Queer Progress: From Homophobia to Homonationalism by Tim McCaskell (review)

At the end of Queer Progress is a five-page list of "Acronyms and Abbreviations" for key organizations, campaigns, and services. Reading the list reminded me of a conversation I had with a young activist who argued against replacing the ever-expanding acronym for lgbt with queer. "That alphabet soup is our history," they explained. Queer Progress chronicles the fight for the recognition of gay and lesbian identities in the 1970s to a movement that embraced diverse sexual and gender identities. It examines how the focus on individual human rights gained precedence over the goals of radical gay liberationists committed to socioeconomic justice as the foundation of the movement.

At the centre of this Toronto-based history of queer organizing is Tim McCaskell, collective member of The Body Politic, founding member of AIDS ACTION NOW!, spokesperson for Queers Against Israeli Apartheid, community organizer, and social justice educator. The list of acronyms and abbreviations is a snapshot of the local and international solidarities between one key activist in Toronto's movement and national and international organizations committed to advancing lgbt rights and concomitant social justice movements. The list also includes abbreviations for medical conditions associated with hiv/aids. A poz activist, McCaskell weaves his own medical history into the long struggle to expose the homophobia that stalled aids research and restricted gay men's access to necessary medications. Based on his personal experiences and meticulous research, McCaskell has written a powerful and moving community history.

Queer Progress sets out to explain the transformation of Canada from a homophobic society that criminalized homosexual acts to a nation that positions itself as a world-leader in defending the rights of a respected minority group. McCaskell questions whether this transformation is indeed progress. He is critical of government policies that promote the individual rights of gay men and lesbians who conform to the respectable heterosexual norm of life-long monogamy. McCaskell uses queer theorist Jasbir Puar's conceptualization of homonationalism to explain how these national policies are connected to international politics. In recent years, lgbt rights have become a marker of a civilization. Western governments, which have only recently passed legislation to protect the rights of respectable queers, now deploy their support for lgbt rights in international diplomatic relations that depict racialized and Islamic nations as backward because of their ongoing homophobia. Homonationalism explains how the Harper government, which was never a champion of lgbt rights, used the acceptance of lgbt refugees from Iran as propaganda in diplomatic relations with the United States that targeted the Middle East. McCaskell argues that the individual rights of lgbt men and women who conform to neoliberal values can be integrated into national identities and narratives; gay liberation's more radical demands cannot. He begins from the premise that "inclusion comes with consequences" (2). The co-optation of a movement that since the 1970s has demanded a radical rethinking of family, sex, patriarchy, capitalism, and gender and sexual identity further has marginalized sex radicals. It has also jeopardized international solidarities among liberation groups.

McCaskell's political roots in Toronto are in the Marxist Institute, where he helped to form the Marxist Perspective on Gay Liberation, and The Body Politic, founded by gay men who were active in Toronto's left. The different trajectories of rights-based organizations and liberationists, he argues, cannot be understood outside of the transition from Keynesian economics to neoliberalism, which deepened class inequalities within lgbt communities. McCaskell's career as an anti-oppression educator at the Toronto Board of Education also informs his self-reflexive analysis of key debates about gay liberation, anti-censorship campaigns, the bath raids, aids activism and the criminalization of hiv-positive status, the evolution of Toronto Pride, and same-sex spousal rights and marriage. He pays close attention to how unequal gender relations marginalized lesbians from what was predominantly a white movement in 1970s Toronto and how challenges from activists marginalized by race and immigration status compelled some activists to recognize that gay liberation...