Love and equality in Steinbach

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 07/07/2016 (3609 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

As the Pride March for Equality proceeds toward Steinbach City Hall on Saturday, it will not be the first time that queer Manitobans have demonstrated on the streets of the community.

More than 40 years ago, activists with the University of Manitoba-based organization Gays for Equality staged a protest on Steinbach’s Main Street. Derksen Printers had refused to publish their booklet, Understanding Homosexuality, a 20-plus page broadsheet collection of gay-affirmative writings.

Eleven activists, eight of them women, picketed along the sidewalk outside the Derksen office on July 2, 1974. The protesters marched up and down the block, waving placards reading “Derksen Unfair to Gay People,” and the more inflammatory “Hitler Would Be Proud.”

Not about to surrender the streets of their community to the homosexuals, at least seven local clergy arrived with children in tow and engaged in a counter-protest. Brandishing their Bibles and quoting scripture, the ministers preached that homosexuality was a sin. “It says so in the Bible,” one minister insisted. “Here, let me read you a few passages.”

“What resulted bordered on the hilarious,” the Winnipeg Free Press reported, “with the protesters trying to out-shout the preacher’s cries of ‘praise be the Lord’ with their chants of ‘gay is good!’” Eventually, an RCMP constable arrived and told everyone to go home.

Company owner Eugene Derksen told the Globe and Mail, “We resent these people coming in and I had to leave because I was tempted to throw rotten eggs at them.” To the Free Press Derksen said, “I don’t have to dig in the garbage to make a buck.”

Gays for Equality spokesman Bill Lewis wrote to then-attorney general Howard Pawley to discuss Derksen’s refusal of service and request protection for sexual orientation under the Manitoba Human Rights Act.

Homosexual relations between consenting adults had recently been decriminalized under a 1969 federal bill championed by the justice minister at the time, Pierre Trudeau.

However, Manitoba’s chief human rights official, Jim White, responded there was nothing in the act to cover discrimination against gays and lesbians. If homosexuals wanted change, he suggested, “They’re going to have to push the public for it.”

And push, they did. Founded by a core group of dedicated activists in 1972, Gays for Equality was a local organization connected to a national and international gay-liberation movement. Activists’ views were diverse, but they shared several goals: celebrate the beauty and naturalness of homosexuality, confront societal homophobia and work to change laws and policies that unfairly discriminated against gays and lesbians.

The call to “come out of the closet,” which was popularized during this period, was a part of a strategy aimed at challenging the denial and invisibility of homosexuality.

Over the subsequent decades, the campaign for visibility and equality broadened to include a range of LGBTTQ* identities: lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, two-spirited, queer and more. The struggle for equal treatment and protection of the law, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity went on to achieve remarkable victories. Activists fought against discrimination and for inclusion in the areas of policing, housing, employment, same-sex relationships, adoption and health care.

Today, Derksen’s refusal to publish Understanding Homosexuality would constitute a violation of the Manitoba Human Rights Code, and he would likely face a penalty for discrimination.

Much has changed over the last four decades. In the present-day controversy, it is religious conservatives, and not gay people, who feel like an embattled minority. Today, public opinion is broadly supportive of LGBTTQ* rights. The federal Conservative party even voted to drop its opposition to same-sex marriage, conceding the legal and political debate on the matter was over and done with.

Understanding Homosexuality, the small publication at the centre of the 1974 controversy, contained premises that were radical for the time. It featured the work of psychiatrist George Weinberg, who coined the term homophobia. The booklet also drew from the findings of sexologist Alfred Kinsey, whose studies identified a much higher prevalence of same-sex desires in the general population than previously thought.

Progressive Christian theologians K.H. Jones and Father John McNeil were quoted, too. These authors examined the story in Genesis 19:4-11 that is still used to justify intolerance, and found that it was not homosexuality that was at stake. “The evil of which Lot suspects the men of Sodom and for which God punishes them is not a perverted sexual appetite,” they explained, “but rather a breach of the rules of hospitality.”

Many of the religious conservatives who have opposed equal recognition and treatment of LGBTTQ* persons have cited their Christian faith as a reason for their lack of support. Yet the most basic tenet of this faith, and other spiritual traditions, calls on each of us to love our neighbours as ourselves.

Perhaps then the scriptural lesson for this weekend should emphasize the principle of loving hospitality, rather than reinforcing practices of intolerance and exclusion.

Robert Lidstone grew up queer and Christian in southeastern Manitoba.