Circa 1977 at my Calgary Catholic high school, most of my friends ­— charter members of the drama/music/poetry/punk rock subculture — were gay.

So, even in arch-conservative Calgary, being gay wasn’t a big deal to us. We went to gay clubs like the Parkside Continental, and we wrote and sang songs that were sexually ambiguous. My band’s biggest hit, in fact, featured Yours Truly hollering about making “sweet passionate love” to another guy.

(That song is now covered by Britain’s hottest band, the Palma Violets, by the by. Their decision to do so has unleashed neither critical acclaim nor a torrent of homophobia.)

Arriving in supposedly progressive Ottawa to study journalism in 1980, then, was a bit of a shock. Nobody, in those days, was out of the closet. I had surmised that NDP MP Svend Robinson was in one, so I went to see him to do a story about being gay in public life.

It was 1982, and Robinson was plainly nervous when I met with him. He even brought along an assistant to tape record the exchange. I wasn’t interested in outing Robinson — he would do that all by himself not so long afterwards — but in understanding gayness and public life.

That was then, this is now. These days, being gay and a politician isn’t such a big deal anymore. New Democrats, then Liberals, came around to the view that gays and lesbians are (a) electable and (b) not qualitatively different than straight politicians.

So, Robinson blazed a proud trail for many others. Mario Silva, Libby Davies, Bill Siksay, Real Menard and Scott Brison got elected federally. Provincially, Kathleen Wynne is Canada’s first openly gay premier and no one has said they care (apart from Wynne’s leadership team, that is, who regarded every criticism as homophobia, but that’s a story for another day).

And municipally, there have been not a few openly gay mayors and councillors, too, mostly of the New Democrat and Liberal variety.

But what of Conservatives and conservatives? Well, I can verily attest to the fact that there are as many — if not more — gay folks nestled in the bosom of conservativism. Gay men, in particular, seem to be disproportionately inclined towards fiscal conservatism.

But a thin blue line of homophobia persists in conservative politics, at least in respect of social policy. Conservatives held out against gay marriage, gay adoption and gay pension rights longer than any other party. Gay and conservative isn’t as incompatible as it once was — but a tension remains, nonetheless.

Conservatives will point out at this point that Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird has recently criticized the plainly gay-hating dictatorship of Russia’s Vladimir Putin. But Baird doesn’t deserve credit for doing so — opposing bigotry should be part of his job description.

The reaction of Conservatives to Baird’s stance on Russian homophobia is telling. By hailing what Baird said in year 2013 AD, they are implicitly acknowledging their party still has a way to go.

They are headed in the right direction, but they need to go faster. When human rights are at issue, delay is almost as bad as denial.

And, to those Conservatives who worry they will alienate their base, I say worry not. If a bunch of Calgary misfits could openly celebrate gay causes in the 70s — and live — well, arch-conservatives can, too.

Comments (24)

You’re welcome.

Comments (1)

Beach house, outhouse, old punk louse.

Comments (3)

The revelations about Sen. Pamela Wallin — and her apparent willingness to use the treasury as her personal piggy bank — will get folks talking again about abolishing the Senate.

And that’s good. The Senate is an anti-democratic abomination. And, as everyone from the federal NDP to the Ontario Liberals have said, it should be terminated, with extreme prejudice.

But the Wallin scandal — and the Mike Duffy scandal that preceded it — raises another question: Do former journalists, like Duffy and Wallin, make good politicians?

Mostly, they don’t.

I say this as (a) someone who ran and (b) someone whose writings figured in my loss. Writers and journalists and commentators make for lousy politicians because they have left a written record that can be used against them.

One sunny day in the summer of 2009, I stood in the boardroom in room 409-S on Parliament Hill, which — until Michael Ignatieff came along — had always been occupied by Liberals or Conservatives, but never New Democrats. He approached me and we chit-chatted.

The $4 million “Just Visiting” barrage hadn’t started yet, and Ignatieff was in a voluble mood. I wasn’t. He asked me what I was worried about. I pointed through the window of 409-S at the hulk of the PMO’s Langevin Block, across the street.

“See there?” I said. “There’s a hundred little Tory bastards in there who have digitized and catalogued every single thing that you ever wrote or said on the BBC or anywhere else. And they’re getting ready to use it against you, and I don’t even know what they’ve got.”

Ignatieff was unconvinced. There’s a statute of limitations on such things, he suggested. “Some of that stuff is 20 years old!” he said.

“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “A good war room will take something that happened 20 years ago and make it look like it was said yesterday.”

And so they did. They took old Iggy statements and destroyed him with them. There is, as I later told disbelieving Liberals, no statute of limitations on “f—ing stupidity.”

And that’s why writers/authors/journalists/commentators make lousy candidates: they have a past, they have a record, and it’s more easily accessible than ever before.

In order to be any good in the media game, of course, they have to say something that is controversial, at some point. And that’s where guys like me get them. We dig it up, drop it in someone’s lap and their former colleagues/best buddies will go at it like sharks to chum dropped off the side of a boat. Guaranteed.

Wanna be a perfect candidate in the modern age? Don’t ever write or say anything.

Comments (11)

The noose is tightening. Quote:

“Toronto police are investigating attempts by associates of Mayor Rob Ford to retrieve the crack cocaine video.

One target of the investigation is Alexander “Sandro” Lisi, 35, a Range Rover-driving Etobicoke man with a criminal history of threatening and assaulting women, who has been acting as an occasional driver and security guard for the mayor…

An ongoing Star investigation of the Ford video and matters surrounding it reveals that in the days after news of the video broke, Lisi and Ford’s “logistics director,” David Price, were on a mission to obtain the video, which Ford was publicly saying did not exist. Two Star reporters who viewed the video have described an obviously impaired Mayor Ford smoking what appears to be crack cocaine and making homophobic and racist remarks in response to goading questions from a man not seen in the video.

In one attempt to retrieve the video, soon after news of its existence broke on May 16, Lisi paid visits to the Etobicoke house where a group of men from the Dixon Rd. community involved in the crack cocaine trade were known to hang out. The bungalow is home to Fabio and Elena Basso, both friends of Ford…”

Story here.

Comments (39)

I was a Texan. Proof, in six seconds, here.

Comments (6)

…with some old fart who somehow made it onstage. Hard to believe it was just last week. Pix by Debi Del Grande. LA Music Blog review, here (a “subtle gem”! Ha!).

Left to right: Chilli of Palma Violets, unidentified street person, lead singer Sam.

Comments (11)

…that’s how many followers I now have on Twitter.  Just noticed.

Justin Trudeau, watch out! I’m in your social media rear view mirror, pal!

Comments (5)

The scene: a Starbucks, at Yonge and St. Clair.

The players: Kevin Donovan, the lead investigative reporter at the Toronto Star, and James Lockyer, the founding director of the Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted.

The mood: convivial, certain, but (obviously) insufficiently discreet.

Key elements in the dialogue:

• The video exists, and it has been seen by many, many Toronto defence layers, following Crown disclosure arising out of June’s Dixon Road “Project Traveler” police raids.
• In the video, a large man – Lockyer does not say who he is, but he doesn’t need to – is clearly seen smoking a yellowish substance.  There is no doubt who he is, or what he is doing.
• The authenticity of the video, and who is in it, has been independently confirmed by a very high-ranking police official.

Will it ever come out? (Probably.)

Will it force him from office before the end of his term? (Unlikely.)

And on and on the little drama goes.  Where it stops, nobody knows.

Comments (51)

As I wrote a few weeks ago – and whether you liked the Muslim Brotherhood or not – they were democratically elected, and then were overthrown in a military coup.

You cannot be selective about democracy.  You are either a democrat, or you are not.

And, as of today and as some of us predicted, blood would be the price.  That blood is on the hands of those in the West – Harper, Obama, et al. – who stood by and said and did nothing.

And people wonder why Muslims (a) are getting increasingly radicalized and (b) why they think democracy is a joke.  The one time – the one time! – they try out democracy, power gets taken from them.

Wonder no more, etc.

Comments (41)