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The Canadian Lesbian & Gay Archives / Materials / Records / Related documents |
| The Body Politic and Visions of Community | |
| Page 5 of 14 / Appx 920 words |
The movement as community
Solidarity in the Seventies
The centre spread of the very first issue of The Body Politic was titled Community Page, and in various guises a community page ran in almost every issue right up to February 1987. But you wouldn't have found any bars, baths or dance clubs there at first (though some did exist) and for a long time no gay service agencies, social groups or sports teams (which, with few exceptions, didn't exist in 1971).
The "community" on offer here is the organized gay movement. It's national. Groups are listed in Issue 1 for London, Kitchener, Guelph, Montreal and Vancouver as well as Toronto; in Issue 2 Ottawa-Hull shows up (and should have in Issue 1: Gays of Ottawa, which folded only in September 1995, was older than TBP). In fact, it's international: later issues would carry occasional lists from the US, Europe and Australasia.
And it's radical. The first Community Page is illustrated with two hands clasped in solidarity, "come" on one arm, "together" on the other, and by a photo cut-out of a man standing on the shoulders of the bronze King Edward VII in Queen's Park, his clenched fist raised in the air. The slogan run up in Letraset beside him is "smash heterosexual imperialism." Groups listed include the Vancouver People's Defense Fund, the Young Socialists and the Vietnam Mobilization Committee.
The six cities listed in Issue 1 would become 45 by Issue 71, March 1981; the 30 organizations (not all strictly gay) in 1971 more than 230 by 1981. All conformed to criteria soon set out at the top of the page:
The Community Page is a listing of lesbian and gay groups in Canada [later, "and Quebec" -- distinct as a matter of principle even before a referendum] which primarily direct themselves toward alleviating or struggling against gay oppression. It includes: democratically constituted organizations, cooperatively run clubs and community centres, bookstores which sell gay and feminist literature, and non-profit gay periodicals.The Body Politic became, by both desire and default, what some would call the house organ of the Canadian gay movement, certainly its newspaper of record -- if, as we'll see, not as much so as everyone in the movement might have wished. In interest (politics), background (radical), turf (ideas and action) and adversity (not only heterosexual imperialism but homosexual ignorance: it was assumed early on that most ghetto queens and bar dykes couldn't have cared less -- but for now, so what?), this was the community first defined by The Body Politic as its own.
This movement role is what forced answers to those questions about men and women, about Toronto and the rest of the world.
The movement had to be about lesbians as well as gay men, even as some lesbians carved off separatist territory where they could figure out what life might be like without the boys. And the movement was not local. It was national, even global -- at least in what was then called the First World.
The Body Politic might not always do well by lesbians or people north of Bloor (though Tim McCaskell and later Gillian Rodgerson made the International News section one of its most distinctive and valued features: American readers were surprised that we paid so much attention to the rest of the world, First, Second and eventually Third -- and that we simply lumped them in as one part of it). But we always knew we had to try, even at the cost of being a bit out of touch with life beyond the movement.
For a time that made sense. Gerald Hannon, on the collective since Issue 2, wrote in the 10th anniversary issue, dated January / February 1982 (by which time it no longer made sense):
It was partly true, the out-of-touch bit. We once felt, as Ed Jackson put it, that everybody else was out of touch with what we were doing. There was a sense that we were doing something no one else had done before and we were caught up with creating ourselves. There was only a small group you could turn to for support and you turned to it.That sense of concerted political purpose even coloured perceptions of other self-organized community groups. CHAT, the Community Homophile Association of Toronto, founded in December 1970 by George Hislop among others, had been an all-purpose umbrella organization, running everything from government lobbying to a telephone help line to fabulous dances at Holy Trinity Church. It became the font of many Toronto groups, soon spinning off the more radical Toronto Gay Action (TGA), and a separate (and separatist) lesbian wing.
It was TGA types who started TBP. Some of them later would be involved in GATE, focused on classic mass-based organizing -- if never entirely sure how to finds the masses.
Despite these fissions, once they were accomplished some people warned against any more. Ken Popert, with both GATE and TBP then, worried that the rising plethora of "grouplets" would shatter movement solidarity. (Ken is now president of Pink Triangle Press, and no longer the democratic-centralist he once was.)
I remember well when I started at TBP in 1977 the vague disdain we felt for self-help groups, bowling leagues and, especially, the Metropolitan Community Church, all seen as somehow sappy or frivolous or just plain deluded. I mean, are you ready? Organized religion? My dear, get real!
None of this, we thought at the time, was real politics.
Next: The ambiguous ghetto: Ratty bars meet the "Jesus Christ Farts of the Movement"