The battle continues with We (Still) Demand
On Aug. 28, 1971, the first gay rights march in Canada was held on Parliament Hill. John Wilson travelled from Toronto to Ottawa to take part.
The We Demand demonstration on Parliament Hill was organized by a group called Toronto Gay Action, of which I was a member. CHAT—the Community Homophile Association of Toronto—supported the march, too. People drove in from other cities as well, like Kitchener-Waterloo and Montreal. Naturally, there was an Ottawa contingent, and Vancouver had a coordinated event happening on the same day.
On the bus ride from Toronto to Ottawa, I remember being a bit nervous, but we certainly didn’t think of it as a historic occasion at the time. When we got to the Hill, it was pouring rain. There were about 100 to 125 of us, a couple of news photographers and the RCMP. The police stayed as far away as possible—as if they thought we would contaminate them. There were a few speeches, and within an hour it was over. We went to the bar at the Lord Elgin Hotel for a drink, and took the bus back home.
The march was a way to demand changes to the Criminal Code, including the elimination of archaic “bawdy house” laws that allowed for raids of bathhouses and bars and were used to harass gay men and lesbians. We also wanted amendments to the Immigration Act, because gay men were banned from immigrating to Canada.
I was holding a sign that read, “End job discrimination against homosexuals.” At that point, you could be terminated if anyone suspected you were gay. I was working the night shi at the University of Toronto Press, where I was a pressman. I didn’t talk about that part of my personal life and no one bothered me, but I knew several people who were fired from their jobs at other places.
Forty years later, at the age of 71, I returned to Parliament Hill for a commemoration of sorts, called We (Still) Demand. It was organized by Queer Ontario, which I had a hand in founding. The organization represents, among other things, an updated version of the liberationist perspective of the 1960s and ’70s. In our opinion, the queer movement has deteriorated. It’s been co-opted and even corrupted, in a sense. The Pride marches used to be about community—now they’re about corporations and police presence and so on. I was in favour of the Black Lives Matter intervention in 2016 demanding that uniformed cops be banned from Pride. The police oppress queer people, racialized minorities, sex workers and the homeless.
Pride now is an example of the “We’re just the same as everyone else, except for the fact that we have sex with people of the same gender” line of thinking. Well, that’s not really true. There is a gay culture, and before that there was a gay subculture. And it hasn’t entirely disappeared.
The people who currently run the LGBTQ2 establishment are overwhelmingly white and male and relatively privileged. The original movement in the ’70s had set up a national gay coalition that had conventions where delegates were the ones making decisions. It was democratic. That’s all gone now.
A lot of issues simply aren’t taken up by the current leadership. There are queer homeless people, queer sex workers, trans sex workers. There are all kinds of people dealing with serious issues that need to be addressed. And they’re ignored. The marriage discussion was an example of that. I’m certainly in favour of everybody being free to marry whomever they want, but the conversation is a distraction and one that tends to privilege certain types of relationships.
It’s a good thing to take steps toward legal equality, such as including sexual orientation in the Ontario Human Rights Code. But there should be no illusions that this will liberate people. That’s on paper. What happens on the ground is quite different. Equality isn’t always enforced. Legal recognition does not mean liberation, even if it can shi the public consciousness.
These days, I’m focused on issues related to education, whatever affects young people. In many rural areas, life isn’t necessarily much different than it was in the 1950s and ’60s. In smaller places, there aren’t always queer social or political organizations.
I’ve been an activist since I was 14, when I joined the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, the predecessor of the NDP. I found society very unjust then. That hasn’t changed.
That said, while there’s still a lot of homophobia, many of the younger people today have only a passing interest in sexual orientation. That indifference is progress and acceptance, rather than simply tolerance. In a very liberated society, people wouldn’t ask questions—unless they were personally interested.