The Queer Frontier: Male Same-sex Experience in Western Canada’s Settlement Era

Abstract

The essay documents and interprets episodes of male same-sex sexuality at different localities and moments in time across Western Canada during its settlement era, circa 1870-1945. Drawing upon the theoretical frameworks of Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau, it seeks to explain same-sex experience in relation to the production, strategic, and tactical use of space. Utilizing court, jail, and police records, among other sources, it documents the recurrence of homoerotic desire across the West in this period, the places where men connected with other men, and their resourcefulness in accessing and reclaiming space to express their sexual imperatives. The data and analysis suggest a comparative laxity in moral regulation of male homoerotic relationships in the early frontier era, followed by entrenched police surveillance and repression by 1930-45. A provisional conclusion is that the frontier era afforded men some latitude within which to produce same-sex space, notwithstanding developing homophobic regimes and the risk of discovery, ostracism, and incarceration.