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Agent provocateur or closet fascist?
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Gazette editor-in-chief Peter Stockland faces down the charge that he's homophobic
by Matthew Hays
"One thing I've really noticed about the parade on Saturday," Peter Stockland says as he sits down for an interview this week, "is that it's become a community celebration."
The Gazette editor-in-chief, a former Sun columnist and Calgary Herald editorial-page editor, has welcomed me into his posh Old Montreal office in the Gazoo building. A few minutes in the door, and I'm already correcting him. "Sunday," I state. "The gay parade's on Sunday, not Saturday."
It's a minor point, for sure, but the simple fact of getting a day correct seems indicative of a larger task at hand: getting the facts straight, as it were, on precisely what Stockland's stances are on gay issues--among a bunch of others--is surprisingly difficult. For years, Stockland had written extensively on the topic of the encroaching, burgeoning gay rights movement, usually in disparaging terms, gaining a reputation as one of the most homophobic journalists in Canada.
David Pepper, who now serves as a minority liaison with the Ottawa police but who worked as a political reporter for the Ottawa-based gay monthly Capital Xtra in the early '90s, refers to Stockland as a "highbrow homophobe. Peter seemed to have no problem with gays on a personal level, but his columns were often clearly anti-gay." Pepper frequently locked horns with Stockland over everything from government funding to gay organizations to what legal rights gays were entitled to.
Gay rights isn't the only issue Stockland's become attached to, of course. His fervently pro-life stance on the abortion issue earned him the praise of the Alberta family-values types (hanging in his office is a plaque dedicated by a religious-right Alberta women's group to his work on behalf of the family), while Stockland also supported the anti-union stance of Conrad Black during one of the nastiest newspaper strikes in Canadian history at the Calgary Herald last year. And, the entire time he was writing at the Herald, Stockland often seemed intent on criticizing Premier Ralph Klein and Reform/Alliance founder Preston Manning for not being quite far enough to the right.
Shock waves
Thus it came as something of a surprise when, almost exactly one year ago, it was announced that Stockland, who cites the Pope as his personal hero, would be handed the reins of Montreal's sole English-language daily. The pronouncement sent anxious shock waves through the Gazette's newsroom; many worried it was part of Black's grand master plan to drag every paper in the Southam chain as far to the right as possible. Others even suggested Black might try to finish off the paper, argue it's a money-losing venture, and replace it with a Montreal edition of his favourite son, The National Post. Paranoia about what a Black/Stockland combo might bring soon came to a crashing halt, however, as Black's control of Southam papers ended within weeks, after a controlling interest was bought out by Izzy Asper.
Still, staffers wondered aloud: what's a right-wing zealot like Peter Stockland going to do to a daily in one of the most liberal cities in North America?
"I'm first and foremost a democrat," Stockland says of his approach, and the manner in which he's assuaged fears. "I have things that I believe in, but if they're not part of the vocabulary of the day, if they're not beliefs that other people share, I'm not one of those people who has to come down from the mountain and say that it shall be this way and no other." I remind Stockland that at this point his words sound strikingly like the things Stockwell Day told me in an interview over a year ago: that he was a democrat, not an autocrat. "Well, that's probably true," Stockland says, softspoken as always. (Stockland appears to be one of the last people left on the planet who thinks Day has a hope in hell of a political future.)
Stockland concedes he's fielded a broad range of questions regarding his ideological background since taking over last year. Some Gazette staffers I spoke to give him high praise for being far more accessible than either of his two predecessors. As well, no one at the Gazette seems to hint, even for a second, that Stockland is intolerant of minorities in the workplace. Still, a mistrust hangs in the air.
"Just because he hasn't turned out to be as bad as we thought he might," staffer Alexander Norris told me, "doesn't mean we should let our guard down." (Norris is not gay but is an outspoken Gazette staffer.) Mary Lamey, a reporter who is also an out lesbian, says she's had no worries about working with the editor-in-chief. But she adds that in terms of his politics, "it's like we're still waiting for the other shoe to drop."
Okay gays
As far as Stockland is concerned, he thinks his politics have been taken far, far too personally. Again, his words on this weekend's parade serves as a way of understanding Planet Stockland. The parade is a positive thing, he says, as it's "making that transition from what was largely a political event to a community celebration." Stockland is clearly far more comfortable with the latter than the former, though one could easily point out that the two aren't necessarily mutually exclusive. For this editor, gays, on a personal level anyway, appear to be okay ("One of the last things I did before I left for the west," Stockland says, "was to hug a friend who was dying of AIDS--" he pulls back a bit after telling me this, glassy eyed, realizing he's bordering on maudlin.)
But he has disdained noteworthy legal advances. Though he says he doesn't support discrimination of any kind, for example, he does say that he felt (and feels) the Supreme Court decision which forced Alberta to recognize the rights of gay people within its civil rights code was a broad overreach of federal jurisdiction into provincial affairs. Stockland supported Alberta and not the gay-rights decision of three years ago on the basis of "protection of provincial rights." As for the word "homophobic," Stockland declares that he has problems with the word itself, a common refrain from people who've opposed legal and political advances by gays (witness Claire Hoy). "The word makes no sense," says Stockland, "it means, literally, to fear someone like yourself."
Early in our interview, Stockland looks down at my stack of papers and anticipates the inevitable: a vast number of Calgary Herald and Sun bromides that I've called up off the Internet and printed out. I choose to read just one of them back to its author. In his notorious '96 write-up of a Calgary production of Tony Kushner's Pulitzer Prize-winning play Angels in America, Stockland wrote that it was "smut... it does not speak the language--let alone to the hearts--of common citizens in this city, country or continent... It imposes on us, yet again, sneering, hectoring obscenity that would have led, in better times, to a brass-buttoned constable being called in to make arrests."
Stockland acknowledges he's in familiar territory. People have asked him about this one before, I can tell. Now the interview takes on decidedly Catholic overtones: I feel like the political refugee from Alberta, and Stockland is confessing to me, trying to atone for his past sins. "You have to leave a little room for artistic license or hyperbole. There are no brass-buttoned constables--they don't exist anymore. I thought it was a play that deserved to be smacked about the head and neck. Anyway, the controversy helped to sell the show out. A play that edgy had never done so well in Calgary."
The response plays itself out as a bit weak, not to mention a bit contradictory: Stockland is now happy that the controversy he created helped to sell copious tickets to a play he thought was garbage? It doesn't quite add up.
"You must remember the play--there wasn't a sentence in that play that wasn't absolutely loaded with language that Shakespeare didn't see necessary to use."
"So language is the problem?" I ask. "Allen Ginsberg's Howl was banned on numerous occasions. It's now considered one of the great works of poetry of the 20th century."
"Is it?" Stockland snaps back. Now I see the editor I might have expected, his lips curling into a vague snarl. "Will it be in 20 years?"
As we discuss the drawbacks of the play, Stockland seems to want me to believe two things at once: that he hated the play with conviction, but didn't really mean what he wrote. Though he is conservative, his many stances on social issues were enriched over the years by a need to keep his columns colourful and, by extension, extreme. Thus he is repeating what he's told a number of Gazette staff: that his political views are not so extreme as his Herald days might indicate.
There's something a bit slithery about a person whose politics change with every new job or city they're in, but there you are. Stockland seems to think it has less to do with geography and more to do with social evolution, arguing that now we're "past debate" on many of these issues. Around abortion and gay rights, for example, "the debates have changed. I've already articulated my feelings. I'm not going to keep banging on the drum. What's the point of continuing the conversation? A fanatic is someone who won't change his mind and can't change the subject.
"I'm certainly not going to use my position at this newspaper to hammer away at issues when people don't want to hear it."
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