Introduction

In 1987 Canadian sociologist Gary Kinsman published a landmark study titled The Regulation of Desire – Sexuality in Canada. It is widely considered to be the first critical examination of the history of homosexuality in Canada, or, in Kinsman's own words, an ‘excursion towards a queer history of Canada’ (1987, 65). In outlining his research methodology, Kinsman acknowledges a problem with sources and interpretation:

Kinsman concludes that, given the absence of personal records, researchers interested in queer studies in Canada have often had to rely on the evidential value of public records, which necessarily document only the official version of this issue. Researchers have thus had to read the records ‘against the grain’ in order to grasp some sense of the everyday lives of queer Canadians in the past. The focus that public archives had placed on records that describe individual homosexual acts as criminal offences necessarily excluded from the archival fold any records that spoke of a community of people marginalized by the sexual policies of the state. What Kinsman strongly implies is that traditional archival institutions in Canada have not been accountable to queer people and to researchers interested in the historical construction of sexuality.

Same-gender sexual activity in Canada, as in most Western democracies, had almost always been prosecuted by the state, condemned by the Church and pathologized by science. The situation remained more or less the same until the 1960s, when the emerging civil rights movement began to foster a growing social awareness of homosexuals as a disenfranchised and marginalized group of people.