of the qualitative research, introducing subjectivity.

Together, the two codebooks facilitate data collection from the photographs of violence and protest, also known as the figures of memory, which inform the memory of Toronto’s

164 Parry, 358. 165 Parry, 354. 55

Gay and Lesbian Liberation Movement. However, prior to these codebooks, the image selection process must first be established.

The entire catalogue of images and articles in The Body Politic, referred to here as the corpus, was far too large and unwieldy to perform in-depth qualitative or quantitative analysis on for the breadth of this research. Conservatively assuming a minimum of one image per page and two articles, this amounts to 2665 images and 5330 articles at a minimum. However, there are often several images and articles per page, so the number of items to review could easily be double this number. Beyond the unwieldy size, many of these images and articles are not relevant to the topic at hand; though they depict various facets of the queer experience including images of global concurrent movements, artistic representations, portraits of community members, and historical events, they do not speak to the memory and representation of violence and protest in Toronto during the

GLLM. Therefore, in order to narrow the absolute corpus, this thesis includes a preliminary selection process comprised of exclusion and inclusion criteria. The following criteria was developed on two basic premises: relevance to the topic, and availability to print and use the image in this thesis. First, the items must be contemporary photographs or new articles from the 1970s and 1980s therefore excluding any historical photographs or editorials from past movements in order to stay representative of TBP as documenter rather than historian. Second, all photographs from press organizations outside of the magazine, such as the Associated Press, must be excluded due to copyright issues and inability to reproduce.166 Third, the images must be identifiably Toronto, either contextually through the caption, title, or associated article or

166 Ken Hickling, “Photographs in The Body Politic and Research Permissions,” email received by Jessica Wilton, January 31, 2020. Ken Hickling is the director of Mission Engagement at Pink Triangle Press. This organization published The Body Politic and owns the rights to the images and content. 56

visually through signage, landmarks, or landscape. Articles must be indicated as Toronto through the title, article content, or byline. Fourth, the images and articles must depict or describe violence or protest following the definitions previously outlined; in this case, protest is a public demonstration of disagreement to communicate discontent or advocate for change while violence refers to visible physical or psychological force indicated by injury, damage, or outburst of intense anger. After application of the inclusion and exclusion criteria, the absolute corpus was narrowed to the “selected” corpus, which refers to the group of all images and articles that are relevant to the topic and available for inclusion.

Following the preliminary selection process, this chapter includes a broad stroke statistical analysis on the total corpus in order to attain data on general trends and larger comparisons of the images and articles in The Body Politic. This analysis was executed using Codebook One (Appendix I) which was designed to collect two types of data: descriptive information and type. Descriptive information remained basic in nature and consisted of year and month of publication, issue number, page number(s), and a brief description for locating the item. Determining the content and data type was a way to classify and sort using qualitative observations in tandem with the definitions of violence and protest. Stemming from the definitions, “violence” and “protest” are the two main content types for sorting each image or article; the content types relate to the information the articles and images represent or communicate. Subsequently, each content type could then be sorted into one of the eight data type groupings, four for each content type, which were based on preliminary qualitative observations. The data type is less about what is in the article or image and more about the format the information is communicated through,

such as an image with only a caption versus an image with an article. The eight data types are as follows: violent image (VI) meaning an image with no article or only a short caption or title depicting or indicating violence; violent image with article (VIA) meaning an image with associated article where an image depicts or indicates violence and has an associated article; non-violent image with article (NVIA) where an article indicates or describe violence while its associated image does not; violent article (VA) where an article indicates or describes violence without an associated article; protest image (PI) where an image with no article or only a short caption or title illustrates a protest; protest image with article (PIA) where an image and article describe and depict a protest; non- protest image and protest article (NPIA) where an article describes a protest but the associated image does not; and finally the protest article (PA) which describes a protest with no associated image. After sorting each image into content and data types with accompanying descriptive information, this data was used as the basis for the statistical analysis including prevalence of each data and content type over time, their totals and the data type breakdown for each type of content.

The preliminary selection process resulted in the 234 articles and images, which though appropriate for the general trends, were still too numerous for an in-depth quantitative and qualitative analysis. Thus, a secondary selection process was required to narrow the corpus further into a representative sample. Only photographs were chosen from the corpus as the secondary codebook was informed by visual anthropology and the focus of this thesis is photographs in The Body Politic. Several options for the content and data type proportions existed including no limited proportions, a 50/50 split of the two content types, equal distribution across all data types, or proportional distribution

across the data types. As it is a representative sample, the proportional distribution across all data types appeared most appropriate since it would not skew the results towards or against certain content or data types but instead keep the proportions of the total corpus but on a smaller scale. To elaborate, a 50/50 split of violence and protest would have made the two content types appear equal in prevalence and relevance despite general trends to the contrary, while equal distribution across all data types would have overrepresented smaller categories like violent images. Similarly, without limiting proportions, conclusions would have been difficult to quantify because it would have to be entirely randomized which could have easily resulted in over or under representation across both data and content types. With proportional distribution, the final corpus remains as representative as possible since it does not under or over represent any categories, nor does it equalize the content types. However, the decision to choose proportional distribution does alter the overall number of images chosen for the final corpus as certain categories are significantly smaller than others. Thus, a number had to be found that allowed inclusion of at least one image for each data type without being too vast for in-depth analysis.

With 234 items in the total corpus, 165 of them were images and of these images the smallest category, violent images, amounted to only four items. The smallest total number that allowed the VI category to have at least one image was 41.25 images, which was rounded down to 40 because at the initial number of 41 images the two smallest categories of VI and NPIA would have been rounded to equivalent amounts which is not reflective of the corpus. This resulted in a distribution shown in table 1.

Table 1 Proportional distribution of photographs in the representative sample

Unrounded proportion Rounded Data Type /40 proportion /40

VI: Violent 0.96 1 Image VIA: Violent Image and 3.15 3 Article NVIA: Non- Violent Image 8 8 and Article

PI: Protest 4.36 4 Image

PIA: Protest Image and 22.06 22 Article NPIA: Non- Protest Image 1.45 2* and Article All numbers were rounded to the nearest whole decimal, except for NPIA which was rounded up instead of down despite its decimal. Rounding down would have resulted in

39 images instead of 40 and its decimal was closest to 0.5, making it the logical choice.

With the final numbers for the proportional distribution completed, the selection process continued by choosing the images that would populate the representative corpus. Initially, a randomized approach seemed plausible, but by choosing certain images that were representative of a trend or exception it ensured a variety of images as well as maintained its representative nature. However, this decision does introduce uncertainty and subjectivity, which can arguably be mitigated with careful reasoning, a premise of

qualitative and quantitative data, and an understanding of memory as inherently subjective.

With the final “representative” sample chosen, the secondary codebook (Appendix 2) could be applied, which focused on an in-depth compositional, visual, and contextual analysis built from the ideals of multimodality, hermeneutic, and postpositivist evidentiary frameworks. Beginning with the image-text relationship, the codebook indicates three types: illustration, anchorage, and relay. 167 There are five connections between text and image which also stem from the multimodal framework: exposition, exemplification, extensions, enhancement, or projection.168 Next, the codebook proceeds to composition, including image placement, framing, colour, typography, and pose.

Finally, the third section of the codebook deals with content following the hermeneutic and postpositivist approaches. This section categorizes the visibility and nature of graphic images, as well as its makeup of intersectionality, separated by gender, race, and co- movements. Though the coding has clear definitions and can be considered somewhat objective and replicable (for example an image on the left is always an image on the left), the application of these results and their meaning as they intersect with the previous memory framework is where the subjectivity lies. The following chapters will not only detail these subjectivities but also display the results of the two sets of coding performed on the total and representative corpuses.

167 Leeuwen, 551. 168 Ibid., 551. 61

Chapter 4

Remembering the Movement

Memory is not a monolith. As established in previous chapters, there is no one

“true” memory of Toronto’s Gay and Lesbian Movement, but rather there exists a multiplicity of intertwined memories, histories, and narratives. One such narrative is that created, curated, and communicated by The Body Politic. This narrative is itself a multifaceted mosaic made up of the various texts in the magazine including news stories, poems, letter journalistic images, and pornographic depictions. As a multimodal collection, these images and texts interact in various ways, creating dissonance and semblance at every turn while producing a different facet of memory depending on which aspects are enlisted. As laid out in the introduction, this thesis explores one of the facets of the memory curated by TBP: that of violence and protest. This chapter begins with the broad strokes and themes of the story derived from various textual sources and uses data from the corpus to illustrate it, thus visualizing the memory. This section presents the movement’s generally accepted chronology and keystone events, showing how the sources from activists and scholars overlap with the wide themes of liberation, visibility, pride, desire, and agency.

To reveal the shape of Toronto’s GLLM as it is chronicled, its metanarrative, this section synthesizes the narrative derived from books, articles and memoirs on the subject published in the last 30 years. This synthesis emphasizes the commonalities in the chronology and themes of the various sources, while further focus is paid to where these sources differ, indicating major variances, missing narratives, or blatant silences.

A Chronology of Toronto’s Gay and Lesbian Liberation Movement

Published in 2002, Tom Warner’s Never Going Back is one of the most complete historical accounts of the movement. A more recent book on the movement is activist

Tim McCaskell’s Queer Progress, published in 2016. While Warner seeks to chronicle

Canada’s history of activism, McCaskell’s work focuses on Toronto and the underlying philosophies behind the movement rather than the events themselves.169 For this reason, many of the broad strokes that make up the chronology of Toronto’s movement are largely informed by Warner’s work, supplemented with other texts, memoirs and articles.

Beginning with a historical understanding of homosexuality, Warner traces the

Canadian movement from its beginnings in the homophile movement of the 1960s to queer liberation in the 21st century.170 Warner considers Canada’s liberation movement alive and well, despite many who consider its demise came with the onset of AIDS.171

Warner organizes his work in three chronological periods: prior to 1975, 1975-1984, and

1985-1999. Broadly traced, Warner’s narrative first identifies the homophile movement,

Stonewall and the rise of liberation prior to 1975.172 The second period, from 1975 to

1984, is the height of the movement with police repression, debates over activism tactics, a conservative backlash, and the rise of AIDS.173 Thirdly, from 1985 to 1999, the movement is renewed with the organizing amidst AIDS, human rights campaigns, same- sex relationship recognition, and identity politics.174 The scope of this thesis ends with

169 McCaskell, Queer Progress. 170 Warner, Never Going Back, 60, 353. 171 Ibid., 4. 172 Ibid., 59, 61. 173 Ibid., 99, 119, 132, 161. 174 Ibid., 164, 191, 218, 247. 63

The Body Politic in 1987 so this third period is not outlined in-depth in this metanarrative.

Some of the semblances across the sources include the homophile movement, the prominence of Stonewall, and the subsequent conservative backlash. The Homophile

Movement which focused on “unifying homosexuals” and “giving them a sense of belonging”175 rose from the wake of the American Homophile Movement and establishment of the Mattachine Society in 1950.176 Subsequently, Canada’s first gay organization was founded in 1964 in Vancouver with other cities following suit in the early 1970s.177 However, queer communities existed prior to this organization; for example, Steven Maynard, in his article “Through a Hole in the Lavatory Wall,” identifies the existence of a “homosexual subculture” in Toronto between 1890 and

1930.178 Both Barry D. Adam and McLeod begin their narratives with the homophile movement as well; the first year of McLeod’s Canadian chronology is 1964179 and Adam embarks from the homophile movement and Vancouver’s gay organization in his article

“Moral Regulation and the Disintegrating Canadian State.”180 Becki Ross places

Stonewall at the forefront as the “catalyst of modern-day gay liberation”181 and considers the Homophile movement as a precursor but ultimately radically different from the rise of

175 Warner, 58. 176 Ibid., 59. 177 Ibid., 57. 178 Steven Maynard, “Through a Hole in the Lavatory Wall: Homosexual Subcultures, Police Surveillance, and the Dialectics of Discovery, Toronto, 1890-1930,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 5, no. 2 (October 1, 1994), 208. 179 Donald W. McLeod, Lesbian and Gay Liberation in Canada: a Selected Chronology, 1964-1975, (Toronto: UCW Press/Homewood Books, 1996), 1. 180 Barry Adam, “Moral Regulation and the Disintegrating Canadian State” in The Global Emergence of Gay and Lesbian Politics, eds, Barry Adam, Jan Willem Duyvendak, and André Krouwel (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009), 12. 181 Ross, 15. 64

liberation.182 Similarly, Gary Kinsman in the second edition of his Regulation of Desire writes that the liberation movement “followed” Stonewall,183 though he also demands that Canada’s movement be understood as informed by Canada’s colonialism and the division between Anglophones and Francophones, in addition to American influence.184

Barry D. Adam, in his several works on the global movement, emphasizes the Canadian characteristic as well, and also writes that “the U.S. influence runs the risk of being overestimated” in a co-edited book on the subject.185 This overestimation relates to both the impact of the American Homophile movement and the influence of Stonewall.

However, Adam does continue to root Canada’s gay liberation in the homophile movement in his article “Moral Regulation and the Disintegrating Canadian State.”186

Besides American influence, the metanarrative of Canada’s GLLM also centres on the specifically Canadian influences including Bill C-150, the decentralized political system, and the rise of Québec nationalism. In 1969, Pierre Trudeau’s government reformed the Criminal Code with Bill C-150 which decriminalized homosexual behaviour between consenting adults “in private sexual activity.”187 However, as Tom

Hooper argues, this apparent “decriminalization” in the bill, also known as the omnibus bill, did not fundamentally change the way queer people, especially women in the community, interacted with the legal system.188 In fact, he considers the introduction of this bill as a “recriminalization of homosexuality in Canada” as it actually enabled the

182 Ross, 31. 183 Kinsman, 14. 184 Kinsman, 67 185 Barry Adam, Jan Willem Duyvendak, and André Krouwel, Global Emergence Of Gay & Lesbian Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009), 369. 186 Barry Adam, “Moral Regulation and the Disintegrating Canadian State,” 12. 187 Barry Adam, “Moral Regulation,” 12. 188 Tom Hooper, “Queering ’69: The Recriminalization of Homosexuality in Canada,” The Canadian historical review 100, no. 2 (2019), 259. 65

legal institutions in Canada to interfere more with the lives of queer Canadians.189

Despite this view, numerous sources begin their narrative with this 1969 bill feeding into what Hooper calls the “decriminalization myth.”190 Another Canadian root of the GLLM is the decentralized political system which Adam calls the “weak state system of tentative compromises” shaped by the rift between Quebecois and Anglo-American cultures.191

The rise of Québec nationalism, a movement resisting federal policy of multiculturalism due to a lack of space for Francophone culture within the policy, had indirect consequences on the rise of Canada’s GLLM. 192 For some, this rift created a culture of compromise, which made space in Canada’s political structure for gay and lesbian organizations.193

Donald W. McLeod’s set of annotated chronologies, split between 1964-1975 and

1976 to 1981lists the major events and their primary sources throughout the movement.194 These chronologies focus on “demonstrations, political action and lobbying, and legal reform” alongside lesbian or gay media or literature.195 Significantly, he writes this “is not to be viewed as a history of lesbian and gay liberation in Canada between 1976 and 1981, but rather as a chronology of it, with additional bibliographical support.”196 His chronology does not contradict Warner’s. In fact, Warner cites McLeod, and the frequency of certain types of events mentioned such as bathhouse raids and protests in McLeod’s chronology supports the rise of police repression and conservative

189 Hooper, 258. 190 Ibid., 263. 191 Adam, “Moral Regulation,” 18. 192 Ibid., 20. 193 Ibid., 22. 194 Donald W. McLeod, Lesbian and Gay Liberation in Canada: a Selected Chronology, 1976-1981. (Toronto: Homewood Books, 2017). 195 McLeod, 1964-1975, viii. 196 Ibid., xi. 66

backlash Warner identifies. Similarly, “The Rise of Gay Liberation in Toronto: From

Vilification to Validation,” written by Renee S. Grozelle, a recent doctoral graduate in sociology at the University of Windsor, outlines the general shape of the movement from the 1970s onwards. Citing many of the authors above, she classifies the mid-1970s as a beginning point of gay rights visibility and the foundation of the liberation movement.197

She then highlights the 1977 murder of Emanuel Jacques, a shoeshine boy, as leading “to the reformation of the public’s view of association homosexuals with child molestation” and used by media to depict homosexuals in a negative light.198 Next, she notes the bathhouse raids and the 1985 Kenneth Zeller murder as major events in the chronology of the movement, akin to Warner’s classification of police repression and the conservative backlash.199

During the late 1970s this conservative backlash, embodied by Anita Bryant’s anti-gay crusade, consolidated with backlash from the Jaques murder.200 As Adam explains, this was soon followed by “a series of assaults initiated by police and governments” which severely dampened the attainment of civil rights for the gay community until the mid-1980s."201 In the letters between two TBP contributors, editor

Rick Bébout and casual contributor Jane Rule, Bébout elaborates on one of these threats and key events of the movement: the 1981 Operation Soap bathhouse raid. Unlike Adam,

Bébout observes the increased support for the liberation movement. He writes:

"the fun has been in response to these threats, not responses of bluff and bravado, which can only come from people who don't know the risks, but intelligence,

197 Renee Grozelle, “The Rise of Gay Liberation in Toronto: From Vilification to Validation,” Inquiries Journal 9, no.1 (2017), 1. 198 Ibid., 1. 199 Ibid., 2. 200 McCaskell, 69. 201 Adam, “Winning Rights and Freedoms in Canada,” 29. 67

determination and, I think above all, organization. The most encouraging things were the fact that we could organize a strong and effective response to the raids involving not just demonstrations, but also personal support for those who were arrested, the amount of support we were able to marshal in the straight community, and, most of all, the number of gay people involved in all this-- the great majority of whom have never been "politically" active before."202

Like Warner’s chronology, Bébout’s comments combined with the works of Adam and

McCaskell reflect the height of the movement: both its highs of protest and lows of violence. Yet, just on the horizon a bigger crisis was waiting to lay claim to the community. As McCaskell writes, "AIDS was conceptualized as the crisis that followed the bath raids."203 Though Warner continues his narrative of liberation far beyond the rise of AIDS into the 21st century with identity politics and equality-seeking, most scholars end their narrative during the mid to late 1980s coinciding with the inevitable end of The

Body Politic. Like the movement itself, the end was largely occupied by AIDS coverage where “half of TBP's world news was dedicated to AIDS" by the Fall of 1983.204

Themes of the Metanarrative

The generally agreed upon chronology shared by the members of Toronto’s gay community as presented above scaffolds five overarching themes that weave together both dominant and under-represented voices of the movement: liberation, agency, visibility and pride, and desire. All versions of the metanarrative make clear that these themes, while dealt with discreetly here, must be understood as working together and intersecting in many ways. Liberation cannot be achieved without visibility and agency, while desire plays an important part in pride and the liberation movement as a whole.

202 Schuster, Rule, and Bébout, 8. 203 McCaskell, 168. 204 Ibid. 68

Liberation is both the goal and namesake of the Gay and Lesbian Liberation

Movement. It is a call to action which demands social and legal liberation for gay people and lesbians in Toronto. As well, its use of language evokes ideas of freedom, equality and a connection between co-existing liberation movements, such as the Women’s

Liberation Movement. The Body Politic, in its first issue, includes an article called “a

Program for Gay Liberation,” but does not define liberation explicitly; its meaning can be inferred through its use of language. The “program” implies liberation as an end goal, which can be attained by “fight[ing] against this oppression and gain[ing] equality with our straight brothers and sisters.”205 Thus, liberation in the metanarrative is coded as a goal or state parallel to equality and fundamentally opposite oppression. However, as

McCaskell puts it, the liberation of gay liberation was also product of liberal values where “sexuality was the property of the individual and its goal was to maximize personal happiness."206 In this way, liberation banking on its connection to the “liberal,” is also associated with freedom, specifically the freedom of personal happiness.

These definitions, evoking ideas of freedom and equality, were not consistent throughout the movement. Warner explores this shift in meaning of “liberation” by highlighting the activist division between liberationists and assimilationists in the overall liberation movement, where certain activists wanted true liberation or freedom, while assimilationists were happy with tolerance.207 These changing definitions can also be seen in certain images of the magazine, as Mezo-González writes that "the reception of

TBP's visual culture was profoundly shaped by conflicts and clashing understandings of

205 “A Program For Gay Liberation,” The Body Politic 1, November 1971, 14. 206 McCaskell, 36. 207 Warner, 121. 69

oppression and liberation."208 Within this activist divide, a sect of the liberation movement sought mainstream acceptance over freedom.209 Though the liberation movement encapsulated both sides of the debate, the actual use of liberation to denote liberationists was specifically in contrast with assimilation. This furthers the notion of liberation as radical freedom by posing it as opposite assimilation or just mere tolerance.

The use of language also brings the Gay and Lesbian Liberation Movement closer to other co-existing and co-operating movements that also used the term “liberation” such as the women’s liberation movement, or black liberation. Catherine Miriam Smith outlines this association of co-movements in her book Lesbian and Gay Rights in

Canada: Social Movements and Equality-seeking, 1971-1995.210 Smith posits that

Canada’s movement is “intimately linked in both theory and practice” to several social movements across the Western world in the 1950s and1960s including the African

American civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, and the women’s movement.211

Though Smith uses the language of social movements, many of these examples had the word “liberation” in their movement title or was made up of liberation groups. For example, the women’s movement in the 1960s was commonly referred to as the

Women’s Liberation Movement across the United States and Canada.212 As well, scholars of the African American civil rights movement locate Black liberation as a goal

208 Mezo-González, 31. 209 Warner, 120. 210 Miriam Catherine Smith, Lesbian and Gay Rights in Canada: Social Movements and Equality-Seeking: 1971-1995 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999). 211 Smith, 4-5. 212 Constance Backhouse and David H. Flaherty, Challenging Times: the Women’s Movement in Canada and the United States, (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1992), 48. See also Nancy Adamson’s “Feminists, Libbers, Lefties, and Radicals: The Emergence of the Women’s Liberation Movement.” 70

of the movement, which also intersected with the women’s movement.213 This similar use of language sheds light on the associations between these co-movements and furthers the idea of liberation as freedom from oppression.

Ultimately, through language appealing to freedom and co-movements, alongside the movements debate of definitions, liberation in the metanarrative is the goal of freedom from oppression, and equality. While liberation in the metanarrative is a defining goal of the movement encapsulating freedom and equality, it was achieved through agency.

The theme of agency is synonymous with action, specifically action through activism in the metanarrative. In Laura M. Ahearn’s short article “Agency,” she identifies agency as “the human capacity to act” when used by scholars, a term that rose in popularity in the 1970s and 1980s.214 Crucially, she notes that though some use the term agency interchangeably with resistance, it is not necessarily synonymous and “agentive acts” could also reinforce the status quo rather than resist it.215 In the metanarrative,

Agency is rarely a specifically outlined goal, except by those QTBIPOC who specifically identify lack of agency as part of the whitewashing of the archive.216 Yet agency still links every one of these writings by emphasizing the role of individuals in the liberation movement where the queer communities of Toronto fought for their rights on the streets and in the courts. Though agency is not inherently synonymous with resistance, in the case of Canada’s Gay and Lesbian Liberation Movement it is. Liberation as the fight

213 See Anne M. Valk’s Radical Sisters: Second-wave Feminism and Black Liberation in Washington, D.C. and William W. Sales Jr.’s From Civil Rights to Black Liberation: Malcom X and the Organization of Afro- American Unity. 214 Laura M. Ahearn, “Agency,” Journal of linguistic anthropology 9, no. 1/2 (1999), 12. 215 Ibid., 13. 216 Haritaworn, Moussa, and Ware, Marvellous Grounds, 3. 71

against oppression for freedom necessitates queer people becoming agents in their own liberation by taking to the streets, protesting, and advocating. Agency in the metanarrative is specifically the focus on actions of individuals, or collectives of individuals, and their effect on the liberation movement rather than only the institutional or larger social structures. For example, even though Smith focuses on the effect of the

Canadian Charter of Freedom and Rights, she explicitly draws attention to the importance of “agents and structures” where “the choices of activists and movement actors (Agents) have been framed by broader features of the political environment in which they are operating.”217 In this way, agency is not to ignore larger structures or the impact of institutionalized politics, but rather to forefront the effects of individuals and grassroots movements. Agency in the metanarrative is slightly more implicit than the theme of liberation, as it is more to do with the framing of events than the use of language. By emphasizing the role of individual and collective actions in the major events of the movement, such as the massive protest after Operation Soap, the metanarrative promotes agency as a method for attaining liberation. In tangent with agency, as an intertwined tactic of liberation, is visibility.

Visibility in the metanarrative is the result of liberation and a tactic for the liberation program, but also being “out and proud” is about taking charge of one’s own self-image, not about the perspective of heterosexual society. To elaborate, visibility is one of the actions individuals can take in their practice of agency towards liberation. As

Warner writes:

"in a simple sense, liberation meant moving gay existence out from closets, backrooms, bars, and other clandestine spaces. The push to end closetry must be

217 Smith, 22. 72

understood, however, not only as a desire to be out and proud (to be publicly out) but also a freedom from violence and the surveillance of private and semi-public gay spaces."218

As this quotation shows, Gay and Lesbian Liberation cannot be disconnected from visibility and pride, which are inextricably intertwined. One of main ways of being visible in the movement was being “out and proud,” and participating in public displays of pride, such as pride events. However, since liberation also meant moving “out of the closets,” visibility is also consequence of liberation, as it means the freedom to be visible and to be seen. McCaskell seconds the prevalence of visibility, though noting the double- edged sword of the matter, writing that "before I had felt ashamed and afraid; now, I had to be proud. Before I had been glad that no one could tell. Now anything that contributed to invisibility indicated cowardice."219 Similarly, Smith writes that “if lesbians and gay men were not free to be out, if they did not decide to be publicly visible, then the movement could not exist.”220 Not only do these quotations highlight visibility and being

“out” as associated with pride, but it also reveals a level of conformity and pressure to be out that was an integral aspect of the movement. As Kinsman puts it “the movement focused on "coming out" as a means of proclaiming gay identity and community, suggesting in the process that such acts of will could, in and of themselves, cause the walls of heterosexual hegemony to come tumbling down.”221 Coming out, being visible, in this way was not only a result of liberation but a tactic of liberation as well where visibility and organizing became the objective through which liberation would be

218 Michael Connors Jackman, “The Horizons of a Queer Counterpublic: Intended Audience in Sexual Liberation Activism” in American Counter/Publics (Universitätsverlag Winter, December 2019), 284. 219 McCaskell, 30. 220 Smith, 22. 221 Kinsman, 14. 73

attained.222 This concept of visibility ties in with the prior theme of agency as it emphasizes the individual actions of being visible and the impactful results of those actions. Visibility and agency also both intersect with liberation as a means to an end.

However, these three themes do not touch on the motivations underlying the movement nor do they shed light on the theme that binds the queer community: desire.

In the metanarrative, the theme of desire is the movement’s driving force and a basis of community building. Philosophically, one theory of desire, from Carolyn

Morillo, considers desire as intertwined with pleasure where “all desires are ultimately desires for pleasure” and, crucially “being moved to action is something that desire can cause and explain.”223 In this way, desire is entangled with sexuality, love and pleasure, but also a motivation of the movement manifesting through agency and visibility. This notion of desire is also integral to the bonds that unite the community driving the liberation movement. According to Mezo-González, "the majority of the TBP collective regarded the publication of sexual imagery as a liberating practice that challenged the oppression of gay sexual desire and helped to build community."224 For those a part of the TBP community, desire became “the glue behind the unity” in the 1980s and initially was the reason for the movement’s creation.225 Through this lens, visibility is more than just the right to exist in public, but also the ability to express one’s desires and affections in public on par with heterosexual society.

However, desire also became a justification for certain decisions, which led to further divisions. For example, in April 1985, an ad submitted by a white man seeking a

222 Warner, 61. 223 Schroeder, Tim. “Desire.” Philosophy Compass 1, no. 6 (2006): 631–639. 224 Mezo-González, 38 225 Ibid., 45. 74

“young well built black man for houseboy” was printed in The Body Politic, which sparked a debate over race within the collective before publishing, and within the community after its publication.226 Though the ad was never run again, a member of the collective defended its publishing as the “inviolability of desire” despite its racist undertones.227 The use of “inviolability” marks the importance of desire by evoking purity, implying that desire rises above any corrupt motivations. But furthermore, by placing desire as a reason to perpetuate racist stereotypes, without concern for the damage it could cause to black queers across Canada, this article also identifies the exclusionary conception of desire and community in the movement. In this way, desire is both essential to the movement and highlights its inherent issues.

Ultimately, desire in the metanarrative is the substance uniting the community and its sexual politics, but it also motivates action by and for the community. Yet, if desire can be considered a driving force behind sexual politics and a basis for community, it nevertheless also leads to erasure, racism, and sexist understandings in the narratives of the movement.

The desire underlying Toronto’s movement mostly centers on the white gay men of the GLLM. For example, discussions of desire dominating The Body Politic, exclusively represented and illustrated the desires of one or more gay white men. This is notably true of Gerald Hannon’s controversial 1978 article on the relationship between boys and gay men228 and the inclusion of the racialized houseboy ad as previously

226 Arshy Mann ““The Body Politic Failed Black LGBT People, Symposium Hears.” Xtra. XtraMagazine, June 2016. 227 Jackman, “Reception of the Past,” 294. 228 Becki L. Ross, The House That Jill Built: a Lesbian Nation in Formation, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995). 75

discussed.229 Integrally, desire as a theme is not spread evenly across intersectional identities; white male desire in Canada’s Gay and Lesbian Liberation movement obscures or subsumes female and QTBIPOC discourse and desire. In the memory of the movement, this unevenness further obscures the histories, and sometimes even the existence, of women’s and QTBIPOC’s desire.

Obscured Narratives

An example of this exclusion is lesbian desire. Lesbians have a complex relationship to desire within both queer and women’s spaces. In the GLLM the desire of men dominating most gay spaces subsumed lesbian desire, but in the women’s movement, straight women invalidated or buried women-loving-women desire.230 This invalidation results in the exclusion of a lesbian narrative in the memory of Toronto’s movement, something Grozelle also identifies.231 In Warner’s text, lesbians are included but subsumed by the larger narrative. One of his sources is in fact Becki L. Ross whose book The House That Jill Built looks at “lesbian-feminist nation-building” from 1976 to

1980 in Toronto232 by focusing on The Lesbian Organization of Toronto (LOOT).233

Though many of the larger events, like the Brunswick Four or Anita Bryant crusade, take a similar trajectory to those laid out by Kinsman, Adam, and Warner, Ross’ book details many dynamics overlooked in some of these broader overviews. She writes that in the early 1970s gay men collaboration seemed promising, but later this became untenable for

229 Schuster, Rule, and Bébout, A Queer Love Story,147. 230 Ross, 5. 231 Grozelle,1. 232 Ross, 8 233 Ross, 11. 76

many women as they “struggled to find their own voice and be taken seriously as lesbians”234 By the mid-1970s any cooperation, except by the few, ceased to exist as lesbians tended to developed a distaste for the capitalism and personal politics rampant in gay men’s political culture; this distaste often grew from the stark realization that gay male politics simply did not address the many complexities of being a woman and gay.235

By 1975, Wages Due Lesbians formed which sought to address many of these issues without giving way to the invisibility enforced by the feminist movement.236 Even still, by the end of the 1970s, Ross writes that “in Toronto, lesbian feminists felt caught between a mainstream culture that either ignored or oversexualized their existence, a women’s movement and leftist organizations mostly content to preserve their invisibility, and a gay-liberation movement that tended to equate political lesbianism with asexual puritanism.”237 Despite many semblances to Warner’s outline of the movement, including a reference to conservative backlash and the rise of Anita Bryant,238 Ross’ broad strokes of the movement are significantly different from the shape Warner gives the movement through Never Going Back.

The main narrative on Toronto’s Gay and Lesbian Liberation directly obscures many other groups within the community, particularly those who identify as transgender or persons of colour. Mezo-González’s article “Contested Images: Debates on Nudity,

Sexism, and Porn in The Body Politic” details some of these exclusions as shown in the magazine. He writes "the absence of people of colour in the editorial collective was

234 Ross, 30 235 Ibid., 36. 236 Ibid., 53. 237 Ibid., 136. 238 Ibid., 217. 77

mirrored in the paper's visual culture, which featured mostly white people"239 Similarly, queer and trans people of colour also have an intricate and contested relationship to desire often intertwined with racialized fetishization, violence, or stereotypes.240 As Wesley

Crichlow writes “Race and racism are manipulated to subsume Black same-sex desires, and made to blur and suppress all interplay between same-sex desires, gender, and racism.”241 These intersectional identities of race, gender, and sexuality each have different and often fraught “interplay” with desire, but in the narrative of Canada’s

GLLM, those fraught relationships are not the focus. Rather, the white and mostly male desire is the centre and, crucially, the only perspective that seems to matter even when discussing intersectional identities and desire. Harkening back to the houseboy ad, the evocation of desire’s inviolability has nothing to do with those on the other side of the ad, the potential houseboy, and his possible relationship to desire through a lens of racialized fetishization. Instead, the article only considers the perspective, desires, and motivations of the writer, a white gay man, and his relationship to racialized fetishization. In this way, even the discussion of desire in intersectional identities holds the white male gaze at its centre in the memory of the movement. Michael Connors Jackman, in his article

“Reception of the Past: Commemoration, Racism, Desire,” identifies the houseboy ad in

TBP as a “pivotal moment in the history of the paper, both in terms of how its editorial collective members related to one another and for how the paper attempted to deal with the changing face of gay activism in Toronto."242 These exclusions and marginalization

239 Mezo-González, 37 240 See JM Ussher’s “Crossing boundaries and fetishization: experiences of sexual violence for trans women of color” and C Nelson’s “Coloured nude: fetishization, disguise, dichotomy.” 241 Crichlow, 79. 242 Jackman, “Receptions of the Past,” 289. 78

within the movement and its relationship to desire are central to the metanarrative and the history of The Body Politic.

One of the most detailed texts on intersectionality in Toronto’s movement is

Marvellous Grounds: Queer of Colour Histories of Toronto, a collection edited by Jin

Haritaworn, Ghaida Moussa, and Syrus Marcus Ware, directly problematizes Toronto’s whitewashed queer archive and historical narratives.243 The editors show that the history of Toronto’s queer communities erases and removes agency from queer and trans Black,

Indigenous and people of colour (QTBIPOC).244 Not only are QTBIPOC rarely mentioned, but if they are, it is often as a token to provide diversity. It is not a depiction of their rightful place as instigators, organizers, and participants.245 Unlike the majority of other texts on the movement, this collection relies on a range of sources outside of The

Body Politic articles and academic articles. Instead, it relies on interviews, stories, poetry, and photographic collections, which speak to experience as history246 and do not follow the typical chronology as used by Warner, McLeod, Adam, or Grozelle.

Though central in Kinsman, Warner’s and McCaskell’s writings, visibility, coming out and pride are essential to the stories in Marvellous Grounds. For example, the fourth chapter details the coming out story of Maria “a brown, carib, trini, callaloo dyke” and her journey to “becoming loud and proud.”247 Like the visibility in the main and unobscured metanarrative, pride, and being out, is entangled with notions of visibility. As well, in a rare precedent, this visibility was especially important for the work of Monica

243 Haritaworn, Moussa, and Ware, “An Introduction,” Marvellous Grounds, loc 126. 244 Ibid., loc 111. 245 Ibid., loc 132. 246 Ibid., loc 220. 247 LeZlie Lee Cam, “Loud and Proud: The Story of a Brown Callaloo Dyke Coming Out in the 1970s,” in Marvellous Grounds, Ch. 4, loc 1149. 79

Forrester during the 1980s and 1990s who focused on visibility of trans people, particularly those in sex work.248 Evidently, despite the value in these texts and their commendable level of detail, there remains an inherent bias towards the organization of gay white men in the memory of the movement, a bias that is reflected in or even derived from The Body Politic.

In sum, the metanarrative of Toronto's GLLM is an imperfect, incomplete and contested story of pride and agency in the fight for social and legal liberation. After

Stonewall and the decriminalization of homosexuality in Canada (bill C-150), Toronto's queer communities mobilized from the ashes of the Homophile movement. Driven by visions of liberation, they took to the streets, the press, and the courthouses to advocate for equality under the law. Propelled by desire and the threat of violence, Toronto's

GLLM was also engaged in the battle for social acceptance: safety, visibility, and existence. With increased visibility came rising levels of violence against gay people, both on the street via gay-bashing and institutionalized police violence in the bathhouses.

In response to this violence, at the height of the movement, protests grew larger and louder and self-defence tactics became popularized for gay men and women. But these breakthroughs in gay liberation were taken down a notch by the conservative backlash and increasing differences of opinion on strategy for liberation. During the mid-1980s the rise of AIDS rippled through the community prompting advice and opinions that directly contradicted the free-love and desire-based liberation of the 1970s, solidifying what many considered the end of the liberation movement.

248 Syrus Marcus Ware, Monica Forrester, and Chanelle Gallant, “Organizing on the Corner: Trans Women of Colour and Sex Worker Activism in Toronto in the 19980s and 1990s,” in Marvellous Grounds, Ch. 1, loc 524. 80

Despite the movement's claims of acceptance and inclusion, the historical narrative of Toronto's GLLM is largely memorialized in the pages of books and magazines written mostly by and often for gay white men. Lesbians (particularly white lesbians) appear scattered throughout this memory, participating in a handful of protests, but are remembered largely as being preoccupied by the women's movement. Trans and

QTBIPOC, on the other hand, have almost no place in the story of their own in this movement's memorialization, until recent calls from scholars and activists seeking to rectify these missing narratives.

Ultimately, the memory of the movement as mediated by these texts, articles, books, and memoirs, is also the chronology and metanarrative of The Body Politic. In the textually-constructed narrative of the GLLM’s memory, the vast majority of these sources use articles from the magazine as its basis. The tales these sources spin is one of liberation, agency, visibility, and desire, but obscured by this memory is a story of exclusion built on racialized understandings of desire, gender, and sexuality. With new sources seeking to shed light on these obscured histories, this condensed memory is beginning to be contested through books like Marvellous Grounds. Yet, the semblances of the textual narrative maintain the constructions perpetuated by the magazine in the first place, thus keeping the textual memory of the movement into a space by and for gay white men. However, the visual record in The Body Politic is not included in this textual memory, but is still an important figure of memory in queer cultural memory, particularly since it evokes the ephemeral.

Visualizing the Movement

By narrowing in on the representations of violence and protest as illustrated by images of the magazine, further insight into the queer cultural memory of the movement can emerge to the story of the movement that other articles and books have constructed.

As outlined in Chapter 3, the corpus includes 234 data points consisting of articles and images from the magazine as they relate to protest and violence. The articles, even when accompanied by images, are in effect representative of the textual metanarrative since articles in The Body Politic inform the majority of the texts. Of these data points, 165 have images associated with the articles or are images by themselves. This subset of the corpus represents the visual narrative of the memory of Toronto’s GLLM. Through quantitative analysis of both the visual and textual sample, this section seeks to visualize the metanarrative. By comparing the two samples, it illustrates where the visual memory expands, contradicts, differs from, and adds to the previously presented textual metanarrative. Evidently, although the articles of TBP form the base of the metanarrative, the images in the magazine present a different narrative.

In many ways, this corpus corroborates the metanarrative’s chronology, including increased levels of violence and protest during the late 1970s and early 1980s and the denouement and division of the movement in the 1980s. Figure 1 below visualizes this conclusion by showing the instances of protest and violence in TBP throughout its run.

Instance here refers to both articles and images, capturing the combined textual and visual metanarrative. Until 1979, instances of violence stayed below 6 articles or images per year, but between 1979 and 1982, this value ranged from 13 to 18, which was at least double and sometimes triple the number of recorded instances in years prior. These

numbers show an obvious increase of levels of violence during the late 1970s and early

1980s. Similarly, instances of protest before 1979 had a median of 7 and average of 7.33, with one outlier of 11 in 1976. In 1979 this number rose to 14, which is double the mean and 3 points higher than the outlier. Between 1979 and 1983, the number of protest instances ranged from 5 to 23; during this time the median was 14 with an average of

13.8. The median doubled between these two periods pointing towards a similar rise in protest, though slightly less consistent due to the outlier in 1980 which only had 5 instances. After 1982 and 1983, instances of violence and protest, respectively, dropped back down to similarly low numbers until the end of the magazine’s run in 1987.

Articles and Images of Protest and Violence Over Time in The Body Politic, 1972-1987

5 Number of Instancesof Number

0 1972197319741975197619771978197919801981198219831984198519861987 Violence 3 2 5 2 5 6 6 13 14 15 18 7 4 6 3 2 Protest 4 3 7 7 11 8 4 14 5 23 14 13 2 4 3 1 Year of Publication

Violence Protest

Figure 1 Articles and images of protest and violence over time in The Body Politic, 1972 to 1987

The correlation between the peaks of violence and protest points to a keystone event also highlighted in the metanarrative: the Operation Soap bathhouse raids in 1981. These

bathhouse raids are a key intersection of protest and violence; not only were the raids themselves violent, but the massive protests that followed were also met with violence.

Thus, the highest number of recorded protest instances with a similarly high rate of violence instances is logical and intersects with the metanarrative. However, unlike this peak which is easily attributed to the raids and retaliation, the denouement after the early

1980s could be reflective of various, and often interacting, reasons. Not only does the metanarrative indicate a division between liberation and assimilationists, which could have resulted in fewer organized protests or divisions within the magazine, but this decrease in violence and protest instances also correlates to the rise of AIDS, particularly the larger emphasis TBP placed on AIDS in the pages of the magazine, which were mostly not included under the protest or violence types.

Evidently, the peak in the early 1980s is prominent and points to 1981 as the height of the movement, but the peaks and dips of violence and protest are not represented by the same types of media. Instead, protest is represented through many articles with associated images, while violence is primarily represented by articles with few images. Figure 2, below, illustrates the same data as Figure 1, but includes the breakdown of media type per year. The type labels refer to the coding process in Chapter

3. In the protest category, NPIA stands for Non-Protest Image and Article, PIA stands from Protest Image and Article, PA stands for Protest Article, and PI stands for Protest

Image. In the violence article, NVIA stands for Non-Violent Image, VA stands for

Violent Article, VIA stands for Violent Article and Image, and VI stands for Violent

Image.

Articles and Images of Violence and Protest Over Time in The Body Politic According to Type, 1972-1987.

10 Number of Instancesof Number 5

0 1972 1973 1974 1975 1976 1977 1978 1979 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 NPIA 0 0 0 1 1 0 1 2 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 PIA 2 2 4 4 8 8 3 12 3 21 11 7 2 2 1 1 PA 0 0 2 0 0 0 0 0 2 1 1 2 0 0 0 0 PI 2 1 1 2 2 0 0 0 0 1 1 4 0 2 2 0 NVIA 2 0 1 0 1 2 1 2 3 7 6 1 1 3 2 1 VA 1 2 3 2 4 4 5 8 11 5 9 2 2 2 1 0 VIA 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 2 0 2 2 4 1 0 0 1 VI 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 0 Year of Publication

Figure 2 Articles and images of violence and protest over time in The Body Politic by data type, 1972-1987

Focusing primarily on the “peak of the movement” from 1979 to 1983, the separation of media by type of data shows that the height of the movement is predominantly made up of two categories: PIA and VA. In images and articles of protest in TBP, those under the NPIA, PA and PI categories remained consistently low throughout the magazines run ranging from 0 to 4 per year. These three categories do not show an increase in the late 1970s. The PA category, in contrast, ranges from 1 to 21 and

demonstrates the 1979 to 1982 peak illustrated in Figure 1. In this way, instances with an image and article dominate the protest aspects of the metanarrative.

The instances of violence are more inconsistent than those of protest. As the data shows, the categories of NVIA and VA are more populous than those of VI and VIA. The

NVIA category ranges from 0 to 7 with at least one instance in 13 out of the 15 years, while the VA category ranges from 0 to 11 with at least one instance in 14 out of the 15 years. Instances in the VIA and VA category are predominantly 0 to 2, with one outlier of

4 in 1983. In 12 of the 15 years, the VI category had 0 instances, while this only occurred in 8 of the 15 years in the VIA category. Since the VIA and VI categories are so low they do not show any type of increase during the “peak” years of the late 1970s and early

1980s. NVIA does show a significant increase in 1981 and 1982 when the number of instances jumps from 3 in 1980 to 7 and 6, respectively. However, it is the VA category that mostly accounts for the increase in 1979 and 1980 with 5 and 8 instances in those years. Evidently, the instances which do not include images depicting violence are predominant in the narrative of violence.

Table 2, below, shows the totals per data type across the run of The Body Politic

(1971 to 1987). Much of the information can be extrapolated from Figure 2, but the data compiled in this table shows more clearly the dominance of PIA and VA in the corpus. It also allows for deeper comparison between type totals rather than only their prevalence during the peak in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Table 2 Total number of articles and images per type from 1971 to 1987 in The Body Politic

Data Type Total per Type

NPIA: Non-Protest Image and Article 6

PIA: Protest Image and Article 91

PA: Protest Article 8

PI: Protest Image 18

NVIA: Non-Violent Image and Article 33

VA: Violent Article 61

VIA: Violent Image and Article 13

VI: Violent Image 4

The quantitative analysis of the corpus by type shows that violent articles with no image

(VA) dominate the violent instances. The VA category total of 61 is close to double the second most populated violence category, NVIA, at 33. Notably, the two categories with the lowest number of instances are those with violent images. The instances that include violent depictions (VIA and VI) total to 17 compared to the 94 other instances which either do not include an image or have an non-violent image. This means that 5.5 times more pictures did not depict violence, which could indicate a hesitancy in depicting violence in The Body Politic.

The totals of protest images by type show even more clearly that PIA dominates the narrative with 91 instances compared to 18 in the second most populated category PI.

Crucially, these top two categories are the only two that visually depict protest since PA

instances do not include images and NPIA does not include images of protest. The total images of protest, comprised of PIA and PI together, total 109 compared to 14 instances without visual depictions of protest. This means that 7.8 times more instances of protest include photographs of protest indicating a preference of visualizing protests rather than simply describing them through text.

Furthermore, even though Figure 1 and 2 show similar amounts of instances over time between protest and violence, each with similar increases and decreases, the data in

Table 2 demonstrably shows that there are 30 more instances of protest in the largest protest category (PIA with 91) than the largest violence category (VA with 61).

Evidently, the totals of protest and violence divided by type in the corpus reveal hesitancy towards representing violence visually and inclination towards representing protest visually. Despite the significant difference between PIA and VA, this disparity is not present in the total number of violence and protest instances, including all articles and images in each category. Figure 3, below, shows these totals.

Total Instances of Violence Versus Protest in The Body Politic

123 111 53% 47%

Violent Images and Articles Protest Images and Articles

Figure 3 Total instances of violence versus protest in The Body Politic 88

The images and articles in the violent category number 111 and make up 47% of the entire corpus. In comparison, the instances in the protest category number 123 making up

53% of the corpus. Despite the massive difference between the two most populous categories, there are only 12 more data points under the protest category. This shows a slightly more nuanced narrative in the violence category with more input from other categories, while the protest category is almost exclusively dominated by the PIA instances. As well, it also shows that despite less visual representation, the corpus is nearly split equally between the violence and protest narrative, which indicates the prominence of the violence narrative despite its significantly lower amount of visual representation. Figure 4, below, visualizes this difference in visual representation by comparing all the images of violence versus all the images of protest.249

Total Images of Violence Versus Protest in The Body Politic

17 13%

109, 87%

Violent images Protest Images

Figure 4 Total images of violence versus protest in The Body Politic

Compared to Figure 3, the percentages in Figure 4 show a stark difference in the ratio of violent images to protest images included in The Body Politic. As shown in Figure 4,

249 This graph only includes images of violence and protest. Therefore, it does not include PA or VA which do not include images, nor does it include NVIA and NPIA which have images that do not depict protest or violence. 89

there are 109 images of protest, amounting to 87% of the total images, while there are only 17 images of violence at only 17%. While the percentages in Figure 3 are quite close, with only a 6% difference, there is a difference of 70% in the comparison of images. Evidently, the majority of the images in the corpus are those of protest and thus protest dominates the visual narrative.

As the textual metanarrative reveals, Toronto’s Gay and Lesbian Liberation

Movement is a movement built on protest and visibility. Thus, it is logical that TBP as an organ of the movement would favour protest in its images as a way to represent itself parallel to the movement. Yet the magazine still includes depictions of violence, though to a significantly lower degree. To an extent, a lower amount of depictions of violence is to be expected considering the nature of these violent encounters. Though violence at protests might have been anticipated and thus photographed, instances of police raids, gay-bashing or anti-gay murder would have been captured less often because of their unpredictable and sometimes solitary nature. However, harkening back to the definition of violence outlined in Chapter 3, violence in this case is not relegated to active physical violence but could also include visualization of injuries to person taken after the fact, evidence of property damage, graphic illustrations of crime scenes, or even artistic recreations of the violence. Despite this broad understanding of violence, the number of violent images compared to protest images (17:109) remains remarkably low which indicates a reluctance to include images that victimize or dehumanize their community.

Crucially, these images of violence appear to be included for a reason, which will be elaborated on in the subsequent chapter.

Ultimately, the metanarrative of the movement informed by textual resource reflect the contested memory of pride, visibility, and agency in the fight for social and legal liberation. The chronology of the narrative begins in 1969, following Stonewall and

Bill C-150, and extends until the late 1980s encapsulating the fight for liberation through protests, press releases, and courthouses. It establishes a conservative backlash and subsequent rise of violence during the early 1980s alongside a divide in the movement split along lines of liberationists and assimilationists complicating the meaning of liberation. Finally, in the late 1980s, the threads of desire holding together the liberation movement wore away in the wake of the AIDS crisis giving rise to different movements and different priorities. Crucially, the memory of the movement as mediated by these texts, articles, books, and memoirs, is also the chronology and metanarrative of The Body

Politic. Yet, the semblances of the textual narrative lacked intersectionality by maintaining the constructions perpetuated by the magazine in the first place, largely written by and for gay white men. The tale of the metanarrative is one of liberation, agency, visibility, and desire, but obscured by this memory is a story of exclusion built on racialized understandings of desire, gender, and sexuality, which only recently writers and activists have begun to unravel and shed light on.

This textual metanarrative is one form of queer cultural memory of Toronto’s Gay and Lesbian Liberation Movement. The texts of the metanarrative are the figures of memory which inform the cultural memory. As the textual metanarrative shows, the chronology present in these figures scaffolds the five themes of liberation, agency, visibility, and desire. However, as noted in Chapter 2, images are also integral figures of memory, and because of their ephemeral characteristics even more essential to queer

cultural memory. The second half of this chapter began detailing the outline of this visual memory obscured by the textual memory of the metanarrative. The corpus, which includes both articles and images, largely reflects the metanarrative chronology numerically by showing increases of violence and protest in the late 1970s and early

1980s corresponding with many of the major events like the bathhouse raids, and Anita

Bryant protests. However, with analysis and comparison of the data types, it is evident that the visual narrative significantly differs from the textual narrative through its representations of violence and protest. Not only do images of protest dominate the protest category while articles of violence dominate the violence category, but images of protest are more numerous than the articles denoting violence despite taking up similar space in the corpus. This implies a strong inversion to visually representing violence alongside a strong preference in depicting images of protest. This favouring of protest aligns with the metanarrative’s emphasis of protests and advocacy, but the fewer instances of violence also mark them as important. These images of violence are rarities, and chosen for a reason. This chapter has established that the textual metanarrative aligns with the visualizing of the movement through quantitative comparisons. However, it also highlights the many disparities in the visual narrative between representations of protest and violence. The following chapter takes these disparities as its starting point in order to fully develop the visual narrative on its own through close analysis of the images themselves.

Chapter 5

Snapshots of Memory

Despite the many similarities in the chronology of the metanarrative and the visual narrative, the visual memory of Toronto’s Gay and Lesbian Liberation Movement cannot be considered merely a reflection or representation of the metanarrative. The metanarrative arises from decades of scholarly and activist-led work on the subject, which has given it time to condense and evolve. The visual memory from images in The

Body Politic reflects the contemporary state of the movement and its representations, but since it has been severely understudied, it has not had the chance to evolve over time.

Though liberation, visibility, desire, and agency each play a role in the visual narrative, it is not to the same extent nor to the same effect. The previous chapter showed that the metanarrative’s recounting of liberation is central to the cultural memory of Toronto’s

GLLM; it is the binding that links each theme together and is understood as freedom and equality. This understanding is not identical to the visual narrative nor is it expressed through the same channels. Obviously, the written word of the metanarrative has the benefit of explicitness; ascertaining the prevalence of themes to illuminate the crux of the movement may have required close reading, but these themes are easily revealed through the reading of unambiguous language in articles, memoirs and studies. However, the analysis of this chapter will rather focus on the information communicated by the poses and expressions of the captured subjects, as well as the other content, composition and paratextual clues of the photographs. This visual information reveals that while liberation remains relevant to the narrative, the connecting thread is instead solidarity: an additional theme intimately intertwined with liberation, desire, agency, and visibility.

This chapter presents the close analysis of the representative corpus’ 40 images and analyzes the ways in which each theme is represented visually therein. At times, much of this understanding stems from contextual cues in the paratext—predominately headlines and captions—alongside the prominent words on protest signs. Though these communicative features are written examples, it is important to note that such text, like captions and words visible in images, are not equivalent to the metanarrative texts analyzed in Chapter Three nor the TBP articles they are taken from. The citations that rely on TBP for historical documentation are largely, if not exclusively, from the articles and not the captions or images, which act as illustration or corroboration instead of sources in and of themselves. Thus, paratext and all that is visible in the frame of the photograph must be considered together as the complete image. Here, the photographer’s role in framing cannot be ignored, be it the choice to focus on the signs instead of the protesters’ faces, the size of the crowd, or the instigator. A photographer’s choices are purposeful and thus the visible words on the signs is not only a part of the image, but integral to discerning the visual narrative.

This chapter details the many ways images of protest and violence in The Body

Politic interact and intersect with the themes of liberation, agency, visibility, and solidarity in order to produce a visual memory of the movement. It also shows how intersections, at times, contradict, corroborate, or add nuance to the broader GLLM metanarrative. Throughout, the chapter establishes a visual narrative of violence as it depicts, or does not depict, instances of police brutality, anti-gay violence and its aftermath, and self-defence alongside a visual narrative of protests. By first establishing how each theme is represented overall in the visual narrative, this chapter can then draw

on specific examples from the representative corpus to illustrate how these visual representations bring nuance and alter the metanarrative. This chapter will therefore demonstrate that the visual narrative of violence and protest in The Body Politic acts both as a narrative in and of itself, and adds to the greater metanarrative of Toronto’s Gay and

Lesbian Liberation Movement.

Signs of Liberation

Liberation is intangible and therefore does not directly correspond to a visual concept or cue. How exactly can one see liberation if it is both an ideological underpinning and an aim of the movement? By close analysis of paratext, protest signs, and subject pose, the theme of liberation in the visual narrative becomes evident, though rarely through the use of the word “liberation” itself. Interestingly, the word “liberation” itself is rarely found on protest signs. Instead other words and phrases are more prevalent on the protest signs and banners, aside from “gay” which of course dominates. These include “equality,” “rights,” and various phrases using defensive language in the imperative tense. Overall, the theme of liberation is communicated through images of protest in the visual narrative, specifically by appealing to the idea of equality, rights- seeking, and defensiveness through language of protest signs and in the paratext.

The prevalence of “equality” in the aims of the movement is unsurprising and corresponds with the theme of liberation as shown in chapter 3. In the metanarrative, equality refers to equality between straight and gay people. In the visual narrative, equality implies a further degree of intersectionality. One example is found in the August 1972 issue, No. 5 in an article on the Ontario Human Rights Code; an image of a Queen’s Park protest demanding the inclusion of sexual orientation protection under the code features a small group of protestors 95

holding protest signs towards the camera. The image is small and high contrast with a dark background and bright white signs. In fact, the contrast is so high, in favour of the signs, that the faces of those holding the signs are shaded and lacking definition. At least five signs are visible at various heights, but only two are entirely readable. On the left, a faded-out sign is visible with several pale, illegible, words followed by the word “act” and “wants sexual orientation in OHRC” in very dark lettering. On the right, the most legible, a sign reads “Equality for all human beings.”250 Not only does this second sign appeal to humanity by reiterating that queer people are in fact part of “all human beings” and thus deserving of equality. But, the presence of a sign that does not explicitly signify sexuality at a protest on sexual orientation, implicates the objective of the protest as equality. Furthermore, it perhaps expands the definition of equality to a more intersectional reading demanding equality for all regardless of sexual orientation and, arguably, race or gender. Since the metanarrative’s version of liberation and equality is relegated to equality between straight and queer people, this image possibly complicates the memory of liberation in

Toronto’s GLLM, depicting its initial understanding as more inclusive. However, despite the added intersectionality in this image, other protest images that also evoke equality instead corroborate the metanarrative’s narrow definition.

Another liberation image that relies on “equality” communicates a narrow definition relegated to the equality of gay people in the world, but also connects the liberation project to a broader global context. To illustrate, published in July and August of 1975, issue 19 features an article entitled “Gay Community Effects Concerted Effort to

Protest Failures of Immigration Paper” with an accompanying photograph of Gay

Alliance Towards Equality members protesting the Green Paper on Immigration, which

250 Art Whitaker, We Go to Queens Park in The Body Politic 5, July-August 1972, 11. 96

restricted the movement of gay immigrants.251 In this image, shown in Figure 5, three

male protesters, each holding a large protest sign above their heads, are clustered together

and centered against a backdrop of a building. All three signs are handwritten in black

lettering on white boards. From left to right, the signs read: “take “homosexualism” out

of the immigration action”; “take gays out of the immigration act”; and “gay alliance

towards equality.” The last sign, which contains the name of the organization leading

the protest, is notably accompanied by the double male and double female symbols

beneath the words. These symbols visibly signify attraction between homosexual men

and lesbians

respectively. In

this case, the

understanding of

equality and

liberation is

relegated to

equality between

a narrow

Figure 5 Photograph of GATE Members at Green Paper Protest in definition of gay Toronto. Photographed by Gerald Hannon. In Issue 19 of The Body Politic. July-August 1975. people and their straight counterparts, but its global extension adds nuance to the term implicating

liberation as connected to a broader and more global liberation project. Unlike the

previous image, this photograph specifies sexuality with the sign reading the name of the

251 Gerald Hannon, GATE Members (from left): Brian Mossop, Randy Notte & Michael Riordan at first protest against Green Paper in Toronto in The Body Politic 19, July to August 1975, 5. 97

organization “Gay Alliance Towards Equality,” but it still complicates the understanding of liberation by hinting at global solidarity. This protest is not for the benefit of current gay or lesbian Canadians but immigrants attempting to move to Canada who have been or will be barred entrance due to their sexuality. In other words, these changes would be for the benefit of future queer Canadians. In the protest’s consideration of sexuality in equality, this image largely corroborates the metanarrative, and even narrows the concept of sexuality with the symbols. This global liberation project, particularly the connection to future queer immigrants, certainly intersects with liberation and equality, but even more so the image evokes a sense of solidarity beyond borders. In conjunction with the

OHRC image, it is evident that, like the metanarrative, the definition of liberation is intertwined with concepts of equality, but the understanding of equality is not uniform across the protests. Furthermore, this lack of uniformity, present in both the OHRC image and this immigration image, also extends to the other examples of liberation images that evoke “rights” and defensive language rather than equality.

Continuing this lack of uniformity, another aspect of liberation is the integration of “rights” which is evident in the visual narrative through multiple protest signs including the word and evoking legal liberation as a goal of the protest, if not the movement. One example is the image of the October 14, 1976 demonstration at Queen’s

Park protesting wage control, which was attended by a gay contingent.252 Featured in an article about the protest in issue 29, the image is taken from what appears to be the centre of a crowd with at least nine protesters partially visible, but none face the camera. Instead two protest signs are emphasized in the top half of the image. The smaller sign, shown on

252 Gay contingent at October 14 demonstration at Queen’s Park in The Body Politic 29, December 1976- January 1977, 1. 98

an angle facing the photographer’s right side, reads “protecting gays in all human rights codes.” The sign in centre left, which occupies the majority of the frame, reads “Job security a gay right.” The use of “right” evokes “rights” in the singular form since the sign is only referring to one right, that of job security. In this image, it directly connects this protest and liberation to the attainment of legal rights. More specifically, using “gay right”—instead of “human right” or just “right” on its own—emphasizes the connection between sexuality and rights, but also narrows the focus of the protest. Unlike the OHRC image of equality, this protest and sign are specifically advocating for the needs of gay people as gay people, rather than solely as members of humanity. Despite the presence of self-interest, advocating on behalf of gay people in or barred from the workforce, the existence of this image and the presence of the gay contingent at a wage rally supports the theme of solidarity connecting this conception of liberation. Rather than simply demanding rights solely having to do with sexuality, such as inclusion of sexual orientation under the Ontario Human Rights Code, liberation here extends to rights that heterosexual working class society is also fighting for. In the visual narrative, the attainment of rights plays an important role in the theme of liberation as both a goal of the protest and movement, which corroborates the legal liberation concept prevalent in the metanarrative. However, it also complicates the types of rights implied by gay liberation shown in the metanarrative by extending beyond rights that specifically affect gay people, such as the inclusion of sexual orientation in laws, to more genera (sexuality non-specific) laws like wage control. This extension of rights hints at solidarity and co- movement, an idea further elaborated on in another image including rights and liberation.

This second example, an image of the September 21, 1984 women’s march against violence, furthers this notion of rights and solidarity by extending and overlapping with the women’s movement. This image, featured in issue 108 from

November 1984, accompanies an article by Chris Bearchell entitled “A cold shoulder for a hot issue” which describes various violent events and oppressive policies that incited the march.253 Three large and overlapping white banners occupy the top two thirds of the image, prioritizing the slogans’ legibility over the women’s faces which speckle the background and bottom fifth of the image. The foregrounded, and most legible, banner on the right side of the image reads “dykes support hookers rights” in bold lettering.

Immediately behind this banner, but occupying the left half of the image, is a second larger banner; the right side of its slogan is partially obscured but it obviously reads

“Canadian Organization for Rights of Prostitutes.” Finally, the background banner, which is visible on the right side of the image underneath the foreground banner, is partially obscured but the words “women’s self defense” and a stick figure kicking are visible. By evoking the word “rights” here, this image shows a similar extension to the conception of rights beyond only sexuality, though more to a marginalized community than to the whole of working class society like the wage protest. Sexual orientation and prostitution are not interchangeable, but the demographics of these groups overlap between lines of gender, class, and sexuality.254 This particular protest included lesbian-focused signs and was attended by lesbians, but the advocacy was first and foremost for all women. Not only does this image illustrate the relationship between co-movements, in this case the women’s movement, but it exemplifies solidarity across lines and intersections of gender

253 Untitled image below “A cold shoulder for a hot issue,” The Body Politic 108, November 1984, 14. 254 See Ummni Khan’s “Homosexuality and prostitution a tale of two deviancies” (2020). 100

and class. Ultimately, like the metanarrative, the attainment of rights is an essential aspect of liberation shown in the visual narrative, but the visual narrative complicates the basic understanding of legal liberation through its inclusion of solidarity through queer contingents at co-movement protests. This thread of solidarity is an essential departure from the metanarrative, but in the case of the visual narrative the theme of liberation does not rely on the word “liberation” to communicate this theme. However, there is one notable exception to this that also communicates the narrative’s adherence to the theme through protest images.

The image of Toronto’s 1979 International Women’s Day contains a banner that evokes the threads of solidarity and predominance of co-movements, but its use of liberation is arguably more reflective of the understanding of liberation in the women’s movement than the GLLM. 255 The image, found in issue 5, accompanies an article entitled “coalition adds lesbian rights to Women’s Day demands.” It shows dozens of women and some children bundled up in winter and fall clothing marching along the street holding signs and banners of various sizes and shapes above their head. Most of the slogans are blocked by other signs or not legible because of the furling of the banner, the sign’s pale lettering, or its size. Although, a drawing of a tree with long roots on a partially stripped background is visible on the rightmost sign. The centre banner, located in the top half of the image, is the only sign with entirely legible writing; it reads

“Women’s Liberation Now!” in dark bold lettering with a large drawing of the woman symbol. It is notable that one of the main uses of “liberation” in the magazine is actually an image of the women’s movement with little visual information pointing to the queer

255 Untitled image above “Collation adds lesbian rights to Women’s Day demands,” The Body Politic 51, March-April 1979, 11. 101

community. While the contextual information denotes the inclusion of lesbians and their interests at the protest, the image itself does not include a visible sign connecting to lesbian or gay rights. Lesbians are women and included under the umbrella of women this image represents, an idea this image visually upholds by not singling out any lesbians. Beyond this, the use of liberation in a march organized by the women’s liberation points to the existence of cooperating movements and interactions between the

GLLM and women’s movement. This in turn furthers the concept of solidarity as it intersects with liberation. Though it is an exception, this image importantly adds nuance to the metanarrative by furthering the idea of liberation beyond legal and social liberation of queer people. Instead, this exception, in conjunction with the previous protest images, shows the idea of liberation is inextricable from solidarity amongst co-movements.

Nonetheless, protest images are not the only images in TBP that elicit the theme of liberation. Unlike these protest images which communicate through signs, slogans, and paratext, the images of violence also further this theme in various ways.

Unlike the attainment of legal liberation or equality, defensive phrases adorn several protest signs, many of which are related to institutionalized violence and police brutality. These defensive phrases use the imperative tense and evoke ideas of oppression, which complicates the understanding of liberation as not just rights, but the implication of “fighting back.” For example, Issue 71 (March 1981) includes a collage of four images from the massive protest that proceeded Operation Soap in February 1981.

One image, in the bottom left of the collage, shows a lone man holding a white sign, above his head; contrasting with the darker signs in the image above and the pervasive black backgrounds of all four images, the sign reads “Get off our backs” in black lettering

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with a swastika in the corner.256 While the previous understandings of liberation were informed by statements shedding light on demands and goals of liberation, this phrase is reactionary and defensive, but also, importantly, written in the forceful imperative tense.

Similarly, featured in Issue 81, published March 1982, four different images of this protest enhance a feature on “The Raids a Year Later: We’re still here—and stronger than ever.”257 The largest image flips the common composition of the previous images; instead of banners and signs held above the heads of the protesters, a banner is held up by several men at waist height as if pushing the banner forward with their lower bodies. The top half of the image, the part not occupied by the dark banner, is the crowd of male protesters and several small white protest signs hoisted above their heads. Significantly, the massive banner reads “enough is enough stop police violence.”258 By using the imperative tense, issuing a command to “get off” and “stop” the slogans illustrate backlash and aggressive push back; no longer asking for inclusion under the written law, these protesters are demanding that the oppressive treatment lead by law enforcers end once and for all. As well, aside from the association between Toronto police and Nazis with the swastika symbolism, the words themselves shed light on the decades long oppression of gay people in Toronto by the police. The phrasing of “enough is enough” and “get off our backs” points to long term oppression, not just one act; while “enough is enough” implies exasperation at a string of incidents, “get off our backs” evokes the physical weighing down of oppressive force symbolized by a weight on ones back that needs to be lifted.

The visual narrative constructed in TBP follows the same general chronology of the

256 Gerald Hannon untitled photos accompanying “Taking it to the Streets,” The Body Politic 71, March 1981, 9. 257 Gerald Hannon, Undercover cops on the banner February 20 in The Body Politic 81, March 1982, 10. 258 Ibid. 103

metanarrative in its representation of police brutality and the strong backlash against the bathhouse raids. However, close analysis of the photographs shows that the narrative of liberation also emphasizes the role of police brutality in curtailing the fight against oppression. Liberation is not just about equal treatment and rights but also social, liberation including fighting back against oppression. In this way, liberation as communicated by the visual memory of the movement is also closely connected to agency.

Evidently, there is a lack of uniformity in the messages communicated by the protest images. One aspect of the images that could have led to this lack of uniformity is authorship; each image has several layers of artistic, journalistic, and editorial choices beginning with the author of the sign and the organizer of the protest, going through the eyes and editing of the photographer, and ultimately its inclusion and captioning at the discretion of TBP’s editorial collective. A similar multivocality can be seen in the metanarrative as it is constructed by many voices over the decades and has gone through various levels of editing. However, these voices have condensed over time ultimately converging in unison—manifesting as the metanarrative in cultural memory. The metanarrative has evolved over time due to hindsight, context, and new scholars, but The

Body Politic has not because its run is over, and its contributions to the metanarrative are finished. In contrast, the spectrum of voices presented by the visual narrative reflect the immediacy of contemporary reality and, as such, does not have the condensing effects of hindsight. In effect, these images communicate dissenting voices more clearly as separate entities, thus resulting in a lack of uniformity. Though a succinct and all-encompassing understanding of equality is impossible to ascertain with so many layers of choices, this

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is actually essential to why the visual narrative and its relationship to the metanarrative matters; these images are a key aspect of cultural memory that have not been included in the study of Toronto’s GLLM. Unlike the metanarrative which over the years has come to form a mostly agreeing but exclusive story, these images are responding to immediate reality and depict the nuances, underlying disagreement, and dissenting voices that make up the mosaic of Toronto’s GLLM.

Ultimately, through images of protest the visual narrative associates liberation with a malleable concept of equality that at times appeals to a broader, sometimes even global, sense of solidarity that stretches beyond the GLLM, but in other instances reinforces a narrow concept of queerness and gender. This parallels the metanarrative by reflecting differences of opinion in aims of the movement and inclusion criteria of the community, but the increased conflation of solidarity and liberation also complicates the memory of the movement by revealing its local, intersectional, and even global tendencies. Furthermore, classifying liberation as fully implicated in the action of fighting against oppression—rather than just its opposite like the metanarrative—these images illustrate liberation intertwining itself with agency.

Agency: Never the Victim

Both in the visual narrative of the TBP and in the metanarrative, liberation is irrevocably entangled with agency. Just as the protest images underline the aim of the liberation movement, the protest images are inherently related to agency because they visually illustrate gay people across Toronto advocating for their right to exist, both socially and legally. Protesting and advocating form the backbone of agency in the

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metanarrative; another essential aspect of agency in the GLLM is anti-victimization.

Victimization requires a powerlessness and a lack of agency, implying that agency is the opposite of this powerlessness and victimization. Several images in the representative corpus depict agency beyond protest. Notably, in the visual narrative, agency is primarily shown in images of violence being inflicted, or images of those who have experienced violence. In these images, agency tends to be illustrated through compositional choices or even re-enactments that prioritize strength, avoids victimization, and asserts power against institutional oppressors. Furthermore, the visual narrative demonstrates agency in images of self-defence by pointing towards the proactive role of gay men and women in their own community’s protection.

Images of violence can also illustrate agency beyond the use of signage and captions discussed earlier. Body language of the subjects, as well as the composition and framing of images present images just as strongly. For example, in Issue 94, published in

June 1983, images from the Back Door Sauna raid and subsequent protest enhance an article called “Back to the baths; back to the streets” which describes the violent raids and the angry protest in response. 259 The largest image, located at the bottom of the page, shows a line of police officers standing in front of a crowd of protesters. The caption includes information about the “defender” sticks (likely some sort of baton) held by the officers as they face the crowd. The officer in the foreground is the largest element of the photograph, but the protestors are numerous and their white picket signs rise above their heads contrasting with the black background of the night. Despite the raised hands,

“defender” sticks, and visible snarls from the police officers, the protesters parallel the

259 Gerald Hannon, Confrontation in The Body Politic 94, June 1983, 9. 106

officers. As well, aside from one officer entering the crowd on the left of the image, there is physical space dividing the police officers from the crowd.

The image uses space to draw a clear line between the protesters, identified by signs behind their heads, and the police officers in their uniforms. However, neither side is particularly diminutive in comparison to one another; though the officer in the foreground is slightly taller due to perspective and position of the camera, the white signs in the background give the protesters a matched size. Similarly, the positions and body language of the protesters with open faces turned directly towards the police officer show no expressions of fear or retreat. These compositional choices illustrate the agency of the queer community by visually matching the unarmed strength of protesters to the armed violence of the oppressor. By paralleling the community and oppressors, the visual narrative portrays agency as beyond protesting and advocating, but physically standing up and fighting back against oppression. In the metanarrative, advocating for the benefit of the community—often through protests— is the main connection to agency. This is continued in the visual narrative, since this image shows a form of advocacy: a community advocating for their own safety. However, as this photograph establishes through body language, agency is also about physically standing up and fighting back, something that the metanarrative does not clearly communicate. Agency through body language and composition is a common thread in photographs of violence in the corpus, which is also present in non-protest images.

An image taken on Halloween night in front of St. Charles’ Tavern also illustrates agency through body language, but does so by evoking solidarity and strength in a defensively linked position. In issue 6 from Fall of 1972, an over-exposed image of drag

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queens accompanies an article entitled “The Halloween Phenomenon.” The article details the angry crowds that gather to bother, insult, and sometimes assault queens arriving for the annual Halloween drag show.260 The image features four drag queens standing close together in a line, all with styled hair and a fancy dress or outfit. The leftmost queen looks directly into the camera lens, smiling broadly, while the person to the right blocks her face with their hand. The two drag queens on the right side of the image are further away from the camera and appear to be directing their gaze outwards, presumably towards the crowd. Although the crowd, while not shown, was described as difficult to control and the situation as “ugly and potentially explosive” in the article,261 the drag queens stand close together and form a united front against the crowd. The tight-knit unity of this group is undeniable in their defensively linked position. The closeness of the drag queens in their positions emphasizes their close association and togetherness giving the impression of solidarity. The inclusion of this image of protestors absent of the representation of the crowd illustrates agency by centring perseverance against violent threats. By centring the drag queens, rather than capturing the potential anger or violent appearance of the crowd, this image communicates agency as a phenomenon that can stem from the combined strength of a group, and, integrally, does not necessarily require explicit action. The last example shows a crowd and aggressor caught in action with arms raised mid-air and frozen snarls, but the photograph of the drag queens does not show any form of captured movement. The image, by showing only the drag queens and their position standing up against angry opponents, establishes the queens as literally standing up for themselves and their own safety, thus embodying agency. In the metanarrative,

260 Untitled image below “The Halloween Phenomenon,” The Body Politic 6, Autumn 1972, 21. 261 Hugh Brewster, “The Halloween Phenomenon,” The Body Politic 6, Autumn 1972, 21. 108

where agency is built upon advocacy, this furthers the theme of agency beyond planned protests and traditional “acceptable” forms of advocacy, but also through physically standing up for one’s on safety in the face of violence. These examples of embodied agency are integral to the understanding of agency in the visual narrative, but violence is not always directed at the body in the visual narrative and thus communicated in separate ways. Photographs depicting violence towards buildings and structures further communicate agency by exposing a narrative of injustice while preventing the victimization of community members. For example, in the previously mentioned long feature on Operation Soaps and subsequent protest in Issue 71 (March 1981), images taken during the raid show extensive damage to lockers and doors in the bathhouse.262 On page 11, three overlapping images of the raid occupy the top right hand corner of the page; two of these images show damage, while one focuses on two police officers presumably taking a statement. The leftmost image shows a smashed open door broken into pieces, while the top image displays several rows of small lockers with their doors ripped open and contents strewn across the floor. This damage contrasts with the content of the caption in the top right corner which consists of a quote from Attorney General

Roy McMurty. It reads: “one police officer took a hammer into the place with him but it was not used. At another establishment, one crowbar was taken and was used to open three lockers. This is the total evidence...”263 The visually evident damage paired with the implication of a hammer and a major discrepancy between the actual damage and the admitted damage exposes a narrative of injustice and institutionalized violence. By

262 Gerald Hannon and Norman Halton, untitled photo accompanying “Rage!” The Body Politic 71, March 1981, 11. 263 Ibid. 109

juxtaposing these images with McMurty’s quotation, TBP highlights the corruption within Toronto’s police and justice system. Exposing this corruption and injustice is a form of agency because it shows TBP defending its community by flipping the narrative of violence in favour of Toronto’s queer community. Furthermore, it does so without further victimizing a human victim of police violence by centring the damage wreaked on the bathhouse rather than those arrested. Like the metanarrative, avoiding victimization is major aspect of agency in the visual narrative. However, the metanarrative hinges on taking to the streets and protesting for rights. Instead, as this image and paratext combination shows, agency in the visual narrative also takes a latent and implicit form which fact-checking and altering the dominant narrative rather than active protests or bodily depictions. However, TBP also uses depictions of the body as a tool of agency while still avoiding victimization of the community it is advocating for.

The Body Politic takes this form of agency, that prioritizes anti-victimization, even further by using a dramatization of a bathhouse raid on the cover of Issue 50.

Adorning the cover from February 1979, the photograph rests alongside a headline reading “Busting up the Baths, Getting Killed, And…” with more detailed bylines underneath each section of the headline.264 The high contrast black and white photograph, which starkly contrasts with the bright red background of the cover, shows two men in a tiled room; one man, dressed in a full suit and a crouched man who is nude except for a white towel clutched against his pelvis. The inner page of the issue reads “on location with a rented uniform and a borrowed towel, collective members Alex Wilson and Keith

264 Gerald Hannon, untitled image of Alex Wilson and Keith sly dramatizing the Barracks raid next to “Busting up the Baths, Getting Killed, And…” The Body Politic 50, February 1979, cover. 110

Sly dramatize the Barracks raid for photographer Gerald Hannon.”265 This is the only

image of a bathhouse raid that shows an arrest in progress and it is notable that it is a

dramatization. As one of the most explicit images of violence in the magazine, it is also

notable that this image includes partial nudity. The Body Politic is no stranger to nudity,

especially in drawn illustrations and art, often included in the Our Image section of the

publication. As a re-enactment of an event that occurred, it is far more telling. Instead,

the implied nudity and vulnerability is

used for the very specific political purpose

of enticing anger and outrage by showing

the trauma inflicted upon gay men for

simply enjoying themselves. The

photographer and collective editors are

actively avoiding victimizing anyone

directly, and as such, emphasizing agency.

Despite illustrating what is evidently a

humiliating event, further compounded by

the “surprising” appearance of a camera to

capture this humiliation, this Figure 6 Staged cover image dramatizing the Barracks raid on the cover of issue 50 of The Body Politic, February 1979. photograph was taken with Photographed by Gerald Hannon. intent and consent. By these

men taking control of their own illustration, their own depiction, even in a representation

of violence, they are acting upon their agency and flipping the narrative from victim to

265 “The cover” The Body Politic 50, February 1979, 1. 111

agent and survivor. Like the last image, the evident avoidance of victimization aligns the visual narrative with the metanarrative. However, this photograph also sheds light on how the weaponization of vulnerability and the queer body can still be a form of agency. This could perhaps be aligned with the Elizabeth M. Schneider’s understanding of “the false dichotomy between women’s victimization and women’s agency.”266 Schneider’s work evidently applies to women and feminism through legal work, but can extrapolate to the queer body as well. In her article, she explains that feminist discourse on pornography and domestic abuse tends to lead to an either/or situation where a woman must be either an agent or a victim; instead she argues that these are actually “interrelated dimensions of women’s experience.”267 Considering this theoretical perspective in tangent with the cover image, the theme of agency is therefore expanded beyond traditional concept of agency embodied by protest and advocating. This image could be considered a form of negative depiction at first glance and, in this way, contrasts with the next images that centre on positive representation as a form of agency. Similarly, these next images also include control over one’s own or the communities image and representation.

For images that show or represent violence, the connections to agency tend to be associated with activity; they show crowds or individuals actively battling oppression or standing up strong in the face of violence, even if it is sometimes paradoxical. However, images chosen to visualize those who have previously faced violence, such as murder victims or the targets of gay bashers, instead focus on positive representation alongside strength, composure, and lack of fear in the aftermath of violence. The photographs of those who have previously faced police brutality or gay bashers tend to have similar

266 Elizabeth M. Schneider, “Feminism and the False Dichotomy of Victimization and Agency.” New York Law School law review 38, no. 1-4 (1993), 387-388. 267 Schneider, 395. 112

posing and composition to the Halloween drag queen image, but are instead images of the survivors not taken during the attack. For example, in issue 12, from March and April

1974, an article called “Uppity Women” is punctuated by a picture the “Brunswick

Four.”268 On Saturday January 5th 1974, four queer women—Adrienne Potte, Pat

Murphy, Sue Welle and Heather (beyer) Elizabeth—were at the Brunswick House pub when they were “insulted, arrested and roughed up.”269 The associated photograph shows the four women sitting and posing together; their faces are facing towards the camera while three of the four embrace one another. Potte is slightly more distanced from the group, not embracing, and Welle has her arms draped around Murphy and Elizabeth’s shoulders. Most of the women are smiling with playful and warm expressions. Like the photograph of the drag queens, this image shows a united front through body language and positioning, which communicates composure and unity. Yet, the intimacy of their poses and embrace stretches beyond unity in the face of foe or shared experience, but instead indicates friendship. This intimacy, alongside their relaxed expressions, shows a non-threatening group of women. By contrasting the violence committed by the patrons of the bar and the police with the non-threatening nature presented by the image, this photograph emphasizes the injustice of these actions. The positive representation and appearance of the united front in this image establish strength and composure in the aftermath of violence as an integral aspect of agency in the visual narrative. In the metanarrative, strength in the face of violence is not prioritized, instead actions and advocacy lay at its heart. This image is an example of reverse-victimization. Thus, this image furthers the theme of agency beyond planned protests, but also through visually

268 The Brunswick Four in The Body Politic 12, March-April 1974, 1. 269 Ibid. 113

overturning stereotypes of weakness in the aftermath of violence. This portrayal of strength in agency through posing is also shown in the next image.

Similarly depicting strength in agency through posing in the aftermath of violence is a photograph in issue 24 from May/June 1976. Accompanying a short article entitled “Two women attacked” is a posed imaged of collective contributor Christine Bearchell and her partner Konnie Reich.270 The article briefly details the violent assault these women experienced because they were holding hands while walking home.271 The image shows both Bearchell and Reich smiling, holding hands, and looking at the camera. There are no visible injuries and Reich’s shirt clearly reads “gay and proud.” The image illustrates strength in the aftermath of danger by centering on their clasped hands, which is further emphasized by the fact that both the women’s outer arms are cropped out; the only hands in the image are those held together even though holding hands was the gay bashers motivation. Bearchell and Reich’s symbolic pose accentuates their resilience in the aftermath of an assault, as well as their agency. Bearchell’s role as a TBP contributor points towards an explicit decision of depiction and by choosing to not only share their story, but to visually represent themselves as strong, whole, and undamaged, they contribute to a concept of agency infused with taking one’s own representation into one’s own hands. This photograph works in tandem with that of the Brunswick Four. Like the last image, the violence against queer women is described in the article, but the images chosen to complement the texts are positive representations that illuminate strength and intimacy. In comparison to the metanarrative, where protest and direct advocacy are centred, the visual narrative shows agency through these images as intimately intertwined

270 Christine Bearchell (I) and Konnie Reich in The Body Politic 24, May-June, 7. 271 Ken Popert, “Two women attacked,” The Body Politic 24, May-June, 7. 114

with representations of strength and literally taking a stand in the aftermath of violence.

In the metanarrative, agency is rarely specifically invoked. However, it is largely communicated through language surrounding protesting and advocating. Predominantly, agency in the metanarrative is relegated to political agency and fighting for social and legal liberation. The visual narrative continues this concept of fighting and advocating— specifically in the images of protests where police and crowd clash—but it also extends this definition of agency to proactive protection of the community and the portrayal of strength in images of those facing, or having faced, violence. Evidently, representation is essential to agency and TBP when dealing with survivors of violence. However, a similar type of agency is also evident in photographs who did not survive meeting anti-gay violence.

Agency in the visual narrative is also communicated through positive representation in photographs of the numerous members of the queer community in Toronto who were murdered because of their sexuality. These mostly gay men’s violent deaths were catalogued in The Body Politic both in memorial and to spread awareness of safety concerns regarding possible serial killers. Notably, the focus of these articles and images are almost exclusively those who have been killed. At times, the articles also include a police sketch of the suspect, usually if the article aims to increase awareness towards specific dangers or ascertain information about the presumed killer’s identity. For example, two images of “the two most recent victims” complement an article entitled

“Cops seek help in murder cases” in issue 93 from May 1983.272 The photographs show victims Donald Weir and Graham Pearce, separately, smiling for the camera. Despite the

272 The two most recent victims in The Body Politic 93, May 1983, 12. 115

gory details included in the article describing their violent killings, these images present two happy, respectable, and peaceful men. Weir’s portrait shows a smiling bearded man with his hands loosely holding a tiny dog on his lap. Similarly, Pearce’s portrait is a headshot of a slightly smiling man bearded man with glasses wearing a collared shirt and suit jacket. These images could just as easily be an image in a photo album or yearbook.

These images are informed by notions of agency and strength by avoiding victimization even in death. Notably, there is no violence shown in the images of these men. Since they were murders, it follows that no direct image of a crime in action could be included since this type of image certainly does not exist as many remain unsolved crimes. However, there are also no crime scene images, no police tape, and no images of weapons. These are images that the police, and possibly members of the media, certainly had access to.

There is also no evidence of TBP using dramatization for visual representations of murder. The dramatization of the bathhouse raid is an exception in many regards, but it begs the question of why, despite the obvious traumatic potential, is it acceptable to dramatize a raid and risk causing further trauma to the readers or the models, but murders and serial killers were not? Evidently, TBP chose to move away from sensationalism and instead focus on the humanity of the victims. The lack of violence or violent motifs in the images appear to be a deliberate choice to separate the violence that ended the lives of these men from the lived experience of the men themselves. Instead of portraying the men as victims, they are humanized by the inclusion of positive images showing their joy or sensitivity. In the example, the choice to depict these men as anything but victims ensure they are not re-victimized after death, which speaks to this idea of agency associated with anti-victimization. However, it also reaches beyond the restricted concept

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of anti-victimization because, through these images, it extends beyond agency that can only be employed by the living. These images embody agency both in their purpose of community protection—preventing further deaths by spreading awareness—but also in the way these respectful depictions continue a legacy of actively avoiding victimization, even if the subject is, by definition, a victim. Like the previous images of those in the community who have experienced violence, the positive representations of murder victims like Weir and Pearce, adds nuance to the metanarrative by intertwining agency with representation. In this case, it is not individual control overrepresentation, but rather the editorial choices that chose to prioritize humanity and positive representation over sensationalism in an open murder case. Furthermore, the connection between anti- victimization in the metanarrative and visual narrative is even further solidified through this choice of humanization. In these past images, agency has largely been demonstrated by positive or non-threatening depictions communicated by posing. However, pose can also indicate agency through more threatening positionality as shown by the next images of self-defence.

Agency, demonstrated by stance and position of the body, or embodied agency, was also present in images of self-defence. With the onset of spring in 1982, queerbashing was increasing in response to the conservative backlash.273 As detailed in an article on “A different kind of streetwalking” in May 1982, the community, like the year before, formed the Toronto Gay Patrol (TGP) as a self-defence tactic to increase safety for gay men and lesbians in the downtown core of Toronto due to “inadequate police

273 Warner, 107. 117

protection.”274 The photograph accompanying this article shows four people walking along a street with a caption identifying them as “A Toronto Gay Patrol team.”275 With their backs turned to the camera, their faces are obscured, but their formation and clothing illustrate them as a unit. Not only are they walking in close pairs, but each pair is visually linked by the colour of their jackets, the first white, the other black. The TGP is an example of agency where community members have taken matters of their own community’s safety into their own hands. This image of the TGP casually links agency to the acts of altruism and community self-defence. While the previous images use positive and non-threatening posing to communicate a sense of injustice or to avoid sensationalism, this image shows a unified group in matching jackets specifically prowling the streets to find violence being committed against queer Torontonians. In this image, visualization of the defense of their own community is a form of proactive and embodied agency. The addition of self-defence to the understanding of agency in the metanarrative is subtle. Like the last several images, this photograph stretches beyond the confines of agency as protest or advocacy. It also furthers this idea of anti-victimization, but in an even more active way. In the cases of the previous images, the anti- victimization is shown after the fact of violence through representation. In this case, anti- victimization is shown in action as members of the community literally put themselves in harm’s way to prevent anyone else becoming a victim. While this image shows people preventing victimization by physically protecting others, other images show victimization prevention through individual self-defence and agency.

274 Danny Cockerline, “Gay patrol: a different kind of streetwalking,” The Body Politic 83, May 1982, 10. 275 A Toronto Gay Patrol team on duty in The Body Politic 83, May 1982, 10. 118

In two photographs of Dean Haynes and his self-defence class, agency is communicated by exemplifying self-defence as a priority of the liberation movement. In issue 87 from October 1982, two images augment an article entitled “self-defence: fighting back and speaking out” which establishes the increasing accounts of street violence in Toronto and the necessity of learning self-defence to combat these attacks.276

The larger of the two images shows a smiling Dean Haynes with hands on his hips and wearing a loose white shirt adorned by a small light-coloured triangle. The colour is not visible as the photograph is in black and white. However, it is quite likely the triangle was a pink triangle, which was an important symbol reclaimed for LGBT pride and a recognizable signal identifying himself as gay.277 A smaller photograph overlays the bottom right corner of the larger image and depicts Hayne in a jabbing position with his right fist raised to the face of a shorter man in similar garb.278 Both images are evidence of proactive agency. These men are taking an active role in their own protection and, by extension, the protection of their community. The theme of agency is not just an act of anti-victimization or showing strength. Here it is the literal depiction of strength and organized self-defence as a component of agency. Like the previous image, the photographs of Dean Haynes and his class are preventing further victimization by showing queer people of Toronto gaining the skills to combat any who mean them harm.

However, this image also means the visual narrative understands agency in self-defence as both defensive and proactive, thus adding nuance to the underdeveloped understanding of agency in the metanarrative.

276 Self-Defence Group’s Dean Haynes in The Body Politic 87, October 1982, 13. 277 Olivia B. Waxman, “How Nazi Pink Triangles Symbol Was Reclaimed for LGBT Pride.” Time. Time, May 31, 2018. 278 Small untitled photo below Self-Defence Group’s Dean Haynes in The Body Politic 87, October 1982, 13. 119

Examination shows that, in TBP, the images of violence are portrayed and treated differently depending on the type of violence the depict, but agency rests at the core of each of these examples. In the visual narrative, agency, on one hand, denotes anti- victimization while prioritizing strength even in the face or aftermath of violence.

Similarly, certain images show the queer community in Toronto visually asserting their greater or equal power against institutional oppressors, such as the police. On the other hand, the images of self-defence emphasize a proactive form of agency that aligns more with the “get off our backs” message of the protest signs in the liberation section. In images of those experiencing, or having recently experienced, violence, the images assert agency as members of the community taking a stand against oppressors or standing together, strong, in the aftermath. However, the images of murdered men take a slightly different approach; since images of these individuals cannot be taken after the event, their portrayal in the magazine is limited to photographs taken before their deaths. Yet, the evident avoidance of using violent images or motifs in these memorial articles lends itself to a strong association with anti-victimization and agency. Finally, the images of self- defence in the visual narrative construe proactive protection and strength as a form of agency. Ultimately, the visual narrative corroborates the anti-victimization aspect prevalent in the metanarrative but extends the notion of agency beyond traditional channels of action and advocacy through protest by portraying strength, unity, and positive representation through images of those who have faced violence. The theme of agency is essential to the memory of the movement in both the visual narrative and the metanarrative, but it is also intimately entangled with the theme of visibility as both a tactic of agency in liberation and the defining feature of the visual narrative.

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Proud to be Seen

In the memory of Toronto’s Gay and Lesbian Liberation Movement, visibility plays an integral role in both the visual narrative of The Body Politic and the metanarrative. While the written metanarrative explicitly considers visibility as a tactic of liberation, the visual narrative is an embodiment of visibility. The metanarrative considers visibility—the concept of seeing and being seen for the purposes of this study—a tactic towards social and legal liberation. By being seen in public as “out and proud,” queer people could provide evidence of their existence as a way to leverage and advocate for rights and acceptance. In the visual narrative, the photographs in TBP are evidence and corroboration of the role of visibility as a tactic towards liberation.

However, visibility in the visual narrative runs deeper than simply evidence because the very existence of TBP as a “publication coined liberation magazine” that uses photographs to punctuate, supplement, or represent its articles is visibility. Images, at their core, cannot be divested of their association with visibility. As well, visibility in the visual narrative places emphasis on who or what is visible, thus pointing to editorial and authorial agency. In this way, every image in the magazine, including those already discussed, are integral to the notion of visibility in the memory of the movement. The importance of who and what has been included in each of the photographs of the corpus has already been discussed, but one type of image specifically invokes visibility: the image of pride parades which hinge on visibility, inclusion, and being “out and proud.”

An image and text spread of Gay Pride Week 1972 perhaps best exemplifies the characterization of visibility in the visual narrative as being “out and proud.” In Issue 6

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(Autumn 1972), nine images of the pride week festival in Toronto are accompanied by a combination of long captions and short articles describing the events of pride week.279

Several of these images depict events such as a “gay picnic” in the park and an “Open

Society” seminar.280 Most pertinent is an image on the second page of the spread which shows the 1972 pride parade marching through City Hall Square.281 The photograph shows a large crowd marching along a city street with visible power lines towering above the heads of the marchers. Because of the position of the photographer, which is seemingly slightly to the right, but head on at the front of the crowd, the image shows the front of the crowd on the left side of the image with dozens of trailing people in rows of approximately five across. In the left foreground, taking up the top quarter of the image, a large banner reading “Gay Pride” in bold letters is being held above the heads by two people presumably leading the march. With this perspective and distance, the image shows the individual people marching but obscures facial details and gives the impression of a numerous and infinite march of people with no “end of the line” in sight. The closeness of the crowd, with little separation, implies solidarity and uniform support behind the statement of “Gay Pride” both as the name of the festival and as the feeling of pride for being gay. Several of the other images in the 1972 collage instead show individual or small groups of people having fun at the beach, at a conference, or having a picnic without explicit signage announcing their sexuality. While the march photograph gives an impression of massive support, solidarity, and being very visibly gay and proud on a city street in broad daylight, many of the other photographs focus on the social

279 Kenneth Bagnell, “Gay Pride Week: Pride and Prejudice,” The Body Politic 6, Autumn 1972, 12-13. 280 Jearld Moldehnhauer, Gay Picnic and Seminar: “The Open Society” in The Body Politic 6, Autumn 1972, 12-13. 281 Jearld Moldehnhauer, Gay Pride March in The Body Politic 6, Autumn 1972, 13. 122

nature of these festivals with more subtle hints towards sexuality, ultimately embodying a sense of community not built on protest and pride slogans but a similar struggle.

Compared to the metanarrative, the use of visibility as pride in these images first and foremost aligns with visibility as a tactic of liberation for acceptance. Though legal liberation is not mentioned in the paratext or indicated by the image, the photograph’s use of “pride” and emphasis on mass support does implicate celebration of one’s sexuality which correlates with a tactic of liberation in the metanarrative. However, this photograph must also be understood as a part of a spread of images. The adjacent photographs show queer people having fun and being together, which throws a new light on to the pride parade. Rather than be only a show of visibility along a public street, the notion of visibility and pride visibility specifically hinges on the formation and cohesion of community. This takes the closeness of the crowd beyond being numerous and visible but being indicative of the tight bonds of community. In this way, visibility in the memory of the movement is both something that can be done to attain liberation and a way to capture a moment in the queer community. This image exemplifies visibility as it connects to community and liberation, but other images of pride parades also emphasize mass support and solidarity.

In a collage of the 1986 pride parades across Canada, an image of Toronto’s parade uses visibility to exemplify mass support and solidarity in the name of liberation.282 In issue 129, from August 1986, images from St. John’s, Ottawa, and

282 Gregory A. Wight, top left image of proud and loud in The Body Politic 129, August 1986, 12. 123

Toronto are

shown next to a

short article

about being

“proud and

loud.”283 The

Toronto image

is taken from

Figure 7 Photograph of the 1986 Pride Parade in Toronto in issue 129 of atop a building The Body Politic, August 1986. Photographed by Gregory A. Wight. with a view of

the roof peaks in the left foreground of the image. Just beyond the peaks, in the

background, is a towering building with a large billboard measuring the whole length of

its side and reading “Lesbian & Gay Pride Day.” On the right side of the image, a city

street is visibly lined with shorter townhouse style buildings and a couple high-rise

buildings. Taking up the entire right-hand side of the street, there is a massive crowd with

some visible, though illegible, signs above their heads. The crowd is extensive, stretching

past at least 10 buildings, and appears never-ending because the end of the parade is

outside the frame of the image. Considering the text on the building, it can be assumed

that this is the pride parade, but individual people or signs are not visible due to the

distance between photographer and participants. Because of this composition the

participants and spectators are indistinguishable from one another, possibly giving the

effect of widespread support. Rather than an up-close shot, this blurring effect points to

283 “Lesbian and Gay Pride Day ’86,” The Body Politic 129, August 1986, 12. 124

solidarity and unity in the celebration of sexuality; by not distinguishing between people this image shows a group of people as one. As well, with the end of the parade not included in the frame of the photograph, the massive support is even emphasized further since the parade could presumably stretch on for miles and miles. For this image, the theme of visibility is paradoxically exemplified by making certain information less visible through framing. By obscuring the end of the parade and the divide between spectator and participant, the photograph uses the idea of what is or is not visible to further the notion of solidarity and mass support thus furthering the goals of liberation.

Like the metanarrative, this framing remains evidence of visibility as a tactic of liberation, but adds nuance to the way visibility can lead to liberation. Rather than showing more information, this image obscures in order to emphasize the unity of the community and the large amount of support which can then lead to further acceptance from Toronto.

Ultimately, images of pride parades can both use visibility to magnify the community as it exists together and to emphasize mass support and solidarity by making certain elements more visible than others. In the memory of the movement visibility plays an important role as a tactic towards liberation, which the metanarrative and visual narrative have both shown. However, visibility is also inherent in TBP and thus cannot be dissociated from any of the images in the magazine or any of the prevalent themes.

Visibility is not just about being seen as “out and proud,” it is also about showing certain types of images, centring specific representations, and obscuring particular information in favour of liberation, agency, and solidarity. Visibility therefore plays an important role in every aspect of the visual narrative as the defining feature of each image. Despite the

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importance of visibility, solidarity, a theme not explored in the metanarrative, is the connecting thread of the visual memory.

Threads of Solidarity

Solidarity intersects with liberation, agency, and visibility in diverse ways which distance the visual narrative from the metanarrative. In the metanarrative, solidarity is an unexplored notion namely relegated to association between co-movements, like the women’s movement. This is not an unimportant aspect of the GLLM, and it is an aspect of the visual narrative as well, but solidarity is not a linking factor. Unlike the metanarrative, in the visual narrative solidarity is that which links each theme and image as one. Some of these threads of solidarity have been indicated throughout the discussion of the previous themes: visibility, agency, and liberation. Specifically, the visual narrative shows solidarity through framing of blurred large crowds, unifying poses, and emphasis on protest signs.

First, the decision to include images that depict large, often faceless crowds shows solidarity in images of visibility and violence. These photographs—whether of violence or protest—tend to depict groups of people close together, thus visually depicting solidarity across the community and its supporters. A degree of this prevalence is certainly due to the nature of protests that are often attended by large amounts of people or violent incidents which, when photographed, tend to be at protests or annual events like the St. Charles Tavern Halloween crowds. However, the decision to frame and compose these images in a way that emphasizes the mass support and solidarity of the participants is not a result of its nature, but rather indicative of editorial agency. For

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example, in the analysis of visibility, both photographs of pride parades prioritize the size of the march over the detail of the individual participants or spectators. The emphasis on size relays mass support across demographics, participants, spectators, and bystanders.

The lack of focus on details of the crowd means that the construction of the crowd cannot be analysed, but it points to the importance of having numerous community members and supporters in this demonstration of pride in Toronto’s queer community. To put it another way, it prioritizes how many people support the community or are proud of being part of this community over who exactly is in this group. Furthermore, in each case, the most visible aspect of the photograph is the banner or sign denoting the reason for gathering.

This choice makes the intention of pride and celebration clear, but the monolithic crowd—unified by the blur— that marches beneath the signs connects to solidarity above all else. While the sign above is the common interest the unifies the crowd, the literal oneness of the crowd below, compounded by the blur, further emphasizes the participants’ connection to one another. With both examples of framing, the emphasis on size and the monolithic blur, these images indicative of visibility are inherently intertwined with the connecting thread of solidarity. The metanarrative does not develop solidarity but rather considers it an aspect of co-movement relationships. In contrast, the visual narrative invokes solidarity as an interconnected and necessary aspect of visibility, which is the defining feature of the photographs in TBP. This addition of solidarity adds to the metanarrative in the memory of Toronto’s GLLM by associating solidarity with the tactic of visibility towards liberation. This thread of solidarity, woven into visibility tactics, is also prevalent in the images of agency.

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In the visual narrative, solidarity is also communicated through posing of gay people who are under threat of violence or have recently experienced violence in photographs of agency. In the discussion of the theme of agency, the images of the drag queens standing outside St. Charles Tavern, the Brunswick Four huddling together, and

Bearchell and Reich holding hands, each show strength in their depiction through posing as whole, strong, and seemingly unharmed even in the face or aftermath of violence.

However, this posing, with its emphasis on closeness, physical connection, and unity communicates the theme of solidarity by presenting a together and united front. In the image of the drag queens,284 the paratext implies they are facing a large, potentially violent crowd, yet their facial expressions show no fear and, most importantly, they stand together shoulder to shoulder to face this threat. This communicates the theme of solidarity by presenting the queens as a unified wall against the crowd, connected by mutual support.

Similarly, in the Brunswick Four image285 the arms slung around each other’s shoulders communicate unity through physical touch, even in the wake of assault. As shown below in Figure 8, the four women are visually and physically linked by the physical touch and closeness shown in the image, but even their name “the Brunswick

Four” textually demarcates these women as “one.”

284 Untitled image below “The Halloween Phenomenon,” The Body Politic 6, Autumn 1972, 21. 285 The Brunswick Four in The Body Politic 12, March-April 1974, 1. 128

Finally, the image of Christine Bearchell and Konnie Reich286 shows solidarity through posing by centring their hands. By emphasizing the linked hands, the very reason for their targeting, the image primarily shows strength and the refusal to back down even

in the

aftermath

of danger.

However,

the linked

hands are

also a

symbol of

unity,

physically

combining Figure 8 Photograph of the Brunswick Four in Issue 12 of The Body Politic, March-April 1974. Unknown photographer. the two women in the name of a common cause: exposing the injustice of their treatment. In each of these photographs, the unity communicated by the photographs is the crux of solidarity as it intertwines with agency. Rather than focusing on a massive crowd and the solidarity between a blurred mass of people unified beneath a banner, the images of agency look at solidarity between identifiable individuals which can be just as powerful. This expands the idea of solidarity in the visual narrative to encapsulate solidarity on the small scale as well as on a larger more widespread scale. In the metanarrative, since solidarity is not

286 Christine Bearchell (I) and Konnie Reich in The Body Politic 24, May-June, 7. 129

central, this discussion adds nuance to the idea of agency by prioritizing solidarity as a key factor of agency, specifically when discussing the agency of a smaller number of people rather than a massive crowd. Solidarity, as it interlaces with agency and weaves together the visual narrative, complicates the metanarrative and adds a new dynamic to the memory of Toronto’s GLLM. However, solidarity also corroborates this metanarrative through its link to liberation and co-movements.

Solidarity in the visual narrative also occurs throughout the theme of liberation, specifically through the association to co-movements which verifies the undeveloped role of solidarity in the metanarrative. Through the signs and paratext of each image, the role of co-movements in the GLLM is undeniable in the previously discussed images of

International Women’s day, the immigration act protest, and the labour protest. The first image, of International Women’s Day, indicates the presence of a lesbian contingent at the protest through paratext, but does not show this visually. Instead, the image focuses on the female participants in the foreground and the one legible sign reading: “Women’s

Liberation Now.”287 In this image the paratext is essential for understanding the connection to the GLLM since nothing in the image visually indicates the participation of lesbians. Regardless, the existence of this image inside a gay liberation magazine is notable as a sign of solidarity across movements, not just within the GLLM. Though this image relies on multimodality, specifically the relationship between text and image, to communicate solidarity, this image is still indicative of the association between liberation and solidarity which prioritizes co-movement cooperation and acknowledgment.

Dissimilarly, the image of the immigration act protest heavily uses signage, rather than

287 Untitled image above “Collation adds lesbian rights to Women’s Day demands,” The Body Politic 51, March-April 1979, 11. 130

exclusively paratext, to explicitly outline the relationship between the immigration protest and the rights of queer people in Toronto. The signs reading “Gays out of the immigration act” and “take “homosexualism” out of the immigration act”288 specifically specify this relationship and point to the solidarity between immigration advocates and the GLLM. Finally, the image of the labour protest,289 includes the sign reading “job security a gay right.” Even more than the previous images, the sign in this photograph takes up the entire top half of the frame, further emphasizing the slogan. By associating job security with the rights of queer people, especially alongside a headline reading

“Gays join Day of Protest,” this photograph explores solidarity beyond movements focused on other marginalized groups such as women or immigrants, to a central movement representing the entirety of the working class. Evidently, the visual narrative shows solidarity as a key aspect of gaining liberation by evoking co-movement cooperation between women, immigrants, and the labour movement. This corroborates the metanarrative’s brief mention of solidarity in relation to co-movements, but it also further emphasizes the lack of solidarity as a theme in the metanarrative by virtue of its importance in the visual narrative.

Ultimately, in the visual narrative, solidarity is intimately tied to liberation, agency, and visibility through composition, posing and emphasis on co-movements. Yet in the metanarrative, solidarity takes place only in relation to other movements. In combination, the visual narrative emphasizes the importance of solidarity as it intertwines with each other theme and either verifies or adds nuance to the metanarrative. Solidarity,

288 Gerald Hannon Gate Members (from left): Brian Mossop, Randy Notte & Michael Riordan at first protest against Green Paper in Toronto in The Body Politic 19, July to August 1975, 5. 289 Gay contingent at October 14 demonstration at Queen’s Park in The Body Politic 29, December 1976- January 1977, 1.

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like desire in the metanarrative, is a theme prevalent in the majority of these images, but more importantly it can be considered the encapsulating link that binds each theme to its manifestation in the visual narrative. In the memory of this movement, taking both visual and metanarrative into account, solidarity as unity for a common cause takes a new precedence. However, this new precedence must also be considered as it parallels and contradicts the theme of desire: the major difference between the visual and textual memory of the movement. As the conclusion will show, the queer cultural memory of the movement, as informed by both the visual narrative and the metanarrative, is a complex quilt woven together with the threads of solidarity, desire, visibility, agency, and liberation.

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Chapter 6

Redemptive Patchwork

This thesis explored the collective memory of Toronto’s Gay and Lesbian

Liberation Movement through queer cultural memories informed by photographs and texts relating to violence and protest in The Body Politic. These queer cultural memories, formed by photographs of violence and protest, capture the electricity of liberation, agency, visibility, desire, and solidarity that encapsulate the memory of Toronto’s Gay and Lesbian Liberation Movement. However, the collective memory of the movement is contested and often reflective of the dominant narrative prioritizing white, cis, male voices, but queer cultural memory can be used as tool to reveal these obscured narratives.

As Chapter two showed, queer cultural memory is a redemptive form of memory connected to queer past and queer future, which is produced by “figures of memory.”

These figures, largely associated with ephemeral records in community grassroots archives, include both photographs and texts which are important to community-building and identity formation in a community with a shared perception of the past. In this case, that community is the queer community of Toronto during the 1970s and 1980s, while the ephemeral records are the articles and images of The Body Politic. The spectrum of queer cultural memories making up the collective memory of the movement reflects the diverse experiences within the manifold queer community of Toronto during the GLLM.

Chapter three established the visual methodology and definitions used to ascertain the queer cultural memories through photographs and texts in TBP. This chapter created working definitions of protest and violence to inform the selection process of photographs from the magazine. It also explored visual content analysis to develop a

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codebook used to sort and analyze the photographs. Furthermore, this magazine must be considered a multimodal source that includes two types of figures, both texts and images, which contribute separate narratives to the memory of the movement.

Chapter four examined the academic and activist-led writing on the subject of

Toronto’s GLLM to establish the metanarrative. These publications frequently rely on textual sources from TBP, showing the significant effect the magazine and its editorial collective had on memory creation of the movement. For this reason, the metanarrative of the movement is largely synonymous with the textual narrative produced by TBP. The metanarrative is embodied by the themes of liberation, visibility, agency, and desire.

Furthermore, this chapter visualized the metanarrative compared to the visual record in order to shed light on the semblances and differences between each form of queer cultural memory.

As chapter five illustrated, the visual narrative of the movement’s collective memory at times diverges, corroborates, and adds nuance to the metanarrative. The visual narrative shares several themes with the textual visual narrative including the themes of liberation, visibility, and agency, but it communicates these themes through different channels and with different effects. Furthermore, it relies on the theme of solidarity, not present in the metanarrative, to unite each of the themes.

Until now, the images of protest and violence in the magazine have not been scrutinized or considered as sources in their own right. Yet, as queer cultural memory reveals, even without acknowledgment they still contribute to the creation of memory.

Thus, it is essential to grasp the visual memory of Toronto’s GLLM as separate from the textual narrative, but also still owing to the same histories of white, gay men whose

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desire excluded and obscured the experiences of QTBIPOC. This reference to desire is actually the biggest divergence between the textual and visual narrative which creates dissonance in the memory of the movement and can also act as a powerful tool to uncover and acknowledge the experiences and desires of those outside the dominating narrative.

Separation of Desire

In the metanarrative, the theme of desire acts as a driving force behind and intertwined with every other theme, but in the visual narrative desire is not prevalent in images of the liberation movement. Even with added nuance, each of the previous themes has in some way paralleled aspects of the metanarrative’s themes, but “desire” is one theme that does not have a comparable thread in the visual narrative of protest and violence. Though desire is a significant aspect of The Body Politic, and desire arguably underlies many of the protests and acts of violence depicted, most images of desire occupy other sections of this magazine. This is the biggest divergence from the metanarrative. To some extent this lack of explicit desire is to be expected; since this project is relegated to images of protest and violence, pornographic or particularly salacious imagery is less likely to be in the sample.

Notably, this lack of desire relates to the notion of visibility, particularly the

“right” kind of visibility. Overly sexual or salacious innuendo present in images of the liberation could have seemed counterproductive to the gaining of social and legal liberation. Its ethics aside, acceptance in the minds of many requires respectability and pornographic material in public is less respectable than other displays. This, in some

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ways, contradicts the rest of the magazine, which focuses so intently on the freedom of pleasure, the ability to sexually be with who you choose, and even the promotion of public anonymous sex. However, the photographs making up the visual narrative of the liberation movement are notably devoid of these concepts, except when any of these ideas triggered police action. For example, in the November 1977 issue Gerald Hannon’s article “Men Loving Boys Loving Men” sparked outrage, resulting in a police raid and six years of court for pornographic depictions.290 The article, and its association to desire, is not related to images of violence or protest, but the ensuing protests against the court rulings were and therefore were included in the broader corpus.

One example in the corpus evokes the theme of desire, which acts as an exception to prove the rule. In issue 26, published September 1976, an image of a non-traditional protest enhances an article entitled “kiss-in protests conviction of kissers.”291 Taken in broad daylight, the image (Figure 9) foregrounds three pairs of gay men, side by side, embraced in passionate kisses. The background depicts a city street with the names of businesses legible and the outline of a car visible immediately behind the men. All three couples are parallel and their body language communicates intimacy.

These men are not simply showing affection; they are expressing passion and desire. Ultimately, this image hints at the queer desire that underlines the project of liberation and the movement’s themes of agency, visibility and solidarity. By pairing protest with overt displays of desire and affection, this photograph evokes the theme of desire as it occurs in the metanarrative. The appearance of three couples, visually linked by similar poses and embraces, also relays solidarity by indicating this is not a one-off

290 Rick Bébout, “Going Back(wards): Text Crimes” Rbebout, June 2003. 291 Untitled image above “Kiss-in protests conviction of kissers,” The Body Politic 26, September 1976, 3. 136

occurrence but a planned protest representing several members of the community. The

publicness of the image speaks to visibility, which as an exception does not follow the

rule of avoiding desire like the other images in the corpus. Yet, despite the intimacy, the

desire is not overtly sexual, promiscuous, or pornographic in nature, but perhaps

comments more on the consideration of gay intimacy as inherently salacious. By

referencing desire in any case, this image is unique in its blatancy. Even without

significant visual representation, the relevance of desire in the memory of Toronto’s

GLLM is essential to acknowledge, but the unusual representation of desire between the

metanarrative and visual narrative is stark.

Figure 9 Photograph of Toronto Kiss-in protest in issue of 26 The Body Politic, September 1976. Unknown photographer.

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This last photograph also underscores key silences in both the metanarrative and the visual narrative. Crucially, all three couples in this image of desire appear to be white and male. This perfectly encapsulates both the central exclusionary narrative of queer desire in the metanarrative and, by virtue of absence, denotes a conversation of missing narratives. Especially as the exception to the rule, the depiction of queer desire as male and white when used as a tactic of liberation is particularly telling. The photograph’s lack of visible intersectionality further obscures non-white and non-male queer experiences.

However, upon analysis, this photograph can bring attention to the QTBIPOC experiences of desire that the magazine and photograph exclude. The silences in the image can, counterintuitively, reveal that which is absent. Rather than considering what is present, the analysis of this photograph also shows what is absent: the stories, voices, and desires of QTBIPOC and women during Canada’s GLLM. It is this dissonance between the visual and textual narrative and the revelation of missing narrative that leads to the redemptive quality of queer cultural memory. This memory cannot redeem or rewrite the past, but it can begin to rectify and create space within the broad strokes and themes of the movement for the stories and voices of those the dominant narrative has excluded.

Books like Any other way and Marvellous Grounds have recently begun the necessary work of diversifying these histories.292

Evidently the visual memory of Toronto’s movement in The Body Politic is distinctive from the metanarrative; though several themes appear prominent in both the

292 Stephanie Chambers, Jane Farrow, Maureen Fitzgerald, Ed Jackson, John Lorinic, Tim McCaskell, Rebecka Sheffield, Tatum Taylor, and Rahim Thawer, eds. Any other way: how Toronto got queer, (Toronto: Coach House Books, 2017); Jinthana Haritaworn, Ghaida Moussa, and Syrus Marcus Ware, eds., Marvellous Grounds: Queer of Colour Histories of Toronto (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2018). 138

visual and metanarrative, their manifestations and their channels of communication are unique. In comparison, both narratives prioritize agency and action, and there is no denying an obvious effort to keep the activists and community members at the centre of this history and away from becoming victimized. Yet, agency in the visual narrative takes far more diverse forms across images of those shown facing violence or in the aftermath.

Similarly, visibility through pride parades is engrained into the very fibres of this movement, but while the metanarrative considers visibility a tactic of the movement, the images show the tactic in action and as the very state of being in the visual narrative as it intertwines with solidarity. As a theme not very developed in the metanarrative, solidarity is the connecting thread of the visual narrative as opposed to desire which dominates the drive towards liberation, visibility, and agents. Finally, desire is the most notable difference between the metanarrative and visual narrative. With only a single exception, desire is not evident in the visual narrative, but it is the driving force of the metanarrative.

This contrast reflects the considerations of visibility and respectability in the images and texts that shape the memory of Toronto’s Gay and Lesbian Liberation

Movement. Ultimately, in the historical treatment of Toronto’s GLLM, the visual narrative has been predominantly undervalued and understudied. However, with consideration of this visual narrative, it is evident that the photographs of TBP diverge from the metanarrative in numerous ways. The visual narrative is a memory form in its own right; it is not simply a visualization of the metanarrative used exclusively to verify or show the information provided in the text. The images of violence and protest in The

Body Politic tell a story of liberation, solidarity, and agency through a lens of visibility— a story that must not be conflated with that of the metanarrative, but also obscures similar

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narratives. Together these make up the queer cultural memory of the movement which, currently, continues many of the exclusions inherent to their sources.

Analysis of the visual record is a powerful tool that can reveal many of these missing narratives. However, these absences must be acted upon and made present in order for the redemptive aspect of memory to occur. This thesis has contributed an in- depth exploration of the collective memory of Toronto’s Gay and Lesbian Liberation movement, focusing specifically on the way it has been remembered and communicated through texts and photographs in The Body Politic. However, it has also developed queer cultural memory as a tool to redeem exclusionary history and memories by revealing obscured or excluded narratives. In the future, queer cultural memory could be used by historians and activists to reveal obscured and excluded narratives in different queer communities and different time periods. As well, future scholars could take these exclusions as their starting point and, using queer cultural memory, begin the redemptive aspect of the theory to rectify these absences by writing or creating representations of these diverse experiences. Ultimately, photographs of the movement in The Body Politic are an essential aspect of queer cultural memory, but they are also an essential tool for historians to analyze and rectify the exclusionary narratives of our past.

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Appendix A Codebook 1

1. Year/month published 2. Issue # 3. Page # (s) 4. Description 5. Content type (protest/violence) 6. Data type a. VI: Violent Image b. VIA: Violent Image & Article c. VA: Violent Article (no image) d. NVIA: Nonviolent Image and violent article e. PI: Protest Image f. PA: Protest Article (no image) g. PIA: Protest Image & Article h. NPIA: Non-Protest image& protest article (meaning Non-traditional Protest Image)

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Appendix B Codebook 2

1. image/text relationship a. Type i. Illustration ii. Anchorage iii. Relay b. Connection i. Exposition ii. Exemplification iii. Extension iv. Enhancement v. Projection 2. Composition a. Image Placement vi. Centered 1. Centre 2. Margin 3. mediatory vii. polarized 1. horizontal a. given b. new 2. vertical a. ideal b. real b. Framing viii. Frame 1. Thickness 2. Type (box, line etc)

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3. Style ix. Empty space x. Colour contrast c. Typography xi. Font context xii. Weight xiii. Style xiv. decoration d. Pose xv. Protest xvi. Violence 3. Content a. Graphic Nature xvii. NA xviii. Injury visibility xix. Face xx. Metaphorical xxi. Violence timing (latent, prior, in action) b. Intersectionality xxii. Co-movements xxiii. Gender xxiv. Race

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