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Reviewed by:
  • Queer Mobilizations: Social Movement Activism and Canadian Public Policy ed. by Manon Tremblay
  • Barry Adam
Manon Tremblay, ed., Queer Mobilizations: Social Movement Activism and Canadian Public Policy (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press 2015)

This volume provides a useful compendium of the wide array of actions, both collective and individual, that have come to make up queer mobilizations in Canada over the last half century. Its 13 chapters show just how decentralized and heterogeneous the lgbtq movement has become over time. From the singular city or campus-based organization of the 1970s, lgbtq activism has diversified and proliferated on numerous sites and has come to employ a wide range of strategies in pursuit of citizenship rights for lgbtq people across the country. The editor defines the mandate of the book as presenting “the numerous and diverse relationships between lgbtq activism and the federal, provincial, and local governments in Canada” (4) and it is organized by jurisdiction: two chapters provide national overviews of legal changes since the 1969 decriminalization of homosexual relations between consenting adult men in private and of the intersection between lgbtq and Aboriginal rights anchored by the “two spirit” category since 1988. Another set of chapters treat Ontario, Québec, British Columbia, Alberta, and the Atlantic and finally four city level chapters deal with Montréal, Toronto, Vancouver, and Halifax. The division between provincial or regional chapters and their capital cities – or in the case of Vancouver, major city – results in sometimes arbitrary divisions in coverage. While the Montréal chapter, for example, covers years of police repression directed against venues frequented by gay men from the 1960s through 1980s, the equivalent story in Toronto is missing from the Toronto chapter but gets a couple of paragraphs in the Ontario chapter. In other instances, there is a degree of unavoidable duplication as organizations rarely restricted themselves to a single level of government but took on adversaries wherever necessary. In other words, the city and provincial chapters should be read together for the more complete vision of the historical record.

It is should be borne in mind when reading this book that the focus on the engagement of lgbtq movements with the state, while an entirely legitimate organizing principle for a book, does leave behind a number of aspects of queer mobilizations. What it does not cover is a range of non-state social institutions where lgbtq people have sought full inclusion such as in religious denominations, the arts and media, sport, the non-profit sector, and the workplace outside the public service. For workplace-specific issues, Gerald Hunt and David Rayside’s edited collection, Equity, Diversity and Canadian Labour (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), offers much more comprehensive inquiries into the intersection of labour and sexual orientation. Labour unions were often pioneers in lgbtq equality rights, adding them into union contracts well before politicians thought them uncontroversial enough to legislate. Non-legislative state functions in education and health receive somewhat uneven treatment: schools as battlegrounds for the equitable treatment of students and teachers are most comprehensively dealt with in the British Columbia and Halifax chapters. In health, community-based aids mobilization show up in some but not other chapters and ongoing struggles over lgbtq health inequities are largely missed. Just one such current health example is the state provision of vaccine for human papillomavirus (hpv). hpv vaccine was first introduced for school girls only because of a public discourse that coded the vaccine as a prevention for cervical cancer, itself a product of the culture wars in the [End Page 338] United States where the developer of the vaccine chose to avoid Christian right opposition by characterizing hpv as a cause of cervical cancer and not as a sexually transmitted infection responsible for a number of cancers. The result of this cultural construction was public policy excluding men who have sex with men from protection from hpv and a subsequent ongoing struggle to bring school boys and adult gay men into vaccine programs.

Certainly no volume can cover everything, even in 322 pages, but the omission of Saskatchewan and Manitoba leaves out one interesting form of queer mobilization, the co-op-based Saskatoon lgbtq...

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