The new gay right

>> Homosexuals help to build the Canadian Alliance Party

by MATTHEW HAYS

At first glance, Jean doesn't look out of place at a Canadian Alliance rally. Carefully groomed, every black hair on his head in its assigned place, Stockwell Day button pinned on a pin-stripe suit, Jean looks the part: conservative and refined.

But Jean isn't what one might consider so typical. A political operative who is one of Stockwell Day's main handlers in central Canada, Jean (who asked that his real name not be used) is also gay. And, he insists, despite his long association with both the CA and Reform before it, his sexuality is not an issue.

"People respect me here," he says, sensing that I'm not convinced. "Activists have tried for years to show that being gay was normal. The best way I can do this is to be in a gay couple and to show that we're normal within our own social circle. It's important to show that we're a diverse crowd with different views.

"I don't think it's surprising at all that there are gays within the Canadian Alliance," he says, adding that he and his boyfriend have dined with Stockwell Day and his family.

So perhaps it shouldn't come as a shock. Gay people have been arguing for a long, long time that we are indeed everywhere--that's practically been the motto of the movement. But when one considers the horrendous voting record of the Reform Party (from which the CA was born), who voted en masse against every gay-rights initiative since its inception, it could be seen as an odd place to seek political leadership.

Hating the Liberals

But Jean doesn't think so. The federal Liberal government, he argues, is out of control, squandering far too much of our money on dubious ventures while taxing us beyond belief. Funny, but I thought Minister of Finance Paul Martin had just slashed his way through tons of social programs and eliminated our deficit. Indeed, even for conservative gays, the perfect place to vote would seem the Liberals; they are part of an international trend that includes the successes of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, toward a fiscal conservatism/social liberalism combo.

It's unclear how many gays there are working within the CA. The party doesn't keep such numbers. It has become common knowledge among the Ottawa press corps that there are at least three closeted CA MPs. Due to the thorny ethical issues surrounding outing, even when these MPs were busy voting against gay rights statutes, the media and gay activists left them alone. What coming out would mean to a CA caucus member is unclear, but Jean says there are a number of gay men in the CA who are eager to run as candidates, openly, in the next federal election. And Jean estimates that about 10 per cent of the people he knows working for the CA--both as volunteers and paid staff--are gay.

The Log-Cabin model

Though there isn't much of a gay-right identity in Canada yet, in the U.S., one is already quite fully developed. The Log Cabin Republicans, the gay group of the GOP, have tried desperately to convince the nation's gays and lesbians not to place all their political chips solely on the Democrats. The group finally managed to gain an audience with presidential candidate George W. Bush, who is still considered distant on the issue of gay rights.While one Log Cabin Republican did address the Republican convention earlier this week, he discussed trade issues and made no mention of sexual politics. America, however, has a vastly powerful religious right--a force Bush must reckon with--something Canada, mercifully, doesn't have.

Gays on the right very often appear apologetic for straight right-wing people, eager to embrace their values and join their various clubs. Andrew Sullivan, a prominent gay conservative, recently praised notoriously homophobic candidate Patrick Buchanan in the pages of The New York Times Magazine, stating that he might not be so bad after all. Sullivan and company often seem far more eager to attack gays on the left than homophobes on the right. In Bruce Bawer's 1996 anthology, Beyond Queer: Challenging Gay Left Orthodoxy, he quotes Paul Varnell, who once lamented that activism "has too often tended to attract the socially alienated, the under-employed, political wanna-bes and hangers-on, even marginally disturbed personality types." Not terribly nice words, considering activists on the left have carried most of the civil-rights gains of the last 50 years, including the gay liberation movement--gains gays on the right now enjoy as much as anyone else.

Damn that Svend

The irritated-with-the-gay-left sentiment is echoed by CA types. "Something that's really important to me," stresses Jean, "is that people realize we're not all whiny, obnoxious activists. That we're not a bunch of Svend Robinsons."

For a right-leaning homosexual to feel antagonistic toward the gay left is hardly surprising. Lord knows, gays and lesbians have never really reached much of a consensus on anything. And trashing other gay people's politics has become a veritable profession among queers (witness Larry Kramer or Camille Paglia, among many others). But even among the most conservative gay people, the embracing of Stockwell Day does appear very odd indeed.

Day's record in Alberta was one of extreme hostility to what he occasionally referred to as "the homosexual agenda" in the legislature. And though he's trying to repackage himself, many of Day's former colleagues back in Alberta say he's a conservative homophobe, through and through.

"Day is trying to pull off the biggest snow job in political history," says an employee of the Alberta legislature, who worked with Day for several years. "On an individual basis, he can deal with gay people. But as a group, he dislikes them intensely." And social conservative Michael Coren, a columnist for the Toronto Sun, wonders why gays would want to support the new leader of the opposition. "The question is, would Day tolerate two gay men kissing in front of his family? I doubt that very much," Coren told the Mirror.

Gays defend Day

Oddly enough, one of the staunchest defenses of Day during the CA leadership race came from two Québécois gay men, Martin Masse and Gilles Guénette. A couple for eight years, the two worked on Day's French-language Web site. They also co-authored a July 4 National Post article which dismissed Day's anti-gay rap. "The reality is that this gay thing is a complete non-issue," they wrote. Opponents of Day, they went on, have used the gay issue "as a politically correct shortcut to painting someone as irredeemably 'extremist' and thus unfit to run for office in nice, tolerant Canada."

Jean concurs, expressing his belief that Day has been the victim of a "liberal media" slur campaign, depicting the leader of the opposition as a vicious ideologue. "Stockwell is interested in the will of the majority, not doing what activists have done, which is to push people into a corner." Jean adds that he believes that defining marriage as distinctly heterosexual (i.e. between a man and a woman) is "not discrimination."

Aside from his political ideas, gays' attraction to Day has fallen under another theory. As so many homosexuals seem comfortable working on his campaign, could there be a sexual element to his allure? It has long been noted that some gay men have a fixation with figures of power, figures strongly associated as homophobic, oppressive and ultimately dominant (witness the fetishization of cops, military men and prisoners in gay erotica). Writing in the National Post last month, gay-issues reporter Mitchell Raphael declared Day a "gay pin-up," noting that a gay Web site poll had found 65 per cent of respondents thought Day was "sexy." Often caught by photographers on one of his early-morning jogs, Day sports a tank top, showing off his muscular body. Day's son, Logan, expressed his belief that his father would definitely find the results of the gay poll flattering. And I certainly felt Day's personal charisma, something he turned on when I met him at his first Montreal press conference in March. When I asked him how he would respond if he learned that one of his campaign team were gay, Day stated proudly that he had a number of gays working on his team, and that he had no issue with it.

After the question-and-answer session was over, Day exited the room, but on his way paused to talk to me. "I hope that didn't seem like a some-of-my-best-friends-are-gay answer," he said, smiling at me with a toothy grin while engaging in a firm handshake that seemed to go on a bit longer than usual.

Thus Day does represent something of a new phenom in the Canadian political arena: the conservative candidate as cocktease. Despite my theorizing, however, none of the gay CA members interviewed for this article discussed entertaining kinky fantasies of Mr. Day tying them up.

We're here, we're libertarian

What gay CA types do connect with isn't Day's social conservatism--something the leader acknowledges but insists won't colour his political decision-making--but rather his libertarianism. In a speech Day made last April before the conservative Civitas group, he adamantly stated his belief that "there are some things that government cannot and should not do. Liberals and socialists, on the other hand, are convinced that by interfering with the free market they can create a better economy, or that by social engineering they can create a new and improved human nature... [But] the role of government is to pursue a few limited goals and objectives that enable citizens as individuals, families and communities to achieve their own goals."

This, say all of the gay CA supporters interviewed for this article, is the greatest draw of Day specifically and the CA generally. Which, on the surface, may not seem too unusual. But when you dig a bit deeper, some of their reasoning presents a disturbing strain of logic. Libertarians have long argued that Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms--adopted when Trudeau brought our constitution home in the '80s--has been a massive, colossal mistake. The document--which guarantees equality for women, among many other things--is an instrument of liberal interference in free society and hands too much power over to the courts, robbing democratically elected officials of their role in setting the agenda.

This sentiment lies at the heart of the alliance between Day and libertarian gays. "I do not want the government interfering in my life," Guénette says. "The Liberals intervene all the time, and it costs us 50 per cent of our income. I don't want them intervening in our lives."

But when I point out that the Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms led directly to federal gay-rights legislation, legislation most Canadian gays cherish and take pride in, the CA gays actually argue against the legislation itself. In fact, they suggest the government should protect an individual's right to discriminate. "People should have a right to discriminate against whoever they want," says Masse. "If you don't like certain people, that's your business. Forcing people not to discriminate is a violation of their property and business rights."

Masse says he agrees fully with a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision which allows the Boy Scouts to ban gays from their ranks. "People who don't like gays should have the right not to deal with them."

Surprised yet? But libertarians feel that, all things being left alone in the marketplace, the invisible hand of the economy will take over and things will work out fine. Individuals will be hired on their merits, and ultimately, the less the government intervenes, the happier individual citizens will be. By dividing people into groups, whether on the basis of language, gender, sexual orientation or ethnicity, the government has merely created a series of special rights for special groups, rather than promoting the idea of individual liberty (hey, it's not my argument, I'm just trying to explain it).

"When you cannot rent your apartment to whomever you want, hire whomever you want and assemble in a voluntary association with whomever you want," Masse and Guénette opined in their Post article, "you have lost your freedom of opinion and freedom of association... Throughout history, minorities--sexual, religious, racial or others--have been persecuted, discriminated against and massacred by states, not by individuals."

Amazing. Legislation long thought of as the best thing that could ever happen for Canadian gays, the legislation passed two years ago, banning discrimination against people on the basis of sexual orientation, is something these gays would like to see done away with.

"What's next?" asks Jean. "Will people get into trouble for not hiring transsexuals? Will the church be in trouble for not ordaining women? Will people be in trouble for firing fat people? This is a slippery slope, and everyone's rights are threatened.

"I'm fighting for the right to discriminate," Jean admits. "If people want to discriminate, that should be their business."