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Canadian Dimension July/August 2010
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July/August 2010: Queer 2

Volume 44, Number 4

In leading the opposition to Queers Against Israeli Apartheid presence in Toronto’s gay pride parade, Martin Gladstone, self-proclaimed gay-rights activist, argued that issues unrelated to gay rights have no place in Pride. But as Tim McCaskell shows in the lead article of Queer 2, “queer liberation has always been bound up with the liberation of others.” Our second Queer issue focuses on queer’s radical political edge not only by challenging “the remaining forms of heterosexual hegemony” but by demonstrating the many ways queer oppression is “bound up with capitalist class, patriarchal, racializing relations.”

In his article, Gary Kinsman laments that within much of the gay/lesbian communities “our rich queer histories of struggle have been forgotten creating a kind of social and historical amnesia. This forgetting,” he notes, “has become one of the ways that a middle class, white, largely male, and moderate politics has been resituated at the heart of current gay/lesbian organizing moving us away from the radical roots of our struggles and accommodating us with oppression and exploitation.” Benjamin Gillespie explains how “Canada’s most famous transsexual,” Nina Arsenault, constructs her own trans narrative that resists a “starting point and end point,” instead insisting on a ‘transitive and transgressive queer mode of being.’ And co-editor of Queer 2, Noam Gonick, tells the story of Jammy Reyes, whose future in Canada is threatened by one thing: “he is precisely the demographic that the Conservative Immigration hierarchy hope to expel — queer, coloured, exciting, desirable.”

Keen readers of CD will note still more changes among our columns. The Quebec scene is now rotated between Barbara Legault’s Quebec Street Politics (this issue) and Roger Rashi’s Quebec National Politics (Sept/October). Andrea Levy’s EcoSide (this issue) rotates with Judy Deutsch’s Emperor’s New Clothes (Sept/Oct). Our new feminist column is supplied by members of Canada’s new feminist formation, RebELLEs. Richard Wagamese will return!

Over the years some very prominent poets have sent CD their work to be published in our pages among them Milton Acorn, Dorothy Livesay, Tom Wayman, Miriam Waddington, Al Purdy, and Dennis Lee. In this issue as in the previous issue of CD we publish new poems received from one of this country’s finest playwrights, David Fennario. We welcome submissions by poets provided they are sent by email to our literary editor, Brenda Austin Smith: basmith@canadiandimension.com.

Several readers have requested that we publish letters in the magazine and not simply online which is what we have been doing for some time. As space permits we will endeavour to honour this request. Please send your letters online to: letters@canadiandimension.com.

Rick Salutin, playwright and columnist, Toronto Star

Nothing seems to me more important than the debate about what socialism means NOW, with the decks finally cleared of Soviet and similar versions, yet so few are doing it. Thank God, pardon the expression, for Canadian Dimension.

— Rick Salutin, playwright and columnist, Toronto Star. SUBSCRIBE NOW!