The Canadian War on Queers

A passionate, personalized account of national security campaigns against gays and lesbians in Canada.

The Canadian War on Queers shows how the Canadian state used the ideology of national security to wage war on gays and lesbians.

From the 1950s to the late 1990s, agents of the state spied on, interrogated, and harassed gays and lesbians in Canada, employing social ideologies and other practices to construct their targets as threats to society and enemies of the state.

In this path-breaking book, Gary Kinsman and Patrizia Gentile use official security documents and interviews with gays, lesbians, civil servants, and high-ranking officials to disclose not only the acts of state repression that accompanied the Canadian war on queers but also forms of resistance that raised questions about just whose national security was being protected and about national security as an ideological practice. This passionate, personalized account of how the state used the ideology of national security to wage war on its own people offers ways of understanding, and resisting, contemporary conflicts such as the so-called “war on terror.”