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Kelden Formosa: The rise of Canada’s gay conservatives

Commentary

Conservative Deputy Leader Melissa Lantsman during question period on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Thursday, May 2, 2024. Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press.

“People don’t have to like rainbow crosswalks,” replied Elenore Sturko, the member of the B.C. Legislative Assembly for Surrey South, “and I find it troubling that we’re not able to have these conversations.” The Global News interviewer seemed surprised by her blunt response. This was the trap he would catch her in. Sturko, the most prominent lesbian legislator on B.C.’s opposition benches, had just crossed the floor to join the Conservatives, who have surged in the polls to form the primary opposition to the governing NDP. But those Conservatives were “homophobic” and “far-Right,” in the words of their opponent, Premier David Eby.

As the interviewer noted, some of their members had even tweeted that they opposed repainting a small town’s dock in rainbow colours—it was obvious, odious, outrageous homophobia. Or was it? “I don’t actually feel more accepted or less in a community because their dock is rainbow,” continued Sturko, “and if you just box me in as the lesbian of British Columbia, then you’re really doing me an injustice.”

This vignette illustrates a striking yet under-remarked upon trend within Canada’s conservative movement: from its highest echelons to its grassroots, it’s increasingly filled with gay men and women who are changing the conversation around how sexual minorities interact with the broader culture. Our quiet presence within the conservative movement serves as a foil to the more radical queer movement, the priorities of which have extended well beyond same-sex marriage and social acceptance, prompting the beginnings of a backlash from some parents and cultural minority communities.

In this post-2020, post-pandemic, return-to-normalcy moment, where politics and culture seem to be shifting back to the right, gay conservatives have much to contribute. We can help our culture arrive at a more peaceful settlement on core issues of family and culture, averting a destructive swing of the pendulum and allowing gay people and their families to integrate into rather than overturn core traditional institutions.

But first, who are Canada’s gay conservatives?

We’re a diverse lot, with priorities as varied as those of the broader movement. On the political scene, MLA Sturko is joined by the co-deputy leader of the federal Conservatives, Thornhill MP Melissa Lantsman, as well Stormont-Dundas-South Glengarry MP Eric Duncan, the first gay Conservatives who were out when they were elected. The leader of Quebec’s provincial Conservative Party is the columnist Éric Duhaime, best known in English Canada for his opposition to certain pandemic-era restrictions and for leading the fledging Quebec Conservatives from micro to minor party status. But in French Canada, Duhaime has long been known for his provocative commentary, including his 2017 coming-out book La fin de l’homosexualité et la dernière gai, or The end of homosexuality and the last gay, in which he argued (among other things) that the battle for gay rights in his province was won, and that the taxpayer should stop having to subsidize queer activist groups.

Duhaime straddles the line between politicians and the writers and activists who help to form the broader small-c conservative commentariat in the country, a class that includes even more gay men and women. For example, Adam Zivo is best known to readers of The Hub and The National Post for his efforts to investigate the effects of so-called safe supply and harm reduction in drug policy, but his Twitter followers have also read much of his love affair with Leo from Odesa, who he met while reporting on the war in Ukraine. Similarly, Marshall Smith, the chief of staff to Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, is a gay man best known for leading an overhaul in provincial drug policies, supporting the recovery model in contrast to the addiction maintenance model in vogue west of the Rockies.

The writer Eva Kurilova, who jokingly describes herself as Canada’s preeminent lesbian, has argued forcefully in favour of Alberta’s new and more cautious policy on youth gender transition, suggesting that she may have made irreversible medical choices had she been offered them when she was an awkward teenager coming to terms with her sexual orientation. There are even gay people in the ranks of Canada’s least popular political movement, those dastardly social conservatives, one of whom—your lowly correspondent—has dared to argue that society would be better off with fewer abortions.

I’ll be honest. The previous two paragraphs felt a little strange to write. Few of the people listed above have made their sexual orientation central to their political identity. Insofar as it’s mentioned, it’s usually done so in passing. Being gay or lesbian is central to our personal lives, certainly, but one gets the sense that most of us would prefer we spent less time talking about romance and more time talking about policy.

Yet our lives reflect a paradox. We would likely not be here, at least not openly, were it not for the activism of a previous generation of progressives. There are far more New Democrats on the list of openly LGBT elected Canadians than there are Conservatives. The first instinct of a gay conservative ought to be gratitude, even for people of a very different political temperament. We can and should be thankful to people unlike ourselves. But in this moment, we should also take up the responsibility left to us by our progressive forebears, including by helping to moderate where their activist descendants are taking us.

Change comes in waves, and sometimes those waves can go in too far, eroding the solid ground on which we all must live. Not everything can be fluid, so the second instinct of a gay conservative is in helping to discern where the wave should stop, or even be turned back.

We can distinguish here between an integrationist and a revolutionary approach to sexual politics. Much of the gay activism of the last fifty years sought to uphold the basic dignity of gay people and integrate their relationships into the mainstream institutions of social and family life. That includes arguments for the just and humane treatment of gay men during the AIDS crisis, as well as for the redefinition of marriage to include gay relationships instead of just straight ones. These were revolutionary steps in one sense, but in another, they were profoundly conservative, extensions to the core Genesis principle that all of us are created in the Imago Dei and the traditional notion that marriage is good for everyone: husbands, wives, children, and the whole of society.

American writer Andrew Sullivan’s 1989 New Republic article, “Here comes the groom,” which imagined gay marriage as a way of buttressing the institution as a whole while fostering gay commitment and responsibility, is a classic of the genre. The gay integrationists sought to build on our cultural inheritance, not tear it down.

A second and historically less prominent strain of queer activism has always been explicitly revolutionary, seeking to overturn the traditional norms of social and family life, which are seen as inherently oppressive. As the integrationists won their battles for dignity and fair treatment and went back to their day-to-day lives, the revolutionaries picked up the rainbow Pride flag and added a bunch of new colours, each with its own political meaning, so much that the rainbow itself is now largely obscured.

The focus of organizations like Egale, the largest queer activist group in the country, has shifted in this direction. Instead of disbanding once it won on issues like same-sex marriage, Egale moved onto new and more esoteric issues, such as arguing that the Charter of Rights and Freedoms requires legal street prostitution and that teachers should be made to exclude parents from decisions regarding their children’s mental health at school. It also suggested that if you don’t want to fly the new Pride flag, you must be motivated by “disinformation and hate.” And of course, like all revolutionaries, many of today’s queer activists are characterized by their unwillingness to tolerate dissent, no matter how meekly it’s expressed.

A good example of this took place in Regina over the last few weeks, where the local queer activist group petitioned the government to cancel the permits for an evangelical Christian concert in the municipal stadium on the grounds that the organizing church does not approve of gay relationships or gender transition. Thankfully, the activists were ignored and those permits were not cancelled. It was a concert and prayer rally, for goodness’ sake, not a conference criticizing queer culture. But let’s push the issue: even if it were such a conference, the organizers would have a right to freedom of expression and assembly as well as equal treatment under the law. I don’t need to agree with their speech or assembly to believe they should be allowed to exist and participate in a democratic society.

I’m modelling here what I think to be a core responsibility of gay conservatives. In this moment, much of the organized queer movement is trying to use our lives and orientations to justify illiberalism. We shouldn’t let ourselves be used as props. We should stand up for the rights of the unpopular, including those with whom we disagree. Not too long ago, the gay rights movement was the unpopular one, and our forebears relied on small-l liberal freedoms and principles to win the arguments and bring us to where we are today.

Defending the rights of those ideological minorities might have another salutary effect. I am convinced that much of the contemporary hostility to gay and transgender people in certain subcultures, for example, within conservative forms of Christianity and Islam, emerges from a sense that those communities are under siege.

When your children are taught at school that their parents’ views are hateful and have no place in this country, that tends to provoke a reaction, as it’s done in classrooms across the country where teachers have implemented certain forms of progressive sexual orientation and gender identity instruction. But if those cultural minorities see that there’s not some monolithic group of queer activists coming after them, but rather a diverse group of people who happen to be gay, many of whom hold values similar to your own and some of whom are part of your own community, they might begin to rethink their hostility.

As a member of the gay integrationist caucus, my goal is not to harm any traditional religious community. For the most part, they are socially valuable and morally good, and each of them helps point towards the ultimate ends of the human life. I want to help these ancient institutions find ways to integrate people like me, but not at the cost of tearing them down. Theological musings do not appear frequently in the pages of The Hub, but my basic view as a Catholic is that every faith tradition will be stronger and more fully itself when it finds a place within it for all the people that God has made, including sexual and gender minorities.

Gay conservatives can seek out this wholesome synthesis by creating spaces for conversations and compromises, rather than name-calling and cancellations. We should not call concerned parents or traditional religious people hateful or bigoted without good reason. They are our fellow citizens, and, hopefully, they can be our friends.

There are recent signs that the wave of queer activism is beginning to retreat and that this new form of respectful dialogue is needed more than ever. Just in time for Pride Month, Ipsos released a survey showing that Canadians’ support for gay rights and visibility was dropping for the first time in a generation, led by Gen Z and their changing views. This finding could prompt people on both sides to dig in their heels, with some anti-gay traditionalists believing that they just need to hold fast and wait for the trends to turn in their favour, while their queer activist opponents push harder to punish those who dissent.

That path of division will likely feature in political attacks over the coming years, as a struggling federal Liberal government seeks to rally progressive support through various Pride-related wedge issues, pushing the envelope just to provoke a reaction. But the presence of many gay people—not to mention Pierre Poilievre’s love for his father, who came out as gay later in life—within the conservative movement could blunt those attacks. Voters may even react negatively to the cynicism of pretending that challenging and nuanced yet necessary conversations around complex issues mean that settled rights like same-sex marriage are under threat. Fearmongering has backfired on the Liberals before, and I suspect many gay people will find it insulting that our lives are being used to distract from their record.

A better way forward can be led by the gay conservatives, who are uniquely placed to create the political and cultural space for society to come to a more stable consensus on issues as minor as the rainbow-painted dock on a lake in B.C. to as major as to how we can best accommodate the needs of gender minorities across our social institutions. In so doing, we make the point, as Sturko did, that each person is much more than their sexual orientation or gender identity, and that gay rights can be part of a society that upholds the dignity and value of all the people and communities within it.

Kelden Formosa

Kelden Formosa is an elementary school teacher in Calgary. He has an M.Ed. from the University of Notre Dame.

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