The age of acceptance

Researcher looking into how gays and lesbians felt as attitudes changed

A research project underway at Memorial University is trying to find out what it was like for gays and lesbians in Newfoundland and Labrador while major changes in attitudes were taking place over the past 25 years.

After what seemed an eternity of being shunned and discriminated against, gays and lesbians in the province have found the public more accepting and supportive of them.

Michael Connors Jackman, a post-doctoral fellow with MUN’s Institute for Social and Economic Research, is leading the research. He hopes the project will generate knowledge about members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community in St. John’s, and identify changes in the socio-sexual landscape.

“I began the research project in September and I’m interested in how quickly forms of tolerance and acceptance for gays and lesbians has come about. I’m talking about the last 25 years, really,” Jackman said.

“The year 1993 was a pivotal year, the year that sexual orientation was read into the Human Rights Code. That happened in the midst of a number of other things … high-profile sex-related scandals. And 10 years later, same-sex marriage was legalized in Ontario, and two years after, here.

“And now we are at a point where just last winter, St. John’s City Hall raised a rainbow flag during the Sochi Olympics in sol- idarity with the LGBT community.

“So, it went from a pretty conservative Christian society where homosexuality was immoral and backward and something to be shunned, to turning around 20 years later and celebrating it, and to be on board with local and global LGBT campaigns.”

Jackman said St. John’s, which has the largest LGBT population in the province, has a history of gay bars and organizations going back to the 1970s.

He noted there were newsletters and other social activities then, but it’s only in the last 20 years that there’s been public acceptance and the celebrations of gays and lesbians in the capital city.

“It’s been a positive development. On other hand, how do you make sense of that, given that a lot of people alive through the ’70s and ’80s had their attitudes changed so quickly?” he said.

“So what I’ve been interested in is how that upheaval has more than one dimension. On the surface, people are accepting of certain forms of certain articulations or expressions of sexuality, and others remain troubled and seem uncomfortable by it.”

His project is also looking at how gays and lesbians reacted to sex-related scandals of the late 1980s and 1990s involving clergy, and a group of men who met to engage in sex acts in the washroom of a

St. John’s shopping mall.