Every summer, Canada's LGBT community celebrates gay pride in all major cities, with many political figures from the federal, provincial, and municipal governments.
Subsequently, discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation was outlawed in different parts of the country, and during the late 1990s, this was extended to the whole of Canada in a series of legal judgments.
[2] Some provinces enacted protections against discrimination based on sexual orientation prior to the Egan decision, with the first being Quebec's amendments to its Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms in 1977.
On June 20, 1996, the Canadian Human Rights Act (CHRA, French: Loi canadienne sur les droits de la personne) was amended to include sexual orientation as a protected ground.
Marie,[11] Simcoe County (Simcoe Pride), Thunder Bay (Thunder Pride), Timmins[12] and Windsor (Windsor Pride) in Ontario; Quebec City, Rimouski[13] and Sherbrooke[13] in Quebec; Charlotte County, Fredericton, Miramichi, Moncton and Saint John in New Brunswick; Charlottetown in Prince Edward Island; Antigonish, Pictou County, Sydney and Yarmouth in Nova Scotia; Corner Brook and St. John's in Newfoundland and Labrador; Whitehorse in Yukon; Norman Wells and Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories and Iqaluit in Nunavut.
[14] Today these people are often identified as Two-Spirit, a term put forth by Indigenous queer activist Albert McLeod, to broadly represent these variances within the many North American First Nations.
The issue of LGBT-affirmative policies has also become a major topic of theological and political discussion in the United Church of Canada, which now ordains LGBT clergy and performs same-sex marriage ceremonies.
On the opposite end, theological conservatives, including those who operate the Roman Catholic Church in Canada and related organizations, officially object to LGBT rights such as same-sex marriage and refuse to perform or recognize them.
Other past and present LGBT publications in Canada have included Esprit, Rites, Fugues, Wayves, abOUT, Outlooks, OutWords, Perceptions, GO Info, Plenitude and Siren, as well as a short-lived national edition of fab.
The company was granted a license to operate a similar radio station, CHRF in Montreal, which was launched in 2015 but converted to an adult standards format within less than a year; the original CIRR, in turn, was shut down in fall 2023.
Most contemporary analysis of LGBT literature in Canada begins with three poets, Émile Nelligan, Frank Oliver Call and Elsa Gidlow.
Although neither Nelligan nor Call can be definitively determined to have been gay, due to the lack of a clear biographical record of their sexual or romantic relationships, both have been extensively analyzed for the presence of homoerotic themes in some of their writing,[16] while Gidlow wrote what is believed to be the first volume of openly lesbian love poetry ever published by a North American writer.
While the cause of his mental illness has been extensively debated, in recent years a number of critics and biographers have postulated that Nelligan was gay and suffered from inner conflict between his sexuality and his religious upbringing.
[19] Nelligan was also profoundly inspired by writers, such as Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud and Charles Baudelaire, who openly wrote about LGBT themes.
Explicitly gay male literature by openly gay writers emerged in Canada in the 1960s, with Paul Chamberland's poetry collection L'afficheur hurle (1964), Jean-Paul Pinsonneault's novel Les terres sèches (1964), Edward A. Lacey's poetry collection The Forms of Life (1965), Scott Symons' novel Place d'Armes (1967) and John Herbert's play Fortune and Men's Eyes (1967) each an important landmark in the history of Canadian LGBT literature.
Several contemporary openly gay writers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, including Timothy Findley, Michel Tremblay, Tomson Highway, Marie-Claire Blais, Douglas Coupland, Wayson Choy and Ann-Marie MacDonald, have been among Canada's leading mainstream literary stars.