At times, the smallest and seemingly least significant artefacts found at the CLGA have had the greatest impact on our research. These everyday items have helped us decipher and connect with feelings of vulnerability and fear so often associated with marginalized groups. Take, for example, a membership card we pulled from a collection of records donated to the archives by a gentleman named Douglas Sanders. He was president of a group called that Association for Social Knowledge (ASK), a small, little-known, yet historically significant group. When it launched in 1964, ASK became Canada’s first homophile organization. Their stated purpose was rather ambitious for the times: “to help society to understand and accept variations from the sexual norm.” Over its five years in operation, the group supported law reform, organized lectures and discussion groups, hosted social events, and ran a drop-in community centre. Printed on the back of ASK’s membership card was a psychedelic-looking pattern typical of the 1960s along with the group’s motto: “You are not alone.” Reading those four simple words of assurance provided us with an almost palpable sense of isolation and loneliness people must have felt. Such emotions invariably made common bedfellows with — and were arguably more corrosive than —the oppression and harassment perpetrated on ASK’s members. When any group is subjected to societal abuse they typically recede from view. They become invisible not just from society but from each other. As Sanders noted years later, “the problem in Canada was not persecution but the pervasive view that gays didn’t exist.” ASK’s reach was limited, with a maximum membership at its height of about 150 men and women. It also folded too soon, in early 1969. This was the same year Canada decriminalized sex between men and nascent gay liberation and lesbian-feminist movements were gathering steam. Nevertheless, ASK was a pioneer in trying to establish visibility. As Katherine Forrest states in Lesbian Pulp Fiction, the impact of helping people find one another cannot be overstated. ASK and groups that followed in their footsteps led — as Forrest explains in reference to a parallel function in literature — to an end of isolation that divided and conquered. Once people excluded and secluded because of their sexual orientation or gender identity found each other, once they began to question the judgments made about them, their civil rights movement was born.” | |
2 Comments
Edward Houle
12/24/2014 10:37:32 pm
I think the graphic of the card represents some of the themes of ASK's mission, too. For instance, the way the warped grid pattern stretches to accommodate the motto "YOU ARE NOT ALONE" recalls the way queers had to create very precious spaces for themselves and their communities. Also, the entire pattern is a warped grid, with no perfect right-angled geometries. I would read this metaphorically, that there are no "perfect squares" in the world: everyone in some way or another deviates from the norm, an important message when challenging prejudice and judgment.
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ron
12/25/2014 01:20:59 am
Interesting analysis!
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The following blogs provide vivid accounts of discrimination perpetrated against people in Canada whose sexual identities did not conform to standards of the day. In equal measure, they provide stirring anecdotes about brave individuals who — in the face of overwhelming oppression — challenged ignorance and injustice. Archives
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