Canada Eh!
by Eleanor Brown

I first saw it 'roundabout when same-sex marriage was first legalized in Ontario: it was an advertisement in a New York GLBT weekly newspaper, placed by a Canadian immigration lawyer offering to help readers get into The Great White North.

I guffawed, shaking my head at the silliness of it. As though Canada were some sort of utopia where discrimination doesn't exist.

But now, sitting here at home in Montreal, I'm inclined to take the idea of homosexuals draining out of the U.S. and into Canada more seriously. As I followed the battle to get sodomy off the lawbooks in the United States, and now watch the hysteria surrounding same-sex marriage, I see all too clearly the differing cultures between our two countries. And I'm talking about differing gay and lesbian cultures.

To start, there's the way the United States' criminal justice system is set up. The country is so decentralized that it appears to me that an act of love in one state will get you sent to jail in another. And so even as the U.S. Supreme Court just recently ruled that it was ridiculous to consider anal sex a crime in one state, the prohibition still stands elsewhere.

In Canada, a much more centralist state, sodomy was removed from the federal Criminal Code -- and thus everywhere -- in 1969. More than 30 years ago!

I believe this is when our two movements began to diverge fundamentally. With legalization so far in the past (in a manner of speaking), we as a Canadian movement have been able to focus on other issues. There was and is much discrimination, yes, but our existence had been legalized decades ago, and it gave us hope and power in the many legal battles to come. So for example when men's bathhouses were raided by Toronto police in 1981, we took to the streets by the thousands and smashed cars and scared the shit out of the politicians, who ensured that mass assaults on gay spaces were never to happen again.

American lesbians and gays have spent more than 30 years just fighting for the right to do what they want in the privacy of their own homes.

Now to marriage. In the state of Delaware, a same-sex marriage could send you to jail for up 30 days. In Canada, you could get married whenever you found a willing pastor. Those vows, until recently, would not be considered legal, but you weren't going to be prosecuted for repeating "I dos" in a church.

The intensity of the marriage battle in the U.S. -- and I do mean to use war-like analogies here -- is breathtaking and a bit scary. I'd go so far as to characterize it as hysterical. The religious nuts are drooling spittle from one end, and yellow bile from the other. And the gay activists! My gawd, I've watched American activists harangue vice-president Dick Cheney's lesbian daughter Mary, demanding that she speak out against her Republican, anti gay marriage dad, through websites and e-mail and letters and endless negative publicity in the media. In Canada, you'd all be charged with criminal harassment. And rightfully so.

I could go on, but I think the cultural differences are beginning to become obvious.

Let me just end by saying that same-sex marriage in Canada is not an earth-shattering issue for the gay and lesbian community. In a recent on-line poll conducted by the gay Fab Magazine, only one-third of respondents cared about having access to marriage. Almost half wanted the same rights accorded to married couples, but wanted to create their own culturally appropriate institution.

This was not a scientifically perfect poll, but it reflects the opinions of those I've spoken to. Gay marriage? Whatever.

Ironically, I expect that those American gays who would abandon their homeland to come to Canada are not the kind who would fit into our gay cultural landscape. They would leave in order to have hassle-free access to marriage.

In fact, they need that access. The San Francisco Chronicle reported in March on the U.S. gay "brain" drain", or as we say here in Canada, the "brain gain."

The Chronicle announced: "Since Canada's immigration law was changed in 2002 to recognize same-sex partners for immigration purposes, an ever-growing number of gay and lesbian couples have uprooted and migrated - especially couples in which one partner is a U.S. citizen and one is not."

A quickie U.S. marriage won't make a difference in an immigration case, because Washington won't recognize the wedding. So in many ways, Canada is the only option.

And that immigration lawyer, the one with ad in the New York gay weekly? He told the Chronicle he's getting hundreds of inquiries.