Queer Progress: From Homophobia to Homonationalism

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520 pages Canada
ISBN: 978-1771132787
Author: Tim McCaskell
Language: English
Publisher: Between the Lines
Genre: Non-Fiction
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Synopsis

How did a social movement evolve from a small group of young radicals to the incorporation of LGBTQ communities into full citizenship on the model of Canadian multiculturalism? Tim McCaskell contextualizes his work in gay, queer, and AIDS activism in Toronto from 1974 to 2014 within the shift from the Keynesian welfare state of the 1970s to the neoliberal economy of the new millennium. A shift that saw sexuality —once tightly regulated by conservative institutions—become an economic driver of late capitalism, and sexual minorities celebrated as a niche market. But even as it promoted legal equality, this shift increased disparity and social inequality. Today, the glue of sexual identity strains to hold together a community ever more fractured along lines of class, race, ethnicity, and gender; the celebration of LGBTQ inclusion pinkwashes injustice at home and abroad. Queer Progress tries to make sense of this transformation by narrating the complexities and contradictions of forty years of queer politics in Canada’s largest city.

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Tim McCaskell

Tim McCaskell is a long-time Toronto writer, activist and educator. He was a collective member of The Body Politic, Canada’s first national magazine for Lesbian and Gay Liberation from 1974 to 1986, chair of the Public Action Committee of the Right to Privacy Committee which fought back against police raids on gay baths in Toronto in the early 1980s, and part of the Simon Nkodi Anti-Apartheid Committee: Lesbians and Gays Against Apartheid in the late 80s.

He was a founding member of AIDS ACTION NOW!, an activist group which won access to experimental treatments and funding for medications in the 1990s and Queers Against Israeli Apartheid after 2010.

For more than twenty years McCaskell worked at the Toronto Board of Education, developing and delivering programs on racism, homophobia and sexual harassment for students and teachers. He received the City of Toronto Award of Merit for his human rights work in 1996.

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