It is now clear that due to health reasons I will not be able to attend the opening of Thunderhead: the 2SLGBT+ ‘National’ Monument in Ottawa on August 21ST — I take it this refers to the Canadian nation and not the many Indigenous nations in northern Turtle Island, or to the Quebecois or Acadians.
I have a lot of things to say about the limitation of the Monument if it does not address the important resistance and non-cooperation of queer, trans and gender diverse people to the national security purge campaigns which disrupted RCMP and military strategies. I am also concerned about the need to make connections with others thrown out of the fabric of that nation by national security practices including (at various points Indigenous people, immigrants, Black and anti-racist activists. trade unionists, Quebec sovereigntists, feminists, anti-poverty activists, leftists, radical ecological groups. and since the ‘war on terror’ Arab and Muslim identified people and most recently Palestinian solidarity activists; All these groups have also included queer, trans and gender diverse people.
We always need to ask which nation is being defended and whose sec, August 29, 2025k urity is protected. Along with Patrizia Gentile I am the co-author of The Canadian War on Queers: National Security as Sexual Regulation (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010) which helped initiate some of the apology process and I was also involved in the We Demand an Apology Network. From these vantage points I was able to see how an apology from below – one created through the resistance and struggles of queer and gender diverse people was slowly turned into a state defined apology which largely denies our resistance and struggles. (On this see The Regulation of Desire, Third Edition, Montreal: Concordia University Press, 2024 pp 324-334. Finally, the Purge Fund is relying on uniformed police and private security for ‘security’ despite police being barred from several Pride parades because of their Anti-Black racism and their history of attacks on queer, trans and other oppressed people.
A podcast by my friend gay historian and archivist Ross Higgins reminded me that {https://youtu.be/i7kNMgUfBF0{} prior to the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal there was a national security inspired campaign to not only clean out the unhoused and sex workers but also queer and trans people. There are important connections here between national security (the defence of the nation), social and moral cleansing, and sexual policing. This campaign was organized through the Montreal Security Service and extended to Ottawa and Toronto. This lack of mention of the clean up campaign along with many other instances of antiqueer policing and repression in the Apology statement is why it is important to remember that the Monument is opening on the anniversary of this clean up campaign. The opening of the Monument needs to be put in the context of this heightened police repression.
The police began to use the acts of Indecency section of the Bawdy House Laws in February 1975. 35 men were arrested at Sauna Aquarius. These raids continued through the spring of 1975 and in October 1975 seven lesbian and gay bars were raided. In 1976 police repression intensified with raids on the Club and Neptune both of whose membership lists were seized by the cops. At the Club baths they arrested 34 men as ‘found ins’ where they broke doors down with axes The raids and arrests went on. The Body Politic reported that “For a short period of time in late May and early June, all of the bars in Montreal were closed. For a lot of men in Montreal their first experience of the great Olympic clean-up was the sight of a police axe crashing through the door of their room at the baths, (Body Politic “Queer- Free and Proud of It,”)
This led to resistance and organizing. On June 10th CHAR (Gay Coalition Against Repression) organized a demonstration against police repression and the Olympic cleanup of more than 300 gays, lesbians and supporters who marched though the streets in one of the largest protests up to that point. Several of us from Toronto went to show our support. This helped to set the stage for the rebellious response to the police raid on Truxx where 146 men were arrested as found ins in a common bawdy house in October 1977.
The Montréal police and RCMP tried to secure more information on gay and lesbian groups across the country. Although the apology statement does not mention it, national security surveillance targeted gay and lesbian organizing in the 1970s and early 1980s as a threat to National Security. Since Toronto and Ottawa also held Olympic events the RCMP Security Service met with Toronto gay activist Tom Warner and the police also visited the offices of The Body Politic.
In Ottawa the Club Baths was raided on May 26, 1976, with the arrest of 27 men as ‘found-ins’ and three as ‘keepers’ (staff and sometimes owners) They also seized the membership list of more than 3,000. Members of Gays of Ottawa (G0) who were at a Coalition for Lesbian and Gay Rights conference that weekend in Kingston, rushed back to leaflet for a special meeting and a media conference linking the arrests to the Olympic cleanup. On May 29th GO organized a demonstration against the raids and arrests at Police HQ which 50 people attended.
For those convicted of being ‘found ins’ the expungement legislation that was part of the apology process did not get rid of many of the unjustified criminal offences like the bawdy house law which was not included. These men therefore had no recourse. EGALE and people around the Purge Fund seemed fine with this. It was only organizing by the Lesbian and Gay Historians group (of which I was a member) along with sex workers, AIDS activists and others in June 2019 that finally got the legal offences regarding anal sex, bawdy houses, and vagrancy abolished. Abolishing these historic “crimes” did not automatically get them into the expungement legislation in March 2023 – despite what we had been told. It took four more years and even then, they only got rid of the acts of indecency section of the bawdy house law and not the sex worker part. This broke ties between queer people and sex workers. It also only covered acts of indecency in bawdy house situations not sex in parks or washrooms, The number of people who have been able to get their convictions expunged has been small. In this area the apology process has been very limited. (For an expanded analysis see Gary Kinsman, The Regulation of Desire: Queer Histories, Queer Struggles Montreal: Concordia University Press, 2024, 324-334)_
The Carney government’s move to the right will hurt many queer, trans and other people. It includes speeding up resource extraction on Indigenous lands which is also a threat to Two-Spirit people, attacks on refugee rights affecting queer and trans refugees, showing Pride in Genocide by supporting Israeli genocide and letting armaments to be sold to Israel for use against people in Palestine and south Lebanon (there can be No Pride In Genocide!). It is also massively expanding the military budget including buying attack submarines when the funds could go instead to social programmes and social needs, and rather than a popular or peoples summit the Carney government is hosting a CEO Summit with highly paid corporate executives from around the world often with military connections. Please if you can raise these concerns with others.
August 20, 2026
Gary Kinsman is a long-time queer, AIDS, antipoverty, ant-racist, anti-colonial and anti-capitalist activist living in Dish With One Spoon territory and in solidarity with Indigenous Struggles. He is the author of The Regulation of Desire; Queer Histories, Queer Struggles (Montreal; Concordia University Press, 2024 and co-author with Patrizia Gentile of The Canadian War on Queers, National Security as Sexual Regulation (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010) and several edited collections, and articles. My website is: https://radicalnoise.ca/