I finally got to see the Monument when I stopped in Ottawa on my way to Nova Scotia. The Monument is both wonderful and very limited. It is right behind or across from the Supreme Court of Canada Building in a former cruising area that I hope continues to be one despite the Monument and its lights. What is very good about Thunderhead is its Indigenous motivated design and its inclusion of Two-Spirit people along with how the residential school system played a major part in enforcing gender divisions, heterosexism and homophobia onto Indigenous peoples. At the same time genocide against the Indigenous peoples is not mentioned. Two-Spirit people collected the large rocks that are part of the Monument. There also is mention of Indigiqueer people and the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Women and Girls.. My focus here is on the historical and political panels that are embedded in parts of the Monument. Certain things are remembered while others are not. In this sense the Monument is part of the social organization of forgetting.
There are major limitations in these panels. I focus first on those more directly tied to the 1969 Criminal Code Reform and to the Purge parts of the Monument. A panel reproduces the mythology that the 1969 Criminal Code Reform was the “partial decriminalization of homosexuality.” It does mention that bar and bathhouse raids took place after the 69 reform but no examples. The 69 reform was only about two sex offences that were used largely against sex between men. These were “gross indecency” (usually covering oral sex) and “buggery” (covering anal sex). These offences were no longer criminalized if they were engaged in a narrow ‘private’ realm and only involved two people 21 years and over. This public/private form of regulation and an age of consent set a full 7 years higher than for heterosexual activity, is why there was a major increase in the criminalization of queer sex after the 69-reform including the use of the acts of indecency section of the bawdy house laws against queer men in bathhouses and bars. The mass resistance to the Truxx bar raid in Montreal and the bath raids in Toronto is not included at all in the panels for the Monument.
Although the term resistance is used on a few panels no clear examples are given. From the early 60s on there was growing resistance to the national security campaigns including when queer people turned the tables on RCMP security officers by acting like they were taking pictures of them. The RCMP itself noted that many of those homosexuals who used to be informants were now refusing to cooperate. The purge campaign, especially that focussed on the public service faced growing non-cooperation even before the emergence of our organizations and movements.
The term national security is mentioned once on the panels with the wording being the “false pretence of national security”. But it was national security ideology and practice that was used to organize the purge campaign against gay men, lesbians, bisexuals and gender diverse people. We were seen as threats to national security because we suffered from a ‘character weakness’ that made us vulnerable to ‘blackmail’ and made us disloyal. We became enemies of the state and risks to national security who were expelled from the fabric of the ‘nation’. And it was all these anti-gay laws that made this blackmail a possibility. The panels at the Monument do not point out that national security practices have also been used against Indigenous warriors and activists, against Black activists, against trade unionists, immigrants, feminists, the left, and others. By not making these connections, seeing the Monument does not lead to any broader solidarity with groups who have faced similar national security policing. Queers have not been the only group targeted as national security threats. There is one reference to the connections of queer struggles to other oppressed and marginalized groups.
The panel on decriminalization also includes the ADS crisis. It only mentions the impact on gay men and neglects to mention Haitians, drug users and sex workers who were also directly affected. This forgets the full impact of the AIDS crisis and the organizing against it.
When it comes to the oppression of lesbians organizing for custody rights for lesbian mothers and connections to the feminist movement are not remembered.
The major organizing against Anita Bryant, Jerry Falwell, Ken Campbell and the ant-queer, anti-feminist, and white supremacist right-wing is also forgotten. Given the resurgence of right-wing organizing against trans people and queer youth which is mentioned this is an important omission.
Under “The Human Toll” there are good descriptions of the psychological terrorism including conversion therapy directed at queer, trans and intersexed people. There is also discussion of the differences and exclusions within queer community formation. As part of the panels regarding differences Syrus Marcus Ware of Black Lives Matter in Toronto and lawyer El-Farouk Khaki are briefly quoted but the need for opposition to white supremacy and for refugee and migrant rights are not emphasized.
They also cite the Charter and court battles but not as much on battles in the streets. There is mention of Pride festivals and marches/parades but no mention of how the police have been challenged and excluded from many including in Toronto. There was the experience of Pride Toronto trying to ban Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (Quaia) and the formation of various Queers for Palestine groups and calls for No Pride in Genocide which is not mentioned. The early We Demand demonstration on Parliament Hill in 1971 is noted as the first cross-country protest.
The panel on Indigiqueer Experience is very good in critiquing colonialism and racism but there is no mention genocide against the Indigenous peoples. The solution mentioned on the panel is Reconciliation forgetting that before this needs to come the Truths of settler colonialism and racism. While there is mention that some queer people have more power than others, questions of class and poverty are not addressed.
The limitations of the Monument and its partial participation in the social organization of forgetting points to the need for the resistance of remembering of queer and allied resistance and organizing and an active challenge to national security.
Gary Kinsman is the author of The Regulation of Desire: Queer Histories, Queer Struggles (Montreal: Concordia University Press, 2014); co-author with Patrizia Gentile of The Canadian War on Queers: National Security as Sexual Regulation (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010) and part of the organizing committee for the Anti-69 conference in 2019.