Gary Kinsman interview
Ryan Van Huijstee (Concordia University Press)
May 29, 2023
This text has been lightly edited for clarity—some contextual details have been inserted.
Ryan: This is Ryan Van Huijstee from Concordia University Press recording with Gary Kinsman on the 29th of May, 2023 [at York University in Toronto,
Ontario]. We’re here to talk about the third edition of the Regulation of Desire, which is coming out in [2024]. Gary, I wanted to ask you a few questions. First of all, how have you seen the Regulation of Desire change since your first edition of this work in the 1980s?
Gary: So there’s a lot of transformations that take place in the book. The first one is the one between the 1987 edition and the 1996 edition. But I have to say that there’s far more transformation between the 1996 edition, which was in some ways an almost different book project than the 1987 version because it was at least twice as long, if not three times as long—but now, when you jump ahead from 1996 to 2023, there’s so much that has happened. So, it’s a text that has to be transformed, it has to be updated, it has to learn from the new struggles that have taken place. There’s an awful lot that has to actually be added to it. So, I’m really quite pleased with what’s been achieved in the third edition. I think there’s probably going to still be areas that are not as developed as they should be. But the central question I’ll focus on here is that, in the first two editions, I adopted a Leftrights perspective that is critical of rights approaches, but within that framework, that we’re fighting for human rights for lesbians and gay people. And of course that’s now been expanded to include bisexuals, trans people, and Two-Spirit people, and made much broader.
But in this edition, I’ve learned from some of the major struggles that have taken place, including the global uprising against anti-Black racism and policing in 2020, and the 2021 No Pride in Genocide protests from Indigenous communities and Two-Spirit people. I’ve moved from a Left-rights approach, which does have as its objective to basically integrate oppressed groups into existing social institutions and social rights, a strategy of inclusion, versus what I’ve learned from abolitionist approaches, which comes from Black feminism—but, also in other ways from Michel Foucault and many other sources—that it’s not a question of just wanting to be integrated or included within existing institutions that are often oppressive and repressive in character. What we need for trans and queer liberation is a strategy that is abolitionist in character, that actually centres on the repressive disciplinary institutions of state-formation, including policing and prisons, and carceral injustice. And it actually sees us as getting rid of those institutions and building in their place our own alternative forms of community safety. And I think that’s a much more radical, a much more transformative approach. And one of the challenges that the third edition offers for readers is, are we ready to make that transition from a Left-rights approach to a much more radical—but in the sense of getting to the root of the problem—more radical abolitionist approach? And that’s what the book is an argument for, on the basis of all of the struggles that have taken place, including ones since 1996, that we actually have to draw some rather different conclusions.
Ryan: You’re known as not just a scholar, but certainly as an activist, and I wanted to ask you, having those two skill sets, how do you see the relationship between scholarship and activism?
Gary: I see them as being intimately related. I know that’s not how the university world often operates. It wants to construct activists and social movements as objects out there, to be put in different categories and objectified. And I think that’s entirely the wrong type of knowledge than what we need. I see activism and activists as being at the center of knowledge production. The confrontations that people have with ruling social institutions in our society, whether it’s with the police, or the government, are actually incredible sites for knowledge production, because if you’re an activist in a movement, you’re constantly learning. It may not lead you to an academic reputation, but you’re constantly doing research, producing knowledge, and learning more about the social relations of struggle that you’re involved in, because you want to win. You want your campaigns to go on. You don’t want to lose, so you actually have to constantly analyze what you’re up against.
That’s one of the reasons why one of my mentors, Dorothy E. Smith, who died last year, who was the supervisor for my PhD thesis, I felt in some way she saved my life when I went to the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE). Her approach to sociology— which can be talked about as institutional ethnography, I would also talk about it as political activist ethnography—was such that it was about knowledge for particular movements and groups of people. It’s producing knowledge for oppressed and exploited people. So it wasn’t about producing knowledge for those who already rule and have lots of knowledge. And, of course, the university unfortunately operates more or less in the interest of those people who already have lots of power, and lots of power-knowledge relations, to use
an expression from Foucault. But it’s actually about, how can we produce knowledge that will assist people in the struggles that they’re involved in? So that’s central to the project I’ve been engaged in. When I went to OISE as a student, I was an activist against the anti-queer right wing. And I was also an activist in the resistance to the bath raids in Toronto.
But what Dorothy Smith and the people I met at OISE actually allowed me to do was to pull those two things together, the activism and the scholarship in the intellectual world, and to actually try to produce knowledge in the university context that could be immediately used by people in their social struggles.
So, for me, the connection between activism and knowledge production and doing research is absolutely intimate. And for those people who don’t think there’s a relationship there, I think they don’t really understand the knowledge that they could learn from people who are involved in activist movements.
Ryan: That’s a great way of putting it. Next question is: I’m curious if you see a trade-off in the relationship between rights for queer subjects and heteronormative expectations. In particular, I’m wondering what you see as the relationship between what you call the neoliberal queer, after same-sex marriage in Canada, which is notably a key difference between what’s covered in the second edition and in this third edition.
Gary: Yes, there’s an incredible amount that happens from 1996 on. And clearly there was the initial emergence of what I’m describing as the neoliberal queer by the time I was completing the 1996 edition. But it doesn’t really fully become clear to me until later on. And you’re quite right, the same-sex marriage campaigns are part of where that becomes more visible. And what you see with the same-sex marriage campaigns is an attempt to take that rights approach to a further level, which is, we not only want to be integrated into human rights and into family and spousal rights, but we also want to have the right to marriage, as if that is somehow the endpoint of our struggle.
And oftentimes the advocates for same-sex marriage would say this is the final goal. As if being included in an institution that has a history behind it that is patriarchal in character, and is basically about the private property ownership of another person, that somehow that is liberation for queer people. And I raise really profound questions about that, because in some ways the same-sex marriage struggle was also a highly racialized struggle. It was posed as the rights of white, queer couples and did not adequately deal with how this would deal with questions of racism, especially in the States, but also in Canada. It was a very white-identified struggle, a very couple-identified struggle, and also desexualized the movement. A friend of mine, Alan Sears, wrote an article that I think has a wonderful title: “Is There Sex After Marriage?” And there actually was a sort of de-sexualization, which was also the de-radicalization of the queer and trans liberation movements that occurred through the same-sex marriage struggle.
I supported same-sex marriage, but I also have to say that, when I wrote briefs to the government on same-sex marriage, I would say that because at the level of formal equality, there was discrimination against same-sex people in getting married, obviously that should be changed. But on the other hand, I actually talked about the state institutionalization of marriage as itself a discriminatory practice and institution because it discriminates against all the other types of social relationships people have with each other. So, I also made that point, which of course is why some people didn’t want to even talk to me about the same-sex marriage struggle, because I would point this out. But at the same time, one journalist actually said, “Oh, you’re thinking outside the box here.” I would say that marriage itself is a state institutionalization of forms of discrimination. So we obviously have to deal with that. But in a certain sense, the politics of the neoliberal queer—and I’ll come back to what neoliberalism is in a second— we’re very much into saying we want to be integrated into this type of social institution because it will make us much more respectable, it will make us appear not to be sexually radical anymore, and it will make us more palatable in corporate boardrooms for people who already have power in our society. So, I just wanted to come back to why I use the expression “neoliberal queer.” And I develop this in the third edition.
So neoliberalism is the strategy that is elaborated by racist capitalist societies in response to the massive movements of struggle in the late ’60s and early ’70s, which actually put not only profit rates in question, but also capitalist, racist, and patriarchal social relations. These were all put in question. The response from those who were ruling in our society was they can no longer tolerate Keynesianism and the so-called welfare state, we have to actually adopt a different approach. And that’s where neoliberalism comes from, which is not really about liberalism in the old sense. It’s actually a combination of conservatism and liberalism, but it’s called neoliberalism. And it really was about not only cutting social welfare and cutting the social wage, it was also very much about increasing criminalization, increasing the police, increasing “law and order,” and the tightening up of borders. That’s really what the neoliberal project is. It was an attempt to tear apart and to weaken that composition of struggle that people had actually accomplished in the late ’60s and early ’70s, and of course that included the feminist movement and the gay and lesbian liberation movements. They were part of the circulation of struggles during that period of time.
That’s not to say that all of the other people who were part of that composition of struggle loved queer and trans people. There were clearly tensions and contradictions there. But we grew out of that radical challenge to capitalist, racist, and patriarchal social relations. Neoliberalism is a different strategy. And what begins to happen is, as we win those rights victories, using the Charter of Rights, in the Canadian context, which makes it a lot easier in some ways for us to win formal equality, formal rights, not substantive equality but formal rights, is that they have a very differential effect on people in our communities. They have a much more profound positive effect on white, middle-class people than on Black, Indigenous, and racialized people, or poor people, or unhoused people, who don’t experience the same types of rights, who don’t get the same sorts of victories and gains from them. But what this means is that rising to the top of our communities, especially because of the space that we ourselves opened up by resistance to the bath raids and by struggling against the right wing, are these white, neoliberal lesbians and gay men—mostly gay men initially, and later on some lesbians and also some trans people—whose objective becomes, “We simply want to be let into the existing middle-class notions of capitalism. And that’s all we really want. We want to sever our struggle from all of the other struggles that we’ve been associated with.” And they adopt a sort of politics of the “community” that they try to construct as being classless and raceless. And they try to become the spokesperson for our communities. And they do have the “right” credentials. They have the right speaking skills. They know how to speak to wealthy people and people in power. And they come to represent our communities. But they also engage in what I make more visible as a onesided class struggle against those of us who don’t benefit from the rights revolution.
Ryan: Neoliberalism requires a powerful communications apparatus to make it seem that more is being done than has, in actuality, been done. I’m thinking in particular of things like institutional apologies to various wronged communities, but a lack of structural change to address these historical and ongoing injustices. I’m interested in how you think of communications and neoliberalism and how scholarship fits within this discursive field.
Gary: Sure. that’s a really good question. Neoliberalism operates quite intensely around means of communication. And of course, we also see the explosion of the internet, the explosion of different social-media platforms throughout this whole period of time. Which is, interestingly enough, a contested terrain, along with many other terrains around communication. But in some ways people try to use the internet, email, and various different social-media platforms to actually extend social struggles, but on the other hand, they are also used to try to contain and to de-radicalize these struggles. The struggle over these social forms of communication is really important.
One of the texts that I find most influential on me around this is actually by Nick Dyer-Witheford, who teaches at Western University, who wrote a book called Cyber-Marx, which is an attempt to apply a Marxist, autonomist analysis to the development of communications in the era of the internet and these new social-media platforms. And he points out that this is a terrain that can be used against us, and often is, but it’s also a terrain we need to struggle on. That’s a really important part of this.
Now, the question you asked also raised the question of institutional apologies. So I’ll just talk about the apology moment that occurs in the Canadian context in 2017. I was quite involved in the We Demand an Apology Network and organizing leading up to this apology statement. In November 2017, the prime minister actually makes a statement apologizing, decades late, for the purge campaign, a massive purge campaign against lesbians and gay men, what Patrizia Gentile and I, in our book, refer to as The Canadian War on Queers. So Trudeau apologizes for that in some ways, but also in a very limited, superficial way. It’s a very white apology. He does not address questions of settler colonialism or racism. He actually alleges that the motivation behind the Purge campaign was the “thinking of the day,” as if somehow it’s in the past: “We used to think these horrible things but now we’re enlightened.” It was not the thinking of the day that led the Canadian state at its highest levels to institute this purge campaign. It wasn’t like some vague ideas people had, this was a clear intention of the Canadian state to construct us as suffering from a “character weakness” that supposedly made us vulnerable to the “evil” blackmail of Soviet agents—and I’m being somewhat sarcastic here. When the people that Patrizia and I interviewed said the only people who ever tried to blackmail them was the RCMP itself, who wanted to get the names of their friends so that they could put them on the list of people to be interrogated and investigated and put under surveillance.
So there’s problems with the form of an apology, because if you even think about what an apology is, if you think about it interpersonally, if you apologize to someone, you expect in some ways, them to forget about this. So in some ways that’s one of the features of an official apology. It is like, the purge campaigns are now over and we don’t need to think about them anymore. Which is not what we really want to be raised because we want people to learn something about, what does that mean about national security that, for decades, lesbians and gay men and gender-diverse people were constructed as enemies of the state, security risks to the state. And our movements themselves were constructed as being risks to national security in the ’70s and early ’80s because we opposed the purge campaigns. We need to actually pose more radical, more profound questions.
Ryan: What struggles do you most want to encourage activists to take up? Which subjects do you think governments, social services, and the private sector need most to informed about or repeatedly reminded of?
Gary: I’m going to try and separate this into two responses. So, what areas should activists be most interested in right now? Well, I think we’re actually in a different context than even when I was starting to write the third edition. Readers will notice that there’s some additions towards the end on the new rise of right-wing violence and hatred towards trans people, the protests against the drag story hours. I think what we have to begin to understand is that, as we’ve lived through and learnt from the Black uprising against the police and anti-Black racism, No More Pride in Genocide, and the COVID pandemic, that there’s also been ways in which space has been created for the right wing, and this includes fascist groups, to actually enter into organizing. First of all, against vaccinations and against masking around COVID and what they did in 2022 when they actually occupied part of downtown Ottawa and obstructed a number of border crossings with the States, is that you actually saw the right wing, first of all, able to win almost all of its demands around these questions. And second of all, that they were able to get away with this. I’ll just add, some people talk about how the government eventually got rid of this by invoking the Emergency Act. Well, the Emergency Act, if you actually look at it, was invoked because people in Ottawa were starting to organize themselves. It occurs after the Battle of Billings Bridge in Ottawa, where people actually rise up and 1,000 or more people turn up and block the fascists and the right wing from doing what they want to do in terms of continuing the occupation of downtown Ottawa. And the government knew, that there were going to be more protests like that the following weekend so they invoked the Emergency Act then. But prior to that, they actually held a great deal of cooperation, between the right-wing white supremacists and fascists and the various police forces. And they treated those protestors in an entirely different way than they would have treated Indigenous protestors, Black protestors, anti-poverty protestors, climate justice protestors. You know, none of those would actually be treated the same way by the police. So the unfortunate thing about that growth of the right wing is that it now has provided a limited mass base for right-wing and fascist politics within the Canadian state, and now those are the same people who are targeting drag story hours and trans and queer people. And we have to begin to organize ourselves in different ways. To begin to understand that our movement also needs to be an anti-fascist movement now. That it needs to be an abolitionist movement.
So, the second part of the question was, you talked about what issues to raise with governments and the private sector. It seems to me that the central focus needs to be on trying to push forward our demands, but to also recognize that our demands now can no longer simply be narrow, white, middle-class, lesbian and gay, and bisexual and trans concerns. They actually have to be broadened out to understand the links between our struggles and the struggles of other oppressed and exploited people. And that includes prioritizing things like defunding and abolishing the police, not funding private security firms at Pride, for instance. It means developing a movement that no longer will tolerate the corporate sponsorship of, say, TD Bank or RBC, which both do horrific things towards Indigenous people and somehow think that they’re just wonderful because they’re sponsoring Pride Weeks across the country. It means raising, much more profoundly, the need for queer and trans workers to have rights. I’ll just mention one example of this, we just learned recently that if you were a trans person wanting to run for mayor of Toronto right now (there’s a mayoralty election going on) that you could not run under your new living name. You would have to use your old dead legal name, to run. So there’s still these incredible practices of discrimination against trans people, and gender diverse and Two-Spirit people, that need to be fought against. So, there’s a whole series of issues that need to be raised with various different levels of government, but also with various corporate forms of organization.
We can no longer rely on trying to get the sponsorship of corporations and banks that want good PR, because that’s really what they want when they sponsor Pride celebrations. What we have to actually do is to challenge those groups to come up with the rights and needs of queer and trans and gender diverse workers, and unless you support these, we’re not going to provide you with any support—we’re not going to let you be the corporate sponsors of our Pride Days. Because, right now, Toronto Pride, which is really a corporate form of Pride, is sponsored by TD. So, when people used to say it was actually TD Bank Pride Day, that there’s something very accurate to what they were saying.
Ryan: A new edition is a work that really gets to benefit from hindsight. What subjects were you glad to have the opportunity to reconsider, revisit, or discuss in this third edition?
Gary: The most important one to me is that there were major limitations in the 1987 and 1996 versions dealing with Indigenous people, and I think that I’ve learned a lot in different ways about this, but I won’t go into a lot of detail. Some of them were very practical. For instance, when I was in Sudbury learning things from Indigenous people, from the various forms of organizing of Indigenous people, including Idle No More. But also, since then I’ve learned more from Indigenous people, including the mobilizations in 2021 against the residential school “death” camps. I’ve really tried to restructure and reorganize the book so that opposition to settler colonialism is central and so is support for Indigenous people.
I rewrote the whole chapter from the 1987 and 1996 versions, the chapter on Indigenous people. It’s quite expanded but also quite different than what was there before because I felt that I hadn’t fully been able to grasp the significance and importance of Indigenous struggles and I misrepresented Two-Spirit struggles in important ways. So, I’ve tried to deal with that and that is really important. And the other thing that I realized around that is that the analysis that was presented in the 1987 and 1996 editions were not adequate around the significance and importance of the Indigenous ways of doing gender and eroticism. And how that actually relationally produced the emergence of what can be described as “modern” forms of gender and sexuality, because it really was the responses of European white colonialists and imperialists encountering people doing gender in totally different ways—where in Turtle Island, there were three and four-gender groupings—and being absolutely horrified at that. And, in response, generating the gender binary and eventually heterosexuality as the only “normal’ form of sexuality. So understanding how significant this was, and this was not just in Turtle Island, it was all around the world, how significant it was that European powers and so-called civilizations encountering forms of gender and eroticism that they considered to be “barbaric” actually led them to put in place these sort of so-called “normal,” “modern” forms of sexuality. I’ve written much more about that in the third edition.
But there’s also a tremendous amount to be learned from what happened since 1996, and one of the things I feel fairly good about, even though I’m sure there’s things I’ve missed, is that there’s an awful lot of work in terms of trying to recover what’s happened from 1996 to 2023. And I actually feel like I’ve done not a bad job on it. I do feel good about that, but it also was an incredible amount of work. And I learned more—I’ll just mention one example—I talked about the same-sex marriage struggle earlier. And I knew, when it was going on, that this was not for me. My partner Patrick and I were constantly being inundated by these wellmeaning heterosexual people constantly saying, when are you going to get married? And we would say, we’re never going to get married, we don’t support that institution at all.
One of the things that I had a chance to really think through more critically was, what were some of the problems in organizing the same-sex marriage struggle? And this had to do with its racial or racialized character, but also with this strategy of normalization, what some people refer to as homonormativity, which of course replicates forms of heteronormativity, whereby certain types of practices get excluded from queer and trans communities. So, I learned a lot more about that. I went back and I looked at the emergence and development of the same-sex marriage campaigns, I also looked at the development of EGALE, which used to be called Equality for Gays and Lesbians Everywhere, but now is just called EGALE Canada, which is a very mainstream LGBT+, Lesbian and Gay Advocacy Organization within the Canadian state. So I felt like I actually did a lot of tracing out of that. I was able to see more of what I had learned from abolitionist forms of feminism, but also Black Lives Matter-type organizing. I’ve learned a lot from being involved in the No Pride in Policing Coalition, which has actually been central to my coming to terms with what an abolitionist approach means for developing a re-radicalized queer and trans liberation politics.
Ryan: So, this is the last question. Looking towards the future, what topics in LGBTQ+ scholarship would you hope to see more of in the future?
Gary: I would hope to see more of the scholarship and also activism—I don’t want to separate those—that actually takes up the problems and limitations with the neoliberal queer and the ways in which the apology moment actually provided new financial and material resources for the creation of a neoliberal queer infrastructure organized around EGALE, and the LGBT Purge Fund, which unfortunately has become largely a promilitary organization, which is not at all what we wanted when we were organizing the We Demand an Apology Network. I would really like to see more work on that. And I’ll mention one thing: so there’s a new group that’s been formed called Queer Momentum, on the federal level. I don’t really go into this in the third edition—I can’t constantly be updating it! But it’s a group that has a good motivation in some ways. It’s formed to try and get various levels of government to respond much more seriously to rising antitrans and anti-queer hate. But their demands are solely on the federal government and other levels of government that can’t possibly resolve the problem. Right? Because all they could do is either revise laws to make more things illegal, or to mandate the police to actually do things, when we know the police are not on our side. I encountered this when I was at a drag story hour at the Fort York Public Library in Toronto a couple of weeks ago, and there were about seventy, seventy-five counter-protesters to the thirty right-wingers who were mostly clear fascists, they were even doing seig heil salutes. One of them actually burnt one of the counter-protesters with their cigarette butt. One appeared right beside me, and I had no idea why they were there. We dealt with them with a flag and different movements to move them away. But the police weren’t helpful to us at all. All the police were interested in doing was making sure that people could walk on the sidewalk, but they weren’t actually protecting anyone. We protected the drag queen. We protected all of the parents and the kids who went to the drag story hour. But there is this mainstream approach that somehow you can call on the federal government or other levels of government to provide this protection for us. Well, the only ways they could do it is either by making more things criminal or expanding the police powers that they’re going to use against us too, right? Not just against the fascists and right wing. Especially given there are so many interconnections between the police and, I have to say, the military and these white-supremacist, rightwing, and fascist organizations. The Proud Boys in Canada, for instance, started within the Canadian military. So, that type of approach just doesn’t work. We need to rely on ourselves, and instead what we need is more resources, more capacity to actually develop networks and forms of communication, and forms of community safety, and forms of self-defence that can prevent us from being attacked by the right wing and the fascists. And unfortunately, the current government’s not going to do this.
One other thing. This will be the very last thing. There were some people from what I would describe as the neoliberal-queer sector who were invited to the dinner that the federal Liberal government organized when Joe Biden came to Ottawa. So, in and of itself, this doesn’t seem like a problem, but if you remember that one of the things that happened when Joe Biden came to visit Trudeau was that the Canadian and US governments solidified a new version of the safe third-country agreement, which tightens up the borders between Canada and the US and basically prevents anyone who’s managed to make it to the States from coming into Canada to seek asylum or refugee status. So just to point out, if there’s people right now trying to flee Uganda because of the law that will be enforced soon that basically criminalizes homosexuality—including possibly leading to the death penalty, in some situations—if there’s people who want to flee Uganda, it is often far easier for them to get to the United States than to Canada, even if they want to come to Canada. And given what’s going on in the States, I would understand completely why they would want to come to Canada and not stay in the States. But under this agreement they will be denied the right to actually cross the border. And so far, most of these mainstream LGBT+ groups, none of the neoliberal queer groups, have said anything about this. So what they’re actually doing is sacrificing the possible asylum and refugee needs of people from the Global South, and especially Black and racialized people trying to get to Canada from the Global South.
We need to understand that in some ways it may not seem, from their vantage point, to be central to queer and trans liberation, but if you actually see it from the vantage point of people around the world, and from the vantage point of the people from Uganda who want to make it into
Canada, fleeing the anti-queer policies of the Ugandan government, this is actually quite central. So it’s not just a question of the government saying, “Oh, we’ll let a hundred Ugandan refugees into the country.” It’s actually that they have constructed obstacles for all of those people.
Ryan: Thank you so much, Gary. That was so very helpful.