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	The Body Politic and Visions of Community
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The Body Politic
Some background

I want to talk here about notions of community as they evolved over time in The Body Politic, a medium created by, enmeshed in and helping shape our sense of community. (Or maybe that should be senses. Or communities.)

Briefly, The Body Politic (or, for short, TBP) was a gay liberation periodical -- first called a newspaper, then a journal and then a magazine, finally "for Lesbian / Gay Liberation" -- started in Toronto in October 1971 and publishing 135 issues, its last dated February 1987. It began as a local effort but quickly attracted readers and writers from outside the city. For most of its history only a third of its circulation was in Toronto, with another third across Canada and the rest around the world.

The organization that produced it, though not formally incorporated until three and a half years after TBP began, still exists. Pink Triangle Press publishes Xtra in Toronto, Xtra West in Vancouver, Capital Xtra in Ottawa, and a national classified mag called Canadian Male. It also has an electronic media division. The Press employs more than 40 people and has an annual budget of more than $3-million -- facts that would surely have astounded its founders in 1971.

The Body Politic is itself a study in community self-organizing, begun by people seeking social change, not by "journalists" wanting to publish their own newspaper. In fact, the people who started The Body Politic didn't know the first thing about running a publication. They simply had things they wanted to say -- to each other and to as many other people as they could reach -- and a newsprint tabloid was the best available medium of the day.

They were activists; this was simply another way to do politics, however politics might be defined. They set themselves up as a collective, not a business -- though over time they did have to learn a few things about the business of publishing in order to keep their little rag alive.

For the first few years TBP ran out of various houses, mostly Jearld Moldenhauer's. (Jearld was a founder: not only of the paper but in 1969 of UTHA, the University of Toronto Homophile Association, Canada's first modern gay liberation group; of an earlier group at Cornell in Ithaca, New York; and of Glad Day Books.) TBP moved into an office, shared with GATE, Toronto's Gay Alliance Toward Equality, only in 1974.

The paper ran overwhelmingly on volunteer labour. After the mid-Seventies some people were paid: at first only one; two by the time I arrived in 1977; eight by the time I left staff in 1985 and only three by the time it folded in 1987. But at its peak, TBP could list more than 100 contributors per issue, the vast majority working for love, not money. Even paid staff had to do it out of love: the pay was peanuts and the hours simply nuts.

The Body Politic began, and 25 years later Pink Triangle Press remains, a not-for-profit organization. It has no owners, no shareholders -- no one who can make a buck off other people's labour or sell out to Conrad Black, wave goodbye, and walk away with the cash.

But I want to talk not about The Body Politic as a community organization, but about its changing sense of what -- or who -- its community was.

Two of the most fundamental questions the paper grappled with over the years I'm only going to touch on here: Are we about lesbians as well as gay men? And are we a Toronto's paper? or Canada's? -- or maybe even something beyond that?

I'll pay a little more attention to a third question, a tougher one: Even if we're about "lesbians and gay men everywhere," whom does that include? Whose experience gets to define gay experience?

Those are the classic conundrums. But I'm going to focus on a few others. There are questions that The Body Politic would have had to face even if it had meant to be -- as it was often accused of being -- nothing more than a paper for white, middle-class, downtown-Toronto gay men.

Next: So, what is community? Some tentative definitions