()=indented quotes

This article is dedicated to Jim Egan, Canada’s first gay activist. But here I reclaim him as a queer working class hero. Egan was a working class self-educated “troublemaker” who spoke out for gay rights long before others were willing to. We can learn a lot from his description of class divisions in the 1950s Toronto gay scene.

(Peter was a flamboyant character who was famous for holding parties up in Rosedale…But I don’t think that Jack [Jim’s life-time partner] and I…would have been really into that lifestyle. We didn’t move in those circles. As I’m sure is the case today, gay life in Toronto in the 1950s and 1960s was on a series of levels, with your opera queens and the highly educated university types at the top, and the ribbon clerks at Simpson’s at the bottom. While there may have been a certain amount of overlap, we didn’t associate with anybody except from what we might refer to as the “lower orders”. And I say that in the kindliest way, because we were part of it.)

I want you to hold onto this insight throughout this article. My entry point into this discussion of class and queer movements is as a socialist and queer activist since 1971. A major question I explore is how a radical movement (a movement trying to get to the root of the problem) has been transformed into a profoundly un-radical movement in our historical present, with my involvement as a queer activist in anti-war, anti-poverty, and global justice movements often being defined as beyond the boundary of queerness.

History and Class

We are all a part of history, and history is crucial to investigating the transformation and future possibilities of queer movements. How we have got to be where we are is a result of a history of struggle and resistance. In charting ways forward, it is crucial to grasp where we have come from. Forms of social control, including the currently dominant strategy of “respectability” and “responsibility” in queer communities, are enabled by the annihilation of our historical memories. This leads to forgetting the often very unrespectable struggles that have got us to where we are today.

Class is about our lives, and it has everything to do with queer experiences. As English social historian E.P. Thompson describes it, class is a happening, a social relation between groups of people. Most of us sell our capacity to do work in order to survive, and buy the commodities and services we require to live in a capitalist society. Class exists not only at the point of production (offices and factories) but also in our communities, in culture and it impacts our sexualities. Sexual struggles were central fronts of class struggle in the late 19th century when struggles for social purity were key to dividing the working class between the “respectable” and the outcast “lower orders”, and they are important fronts of class struggle today in battles over feminism, queer liberation, and struggles over the use and character of social space.

Our sexuality is never simply lived on its own. We are never just queer (or straight for that matter). Our queerness is always lived (and lived differently) through class, race, gender, age, and ability. These social relations are organized in and through each other, and class and sexuality are thereby tied together in our lives.

Some now present marriage as the end game of our struggle [see accompanying article by Alan Sears], and this is often bound up with middle-class hegemony within our movements. Not only are union, anti-poverty, anti-racist, global justice, and other struggles not seen as queer struggles, but some forces within queer communities actively campaign against the poor, the homeless, and sex workers.

A historical sketch

My question is, how has this come to be? This is a very preliminary historical sketch towards some answers. In the pre-gay liberation and lesbian feminist period (prior to 1969), it was working-class butch dykes and femmes who established social space for lesbians in bars and elsewhere in battles with the police and straight men, and it was often “effeminate” street fairies who established social spaces for queer men. Class formation within queer men’s networks, as pointed out in Maurice Leznoff’s remarkable thesis on Montreal in the early 1950s, was organized through a distinction between “overts” and “coverts”. The “overts” were networks of largely working-class queer men who had no real need to hide their sexualities. It was these men who fought for and established queer social space. The “coverts” were networks of men who engaged in sex with other men who were part of the elite. These men lived a “double-life” since queerness was not tolerated in the economic and social circles they inhabited. They were threatened by the “overts” and tensions existed between the “overts” and “coverts”.

In 1964 Jim Egan collaborated with journalist Sydney Katz for a Maclean’s article on the gay scene in Toronto. In response to this, as Egan remembers, he was summoned to a meeting with a (very tall, distinguished, grey-haired gentleman with a hand polished leather face. He was just oozing money, position and power...Certainly you would never jump to the conclusion he was gay...The man looked like he could be a lawyer, perhaps, or a wealthy stockbroker or real estate man.

This man said, “A group of us were discussing the matter the other night, and we understand that you’re about to collaborate with Sydney Katz...we think it’s very unwise. My friends are very concerned about this and we think you should change your mind…”)

Egan asked why and was told, “If you keep on publicizing this the way you are, it won’t be possible for any gay man to be safe. People will begin to get suspicious and gay men will be recognized as living a gay life.” Egan responded by saying:

(Well, to tell you the truth, that’s exactly my purpose. Frankly, there’s nothing I would like better than for every homosexual in Toronto to be exposed overnight as a homosexual, simultaneously, and the problem would be solved. There is absolutely nothing society could do about it.)

Jumping ahead — the Stonewall riots in New York City in 1969 against police repression had an important impact in Canada. Gay Liberation Fronts (GLFs) in the USA named themselves after the National Liberation Front of the Vietnamese people that was then fighting US imperialism. In Canada, the gay liberation movement emerged in relation to the new left, student and anti-war movements, and the feminist, anti-racist, and Black and Red Power revolts. GLF politics tried to develop alliances with other oppressed groups and often shared a critical analysis of capitalism and class oppression. But these early radical organizations soon broke up over sexism, lesbian feminism emerged, and many groups moved in more moderate directions to fight for human rights through a strategy of mass action and public visibility.

The Empire Strikes Back

The growing public visibility of queer movements and community formation defied the liberal strategy of public/private regulation where queer sexualities were only to be tolerated in “private”. In response, the empire struck back in mass police raids on gay bars and bath-houses where hundreds of men were arrested as “found-ins” in “common bawdy houses”. On a lesser scale, the sex police are still very much with us today as we have seen in the recent “bawdy-house” raids on gay establishments in Calgary and Montreal.

After the Truxx raid in Montreal in 1977, and in Toronto in the early 1980s, thousands of gay men, lesbians, and supporters took to the streets in militant resistance to these police attacks. The mass base of these actions were bar people and working-class queer men. In the Right to Privacy Committee in Toronto in 1981, this mass base was able to hold the middle-class professionals accountable to mass organizing. However, when the mass mobilizations died down, it was this middle class strata of lawyers, professionals, bar owners, and business people that rose to the top without any accountability to mass organizing.

These mass struggles created both the basis for a major expansion of gay groups and establishments in the larger urban centres, and also the basis for a professional layer to speak for and to stand over and against working-class queer people. These were the people who could speak the same language as the heterosexual middle class and ruling institutions. Increasingly, this layer constructed “gay” (and to a lesser extent “lesbian”) as middle-class and white. Some queers were included, while others were excluded.

In response to this middle-class, white, male hegemony, lesbian feminists, queers of colour, two-spirited people of the First Nations, transsexuals, transgender people, bisexuals, queers self-organizing in the union movement, and others shattered this unitary notion of gay by exposing the many social differences that it hid. For some, this meant a shift away from “gay and lesbian” to “queer”. But the mainstream gay or queer movement found ways to manage these differences so that white, middle-class dominance could be maintained in the centre. One strategy, pointed out by Rinaldo Walcott at the Bent on Change II conference, is the racist manner in which the mainstream white queer movement constructs itself as being the “adult” in relation to queer movements of colour who are viewed as being at a more “infantile” or earlier stage — as not yet being fully mature.

Rights and Citizenship Struggles

Mainstream queer organizing increasingly focussed on a politics of rights and citizenship, using the equality rights section of the Charter of Rights to win many important legal victories. Battles for rights and citizenship focus on being let into existing rights and social institutions. Battles for sexual citizenship contain two moments. One is the social included in such assertions from queers that “We Are Family.” But the other is a moment of integration into and accommodation with existing social institutions without a challenge to oppressive arrangements. These battles have led to important gains, and they have often been won with important union support, which has usually been both unrecognized and unreciprocated with queer support for union and working-class struggles. There is a contradictory character to these gains, since they benefit some queers far more than others and have aided in the expansion of the influence of queer middle-class strata.

Class formation within queer communities takes place within a broader context of capitalist globalization and neo-liberalism. This has led to a hacking apart of social programmes, including health care and education, and to an intensification of state regulation over workers, the poor, immigrants and refugees, and the right to protest.

Forms of consumer-based citizenship defined as being part of the marketplace have also grown. We can become citizens as consumers, as shoppers, as citizens who only exist at the point of consumption. People with disposable incomes are included, while those of us who are poor and without money are excluded once again. As gay historian Steven Maynard puts it:

(We need to ask ourselves if we are satisfied with the displacement of politics from the streets to the marketplace. How does a politics rooted in consumption speak to the many lesbians and gays who are excluded from the world of queer consumption in the first place? Or, how does a politics of the marketplace tackle such institutions as the police or the legal system?)

As Alan Sears points out, there has been a limited moral de-regulation of queer sex by state agencies (combined with continuing criminalization of consensual queer sex), but at the same time an extension of market-based forms of regulation. If you don’t have the money, whiteness, ability or “proper” gender identifications, you cannot enter into the world of queer “respectability.” This continues to produce major divisions within our communities. These divisions are also based on class formation within queer communities, with the expansion of the professional managerial strata who don’t wish to challenge capitalist relations. They simply want to be let in as “respectable” and “responsible” queer people, without challenging broader forms of oppression and exploitation. This provides a social basis for an assimilationist politics and also for divisions between “responsible” and “irresponsible” queers. It also fits into liberal and social democratic strategies of regulation of our communities and sexualities focusing on “good” versus “bad” queers—”bad” ranging from those of us who support sexual liberation to those committed to feminism or to radical activism.

Sex and Liberation: Returning to the Streets

But for many of us sexuality remains central to our lives and the oppression we confront every day. It remains a major social difference between us and institutionalized heterosexuality. We need to continue to fight the criminalization and censorship of our sexualities, especially in the context of those who push marriage and normalization as the solution, implying that a focus on sex is “bad” and “irresponsible”. There is also the need to address the violence and hatred that young queer people confront every day.

We are also becoming aware of the limitations of formal, individual rights. These are important, but they are not the same as a substantive, actual equality, which requires a more radical process of social transformation. For this, we need allies and the development of real solidarity with the most oppressed in our own communities, and with other oppressed and marginalized groups. It requires a return to a politics of the streets and building grass-roots movements that can challenge capitalist and heterosexist social relations. It requires a commitment to challenging class exploitation within and outside queer communities. It requires building working-class and oppressed people’s counter-power in class struggles that open the way for more profound forms of queer and sexual liberation. As Edward Carpenter, an English homosexual libertarian socialist, once put it, using the term “Uranian” to describe what we today might call queer: