April 1969: Poet Ian Young launched his literary career with his first book of poetry, White Garland: 9 Poems for Richard. The same year, he published his second book, Year of the Quiet Sun. In 1970, he started Catalyst Press, which was the first gay literary publishing house in Canada. In the wake of Stonewall, Young felt the time was right for a small press specializing in books of gay poetry and fiction. Young started Catalyst with no money and virtually no publishing experience. Nevertheless, he was able to publish more than thirty titles by Canadian, British, and American writers before the press suspended publication in 1980.
Describing how literature provided him with an escape from discrimination he stated, “In Canada in the 1960s … homosexuality was at best and illness, at worse a monstrous depravity. … Thousands of Canadian boys and girls grew up thinking to themselves, ‘I’m the only one!’ — I escaped by reading Plato, Walt Whitman, and Oscar Wilde.”* The following is from Young’s publication Year of the Quiet Sun: Letter to Vancouver Remembering our flat that we had for only two months, I think of it empty now, and silent, so different from when you made it warm and ours for a little while … the bamboo curtains and the Chinese tea … the wall where we never did put my bookshelves Remembering the things that were broken or disappeared when I moved away … Remembering the Beatles music turning on the record player … Remembering the street-sounds and the morning darkness … Remembering your body, and then your face … I think our room must be empty and cold with you not there … Do you remember how in those two months we moved close to each other, held each other near, under the red lamp by the turning music … *Quoted in “Gay in the Seventies,” Weekend Magazine, Dec 17, 1977 April 1964: The Association for Social Knowledge (ASK), the first homophile organization in Canada, was officially formed in Vancouver. ASK was established "to help society to understand and accept variations from the sexual norm." Its membership was almost equally divided between gay men and lesbians from across Canada. ASK supported law reform and sponsored public lectures and discussion groups, social events, a lending library, and, a drop-in and community centre. ASK collapsed in the summer of 1965 but revived the next year; it disbanded early in 1969.
Notably, ASK published a monthly newsletter series that provided one of the earliest forums for gays and lesbians to share their thoughts about the discrimination they faced. For example, in its September 1964 issue, a Miss V. T. from Vancouver made the following comment about law enforcement’s harassment of gay- and lesbian-friendly bars, viewed by authorities as “breeding grounds” for homosexuals: “If the police are concerned about gathering places for homosexuals because they fear the spreading of homosexuality [they] should know by now that homosexuality is not like the mumps of the measles —no one can catch it if they don’t want to catch it.” Read more about ASK. April 1, 1978: An amended Immigration Act came into force removing long-standing prohibitions against homosexuals entering the country either as visitors or as immigrants. In 1953, the Act had been amended such that homosexuals became a “prohibited class.” They were deemed “undesirable” and barred entry into Canada — along with pimps, prostitutes, drug addicts, chronic alcoholics, traffickers, subversives, and the insane.
April 5, 1976: Ottawa City Council voted unanimously to prohibit discrimination against lesbians and gay men in municipal employment. Ottawa was the second city in Canada, following Toronto in 1973, to bar discrimination of its employees. The decision came after a year of intense lobbying by members of Gays of Ottawa (GO), among others. GO submitted a brief to Ottawa City Council as part of their lobbying effort in which they stated: “The homosexual citizen, male or female, who chooses to live with a degree of honesty and integrity can expect to encounter … pervasive discrimination. So engrained has been the prejudice … that overt discriminatory practices are found in the areas of employment, housing, law enforcement, commercial services, and the media.”* Read more about GO's successful lobbying efforts.
*“Civil Rights of Homosexuals in City Employment: A brief to the Ottawa City Council.” Gays of Ottawa |
This page lists key Canadian LGBTQ+ events, listed by the
month in which they occurred, and sourced from records and publications housed at the CLGA.* CategoriesArchives
May 2015
*Unless otherwise noted, sources are Lesbian and gay liberation in Canada: a selected annotated chronology, 1964-1975 &
A Selected Annotated Chronology, 1976-1981 by Donald W. McLeod. |