Artist debates queer history ‘mythology’
Short film aims to debunk Canadians’ understanding of 1969 legal reforms
Many of this year’s Capital Pride Festival-goers will be celebrating a pair of golden anniversaries when the eight-day event officially kicks off on Sunday: the infamous June 1969 Stonewall riots in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, considered a primary watershed moment for gay rights; and reforms to Canada’s Criminal Code that same year, often viewed as a partial decriminalization of homosexuality in this country.
But there are numerous participants who feel that the elevation of these events, notably the changes to Canada’s laws, to near-mythic proportions does a disservice to those in the LGBTQ2S+ community, particularly those who, in the ensuing half-century, have been persecuted, jailed and even killed pursuing what has been an ultimately elusive equality.
Ottawa artist and activist Ryan Conrad is among those who doesn’t view the country’s 1969 Criminal Code reforms through particularly rose-coloured glasses. An eight-minute video he produced to address the issue, Don’t Believe the Hype!, will be screened Tuesday at the SAW Video Media Art Centre, accompanied by an artist talk and panel discussion. The video will also be screened continuously in Ottawa’s gay village each evening throughout the festival, on an exterior wall of a building at Bank and James streets.
Conrad says growing up gay in rural, small-town Maine in the 1980s and 1990s without any active gay community, the events at the Stonewall Inn in 1969, where members of New York’s LGBTQ2S+ community fought back against police, never particularly resonated with him.
“I made a pilgrimage to New York, but didn’t relate to it. I’d never lived in a city until I moved to Montreal 10 years ago, so that particular mythology is a problem,” he says.
Similarly, Conrad, 36, says he believes that the changes to Canada’s Criminal Code, on the heels of prime minister Pierre Trudeau’s oft-quoted statement that “there’s no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation” (the credit for which actually belongs to the Globe and Mail), offer a false narrative that government acted out of compassion or altruism, or that it even believed in equality.
The 1968-1969 omnibus bill amending the Criminal Code merely reformed two provisions (buggery and gross indecency), adding exceptions allowing individuals to commit these acts provided they take place between two consenting adults 21 and over, and that they occur in private.
No laws related to homosexuality were repealed, and many to this day are still in effect.
I want to remind people that this wasn’t a moment of great equality ... it’s not this watershed moment that people claim it to be.
“It’s been interesting to come from the U.S., to be here a decade and see the Liberal party that’s currently in power trying to create a linear progress narrative from the 1969 Criminal Code reform to today,” Conrad says.
That includes spending $770,000 on such projects as a touring photo exhibition and documentary — Sex, Sin & 69 — that is part of Capital Pride’s programming, and minting commemorative “Equality” coins.
“It’s essentially the Liberal party paying Egale (Canada Human Rights Trust) to produce a film to create a state mythology about how the 1969 Criminal Code reform happened and what its lasting impact has been,” Conrad says. “But homosexuality was not decriminalized in 1969, and the arrest rates after 1969 went up. So to me it’s ludicrous and insulting to all those who were arrested after 1969 to claim that homosexuality was decriminalized then. People’s lives were ruined, people were imprisoned, people killed themselves, and a lot of people who died from HIV/AIDS aren’t here to correct the record.”
Conrad argues that lawmakers 50 years ago were not interested in equality. “The discussion of how that happened in Parliament was that these people are sick, not criminals. I don’t see how you can make any claim that that’s equality in any way. And the Canadian mint has produced a collector coin that says ‘equality’ on it and the year ‘1969,’” he says. “What version of equality was there in 1969? How is this a thing?”
Today, he says, it’s important that people, especially younger ones, know the history of how the LGBTQ2S+ community got to where it is. “And we didn’t get there through the benevolence of government.”
Without music or sound, Don’t Believe the Hype! depicts men kissing, over top of which Conrad has included two ticker-like streams of text. The main one repeats four messages in large type: Reject state mythologies! Celebrate resistance! Don’t believe the hype! This ain’t no Golden Jubilee! Smaller text across the bottom of the screen shows the numbers of people arrested in bathhouse raids in the 35 years after “decriminalization.”
Additionally, much of the video, one of five commissioned by SAW Video and funded by the Ontario Trillium Foundation, is constructed to include things that would still be illegal following the Criminal Code reform: Two of the performers are under 21; one scene depicts three men together; and the video itself will be shown in public throughout the festival.
“I want to remind people that this wasn’t a moment of great equality,” Conrad adds. “Yes, there was a small change in the Criminal Code and maybe it started the conversation, but it’s not this watershed moment that people claim it to be. And I think the claim is quite dangerous because it suggests that these victories were won through the benevolence of government, as opposed to street-based activism of gay and lesbian people, which is actually how everything happened.”