Lesbian and Gay Liberation in Canada: A Selected Annotated Chronology 1976–1981 by Donald W. McLeod (review)

The Canadian Historical Review does not often review annotated chronologies, and readers will rightly ask why this reference work merits review? In a word, because it is essential for scholars in gender and sexualities histories.

This volume follows on Donald McLeod's earlier work, which provided a chronology of lesbian and gay liberation in Canada from 1964 to 1975. My copy is dog-eared from use, and this one is destined to be as well since McLeod has performed yeoman service in charting a movement. In this second volume, McLeod continues with the methodology employed in his first book: date, event, description, and primary source materials (usually, but not always, newsletters and media publications). His coverage is nearly exhaustive, as his chronology covers a wide range of events that affected gay men and lesbians in those years in the realm of arts, culture, politics, activism, and oppression. This book is a gold mine: it includes all of the key fiction and non-fiction publications; it follows the creation and contraction of political organizations; it attends to the varied social clubs that emerged in various regions; it covers the launch of newsletters and periodicals; and it prioritizes liberationist activism, police oppression, court cases, and a myriad of other issues that arose during those six years. This book concludes as the aids virus emerged in Canada and began to take its toll within the gay communities, forever altering the politics as it went.

The strength of this volume, like the first, lies in a few key decisions. First, McLeod is determined to provide coverage of events across the country, conclusively making a case–by inclusion–that gay and lesbian activism, organizations, oppression, and political/social activities were not limited to the usual trio of cities (Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal) but could be found across the country. Readers perusing this chronology will see entries for every province, nearly all of the major cities, and many smaller ones. Numerically, coverage of Toronto predominates, but it is not the exclusive focus, and that, in and of itself, is a vitally important contribution to the history of gay and lesbian activism. Second, readers will notice the inclusion of a number of key international events–in the United States and Europe–that provide important transnational context for the Canadian lesbian and gay liberationist movements. Liberationist politics was international, as books, speakers, activists, and key events transcended borders. Canadian lesbian and gay men were well aware of such developments by virtue of the fact that they were either participants in them or read about them. For example, in just one of many such examples, McLeod enumerates how American border patrol officers at the Port Huron/ Sarnia crossing routinely denied entry to Canadian lesbians en route to the Michigan Women's Festival.

McLeod is very transparent about his aims, clearly stating that his goal was to cast a wide net and to provide a "handy point of departure" for future research (viii). He cautions readers not to view this volume as a history as he does not interpret what occurred nor cover all activity. But in a field such as Canadian histories of sexuality where publications are not as plentiful as we might like, and coverage is largely restricted to major centres, McLeod's work is doing double duty. Here is the scaffolding for many, many histories to come. Anyone with graduate or honours students in search of a topic would be well served to direct them to this book.

Few will have the luxury to read this book as I did, from cover to cover, which is a shame because, when one does, certain persistent threads and discoveries readily become apparent. One of those themes concerns homophobia, oppression, and violence. McLeod's chronology reveals with depressing regularity the extreme violence that lesbians and gay men could expect to face in clubs, in baths, in cruising areas, and by virtue...