You Live and You Learn, but you Leave Wounds Behind You

Earlier this summer, I attended Pride Toronto, an annual festival celebrating the queer community that attracts three million people to its events. Pride Toronto kicks off a wave of pride festivals across Canada throughout the summer.

While I’m not a member of the 2SLGBTQI+ community, it feels very important to show support for those who are, especially given sharply increasing rates of hate crimes motivated by sexual orientation in our country. But like many Canadians, I didn’t always understand this, or know how to be an ally.

Twenty years ago, I was a student at the University of Toronto when a referendum was held on a proposed increase to annual student fees. The proposal would have collected 69 cents from each of the 40,000 undergraduate students at the university, and allocated that money to a campus group. I saw this as wasteful and unnecessary. I wrote an article urging my fellow students to vote no, arguing that each of the university’s clubs and societies should be funded from the another pool of money already drawn from our student fees.

The advocacy group was called LGBTOUT and it represented lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender students on campus. Those supporting the levy argued that the additional money was needed to support and advocate for U of T students who were frequently targeted by hate and homophobia.

The reality of homophobic hate is what I failed to understand at the time.  And so my article asserted that LGBTQ people were not an especially victimized group, that homophobic attacks were rare, and that such attacks could be easily brushed off by their targets.

A BUBBLE OF IGNORANCE

In retrospect, I can see I was blinkered by the progressive bubble in which I had grown up.  I’d attended progressive schools in liberal pockets of midtown Toronto. I had openly gay friends who seemed untouched by homophobia, and I didn’t see the need for the advocacy work that LGBTOUT was doing. But if I’d taken time to ask about their experiences, I would have learned just how close to the surface of Canadian society anti-gay hate lurks.   

I slowly learned more over the years, through personal conversations and my research as an academic interested in access to justice. (Especially Michael Riordon’s Out our Way, a book that communicates very clearly the reality of homophobia, drawing on 300 interviews with gay and lesbian Canadians.)

But the ignorance of my 2004 views only hit me after an embarrassing incident many years later. In 2022 I ran for office for the first time as a candidate for the Ontario Liberal Party.  On May 13th I was thrust into the spotlight. The Ontario NDP found my 2004 article, alerted the media, and demanded that the leader of our party drop me as a candidate. For a while, it seemed like that’s exactly what would happen.

It didn’t happen, I continued the campaign, and lost anyway (like almost all the other candidates in my party that year.)

PROGRESS AND PUSHBACK

In 2004, like now, sexuality and gender identity were frequent topics of discussion in Canadian society.  Same-sex marriage was the hot issue at the time.  Courts in a few provinces had struck down the old definition of marriage (involving “one man and one woman”) for violating the equality rights provision in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. A resolution pledging Parliament to upholding that “traditional” definition had been very narrowly defeated. In my 2004 article I wholeheartedly supported same-sex marriage, which would eventually be legalized nationwide by the Civil Marriage Act.

To me, the legalization of same-sex marriage in Canada remains a breakthrough accomplishment and a reason to be proud of our country —  only the third in the world to accomplish this. Marriage equality not only allows people to form their relationships of choice without legal discrimination on the basis of sexuality, it also has a large and significant effect of reducing  experiences of homophobia and stigma. Our system of government — our independent courts, our Charter, and our Parliamentary democracy — succeeded in 2005.

And yet there is absolutely no reason to be complacent or to stop fighting for progress. The current rise in hate crime is very alarming, and many powerful politicians continue to traffic in transphobia, overt or veiled.  We must all work to make our system succeed again and again if we are to build a better and more just society.

In 2004, I should have better educated myself about the reality of homophobia, and I know that my failure to do so caused harm. That can’t be undone, but I can commit to be a better although still imperfect ally today.