An Interview with Gary Kinsman, “Against the Mythologies of the 1969 Criminal Code Reform”
Interview by Ryan Conrad in Upping the Anti Issue 21
In June 1969, amidst the rhetoric of the “Just Society,” the White Paper on the extinguishing of Indigenous sovereignty, and the early years of state-sanctioned multiculturalism, the Canadian government passed an omnibus Criminal Code reform bill. The Omnibus Bill is often cited as the moment homosexuality was decriminalized in Canada, when Pierre Elliott Trudeau was benevolently trying to bring about equality for lesbians and gays, or when reforms established the right of women to access abortion and reproductive rights. None of these claims are accurate. Ryan Conrad spoke with Gary Kinsman in late March 2019, to reflect on the mythologies of the 1969 Criminal Code reform in light of recent state actions and how these acts of recuperation and co-optation impact left queer organizing strategies in the present.
Gary Kinsman is a long-time queer liberation, AIDS, anti-poverty, and anti-capitalist activist living on Indigenous land and in solidarity with Indigenous struggles. He is currently involved in the AIDS Activist History Project, the No Pride in Policing Coalition, and the organizing committee for “Anti-69: Against the Mythologies of the 1969 Criminal Code Reform.” He is the author of The Regulation of Desire: Homo and Hetero sexualities (Black Rose, 1996), co-author (with Patrizia Gentile) of The Canadian War on Queers (UBC Press, 2010) and co-editor of Whose National Security? (Between The Lines, 2000), Sociology for Changing the World (Fernwood, 2006), and We Still Demand! (UBC Press, 2017). His chapter “Forgetting National Security in ‘Canada’: Towards pedagogies of resistance” was just published in Aziz Choudry’s edited collection Activists and the Surveillance State (Between the Lines/Pluto, 2018). He currently shares his time between Toronto and Sudbury, where he is Professor Emeritus at Laurentian University. His website is radicalnoise.ca.
Interview continues at: https://uppingtheanti.org/journal/article/21-against-the-mythologies-of-the-1969-criminal-code-reform