Queer Progress: From Homophobia to Homonationalism
by Tim McCaskell
Between the Lines Press. 510 pages, $39.95
IT SEEMS CANADA is so adulated by cosmopolitan progressives in the U.S. that it’s almost a crime to say anything negative about the place. Universal health insurance is awesome, the social safety net is enviable, and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is hot. He has promised to update laws to extend protection to transgender Canadians and intends to offer official pardons to those who were prosecuted by now-repealed homophobic laws.
Toronto-based activist and writer Tim McCaskell provides a useful antidote to this adulation, acknowledging the progress that Canada’s GLBT communities have made while offering a sobering look at persistent inequalities that impact especially indigenous people, racial minorities, and the poor. Looking back, he observes in his introduction that progress has not “affected all of us in the same way. Some parts of our community were just as disenfranchised as ever, while others had become identified with the status quo. As we moved from the peripheries to the mainstream, there was a remarkable transformation in dominant LGBT politics, from one aimed at social transformation to one that celebrated social inclusion.”
McCaskell is the right person for this task. His exhaustive recounting of a half century of Canadian activism comes from someone who has spent a lot of time in the trenches. In 1974, he began contributing to the influential Canadian lesbian and gay newspaper The Body Politic, a publication that fused activism and journalism. Since then, he has been involved with virtually every cause imaginable, from defending his newspaper against obscenity charges to the AIDS crisis, the porn wars, legal recognition of same-sex marriage, and what he calls “Israeli Apartheid.” He clearly never shied away from a fight, and his passion runs through the book. For McCaskell, the political is as personal as it gets.
McCaskell’s style is inviting, in particular because he leaves no detail of queer life unexplored. Along with the epic political battles, the protests, and the devastation of AIDS, he never loses his sense of humor. At one point, he notes the shift in gay male style, in particular the preponderance of mustaches in the ’70s: “Was it just a superficial matter of style? Were gay men asserting the masculinity we had always been denied? Or were we becoming more conservative and aping our macho oppressors? Was the Village People’s new hit ‘Macho Man’ ironic or not? Political analysis aside, something was changing, and gay men seemed to be voting with their feet—or rather with their upper lips.”
McCaskell does make connections to global struggles outside of Canada, but the book slips into a rut that Canadians will find all too common: Toronto-centrism. While Canadian law as a whole is addressed throughout, the vast majority of McCaskell’s anecdotes come from Toronto. This is understandable to an extent; it just rubs ever so slightly the wrong way, given how soaked Canada’s national media are in all things Toronto.
But Canadian geographical hang-ups aside, Queer Progress is an essential book, one I would especially recommend to American readers, who—dare I say it?—are often incapable of seeing past their own borders. Consider that the year of Stonewall, 1969, was the very same year that Canada removed sodomy from its criminal code. This isn’t to suggest Canada is better than the U.S., but rather to point out that our civil rights histories are inextricably linked, and that fact demands more analysis.
Rather than just offering jingoistic flag-waving, McCaskell measures his celebration of what is clearly a better situation for Canadian GLBTs with a more complex discussion of the limitations of activist organizations around equality on the basis of gender, race, and class. While what he calls “homonationalism” may have led to greater acceptance, the undeniable progress in some areas has not brought about a queer utopia. The author correctly argues that certain discussions around identity politics have ignored or eclipsed other discussions around class, however unintentionally.
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Matthew Hays is co-editor of the “Queer Film Classics” book series.
