#hapo reads canadian history

[acetechne]

"History" - Opus Daily Practice 26

history is fascinating to me and one of my driving forces as an artist, but obviously it gets pretty overwhelming to choose a topic. Anyway, as some of you know I've been doing some research on local queer history recently, so I decided to focus on that and work on recreating a photo of the Pisces Spa in Edmonton in 1981 from an ad from the Privacy Defence Committee in the national queer newsletter, The Body Politic.

The Pisces was staked out by undercover police for four months before the most organized raid and possibly one of the largest mass arrests in Alberta's history. 56 men were arrested on the grounds of being "found in" a "common bawdy house", and the seized membership list indicted hundreds more. Police learned from recent raids in Toronto (Operation Soap) and took notes and recordings in meticulous detail. It's still not clear what EPS' motives for raiding the spa were, but it's since become known as Edmonton's Stonewall moment.

[battle-of-alberta]

I'm back in 1987-88 for today's research and I keep finding articles in the Journal about how little Edmonton is paying attention and it's really funny

(there were sightings of Brooke Shields with her mom at The Mall and rumours about her and some skii coach in Jasper that seemed to attract more attention) (There also seems to have been some panic about the torch going missing between Lethbridge and Med Hat which is pretty funny as well.)

[allbeendonebefore]

so there's controversy in 1990 because the mayor refused to wear the ceremonial beaver pelt/mayoral chain, which i get although I know the pelt is still in use since I've seen it

BUT she also refused to wield the SWORD. we have a MAYORAL SWORD?!?!?

[battle-of-alberta]

uh oh the girls are fighting...

I doubt the ads still exist but the website does; instead they have passive aggressively elected to take shots at calgary and to put the current temperature (+22 C vs my -2 C) and sunshiny pictures up, haha.

[allbeendonebefore]

absolutely suffering reading about the mall rats in wem in the early 90s like sleeping in the maintenance area under the mindbender must be the most haunted place in there

[allbeendonebefore]

“For all of that, the notion that Alberta’s politics stifles all dissent, or made queer life impossible was not historically accurate. This research illustrates how the largely middle-class activists and organizers strove to make it safe... to be queer in Edmonton. And it makes plain how much further they had to go than their peers in Saskatchewan and Manitoba.” “It is suggestive of the challenges of being queer in Edmonton that so much energy and resources went into counselling individuals struggling with their sexual orientation and negotiating the commensurate identities issues.”

this is very hard hitting to me because waking up today in this reality was an ordeal. but it makes me think a lot.

i don’t want to glamourize or valourize the difficulty of being queer in the “tough” city too much because i don’t want to fall into the trap of queer life in edmonton = suffering only but. at the same time it makes me reflect a lot on how i’ve perceived and chosen to personify and characterize my city (is it mine yet? has it always been?) in art over the years and so rambles about that follow

i designed Ed in sub-rural high school a few years after returning to Canada from post 9/11 midwestern America when i was filled with this dissatisfaction of being "home” only to discover that my life was matching next to none of the imagined past i had growing up in Edmonton, and trying to reconcile the gap between this mythical multicultural utopia in the Big City just out of my reach that existed only in my memory and this growing awareness of the rest of Canada looking down on us as a province and as a city- as I discovered firsthand in a rural k-9 school (which even this past year was subject to a horrific hate crime), this was not an entirely undeserved reputation.

of course during this time i was dealing with several battles that didn’t occur to me until later as having any real impact on who i was: all my classmates assuming upon barely interacting with me that i was a lesbian on the grounds of not admitting to liking anyone Ever; being referred to as “that” because my gender expression was considered deviant by my peers; grappling with the sexual deviance associated with hobbies at the time that were far far far from the mainstream at this point (anime and online social networks! gasp); protesting bill 44 without a second thought as to how people would perceive me after; coming out as asexual to relative strangers in a time where there were still only 2.5 orientations and identities barely spoken aloud; and graduating (finally!) into Big City University where I was struggling to reconcile things like being a notorious atheist completely against religious fundamentalism with my Not a Sexuality TM with my Yaoi is for Perverts Which I Am Not with my Feminism is Too Political For Me and so on and so forth.

(so you can see why when i was stepping between ultra religious conservative alberta and weird lefty university life i made these characters somewhat ironically with all the yaoi tropes and demanded that they not be shipped together. lmao. what was i thinking honestly. was it a challenge for others or for me? was it the start of a dialogue or the end of one?)

and sequestered as i was in my little southside university life a certain born and raised Edmontonian from an inner city north side school background, as desperate to escape the city as i was to be repatriated to it, decided this was insufficient and thrust me into directly confronting the fears and anxieties i had picked up through osmosis of Scary Downtown Edmonton. It’s not really a coincidence that the two major changes in Ed’s design (his queerness and his Indigeneity) happened at northside transit stops, both at night, in the company of the incorrigible quatschmachen). I remember us joking about Ed as “the gay cousin” after a particular journey to a discount theatre with a distinct sketchy reputation just a hop skip and a jump from the industrial, uh, charm of the meat packing plants and Belvedere LRT station and, naturally, it stuck. The myth in my head was beginning to grasp onto the realities that I had once been disenchanted by and was desperate to cover up. And it stuck.

And it stuck and I spent a long time “justifying” it in my head, because you have to remember up until this point that personifying a place with any “difference” (in ethnicity, ability, etc) or acknowledging the real struggles of being queer in a place outside of the sacrilegiously gay-and-silly and yes subversive heta-verse... it wasn’t acceptable in fandom. It was rarely done and when it was it was often met with extremely virulent hostility, hostility in similar-but-different ways to the hostility i faced for accidentally expressing “difference” that I didn’t realize I was expressing in rural backwater Alberta.

And it stuck and suddenly it became a gateway into this secret untold history of the city.

And maybe I will write more about that as my research progresses. but there you go, a little insight into why I designed Ed the way I did and why I’ve upheld that particular characterization for all these years. And now a decade after designing him exist the citations to back up my choices, on one hand, and the resolve to keep fighting, to keep writing that history in spite of these odds that look insurmountable from the outside.

it’s tough being the tough city but the battles are worth fighting. and that’s why i do what i do.

[battle-of-alberta]

sometimes i find some funny stuff while I'm trying to research other things... come back with me to January 2, 1987 in the Journal

the snark actually ends there, believe it or not.

[allbeendonebefore]

“Those that escaped Edmonton could think of nothing worse, clearly, than being stuck in Alberta. Often repeated, but oversimplifications miss how people chose Edmonton, carved out lives, and make the places accessible for those who wished to live there.”

"Assessment of Edmonton's livability is all relative. These cities should not just be judged as wanting by outsiders and expats. They were destinations for small-town queers who believed that Edmonton and Calgary represented significant improvements on smaller towns and rural areas.”

“"Queer life was not merely possible in Edmonton, Alberta; one could thrive there but you had to be tough. And additionally, it helped to be determined, creative, and energetic - those with fewer resources tended not to fa[re] as well."

----

just a handful of quotes from korinek that i am rotating in my mind like a cow.

i keep thinking about that anon a while back suggesting that the ucp won because of the exodus of queers and leftists from alberta (???) and i think that person must be awfully young because (not even touching on this mythical ability for anyone to pack up and move anytime) we’ve always been here and we have been here through 80 years of conservative government and we will be here after. And sure, some of us leave, but a lot of us, either born here or who come here from elsewhere, choose to stay.

I think a lot about the American desire to “escape to Canada” whenever things “get bad” (on both sides of the political spectrum!) and it just reminds me that there’s this idea that there’s always a better place somewhere and it really ignores the fact that those better places have to be created by Someone, and how many people not only ignore the histories of wherever they came from but also wherever they’re going to. and I get it, its hard to read histories when they’ve been scrubbed clean deliberately, but histories have to be built just like communities do and the first place to start is wherever you are.

(and sure, I did “escape” from one of the most stringently conservative areas in the province to Edmonton. not everyone’s narratives are like mine, and you will find people who get more acceptance from their rural communities than in the city, and there’s also lots of quotes on the tendency to underestimate rural acceptance but that’s another post lol)

[allbeendonebefore]

“Much has been written about the Stampede, but for our purposes what matters is that Calgarians have had no difficulty “parading” as cowboys and cowgirls. So when conservative elements in the gay and lesbian communities claimed that “parading” and “flaunting” difference is not a Calgary trait, it was disingenuous. Flaunting western heterosexuality was perfectly acceptable in the city yet flaunting queer sexuality was an entirely different matter.”

i actually cackled out loud reading this section. vindicatioooooon

[allbeendonebefore]

"(It wasn't uncommon for mail with just a name followed by "N.W.T." to reach the right person. J.D. Higinbotham, who was known as "J.D." once received a letter from England addressed to "J.D.H., N.W.T.") 

sometimes i WONDER man how did Anything happen Ever

[allbeendonebefore]

for the exhibition i am doing research on the Pisces bath house raid of 1981 (again) (but more) which is considered to be Edmonton's "Stonewall" (a designation I have my own problems with but will be a helpful framing device in this context blah blah)

one of the big themes here is despite "de" criminalization of homosexuality in Canada in 1969 (yes, yes i know.) there was a complete lack of distinction into what constitutes private. The spa was privately owned and was out of sight of the public eye and was meant as a place for gay and bisexual men to meet and socialize, in all senses.

For the purposes of the police morality squad, it was treated as "public" because it still violated the law (which was supposedly two people, no more, in a bedroom of a private residence - and presumably that was up for debate too because without federal/provincial protections you could still lose your housing if your landlord so much as suspected your orientation)

the spa owners were "suspected" to live together and so when the police searched the house, they seized several brands of lubricant and vaseline as "evidence" because it was found in the bedroom. like. ???

anyway this didn't happen that long ago so uh. keep stuff like that in mind when people complain about gays being too "in your face" at Pride. You have to understand that homosexuality being "legal" in "private" was not actually true.

[allbeendonebefore]

apparently on canada day pre-1995, admission was free for the day for national parks. it was discontinued in 95 because the parks were shifting away from using taxes for support and increasing user fees instead etc.

but im like well.... imagine All those people taking advantage of free admission on one day like. the traffic. unbearable. i get why they made it a year of admission for Canada 150 instead :/;;

[battle-of-alberta]

"describe ed in four words" you got it:

[allbeendonebefore]

i think the idea of calvin having an extreme crush on prince edward (the historical Prince of Wales not magpie prince ed lmao) is really funny because one minute the Prince is mooning over the High River area as the most beautiful place on earth and getting his one property there and “just like one of the fellers” with his hat and doing his chores

and then the next he’s bored to tears and EVEN SO FAR AS TO DITCH TO GO TO EDMONTON...

his assistant private secretary in a letter to his wife said that the visit was cut short when the Prince agreed to "go off to Edmonton, another one-horse town one hundred miles off, and do stunts there." "[The Prince] is so utterly bored here that he clutched even at that extremely unattractive straw to get him away from it into the whirl of crowds and cities again."

[are we being called the extremely unattractive straw...........]

and then the next minute he abdicated and became an embarrassment to the empire that was no longer welcome in canada AWKWARD!!!!!!!!

[allbeendonebefore]

Maybe I’m just annoying but I feel like if we are writing a summary of history for this walking tour, we should focus on the years where the place in question and the community history actually intersected (specifically 1991-1997 with some contextual support from the 80s) and not an entire page on the incident from 2018 that technically still hasn’t been resolved and has less to do with the location in question. i feel like i have been asking “where’s the beef” this entire essay because it glosses over what is supposed to be the main subject so much, but I’m also worried I might be providing too much context.

oh well, I think we are still within a healthy page count at the moment!

[allbeendonebefore]

editing a different writing style this week and its so dry i Thirst for some Meat in this essay. it’s just like “and then this happened and then this happened and then this happened” and i am like oh man, is the situation that desperate? do we really have nothing? and then i check the citations and there is SO MUCH COLOUR, there are QUOTES, There is ATMOSPHERE and so I’ve given myself license to roll up my sleeves and paint this thing pink because having a write up on pride without colour is just. huh?

there’s not even context as to what else was happening at this time or why we even started having parades in the first place so i am injecting all that back in.