Demographics While LGBT people live in both large and small communities throughout Canada, the largest and most prominent LGBT communities are located in major metropolitan cities, such as
Toronto,
Montreal,
Vancouver, and
Ottawa. LGBT-oriented neighborhoods, or
gay villages, such as Toronto's
Church and Wellesley, Vancouver's
Davie Village, and Montreal's
Village gai have emerged as hubs of LGBT culture and tourism. As the
Census of Canada does not ask respondents to identify their sexual orientation, there is no exact overall count of how many Canadians identify as LGBT. A separate data program, the Canadian Community Health Survey, showed in 2015 that 1.7 percent of respondents identified as gay or lesbian, and 1.3 percent identified as bisexual. However, the Health Survey is not the same thing as the census, and it is not a universal survey of all Canadians but only a self-selected voluntary survey filled out by active users of specific health services. Because
same-sex marriage has been legal in Canada since the passage of the
Civil Marriage Act in 2005, census figures are published for same-sex couples. The
Canada 2006 Census recorded approximately 7,500 same-sex marriages nationwide, while the
Canada 2011 Census listed 21,000. This error primarily seemed to affect smaller natural resource communities, such as development sites in the
Alberta oil sands, where some people reported themselves as both married and living with a person of the same sex, but may in fact have been migrant workers, who weren't married to the same person with whom they were sharing accommodation on the census date. Many other Canadian cities, both large and small, have since launched annual pride events, with the largest and most prominent festivities taking place in Toronto,
Calgary (
Calgary Pride),
Ottawa (
Capital Pride),
Montreal (
Fierté Montréal),
Halifax (
Halifax Pride), and
Vancouver (
Vancouver Pride). Toronto acted as host city for the international
WorldPride in 2014. As of 2017, at least one annual pride event takes place in every Canadian province and territory. In recent years, particularly in the 2010s, successful pride events have been launched in many Canadian cities much smaller than the traditional gay meccas. In addition to the events noted above, festivals are currently held in
Cranbrook,
Tenzin Norkhel,
Kamloops,
Kelowna,
Nanaimo,
New Westminster,
Prince George,
Victoria and
Whistler in British Columbia;
Fort McMurray,
Grande Prairie,
Jasper,
Lethbridge,
Medicine Hat and
Red Deer in Alberta;
Moose Jaw,
Prince Albert,
Regina (
Queen City Pride), and
Saskatoon (
Saskatoon Pride) in Saskatchewan;
Brandon,
Flin Flon,
Portage la Prairie,
Steinbach,
Thompson and
Winnipeg (
Pride Winnipeg) in Manitoba;
Belleville,
Brockville,
Cornwall,
Durham Region,
Elliot Lake,
Greater Sudbury (
Sudbury Pride),
Hamilton (
Pride Hamilton),
Kitchener-Waterloo-Cambridge (
Tri-Pride),
Guelph (
Guelph Pride),
Halton Region,
Kenora,
Kingston,
London,
Muskoka District,
Niagara Region,
North Bay,
Peel Region,
Peterborough,
Richmond Hill,
Sault Ste. Marie,
Simcoe County (
Simcoe Pride),
Thunder Bay (
Thunder Pride),
Timmins and
Windsor (
Windsor Pride) in Ontario;
Quebec City,
Rimouski and
Sherbrooke Within indigenous communities these differences were seen as occupying a unique third gender role, and were not seen as a difference in sexuality. Having a unique term was important as Indigenous queer identity and concerns were distinct from those of non-indigenous LGBTQ+ people.
Religion While the earliest advocacy for LGBT rights initially came from or was adopted by members of the left-wing milieu of Canadian politics, LGBT-affirmative religious organizations such as the
Metropolitan Community Church played an early role in the advocacy for civil rights. MCC pastor
Brent Hawkes, rector of the
MCC of Toronto, became one of the earliest openly gay advocates for LGBT civil rights in the country, and performed the first same-sex marriage ceremony in the country, eventually participating in the successful legal struggle to have it recognized by Ontario. The issue of LGBT-affirmative policies has also become a major topic of theological and political discussion in the
United Church of Canada, which now ordains LGBT clergy and performs same-sex marriage ceremonies. On the opposite end, theological conservatives, including those who operate the Roman Catholic Church in Canada and related organizations, officially object to LGBT rights such as same-sex marriage and refuse to perform or recognize them.
Education Anti-discrimination policies apply strongly to state school institutions throughout Canada. Catholic educational institutions have tended to object to these laws and have entered into controversies with provincial governments over the prevention of
gay-straight alliances being formed in Catholic schools.
Media Canada has a significant number of LGBT-targeted media outlets.
Pink Triangle Press has published the newspapers
Xtra! in Toronto,
Xtra! West in Vancouver and
Capital Xtra! in Ottawa. In 2015, the company announced that it was folding all three print titles, but would continue publication of the website,
Daily Xtra, as a digital media title. The company also formerly published the Toronto-based magazines
The Body Politic and
fab. Other past and present LGBT publications in Canada have included
Esprit,
Rites,
Fugues,
Wayves,
abOUT,
Outlooks,
OutWords,
Perceptions,
GO Info,
Plenitude and
Siren, as well as a short-lived national edition of
fab. The television channel
OUTtv, a general interest channel for LGBT audiences, broadcasts on
digital cable. Two premium subscription channels,
Playmen TV and
Maleflixxx Television, air
gay pornography. The broadcast group
Evanov Communications operated
CIRR-FM, a radio station in Toronto which aired a mix of
contemporary hit radio music and LGBT-oriented talk programming. The company was granted a license to operate a similar radio station,
CHRF in Montreal, which was launched in 2015 but converted to an
adult standards format within less than a year; the original CIRR, in turn, was shut down in fall 2023. Nova Scotian comic book shop
Cape & Cowl Comics & Collectibles is a
transgender-owned shop specializing in LGBTQ+ items and
pride items, including pride flags,
self-published books, zines, toys, DVD and VHS tape videos and other items. Proprietor Jay Aaron Roy also features a safe space in the shop for maginalized, LGBTQ+, disabled and at-risk youth.
Literature Most contemporary analysis of
LGBT literature in Canada begins with three poets,
Émile Nelligan,
Frank Oliver Call and
Elsa Gidlow. Although neither Nelligan nor Call can be definitively determined to have been gay, due to the lack of a clear biographical record of their sexual or romantic relationships, both have been extensively analyzed for the presence of
homoerotic themes in some of their writing, while Gidlow wrote what is believed to be the first volume of openly
lesbian love poetry ever published by a North American writer. Nelligan suffered a
psychotic breakdown at the age of 19 in 1899 and was institutionalized for the remainder of his life, and nearly all of his work was published only after his confinement. While the cause of his mental illness has been extensively debated, in recent years a number of critics and biographers have postulated that Nelligan was gay and suffered from inner conflict between his sexuality and his religious upbringing. Nelligan's poetry includes several allusions to
public sex in parks, a practice much more strongly associated with the history of homosexuality than that of heterosexuality; Montreal's
Mount Royal Park, the apparent inspiration for much of his outdoor poetry, was indeed known as a
gay cruising spot even in Nelligan's lifetime. however, later biographers have published some evidence that he may have been the lover of poet
Arthur de Bussières. Analysis of gay subtext in Call's writing rests especially on his 1944 poetry collection
Sonnets for Youth, In 1943, critic
John Sutherland published a review of
Patrick Anderson's poetry in the literary magazine
First Statement which suggested
homoerotic themes in his writing, and accusing Anderson of "some sexual experience of a kind not normal"; Anderson was married at the time to Peggy Doernbach, and threatened to sue. Anderson did in fact come out as gay later in life after returning to the
United Kingdom in the 1950s, Sutherland later published a similar attack on
Robert Finch, dismissing his poetry as the work of a "dandified versifier". Explicitly
gay male literature by openly gay writers emerged in Canada in the 1960s, with
Paul Chamberland's poetry collection ''L'afficheur hurle'' (1964),
Jean-Paul Pinsonneault's novel
Les terres sèches (1964),
Edward A. Lacey's poetry collection
The Forms of Life (1965),
Scott Symons' novel ''Place d'Armes'' (1967) and
John Herbert's play ''
Fortune and Men's Eyes'' (1967) each an important landmark in the history of Canadian LGBT literature. Several contemporary openly gay writers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, including
Timothy Findley,
Michel Tremblay,
Tomson Highway,
Marie-Claire Blais,
Douglas Coupland,
Wayson Choy and
Ann-Marie MacDonald, have been among Canada's leading mainstream literary stars. Beginning in 2007, the
Writers' Union of Canada instituted the
Dayne Ogilvie Prize, an annual
literary award presented to emerging LGBTQ-identified writers. In 2018, Montreal's
Blue Metropolis literary festival created the
Blue Metropolis Violet Prize as a complement to honour established LGBTQ writers for their bodies of work. ==References==