It looked like just another routine scrum at Parliament Hill’s Centre Block. But as microphones huddled in front of a young Pierre Elliott Trudeau, he uttered words that would change the course of LGBT rights in Canada:

“There’s no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation,” he declared. It was 1967. Soon enough, his words would become immortalized in collective Canadian memory.

As the Minister of Justice in Lester B. Pearson’s cabinet, Trudeau’s statement was in response to a controversial omnibus bill he’d just proposed. It would, among other things, decriminalize private homosexual acts between consenting adults over the age of 21.

“I think for a lot of gay people it felt like he was speaking directly to them,” says Sky Gilbert, an associate professor at the University of Guelph specializing in gay politics. The statement, he says, is made more significant by the fact that it was even before the Stonewall Riots, a famous protest in 1969 against police raids of a gay New York City club.

While Trudeau’s statement and the bill were a great step, Gilbert says it’s important not to spread the myth that “gaining civil liberties solves the problem.”

Gary Kinsman, a sociology professor at Laurentian University and a long time gay rights activist, agrees. He says it’s often forgotten that the ‘homosexual acts’ portion of the bill was proposed mainly in response to the controversial Everett Klippert case.

Klippert was a Saskatchewan man convicted of ‘gross indecency’ after admitting to police that he had sexual encounters with other men. He was sentenced to life in prison after being deemed a ‘dangerous sexual offender’. His case reached the Supreme Court, where judges ruled against him in a 3-2 decision, which was met with protest from the gay community. The news made its way to parliament, influencing Trudeau’s drafting of that section of the bill. (Klippert was released from prison four years later).

Evidently, the bill emerged in a context of widespread institutional homophobia, says Kinsman – and this didn’t just disappear when it eventually became law in 1969. He says many don’t realize that after this, arrests of people participating in ‘homosexual acts’ actually rose.

This was because police had clearer legal guidelines for what was considered an offense – which, according to the bill, meant any ‘public’ homosexual acts. Kinsman points to police attempts to shut down gay clubs in Montreal before the 1976 Olympics, and the 1981 Toronto bath house raids, as examples.

“People begin to seize more and more social space,” Kinsman explains, “But by the mid ‘70s, it’s actually leading to the police organizing major clampdowns on public visibility, for gay men in particular.”

These are problems that arise when the state attempts to regulate sexuality, even if the intention may be to expand people’s rights, says Kinsman. Even some of the biggest ‘wins’ since, such as the inclusion of sexual orientation in the Charter, don’t fully address the scope of homophobia, he says.

“Most of the rights that have been won have a very formal character to them,” Kinsman says, “And what we really need is substantive rights and substantive equality.”

Still, both Gilbert and Kinsman agree the magnitude of Trudeau’s statement can’t be discounted, a sentiment echoed by voices from the past.

The day after the bill’s proposal, a lesbian woman told the Globe and Mail she was appreciative of the signal to a shift in attitude.

“It would be nice to be able to get married legally if you wanted to,” she said, “But I don’t think we’ll ever make the grade there. You can’t win them all.”

In nearly four decades, the passing of the same-sex marriage law would prove her wrong. And in years to come, the LGBT rights movement in Canada would continue its fight to ensure the state stays out of the bedrooms of the nation.

Source documentation:

Source 1: CBC Archives Video

I found this video of the scrum with Pierre Trudeau online, through CBC Archives footage. It was helpful because it provided better context as to what the omnibus bill was targeting, the questions the public raised about it, and the attitude and rhetoric behind it.

Source 2: Globe and Mail article

I found this article – and many others related to this topic – through a Pages of the Past search with the Carleton Library. It was useful because it helped bring a voice from the time into my story, and helped reflect societal views and attitudes in 1967.