Lesbian Archives | History with a capital L

After being made invisible and criminalized, their history almost ignored, lesbians in Quebec are emerging from the shadows with the publication ofLesbian Archives, a unique and unprecedented book of some 1,000 pages, and almost as many photos, launched on Saturday as part of the Lesbian Visibility Day festivities. To illustrate how far we come back, look back on this unpublished story in seven selected times, with the author, Julie Vaillancourt.

A law extended to women

Lesbian women are for centuries, if not unknown, at least invisible, private sphere obliges. This is not exactly the case for men, as evidenced by the famous “sodomy” law added to the Canadian Criminal Code in 1892, criminalizing all sexual activity between people of the same sex. In the 1950s, this law was extended to women. This is also what earned the first woman to be accused of “gross indecency” in Yellowknife, in 1955, with the case The Queen versus Moore. A forties of African-American origin is indeed accused of having “dared to kiss another woman in a shameless way”. She will even be accused of “Lesbianism” (with a capital L), although acquitted on appeal.

Elsa Gidlow, poet

Back to the beginning of the XX^e century, when the beginnings of a lesbian cultural life finally germinated in Montreal, around the Canadian-American poet Elsa Gidlow, to whom we owe the very first volume of openly lesbian poetry in North America (On a Gray Thread, 1923). “Lesbianism is first associated with very literary and bourgeois circles”, specifies Julie Vaillancourt. Elsa Gidlow joins the English and underground magazine Fantastic Flies (Fantastic Flies), the first in the country to tackle (and even celebrate) gay issues head-on. Ironically, she then leaves Montreal for New York, for lack of avenues to meet other lesbians here, she says.

Audacious inauguration of the Rideau Vert

If showing off remained dangerous for lesbians until the 1960s, they nevertheless appeared quietly through the living arts. The Théâtre du Rideau Vert, founded by Yvette Brind’Amour and her lover Mercedes Palomino in 1948, dared a bold inauguration with the piece The innocents (Liliam Hellman), banned in Boston, Chicago, then London, which denounces the ambient puritanism, tackling “female homosexuality” head-on, but not lesbianism. “The lesbians are present, confirms Julie Vaillancourt, but are once again not named. »

The purges and the case of Martine Roy

Hard to believe and yet, “it happened in Canada”, recalls Julie Vaillancourt. At the same time, and while homosexuality was considered a crime (by law), a sin (by religion) or an illness (by science), the country carried out a real “purge” of its function public, its Royal Gendarmerie and its Armed Forces. It’s the Cold War and we associate homosexuals, women included, with communists. A professor of psychology at Carleton University in Ottawa, Frank Robert Wake, invents the “fruit machine”, supposed to identify gay people, Clockwork Orange, quickly abandoned. But the purges continue, as evidenced by the case of Martine Roy, brought to the screen in 1989 in a short documentary film (A girl from my gang, by Marilyn Burgess). The ex-soldier underwent various interrogations and psychiatric treatments, before being fired, because of his homosexuality.

1969: beginning of a real little revolution

In 1969, with the “omnibus bill”, Pierre Elliott Trudeau decriminalized homosexual acts committed in private by consenting adults. A major change of course, with one nuance. “It comes, up to a certain point, to criminalize homosexual acts committed in public”, nuance Julie Vaillancourt. This is evidenced by the numerous police raids on gay bars, but also lesbians, which are beginning to appear here and there in Montreal.

The 1970s and the Montreal lesbian underground

Lesbian bars are much more discreet than their gay counterparts. You can count them on the fingers of one hand: Des ponts de Paris (the oldest, from 1950), Chez madame Arthur (in the 1970s, rue Bishop, where the Simone de Beauvoir Institute is located today, address legendary that inspired the novel by Marie-Claire Blais underground nights), and Chez Baby Face. Despite their low visibility, they are also subject to police raids. The most famous is undoubtedly that of the gay bar Le Truxx, in 1977, which will be followed, the next day, by one of the first demonstrations in defense of the rights of gays in Quebec, chaired by Jeanne d’Arc Jutras, pioneer of the gay and lesbian rights movement (deprived of custody of her son at age 20, because of her orientation). That same year, Quebec became the first province to prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation. Canada will follow 20 years later.

From the 1980s to today

The years that followed, 1980 and 1990, embodied the “golden age” of Montreal lesbianism. Loads of journals (Review L), documentaries (Yesterday’s Amazons, Today’s Lesbians, of which a remake will be made in 2002) and lesbian-themed festivals (Image+Nation) appear. Just like bars, this time concentrated on the Plateau, in particular rue Saint-Denis, while the gay bars are moving towards the Village. We think of the Labyris, the Exit or the Lilith. Mixed bars (Le Lézard and Zorro) followed, followed by a number of other addresses in the Latin Quarter. Since the Drugstore, closed in 2013, there is no longer a single women’s bar in Montreal. “Like society, it has become more inclusive,” says Julie Vaillancourt, who hopes that young women will learn a lot about their community by reading these archives. The goal is “not to forget those figures who paved the way before us,” she says.

About the book

Composed of two volumes and the result of two years of research, Lesbian Archives offers an ambitious overview, albeit in “fragments”, of the history of “those who love women” and who have until now been almost invisible, from ancient Greece to today. Published by the Sapphic editions of the Quebec Lesbian Network, the book, reviewed by an advisory committee made up of Dominique Bourque and Line Chamberland (Lesbian Memoirs), will be offered for consultation at BAnQ. Only 200 limited edition copies were printed.