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Prairie fairies: a history of queer
communities and people in western Canada,
1930-1985
Author(s)
Korinek, Valerie Joyce
Imprint
University of Toronto Press, 2018
ISBN
9780802097774, 9780802095312,
9781487518172
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Prairie Fairies
A History of Queer Communities and
People in Western Canada, 1930−1985
VALERIE J. KORINEK
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS
Toronto Buffalo London
© University of Toronto Press 2018
Toronto Buffalo London
utorontopress.com
Printed in Canada
ISBN 978-0-8020-9777-4 (cloth)
ISBN 978-0-8020-9531-2 (paper)
Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled
paper with vegetable-based inks.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Korinek, Valerie Joyce, 1965−, author
Prairie fairies : a history of queer communities and people in western
Canada, 1930−1985 / Valerie J. Korinek.
(Studies in gender & history)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8020-9777-4 (hardcover) ISBN 978-0-8020-9531-2 (softcover)
1. Sexual minorities − Prairie Provinces – History − 20th century.
2. Gays − Prairie Provinces – History − 20th century. 3. Sexual
minorities − Prairie Provinces − Social conditions − 20th century.
4. Gays − Prairie Provinces − Social conditions − 20th century.
5. Sexual minorities − Prairie Provinces − Social life and customs −
20th century. 6. Gays − Prairie Provinces − Social life and customs −
20th century. I. Title. II. Series: Studies in gender and history
HQ73.3.C32P735 2018
306.7609712
C2018-901425-3
This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Federation for the
Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications
Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research
Council of Canada.
University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing
program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, an agency
of the Ontario Government.
Funded by the Financé par le
Government gouvernement
du Canada
of Canada
Contents
List of Illustrations vii
Acknowledgments ix
List of Abbreviations xv
Introduction
3
Part One: 1930−1969 Queer Spaces and Opportunities
1 “The Torch of Golden Boy Burns Bright”:
Winnipeg 1930−1969 29
2 A Kiss Is Never Just a Kiss: Saskatchewan
Queer History 68
Part Two: 1970−1985 Communities, Community Building,
and Culture
3 Wilde Times: Community and Organizational
Development in Winnipeg, 1970−1985 113
4 Grassroots: Organizational and Social Opportunities in
Saskatoon and Regina, 1971–1985 160
5 “Outlaws”: Organizational and Social Activities in
Edmonton and Calgary, 1969–1985 213
vi
Contents
Part Three: 1970−1985 Activism, Reaction,
Visibility, and Violence
6 “Love and Let Love”: Activism, Reaction, Visibility, and
Violence in Winnipeg, 1970–1985 261
7 “Towards a Gay Community”: Activism, Reaction, Visibility,
and Violence in Saskatoon, 1970–1985 300
8 Found-Ins at the Pisces Spa: Moments of Activism, Repression,
and Public Education in Edmonton, 1970−1985 355
Conclusion 397
Notes 409
Bibliography 479
Index 489
Illustrations
0.1 Canada’s Prairie Provinces. 12
1.1 Winnipeg queer spaces, 1930−1970. 41
1.2 Bert Sigurdson yearbook photo, University of Manitoba,
1949. 42
2.1 Nan McKay, circa 1912–15. 77
2.2 Nan McKay and the University of Saskatchewan
ladies hockey team, 1915. 79
2.3 Nan McKay and Hope Weir, approximately 1915. 80
2.4 Evelyn Rogers and Lilja Stefansson, circa 1990s. 95
3.1 Winnipeg Gay Media Collective Staff, February 1981. 116
3.2 Winnipeg queer spaces, 1970−1990. 123
3.3 Phil Graham, founding member of Gays for Equality,
August 1980. 125
3.4 Chris Vogel and Rich North. “Love and Let Love”
campaign, 1973. 126
3.5 Giovanni’s Room, 1983. 152
4.1 Downtown Saskatoon queer spaces, 1960−2000. 170
4.2 Peter Millard. Fifth National Gay Conference, Saskatoon,
1977. 181
4.3 “Saskatoon … one of the biggest gay centres in the
country,” 1977. 184
4.4 Metamorphosis poster, 7–9 October 1978. 195
4.5 Grassroots/Gay Saskatchewan newsletter, June 1978. 203
4.6 After Stonewall, A Critical Journal of Gay Liberation, 1977. 206
4.7 Perceptions, the Gay/Lesbian Newsmagazine of the Prairies,
11 July 1990. 208
5.1 Club Carousel membership card, 1975. 217
viii
Illustrations
5.2 Club 70 News, October 1974 229
6.1 National Conference Parade, Winnipeg, 1974. 273
6.2 Winnipeg contingent and others at the National Gay
Rights Coalition Conference Parade, Ottawa, 1975. 274
6.3 Voices, Winter Solstice 9980, first issue (1980),
Kenora-Winnipeg. 279
7.1 Towards a Gay Community button, Fifth National Gay
Conference, 1977. 301
7.2 Gens Hellquist, February 1977. 303
7.3 Star Phoenix Protest March with Neil Richards in front,
10 June 1975. 307
7.4 Doug Wilson, (3 October 1975). 312
7.5 National March, Fifth National Gay Conference,
Saskatoon, 1977. 319
8.1 Maureen Irwin, 28 July 1993. 393
Acknowledgments
As I put the final touches on this manuscript it is perhaps fitting that Saskatoon Pride has just wrapped up. The party is over but what remains
behind is an enormous rainbow flag still waving atop Saskatoon City
Hall. Looking west, across the South Saskatchewan River towards the
Bessborough Hotel and the city’s downtown, this image dominates the
skyline. Such symbols, while significant, do not tell the whole story that
brought us to this moment in time when the city, the campus, and the
community now flock in record numbers to support sexual and gender
diversity in this prairie city. I could not have anticipated these developments when I arrived here twenty years ago from Toronto with little
knowledge of the depth of prairie queer histories. It is my hope that this
work sheds light on the circuitous path that brought us to this apparent moment of triumph and that it illustrates how hard average prairie
women and men fought to make these changes possible – one petition,
protest, educational moment, newsletter, and community social at a
time. It took generations of queer people, working together and individually, to make that pride flag fly, and while that was not their goal,
nor can their battles be reduced to this one symbolic achievement, they
would be proud to see what many, in the 1970s, would have thought
impossible. Naturally, there are many, many battles still to win, but it is
my hope that such symbols embolden people to keep going.
Books and activism have similarities in that you work for years and
then finally one day you find yourself with a tangible achievement and
the pleasure of writing acknowledgements for a project that seemed
never-ending. Writing is so often misconstrued as a lonely, isolated
experience, but in reality it takes a community to get authors and their
precious manuscripts across the finish line. And I have many debts to
x
Acknowledgments
people who have toiled in the background: as research assistants, readers of drafts, seminar participants, conference audiences, colleagues,
editors, publishers, friends, and family. Prairie Fairies has been the beneficiary of so much good will and it is only fitting that I acknowledge
people’s contributions. Any errors that remain in this book are my
own. In the first instance, I want to thank Neil Richards, for donating
his wonderfully rich archive of material to the Provincial Archives of
Saskatchewan and the University of Saskatchewan Archives and Special Collections that made this work possible. Neil’s enthusiasm for
this history and his encouragement never waivered, and his tireless
suggestions for people to interview, updates about new acquisitions,
and positivity were boundless. The staff at both of those archives have
been phenomenal, even with the provincial funding challenges, and I
want to especially thank Nadine Charabin and Bonnie Dahl at the PAS
and Cheryl Avery and Neil Richards at the U of S Archives and Special Collections for meeting every request, including last-minute ones,
with grace. My retired colleague, Professor Gary Alan Hanson, who
initially gave me a post-it note with Neil’s name, phone number, and
the cryptic comment “person of interest” deserves credit for starting
this whole process! I want to thank all thirty one of my narrators both
those who requested anonymity and those who agreed to their names
being public: Marion Alexander, Barb Clay, Norman Dahl, Lyle Dick,
Bernard Dousse, Bruce Garman, Paul Gessell, Brian Gladwell, Janet
Harvey, Gens Hellquist, Elizabeth Massiah, Alan Miller (via email),
Margaret Osler, Michael Phair, Peter P. Pratt, Neil Richards, David Rimmer, Mirtha Rivera, Evelyn Rogers, Val Scrivener, Erin Shoemaker, Lilja
Stefansson, T, Chris Vogel, and Tom Warner. Everyone took time out
from their busy lives to answer questions about their personal lives,
activism, and innermost thoughts, and the generosity, helpfulness, and
support for this research was much appreciated. Additionally, I want to
acknowledge the generosity of Kevin Allen, the research lead and activist behind the Calgary Gay History Project, for his willingness to share
materials and his enthusiasm for histories of urban, prairie queer life.
I gratefully acknowledge the support of the Social Sciences and
Humanities Research Council whose grant enabled me to travel
throughout the country scouring archives, interviewing narrators, and
to hire a succession of excellent graduate student research assistants.
When SSHRC funds ran out, the University of Saskatchewan provided
research funds via their support for department heads, which enabled
me to continue the research enterprise while engaged in administration.
Acknowledgmentsxi
I am grateful for the support of the Aid to Scholarly Publishing Program
that provided funds for this book to published. At the risk of leaving
someone out, I want to thank my research assistants: Noelle Lucas,
Erika Dyck, Eric Strikwerda, Jennifer Wilcox, Tonya Lambert, Heather
Stanley, Vickie Lamb Drover, Frances Reilly, Erin Millions, and Ryan
Eyford for their dedication and hard work.
Earlier drafts of some of this research has been published in scholarly
articles and book chapters, and I wish to acknowledge those presses and
journals here for permission to reprint those sections. An earlier draft
of chapter 1 was originally published as “We’re the Girls of the Pansy
Parade” published Histoire Sociale/Social History in 2012, see: http://
hssh.journals.yorku.ca. Excerpts from my article “The Most Openly
Gay Person for At Least a Thousand Miles: Doug Wilson and the Politicization of a Province” in the Canadian Historical Review, volume 84, no. 4
(December 2003) appear in the chapters on Saskatoon activism, and
specifically those dedicated to Doug Wilson’s case against the University of Saskatchewan. My thanks to the University of Toronto Press for
allowing this material to be reprinted in a revised format here. Finally,
I thank the University of Athabasca Press for allowing me to utilize
segments of my chapter “A Queer Eye View of the Prairies,” which
appeared in The West Beyond the West: New Perspectives on an Imagined
Region, and edited collection from Sarah Carter, Alvin Finkel, and Peter
Fornta (Athabasca University Press, 2010).
In addition to the publications above, and the helpful comments from
readers and editors I received for those publications, I want to acknowledge the various audiences who have provided enthusiasm and feedback on this research. My work has been workshopped extensively at a
series of conferences, most notably the Berkshire Conference on Women’s History, innumerable Canadian Historical Association conferences,
and at the newly reinvigorated western history conferences. I thank all
the faculty and graduate students in attendance for their comments and
critique. I am grateful for the opportunities I’ve had to present my work
as a keynote speaker at St John’s College, University of Manitoba, and
at the University of Alberta, and I thank Adele Perry, Gerry Friesen, and
Sarah Carter, for those generous invitations. Presenting this work to
keenly interested western Canadian scholars has sharpened my analysis of the contemporary prairies and prairie society immeasurably. My
own colleagues at Saskatchewan have been very generous with their
time and feedback in faculty seminars. Additionally, I wish to thank
Erika Dyck, Simonne Horwitz, Kathryn Labelle, Matthew Neufeld, Lisa
xii
Acknowledgments
Smith (now at Essex, UK), and Bill Waiser for their generosity in reading
earlier drafts of chapters, papers, and in a couple of cases the entire draft
manuscript. My department head, Geoff Cunfer, painstakingly created
the wonderful maps that appear in this volume. Finally, I would like
to thank the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada, and then Director Dr Will Straw, for the invitation to be a Visiting Scholar at MISC
for the fall 2016 term. A huge office, the intellectual climate provided
at McGill, and the warm welcome extended by colleagues, including
by Dr E.A. Heaman, Dr Karen Murray, Dr Nathalie Cooke, Dr Brian
Lewis, and Dr Suzanne Morton, were fundamentally important. The
charms of Montreal, in particular my Mile End ‘hood with its proximity to the Mountain for long dog walks with my golden retriever Scout,
and never-ending cafes, restaurants, bakeries, and markets to explore,
were vital to recalibrating. One could not ask for a better environment
for writing and reflection.
My editors at the University of Toronto Press deserve thanks for their
patience, and I am grateful that were always excited by this project from
the very beginning. My thanks to then editor Jill McConkey (now at University of Manitoba Press) for championing this book early. Len Husband, who inherited this project, was awesome, always available for a
quick email and a timely reminder to keep going. His sage advice on
how to stick-handle the system was so helpful. I thank Karen Dubinsky
for her encouragement to submit the book, and her firm but kind deadline to “get it done” before she left for Cuba. I made it and Karen read
this manuscript in a week, a huge, huge gift to keep the process rolling
along as quickly as academic book monographs roll. As series editors,
one couldn’t ask for better guides and mentors than Karen Dubinsky
and Franca Iacovetta, and it is pleasure to have this book appear in the
UTP Gender Series. I cannot name all of the individuals at UTP who’ve
touched aspects of this book, including the cover art, its promotion,
and the editing process, but it has been a sincere pleasure to work with
such a capable team, including my copy editor Dilia Narduzzi, and the
always calm, confidence inspiring Frances Mundy.
Finally, of course, no words, however heartfelt, can ever truly thank
the families of writers. My sister, Kimberley Korinek, and parents, Shirley and Fred Korinek, have been unfailingly supportive and encouraging of this work, and eagerly read excerpts and chapters. I am grateful to Penny Skilnik for all of her support in the early years of this
project, including single-parenting our young sons while I completed
the research and oral history trips. Penny’s suggestions for people
Acknowledgmentsxiii
to interview in Saskatoon (from her days running the much beloved
queer bookstore cafe Cafe Browse) and her knowledge of prairie life
were helpful in the initial mapping of this volume. Thomas and Daniel
Korinek grew up with this project as a bit of an unruly step-sibling that
was always, at inopportune times, demanding attention. As many feminist writers have observed, having kids and actually writing are often
not compatible life pursuits, and yet, in the end, what kids do provide
(in fact demand) is that one “balance” work and life. Raising my sportsmen, watching football games in the mind-boggling range of climactic
conditions that a prairie “fall” can throw at one, and travelling from one
small-town hockey or baseball tournament to another has provided me
with a marvelous window into a slice of prairie life and geography that
I would otherwise have missed. Season to season, those experiences
have proven to be a tonic for the long hours at the computer, and provided us with a tremendous sense of camaraderie, hilarity, and adventure. I would not have missed them for the world. Thus, in their own
way, Thomas and Daniel, and our prairie sojourns, have immeasurably
enriched this process and the resulting book. Simonne Horwitz came
into this project in its final years and she learned more about this prairie
world than she might ever have desired. She has been the perfect academic partner: supportive, optimistic, encouraging, and willing to drop
her own work to read mine on a moment’s notice. She has my thanks for
her supreme confidence that this would get done, for her good-natured
cheerleading, and for all the laughs we shared as we “made a plan” to
deal with the inevitable speed bumps and detours along the way.
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Abbreviations
CHR
CLGRC
EWP
GARD
GATE
GCR
GFE
GIRC
GLCR
LARC
LASS
LGBTTQ
MGC
NGRC
OWMS
PAS
PL
SGA
SGC
SGCC
TBP
U of M
U of S
Council on Homosexuality and Religion (Winnipeg)
Canadian Lesbian and Gay Rights Coalition
Every Woman’s Place (Edmonton)
Gay Association of Red Deer
Gay Alliance towards Equality
Gay Centre of Regina
Gays for Equality
Gay Information and Resources Calgary
Gay and Lesbian Community of Regina
Lesbian Archives of Manitoba and Northwestern Ontario
Lesbian Association of Southern Saskatchewan
Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Two-Spirited, and Queer
Manitoba Gay Coalition
National Gay Rights Coalition
Oscar Wilde Memorial Society
Provincial Archives of Saskatchewan
Project Lambda
Saskatoon Gay Action
Saskatchewan Gay Coalition
Saskatoon Gay Community Centre
The Body Politic
University of Manitoba
University of Saskatchewan
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PRAIRIE FAIRIES
A History of Queer Communities and People in
Western Canada, 1930−1985
This page intentionally left blank
Introduction
When I was a teenager I used to fantasize about some day discovering a community of other gay people in Saskatoon … After a long evening of walking the
streets in the hopes of getting “picked up” I would contemplate the possibility
that I was the only gay person in Saskatoon. If I was to find a community of
gay people I would have to move to Toronto or Vancouver. It wasn’t until I was
in my early twenties that I discovered that there indeed was a community of
gay people in Saskatoon. At that time it was small, centred around house parties or, in the summer, the park. At last here was a group of people who shared
my experiences and could understand what I was feeling. It was an exciting
discovery!1
Gens Hellquist, Saskatoon, 2002
I knew I was gay all my life and I tried to find out about it. In my teens I went
to the library and it was under mental illness. I did end up when I was seventeen (1945) in a relationship with a girl a few years older that had been in
the army … She wanted me to go to Vancouver with her and at the time I was
going with my ex-husband and I didn’t know which turn to take, I knew she
told me that it was acceptable but society was telling me it was wrong. I became
engaged and so she left.2
“Dorothy,” Saskatoon, 2003
Gay people are everywhere.3
Doug Wilson, Saskatchewan Gay Coalition (Saskatoon), 1980
In 1980, Saskatchewan Gay Coalition’s Doug Wilson could claim there
were “gay people” scattered throughout the province, in small towns,
4
Prairie Fairies
on farms, in the north, and in the big cities. Yet such obvious statements
minimized how hard it was for gay people to find others. For Gens
Hellquist, his discovery of Saskatoon’s queer world, in the late 1960s,
was a monumental event and he never looked back. For “Dorothy,”
finding “gay women” was not difficult. However, despite such knowledge, Dorothy’s hesitation about the long-term viability of gay relationships and their diminished status caused her to opt for a conventional
heterosexual marriage in 1947. Seventeen years later, she and her husband divorced – “because I was gay.” In the 1960s she began a new
relationship with a woman and they quietly parented her two teenage
children. In 1971, she spotted Hellquist’s ad to start a gay organization
in Vancouver’s Georgia Straight and took the plunge undeterred by her
girlfriend’s reservations. Very quickly, she became the group’s “Original Lesbian” and told me that she loved her role in the community. She
was subsequently a board member, and eventually vice president of
the Gay Community Centre of Saskatoon.4 This book covers the varied experiences of people like Gens, Dorothy, Doug, and many others
through the years of queer subcultural life and later the formation of
gay and lesbian communities in the prairies. Searching for queer people
then, and historically, was not an easy process, even if we know logically that “queer people are everywhere.” Prairie Fairies merges those
two issues, what British historian Laura Doan calls the “genealogical”
work (restoring queer histories and networks) but also the “queer critical history” work that “explain[s] aspects of the sexual past that resist
explanation in the context of identity history.”5
As a work of queer history this book seeks to historicize same-sex
desire in the prairies. I use the term same-sex desire advisedly because,
as the research will illustrate, not all actors in this world chose to selfidentify as gay or lesbian. Prior to the emergence of the political concept of the gay or lesbian individual, many people engaged in same-sex
activities but did not define themselves by those activities. “Queer” is a
useful umbrella term to capture both those who did self identify as fairies, pansies, men who had sex with men, “married” gay men, lesbians,
“gay women,” “good friends,” or many of the ways that prairie people
did or did not reference sexuality, as well as those who were merely
sojourners in this world. Similar to Matt Cook and Jennifer Evans, my
use of the term queer is also intended to “accommodate individuals
who ‘disturb’ categories” and capture the range of “diverse experiences
and identifications” that people held.6 While I have chosen the word
queer to describe these worlds and the actors, when people appear in
Introduction5
the text, either my narrators or other protagonists from the archival or
oral history collections, if possible I use the words they used to identify
themselves. If they did not utilize such terms (particularly if they lived
in an era prior to such identification), I have used the word queer for
consistency. Prairie Fairies is a “queer” history in another sense as it
employs a “queer-eye view” of the prairies to purposefully decentre and
challenge the heteronormative historiography of the prairie west with
its emphasis on Euro-Canadian settlement, agriculture, Indigenoussettler relations, and the economic catastrophe of the Great Depression.7
While it has now become commonplace to work from the assumption that queer people were and are “everywhere,” one cannot overemphasize how monumental Hellquist’s discovery was in the late 1960s.
Before anyone with a smartphone and Wi-Fi had access to the world;
before the wide-ranging availability of cultural materials, newspapers,
magazines, or visual culture; and before widespread sexualities activism, most queer individuals in the Canadian prairies faced the challenge of locating others. Once found, Hellquist and others quickly realized that the people, spaces, and communities they sought were literally
right under their noses. And, equally important, that you could choose
to stay in Saskatoon, one did not need to move to Vancouver, Toronto,
or Montreal, cities that became synonymous with “gay life” (post-1969)
and had visible communities and clearly demarcated gay and lesbian
spaces. Very quickly, Hellquist discovered that networks of queer men
and women had existed within the prairie region for decades, and those
individuals had transformed commercial and social places in cities,
small towns, and rural areas into queer spaces. But to find queer spaces
and people initially took time, persistence, and risk. It meant learning
a new language, attention to subtle clues of dress and behaviour, the
willingness to be an adventurer who would walk down dark alleys, up
rickety staircases, or into the darkened shrubs and trees at the river’s
edge to find lovers, partners, and friends. The quest to find others is one
of the commonalities of the queer experience, and, as this book illustrates, prairie queers were no different than those elsewhere in seeking out their compatriots. But, the terrain, the scale, and some of the
challenges were regionally specific. Many literally and metaphorically
circled back, waited, and watched from a distance before they worked
up the courage to enter these spaces. People like Lilja Stefansson who
carried a small classified advertisement in her purse for months before
she and her girlfriend, Evelyn Rogers, anxiously phoned the number to
ask about the “club” in Regina.
6
Prairie Fairies
Prairie Fairies historicizes those moments when prairie people, women
and men, opened the unmarked door into queer culture and walked
through into another world. It wasn’t quite Alice’s Wonderland, but for
men like Bert Sigurdson a successful entry into the world of Winnipeg
pansies took him rather far from his working-class Icelandic-Canadian
family home on Manitoba Street in Winnipeg. It is in homage to the
men like Sigurdson, a Winnipeg “pansy,” and his fellow “fairies” and
“tutti-fruttis,” that the book takes its title. Reclaiming the term “fairies,”
as they did from a term of diminishment and disrespect to a prideful
marker of gendered and sexual difference, is a key focal point of this
book. Prairie Fairies tells their stories, and in so doing opens a window
into a vibrant, larger queer world that has flown under the historical
radar for far too long.
The emergence of gay and lesbian organizations, communities, social
activity, and activism in the prairies is at the centre of this book. That
said, employing the queer framework enables us to move beyond the
binaries of gay and straight, “out” and closeted, so as to better capture the daily lived realities of these small and midsized prairie cities.8 Partly this was necessitated by the fact that Prairie Fairies includes
the era, prior to 1969 (often referenced as the pre-Stonewall era), when
notions of “coming out” and identifying openly as a member of a sexual
minority community wasn’t a possibility. After 1970, when such open
identification as lesbian or gay was well known and increasingly common, there remained sizable numbers of people who did not make this
shift. Some older queer women and men continued to practice their
well-honed discretionary behaviour, or were not comfortable with the
more politicized identity attached to same-sex affection. For others, this
discretion was a calculated risk-management strategy for they believed
the possibility of revelation might be too high. So they too continued
to be “quietly” queer, although in ways that now strike us as hiding in
plain view.
This research is part of a transnational historical project to rewrite urban
and social histories with queer actors at their core.9 It has benefited from
an extensive historical literature on queer urban histories, staring with the
foundational work on New York, Philadelphia, and San Francisco, as well
as a theoretical framework that includes historical and cultural geography
and queer theory.10 In American and European LGBTTQ histories (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, two-spirited, and queer), local studies of queer, lesbian, and gay sexual activity and community formation
has dominated the field for the past two decades.11 British historian Matt
Introduction7
Houlbrook observes that North American and European historians and
sociologists have focused so particularly on cities and sexuality that
“the city and sexuality appear culturally and conceptually inseparable.”12 In the last decade there has been a growing critique of the urbanities and sexualities scholarship on two fronts. First, in some corners,
there is a sense of ennui with these studies. A belief, perhaps, that we’ve
read or heard it all before, and an often unstated but implied question
about whether it really matters what the lived experiences of being gay
and lesbian were in a succession of cities? Obviously, given the focus
of this book, the answer is yes. As Jennifer Pierce argues in Queer Twin
Cities, positioning the coastal cities like San Francisco as “cities of gay
salvation while the Midwest is the place of suicidal despair” ignores
a “history of gay radical activism as long and deep as that found in
coastal cities” and reifies a problematic dynamic that is both historically
inaccurate and dismissive of contemporary queer life in Minneapolis.13
A similar case will be made for the Canadian prairies.
Queer social histories are not only urban, coastal, and metropolitan
but also Midwestern and southern, rural and small town. Another critique of the queer metropolis literature is that it has left the impression
that one could only be queer in New York or London, San Francisco
or Vancouver, Toronto or Montreal. Those not living the queer urban
life were “left behind” in resolutely heterosexual, hostile, or unsophisticated small cities, towns, and rural areas. “Metronormativity,”
J. Jack Halberstam’s shorthand phrase to describe this phenomenon,
challenges scholars’ tendency to establish a binaristic path from rural,
backward “closeted” life to “openly” queer, “liberated” urbanite via
the transformative potential of migration. Halberstam challenges this
assumption, implied or stated, that positions small town, rural queer
people as unsophisticated, apolitical, “closeted” individuals too clueless
or fearful to embrace their realities and, in the words of Kath Weston, to
“get ye to the big city.”14 More recently, scholars such as Liz Millward,
have offered more nuanced analysis of “the rural.”15 This book asserts
that prairie people were not “left” behind. Most actively chose to stay,
either in prairie cities or in smaller towns and rural areas, creating small
pockets of diverse communities and spaces for unconventionality that
included sexual minority culture and expression.
Halberstam’s intervention accelerated a trend that had, in historical
circles, been quietly underway since John Howard’s influential Men Like
That chronicled the lives of queer men in the rural south.16 Howard’s
exploration of men who self-identified as gay but also, importantly,
8
Prairie Fairies
“men like that” in Mississippi parlance, those “men who like that” –
meaning sex with men – was groundbreaking. The latter may frequently have acted upon their queer desires but they did not define
themselves by their sexual behaviour.17 Howard’s research made visible
those men who had sex with men, their same-sex male peers, and foregrounded the rural and small-town world in which they circulated. A
decade later, Colin Johnson’s Just Queer Folks would take the demand to
resexualize rural America even further. Johnson profitably weaves the
various strands of medical, agricultural, and popular literature together
to remind us that long before the contemporary academic focus on “sex
in the city,” farms, farmyards, and small towns were awash in discussions of “breeding,” both normative and non-normative, of people and
animals. Queer people and opportunities for queer lives were part of
the fabric of rural American life.18 Most recently, the encouraging publication of Queering the Countryside indicates others have begun to think
queerly about the vast tracts of land, communities, small towns, and
regional cities where a large number of queer Americans reside.19
Canadian contributions to this transnational history of sexualities
literature are dynamic, but the Canadian field remains much smaller.
Until recently, it has largely been confined to publications focused upon
Montreal, Toronto, or Vancouver.20 Histories of prairie experiences
have primarily focused on the early settlement era and, given the use
of legal case files, have focused attention primarily on male actors.21
As those histories, and my own, make clear, “possibilities” for queer
companionship and life in frontier, later settlement Saskatchewan’s
largely male, rural, pioneering world were myriad yet risky. Patrick
Gales’ 2015 novel, A Place Called Winter offers a poignant, fictionalized
account of one English man’s transformation from married Londoner
to queer Saskatchewan homesteader. These publicatio
