5 Gay Liberation in Conservative Calgary

Nevena Ivanović, Kevin Allen, and Larry Hannant

The 1960s would be a time of dramatic and positive change for lesbians and gays. But in Wild Rose Country, the decade began with an arrest that seemed to presage the continuing reign of conservatism and repression in the province. For a thirty-four-year-old Calgary bus driver whose ready smile made him a favourite of many passengers, the tragedy came in a trial that saw the considerable weight of legal and moral prejudice brought down on him. Everyone who knew him considered Everett Klippert to be friendly, thoughtful, and polite. Yet Klippert lived in a city that cherished its cowboy heritage. Brokeback Mountain was half a century away. It was dangerous to be gay in a town that showed little tolerance for queers.

Beyond Alberta, legal discrimination against homosexuals had been steadily intensifying in Canada since the 1930s, as interest in sexual “deviancy” grew, partly in the context of the eugenics movement. In 1948, the Canadian Criminal Code, which had from the beginning banned “buggery” (that is, sodomy) and “gross indecency,” was amended to include a section on “criminal sexual psychopaths,” aimed largely at men. Gay men, in particular, were assumed to be unable to control their sexual impulses and therefore potentially dangerous. In 1953, buggery and gross indecency were incorporated into the list of offences that could be interpreted as evidence of criminal sexual psychopathology. Further revisions occurred in 1961, when the term “criminal sexual psychopath” was replaced by “dangerous sexual offender” and the definition expanded to include anyone who “is likely to commit another sexual offence.”¹

In addition, the Cold War contributed to a moral panic that saw fear of communism linked to homosexuality in the minds of government officials, including police authorities. During this period, homosexuals came to be considered a threat to national security, with gays regarded either as probable communists or as potentially vulnerable to blackmail by Soviet agents. At the behest of Canada’s Security Panel, the security and intelligence arm of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) actively hunted for, identified, and surveilled queers, who were not only fired from civil service positions and dismissed from the military but also subjected to criminal prosecution. In its effort to track down suspects, the RCMP exerted tremendous pressure on people, turning friends against friends and driving those of queer orientation further underground. Secrecy became a necessity for queers.²

Everett Klippert was not well positioned to engage in hookup subterfuge. A working-class man from a rigidly Baptist background, he had no access to the survival strategies of Calgary’s better-off homosexuals. Those men typically met at the bar of the venerable Palliser Hotel and then made their way to a private home to avoid detection by the police. Klippert, by contrast, frequented boxing and wrestling matches and local swimming pools, pursuing his preference for men over women as sexual partners while still attempting to remain discreet.³

In 1960, his pursuits caught up with him. Denounced to police by the father of a young man with whom he was in a sexual relationship, Klippert admitted, under questioning, that he had committed homosexual acts with the eighteen men listed in his little black book. He was convicted of “gross indecency”—the charge typically brought against gay men—and sent to prison for four years. Once released, he moved to the Northwest Territories, hoping to make a new start. But, as a known homosexual, Klippert would find it difficult to escape his past.

In August 1965, only a year after his release, Klippert was working in the town of Pine Point when the RCMP brought him into custody in connection with an arson case. Klippert actually had no involvement in the case, but questioning soon turned to details of his sex life. During a lengthy interrogation, Klippert was pressured into naming all his sexual contacts and was again charged with gross indecency. The fact that his liaisons were consensual did not sway the court, which sentenced him to another jail term. At the same time, the Yellowknife Crown attorney also initiated proceedings to have Klippert declared a “dangerous sexual offender”—the term that, in 1961, had replaced “criminal sexual psychopath.” Fought all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada in 1967, the case shocked many who followed it, especially after the Supreme Court upheld Klippert’s conviction as a dangerous sex offender even though the two psychiatrists who had examined him agreed that he had no violent tendencies whatsoever.⁴ Klippert was duly sentenced to indefinite imprisonment, quite possibly for life.

In December 1967, in the wake of Klippert’s November sentencing, Pierre Trudeau, then justice minister, launched Bill C-150 to amend portions of the Criminal Code, including its unqualified condemnation of both sodomy and gross indecency. In a statement that’s widely quoted, without citing the key introductory phrase, Trudeau said: “Take this thing on homosexuality, I think the view we take here is that there’s no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation.”⁵ Only five months earlier, Britain’s Sexual Offences Act 1967 had legalized homosexual acts provided they were committed in private between two consenting adult men (men merely because, in Britain, no legislation had ever targeted homosexual acts between women), and Trudeau’s bill neatly mirrored those reforms.

The proposed changes—while long planned and supported by associations speaking for professionals such as lawyers and psychiatrists, as well as by the Canadian Council of Churches—were nevertheless strongly contested in Parliament. Among the leading opponents were members of Parliament from Ralliement créditiste, originally the Québec branch of the Social Credit Party of Canada. Eventually, however, the bill—reintroduced in December 1968, after Trudeau became prime minister—passed its third reading, in May 1969, receiving royal assent in late June. The legal reform was of no benefit to Klippert, who would languish in prison until 1971. The success of the bill gave a tremendous boost to a sense of change that was sweeping through many political, social, and cultural organizations.⁶ Gay liberation and lesbian feminist networks started to form more openly and began to proclaim that “Gay is Good.”

Many young women and men who were gay-curious gravitated to cities in the 1960s, where they sought some relief from the puritanical gaze, and to universities, where they hoped for more liberal social outlooks. Yet Calgary and Edmonton—still relatively small cities of 300,000 and 350,000, respectively, in the mid-1960s—were far from bastions of liberalism, and even university students, especially at the University of Calgary (U of C), were often quite conservative in their outlook. The loneliness and isolation faced by gays was described in a candid letter to the U of C student newspaper, The Gauntlet, in March 1971 from “Ramonn,” who wrote that he knew “from experience just what a frustrating lonely life it can be at a university if you are gay and don’t know any others.” Ramonn was a third-year student who had spent the past two years on campus, then home to about five thousand students. In all that time, he wrote, he had not known “a single gay guy let alone friend.”⁷

Off campus, by the late 1960s gays and lesbians had already taken steps to create their own safe socializing spaces. Until 1970, these were temporary or operated by businesspeople who were not consistently gay-friendly and sometimes exploitive. Police raids and harassment were constant threats, but that changed in 1970 with what Kevin Allen celebrates as “a collective declaration of independence for the first time from the culture of homophobia, repression and intimidation in Calgary.”⁸ The social venue Club Carousel, which opened in March of that year, was initiated and legally controlled by gays who had formed a non-profit charitable society to operate it.⁹ By 1972, the society had almost 600 members and they had begun to publish their own monthly newsletter, Carousel Capers, which appeared until at least 1975.

The two initiatives would contribute—if only by creating a space for networking and conversation—to the founding in 1975 of Gay Information and Resources Calgary, which published its own newsletter, Gay Moods, in 1977 and subsequently Gay Calgary.¹⁰ Cowtown, which had been hostile to gays and bereft of gay activism before the late 1960s, had in short order created a permanent gay support network. By the late 1970s, an active, if more closeted, scene existed even in smaller Alberta cities like Medicine Hat.¹¹

Change was also occurring on the U of C campus. In February 1969, the campus was the site of a lecture by Hal Call, leader of the Mattachine Society, the pioneering gay civil rights organization founded in Los Angeles in 1950. The lecture and post-lecture panel discussion was sponsored by the University of Calgary Civil Liberties Association, although it is unclear precisely who took the forward step of inviting Call to speak. His talk, “Homosexuality: A Police Industry,” was part of a vigorous discussion going on throughout the country on the issue of the criminalization of sexual behaviour.

Reflecting the theme of Call’s lecture, three Calgary city detectives stood out among the three hundred students in the audience, although the police left soon after being invited to join the panellists commenting on the situation in the city. But one of the panel members, lawyer Max Wolfe, observed that there were relatively few prosecutions for homosexuality in the city, reflecting the fact that “either the police are shutting their eyes to it or the homosexuals are being reasonably circumspect about their activities, or both.” He warned, however, that any bar that became known for being openly gay “would be closed in double-quick time,” like one popular coffee shop that had run afoul of city authorities for catering to countercultural patrons.¹² The other panellists, it should be added, were local clergymen—no openly gay person was included.

Late in 1970, Calgary and the U of C campus saw the first exchanges in a years-long debate about human rights—not merely the right to one’s own sexual practices but also the right to freedom of speech associated with sexuality. The discussion was sparked by “Ramonn,” the U of C student who was bravely reaching out to connect with fellow gay students and open-minded straights. In a letter to The Gauntlet, Ramonn expressed his frustration with the censorship exercised by the city’s two daily newspapers, the Calgary Herald and The Albertan. He had attempted to place classified advertisements in the newspapers giving a post office box where lonely gays and curious straights could write to him. The ads were rejected, he reported, because they were “against regulations” enforced by the newspapers. Would The Gauntlet run the ad? It not only would, but it would also become a venue for commentary and criticism of the environment of petty censorship dominating the city, which, unsurprisingly, persisted despite the legal changes that had occurred eighteen months earlier.¹³

Headlined “Gay is Good,” Ramonn’s ads were a sign of the rising tide of the gay liberation movement, in which “homosexuals” renamed themselves gays, lesbians, and queers in a spirit of celebration that rejected shame about one’s sexuality. Coined two years earlier, in 1968, by US gay rights activist Frank Kameny, the slogan “Gay is Good” was a deliberate echo of the Black Power movement’s proud affirmation “Black is Beautiful.”¹⁴ Ramonn reached out again to students in a front-page Gauntlet article headlined “Homosexuality: An Offer of Help to Others,” which appeared in the 20 January 1971 issue. The same issue also carried an article—ironically headlined “Are You a Sex Criminal?”—from the Canadian University Press student news service that described, with a mixture of sensationalism and outrage, California’s oppressive Mentally Disordered Sex Offender Law and the deplorable treatment of homosexuals under it.

This open criticism of the prejudice against gays prompted the conservative newspaper columnist Fred Kennedy to write, in The Albertan, a condemnation of homosexuals on campus. They were nothing but “low-lifers,” he insisted—evidence of what he described as the “breakdown of the moral code on the part of university students,” as well as elsewhere in society. Although The Gauntlet’s reaction was curiously conciliatory, it did voice its opposition to Kennedy. It reprinted his column, accompanied by an appeal from the newspaper’s editor urging Kennedy to try to understand the “code of behaviour of the homosexual.” At the same time, the unnamed author was careful to add that “I am in no way advocating homosexuality.”¹⁵

Despite the editor’s sentiments, the next year saw increasingly open support for gay rights in the pages of The Gauntlet. A classified ad announcement, published in the 19 September 1972 issue, urged “gay men and women” to “Come out! Out of your closets before the door is nailed shut.” The ad was signed by the Gay Liberation Front—a short-lived Calgary chapter, consisting of about a dozen activists, of a coalition that had formed in the United States three years earlier.¹⁶

Shortly thereafter, in early October, controversy erupted when The Gauntlet published an article and photo spread that was intended, the article said, “as a Saul Alinsky style protest” against the sexual stereotyping promoted by Frosh Queen contests. The spoof—headlined “Beautiful Isn’t (S)he?”—was the work of the residents of one floor in a U of C dormitory, who had decided to enter their own candidate in the contest. One photo—titled “The it”—showed a male with his back turned to the camera, wearing nothing but sunglasses, a polka-dot hairband, and a shoulder-length wig. The accompanying article, written by one of the dorm residents, mentions another student’s reaction to the spoof—a “suggestion that after supper we should hang a faggot” —to which the authors offered a “demur blush.”¹⁷

The following week, a critical letter appeared on the front page of The Gauntlet. Its author, Rick Sullivan—at the time, the only openly gay activist at U of C—had only recently arrived on campus and had already been instrumental in the formation of the Gay Liberation Front. Sullivan began by praising the subversion of the anti–Frosh Queen project, which he thought to be “an excellent bit of guerrilla theatre directed at the sexist ‘meat parades’ involved in the selection of a campus queen.” But the organizers of the protest had failed to deal with “their own sexism,” he noted. “Heterosexuals are going to have to realize that we are not ‘its.’ Nor are we a minute coterie of drag queens, hair-dressers and dancers. We are your classmates; your workmates; your neighbours; your relatives.” He concluded on a passionate note: “We are human beings deeply committed to the transformation of society that to date has denied us the right to our freedom. We are angry and we are on the way up. Move over brother, the time has come!”¹⁸

Sullivan’s candour was another, more explicit sign of gays’ determined fight to beat down the walls of the social closet. Yet his views were expressed in a moment when police were still monitoring those at the political forefront of the gay liberation movement. The intensity of the surveillance was evident in an RCMP report that documented the details of Sullivan’s arrival by train in Calgary to take up graduate studies in the fall of 1972. As Sullivan was aware, the police targeted him because they suspected that his politics were left-wing and that he was gay. Indeed, the RCMP attempted to extract more information about him from the U of C administration, although they were denied it.¹⁹

Sullivan’s impassioned plea received a prompt response. In a “personal reply to gay lib,” Gauntlet staff member Shari Meakin interviewed Sullivan to get a better sense of both “[w]hat it means to be gay at U of C” and what the GLF wanted. The article was a sympathetic overview of the demands of the gay liberation movement, emphasizing the need for a “clean-up of the social vocabulary” and educational, political, and legal reform.²⁰ The issues had never before been so visible on the campus. Sullivan himself began to write regularly in The Gauntlet on a wide range of issues, including the social and political condition of gays, reviews of both books and film, and the causes and alleviation of international poverty. In an op-ed piece, “Campus Gays an Oppressed Minority,” he described two approaches for activists: continue to focus on legal reforms and work to “develop gay as a revolutionary life form and make it viable.”²¹ He was also often quoted in The Gauntlet, variously described as a “gay militant,” “gay liberationist,” and “gay Calgarian.”

In the fall of 1973, an apparently short-lived lesbian feminist group formed on campus, whose contact person, Myra (“My”) Lipton, had also been involved in the founding of the Gay Liberation Front. Near the end of the term, she and Sullivan appeared as guest speakers in a human sexuality course taught by Larry MacKillop, a sessional instructor in what was then the School of Social Welfare. The writer of a “Course of the Week” review for The Gauntlet said that he found the course to be a “personal education experience” and noted that the opportunity to hear Lipton and Sullivan was for many students the “first exposure to this aspect of human sexuality.”²² Evidently, MacKillop was pleased with their talk, as they were invited to speak again when the course was taught the following fall.

In November 1974, an article about the second Lipton-Sullivan presentation appeared in The Gauntlet. It reported that their remarks exposed students to gay and lesbian political demands—demands that were, Sullivan later recalled, regarded in the early 1970s as “too pushy” and “aggressive,” even within the Calgary gay community.²³ The writer reports Lipton saying that “just as women should have control over their own bodies in the abortion issue, so should they be able to ‘engage in whatever sexual activities they prefer.’” Lipton added that the “greatest threat to the male role is solidarity among women” and that “lesbianism epitomizes that solidarity.” For his part, Sullivan attacked the “supposedly progressive left for avoiding the issue of gay liberation.”²⁴ But he also spoke more broadly about the anti-gay attitudes still embedded in the legal system and about how gay groups often had a hard time finding a public outlet for their views.

Sullivan’s criticism of the legal system’s treatment of gays probably was shared by some U of C faculty members. An unidentified group of them issued an invitation to Sir John Wolfenden to speak on campus as a distinguished lecturer, which he did in April 1973. It was Wolfenden’s 1957 report to the British government that had served as the key impetus for the 1967 decriminalization of homosexual acts in England and Wales. Yet Sullivan was rebuffed when he lobbied U of C faculty members to support a campaign urging the American Psychiatric Association to strike homosexuality as a mental illness from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). The rejection stung “at a personal as well as a political level,” he later reported.²⁵ As he wrote many years later, “U of C gave us a chance to cut our teeth before moving on to communities that were more ready for our kind of activism.”²⁶

The debates that unfolded in The Gauntlet did not, of course, take place in a vacuum. Elsewhere in the city, early 1973 saw the formation of the People’s Liberation Coalition (PLC), one of Calgary’s first activist groups, which set up a phone line that offered information and counselling to lesbians and gays. Many of the activists involved with the Gay Liberation Front went on to become active with the PLC.²⁷ Both the PLC and its successor, Gay Information and Resources Calgary, established in June 1975, regularly advertised their support services in The Gauntlet. Although in 1975 the Herald, the city’s leading mainstream newspaper, still refused to accept such ads, The Albertan had by then agreed to print them.²⁸

Calgary gay activists were, moreover, sometimes front and centre in places that were decidedly hostile to gays. When, for example, the US-based anti-gay crusader Anita Bryant visited Edmonton on 29 April 1978 as part of a Canadian tour, forty Calgarians joined protesters outside of Northlands Coliseum. Independently of them, two very determined Calgary militants, Windi Earthworm—one of the founders of Gay Information and Resources Calgary—and My Lipton, hatched a bolder plan. They bluffed their way inside, and, with Lipton’s assistance, Earthworm chained his neck to a post, isolated among six thousand Bryant worshippers. When Lipton asked whether he was okay, Earthworm replied, “Yeah, except these really kind Christian folk are ready to hang me.” Newspaper photos show him standing defiant at the event, where he took on Bryant, shouting, “You love me so much you want me in prison.”²⁹

At the time of Bryant’s appearance in Edmonton, Everett Klippert had been out of prison for nearly seven years: he was released on probation in July 1971 and moved to Edmonton. Since his release, he had found his way to a less turbulent life, albeit only by a return to the closet. He categorically refused to take part in gay rights activism and eventually, at the age of about sixty, married a long-standing friend, Dorothy Hagstrom. In the meanwhile, his fellow queers continued their lives, some staying under the radar and some actively fighting for their rights. By the mid-1970s, Calgary was beginning to learn tolerance for a minority that had endlessly been persecuted, shamed, or, at best, ignored. But the town was still decades away from a more progressive legal environment and widespread social acceptance.