Gary Kinsman’ and Patrizia Gentile’s The Canadian War on Queers is a well documented and detailed sociological history of the Canadian national security organizations’ surveillance, investigation, and harassment of gays, lesbians, and bisexuals from the 1950s to recent years. It concentrates largely on the activities of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, but the actions of other federal, military, provincial, and local authorities are also recounted.
The strengths of the book are its emphasis on state actions, its detailed chronology, and its use of interviews with many who lost their positions within the Canadian civil service and military. Its weakness is its disparate use of social theory. As the authors claim, it is clearly a “history from below.”
The book also succeeds in many places as an “institutional ethnography.” However, despite a theoretical chapter in which both Foucault and a queer form of historical materialism are referenced, these approaches appear to play little role in the actual account. That being said, the work makes a great complement to Tom Warner’s 2002 Never Going Back: A History of Queer Activism in Canada, precisely because of the emphasis on national security actors and its more critical stance toward the Canadian government’s present position on gay rights.
Any library holding Warner should purchase this text, and any library interested in modern Canadian history might want to purchase both. It may also be of interest to scholars doing a comparative analysis of United States and Canadian legal treatment of gays, lesbians, and bisexuals.
Reviewed by, David Woolwine
Axinn Library
Hofstra University