The Legal Reform: May 4th, 1969
To be free to live in your body and love who and how you wish has been a contentious topic in Canada for a long time. Among those who became marginalized and punished on these grounds were LGBTQ2S+ people in Canada. For a little over the first hundred years of the settler colonial nation-state of Canada, people perceived as queered from the norm in their sexuality and gender were persecuted for simply being alive. It was not until May 4th, 1969, that homosexuality was decriminalized in Canada through the Criminal Law Amendment Act. Now, while this hard-won legal change meant you couldn’t be imprisoned for certain ‘homosexual acts,’ the fight for the acceptance of people’s right to love and freedom to choose who and how to do so was far from finished. The prejudice that had created the practice of imprisoning people for being queer did not disappear overnight, nor did people gain the right to love freely in Canada. That was a long battle ahead. While many remember the legacies of these moments of resistance through the demonstrations of outrage and anger at the injustice, there is often a less remembered form of resistance that was practiced daily, and it is the right to find joy in your desires. As the reality of the decriminalization of homosexuality set in, queered people across the nation came together to create pockets of acceptance for themselves. This is the future they were fighting for, and in those dance halls, parties, and pubs, it was the embodiment of hope for safer queer futurity that was being expressed – not despite their sexualities/genders but rather in celebration of them.
Continue reading “Imagining Queer Futurities: The ‘Right’ to feel Queer Joy in the Pasts and Presents of Canada”