Raymond Blain

[1] He has been credited the first openly gay politician elected to public office in both Quebec and Canada as a whole,[2] although he was later confirmed to have been preceded by at least one other figure — Bécancour mayor and MNA Maurice Richard — whose pioneering status was overlooked by media at the time.

[3] Blain first ran for office in the 1986 election, as a candidate for Jean Doré's Montreal Citizens' Movement party in the Saint-Jacques district, which included the city's Gay Village.

[10] Along with council colleagues Richard Brunelle, André Lavallée, Abe Limonchik and Diane Martin, he endorsed a report in 1990 which criticized the city's development planning process, calling for new buildings in the downtown core to be limited to a maximum of 39 storeys.

[14] He called his 1990 victory a special moment for the city's gay community, because it illustrated that voters who had opposed him in 1986 because of his sexual orientation were beginning to consider it a non-issue.

[14] In a municipal by-election on November 1, 1992, Forcillo defeated MCM candidate Claude Watters and 11 other challengers, including AIDS activists Douglas Buckley-Couvrette and Gregory Tutko, to reclaim the seat.