He lived for this moment
Jim Egan, gay rights pioneer whose activism led to landmark Supreme Court ruling, celebrated in first LGBTQ Heritage Minute
Before Canada’s first Pride parade, before same-sex marriage was legal, before police stopped arresting people simply for being gay — before all of that, there was a wiry young man from Toronto smashing the keys of an old Underwood typewriter, staging a one-person epistolary battle for gay rights.
“I Am a Homosexual,” he wrote in an article for Sir! tabloid under a pseudonym in 1951, a time when few dared to make such declarations. “The acceptance and integration that every thinking, responsible homosexual desires will come some day,” he predicted in another article four years later in Jus- tice Weekly, this time using his initials.
“The homosexual is the sole remaining minority who can be sneered at, reviled, libeled, and spat upon with virtual impunity,” he pronounced in 1963, in one of the first queer-positive articles published by the Toronto Daily Star. By this point, the writer had made the radical decision to use his real name: James Egan.
Today, the gay rights pioneer remains largely unknown by the wider Canadian public, even though the Egan name was immortalized by a landmark 1995 Supreme Court decision that forever altered the gay rights landscape.
But 18 years after his death, Egan is poised to gain broader recognition as the subject of a new Heritage Minute, the popular 60-second short films that spotlight important people as well as moments in Canadian history. Released online Wednesday, the Heritage Minute is the first to have an LGBTQ2 theme and will portray Egan’s activism, his love story with partner Jack Nesbit and the couple’s eight-year legal battle that became one of Canada’s most important gay rights victories.
“He began his efforts in the 1940s when it was really, really tough to be gay in this country and he fought a very lonely and quite courageous battle for recognition,” said Anthony Wilson-Smith, president and CEO of Historica Canada, the charity that produces Heritage Minutes. “He was a genuine civil rights pioneer.”
Scholars of Canadian gay history often refer to Egan as the country’s first queer activist. Between 1949 and 1964, the Toronto-born iconoclast submitted hundreds of letters, articles and op-eds to newspapers and magazines, advocating for gay rights — a truly radical act at a time when homosexuality was criminal and gay people across North America were being targeted by state-sanctioned witch hunts.
A voracious reader and curious mind, Egan was unusual for his time in that he never agonized over his identity as a gay man. “I thought that being gay was simply wonderful,” he once told University of Toronto librarian Don McLeod, who edited and compiled Egan’s autobiography, Challenging the Conspiracy of Silence: My Life as a Canadian Gay Activist. It helped that Egan had the full support of a loving mother, and a brother who also turned out to be gay (Egan’s father died when he was 14).
As the self-employed owner of a biological specimen business, Egan was also comfortable speaking out because he never had to worry about losing his job — a common consequence at the time for gay people who were outed.
“He didn’t have to hide at work,” McLeod said. “He could pretty much make up his own life.”
Egan’s activism was initially motivated by the salacious and offensive tabloids of the day, which published scaremongering headlines such as “Police nab nude ‘queers’!” and “10,000 homos in Toronto!” Many lives were destroyed by tabloids such as Flash and Hush Free Press, which had no qualms printing the names of gay people living in the closet.
Egan was also outraged by what he read in the mainstream press. Bigoted views were well-represented in the comment sections and letters pages of newspapers like the Star. “How can publication and the slightest tolerance be accorded to such bestial perversity?” one reader sputtered in response to a letter Egan had written in 1963. “Homosexuality is a mental disease,” another letter-writer bluntly stated.
But even police chiefs and politicians of the day would be quoted in articles, claiming that gay people were “degenerate” or that they had pedophilic tendencies.
“This is the sort of thing that used to absolutely infuriate me,” Egan wrote in his autobiography. “I would read something like that and I’d get so goddamned furious I would be inarticulate.
“This fury is what really prompted me to start writing letters to these publications in 1949 … which launched me on the road to public gay activism.”
But Egan’s typewriter went quiet in 1964 after he reunited with his partner, Jack Nesbit. A gentle-mannered hairstylist, Nesbit was, in many ways, an exact opposite to the intense and forceful Egan but the two men quickly fell in love after meeting in 1948 at Toronto’s Savarin hotel, which once stood at 336 Bay St.
After dating for 16 years, Egan’s activism began to take a toll on Nesbit, who preferred a more anonymous life and issued his rabble-rousing partner an ultimatum. After briefly splitting up, the couple reunited after Egan agreed to give up his gay activism and they packed up their belongings and three chihuahuas, driving across Canada and eventually settling in the city of Courtenay on Vancouver Island.
For the next two decades, they lived a relatively quiet life. But in 1987, Egan decided to apply on Nesbit’s behalf for the spousal allowance benefit provided under the Old Age Security Act.
They didn’t really need the money, as Egan explained in the 1996 documentary Jim Loves Jack. But by this time, Nesbit had grown more comfortable with gay activism and Egan saw an opportunity to force the courts into recognizing gay rights under the Charter, which does not explicitly identify “sexual orientation” as a ground for discrimination.
“I knew perfectly well we were going to get turned down,” Egan said in Jim Loves Jack. “As a matter of fact, if they’d pulled a bit of hanky-panky and given him the allowance, I would’ve been the most disappointed gay activist that ever lived because I wanted a hook on which to hang a constitutional challenge.”
The application was denied and they appealed the case all the way up to the Supreme Court. After eight years, the couple finally got a decision from Canada’s highest court — and it was a no.
Egan was not entitled to federal spousal benefits for Nesbit, his loving partner of 47 years, the Supreme Court ruled in a 5-4 decision.
But the 1995 decision had a bright, rainbow-coloured lining. While Egan’s appeal was denied, the justices also ruled — unanimously — that discrimination based on sexual orientation was prohibited under the Charter.
“That was the decision that opened the floodgates,” said David Adkin, director of Jim Loves Jack. “Boom, boom, boom — after that, all of the cases that came were won.”
That same year, Egan was given a human rights award and he and Nesbit served as honorary grand marshals at the Toronto Pride parade.
On the same street where they once faced arrest simply for holding hands, the couple cruised down Yonge St. in a convertible, wearing matching pink shirts and waving as thousands of people cheered them on.
Egan was never an emotional person, Adkin said. But that day, he broke down.
“(For a long time), he didn’t really feel anyone in the gay community cared about what he was doing,” Adkin said. “And in that moment, there was a sense of validation and recognition.”
Egan died in 2000 after a battle with lung cancer and Nesbit’s death followed just three months later.
Adkin thinks that if Egan were still alive today, he would be chuffed to learn that he is now the subject of a Heritage Minute, joining the ranks of people such as Viola Desmond, Terry Fox and various other Canadian heroes.
And Egan is a worthy choice for the first LGBTQ2 Heritage Minute, said lawyer and gay rights activist barbara findlay (findlay spells her name with lowercase letters).
“Before Egan, we didn’t know whether equality rights in Canada included gay and lesbian communities,” she said.
“After Egan, we were jubilant.”
Jennifer Yang is a Toronto-based reporter covering identity and inequality. Follow her on Twitter: @jyangstar