From Stonewall to X-Pride, with Dr. Chris Fraz

January is pride month at StFX but organizing the celebrations amid the new wave of the pandemic has been challenging. However, Amy Macdonald, the Gender and Sexual Diversity Advisor at StFX has been relentlessly leading the efforts towards organizing a virtual series of pride events at StFX.

The event "Spill the Tea-From Stonewall to X-Pride" began with an introduction of Dr Frazer, the Professor of History at the StFX, who is an icon with powerful and important presence in the 2SLGBTQIA+ plus community both on and off campus. Chris has also produced "Priscilla, queen of the Highlands" which is our local drag show for over 18 years. Chris is a well-respected faculty member on campus, being a professor at the department of history in the Faculty of Arts. Chris has also published two books. When not teaching or writing, being a politician or engaging in activism you will catch Chris on stage.

In their introductory remarks, Dr Frazer said, "I am a historian but I'm also a member of the community, so I have a personal investment in coming to understand the history and how people like me come to be and how we improve our lives and those of our community. I am a political activist also and so when I look back, the whole reason for studying history is really to understand why things have happened and what has to happen in order to make the world better and that's a material process we need to be able to lay our hands on the world around us in order to be able to change it. None of us can do this on our own, we're social beings - human beings - and so in the end of the day it's necessary for us to rely on each other and to help each other through moments of crisis and also for us to share a common vision for what this world could be like."

"I just want to say historically as well as politically is that it's about the roots of our impression as 2SLGBTQIA+ people or queer people if you want use that shorthand. First thing I will say is that is that we are oppressed, we're still oppressed, we have a wider menu of rights than our predecessors did, but we still have not arrived at the promised land and there's still a way to go. So, we need to understand how it is and why it is that that we still continue not have a full membership in the society in which we are born into or into which we arrive at, by another means. So, the truth at least from my perspective is that we live in a pretty

exploitive world and in order to exploit, you need to find people to exploit and then you have to oppress them. So, we are oppressed. The roots of our oppression I think are intersectional. I work with an intersectional analysis, but I have to add that my approach to intersectional analysis is never on a personal level, so I don't look at somebody and try to figure out what their intersections are to me. It's issues and movements that are intersectional and we always have to look at how things that affect us also have effects on other people.

The first assertion, Dr Frazer makes is that the "oppression of queer people or 2SLGBTQIA+ people has its roots in the oppression of women or the identification of women and their subsequent oppression by people who identify as men mainly because in the emergence of private property and the accumulation of wealth it became important and necessary in order to be able to transfer that wealth from one generation to another… It's all about regulating sexuality. It's all about controlling people's bodies and one of the aspects of controlling women's bodies is to ensure that there had to be some way of certifying what was acceptable form of sexual activity, which worked… So, almost at the same time that women are being reduced to the secondary status, in fact I would say becoming the vessels through which property gets transferred from one generation to another, there's also a more or less systematic imposition of prohibited sexual practices was wrapped up in the term sodomy. It is not what we think it is today."

They said, anti-homosexual laws in Canada were anti-sodomy laws. The laws that prohibit homosexual activity still exist in some states, for example Texas still has anti-sodomy laws on their books. It's illegal in Texas, it was illegal in Rhode Island when I did my graduate work there and they were all referred to as the sodomy laws. These laws actually refer to a wide range of sexual activities and commonly defined originally as laws that prohibit any sexual activity that does not lead to procreation.

The second assertion that Dr. Frazer makes is that in periods of radicalization and even revolution, sodomy laws are among those to be the first cost. When people are tired of living under exploitative and oppressive regulations they tend to take a pretty close look at how their relationships with other people are defined and they want to rebuild them, and this also includes how we relate to people on very personal physical, sexual terms too. It did not mean that they were encouraging

sodomy, but they didn't see the point of controlling and regulating people's bodies. This was a period of feeling of freedom.

Dr Frazer explains that those laws, and the early French code in 1791, which abolished sodomy then gets wrapped up into the Napoleonic codes which then becomes the first civil law across all of Europe and that's what led to actually a recession in the oppression of queer people in Europe. It's not until the rise of nationalism in the last half of the 19th century in Europe that we see a very focused attempt to reassert sodomy laws and pretty much begins in in Germany after it gets established as a nation around 1870-71. With the collapse of that German Republic and the aftermath of Germany's defeat World War Two, which is a very radical moment in German history that we see the rise of the modern 2SLGBTQIA+ movement of resistance. Its birthplace is in Germany. By 1929 the queer community in Germany was on the verge of forming their own political party to begin campaigning politically, legally democratically in Germany to achieve the abolition of the sodomy laws in Germany which were known as paragraph 175 they were very close to succeeding and then suddenly this guy Hitler comes to power and crushes everything in Germany. So, this is the rise and then the absolute complete defeat of queer liberation movement in the 1930s.

Dr Frazer further traced the beginning of modern queer oppression in North America and Europe and the pattern of organized public resistance. In 1969, it was just a matter of time… it was only it was only two years after the riots at the black cat and it was a similar kind of story, it's centered around the stonewall which was not much by the way, it was a bar that catered to gay people that it was owned and run by the mafia.

Explaining the "rebellion" or the "protest" against the police there, he said that Stonewall was not that different from any other rebellion or resistance or riot or protest. I just think it was the time and it resonated across the country and by the next year we had the first gay liberation march. That was the beginning of a pride, really and it just took off. It was as much timing as anything else. People were ready for it and especially the younger generation were ready for it.

Dr. Frazer said, “I'm so impressed with the younger generation these days. I just think they do the most amazing things and so we get all the support in the world.

Explaining about the movement in Canada, Dr. Frazer said, three years later after Stonewall, that wave starts in Canada, and we see it and it in Nova Scotia in 1972 with the formation of the gay alliance for equality. In 1972 on June 4th, so the very first thing they did was to establish something called the gay line which was a phone hotline and they staffed it with volunteers and circulated a number in the personals of publications like the Herald and so on for as long as they could. The idea of this help line was for people who were in distress or needed help in some way, who were queer would have somebody finally to reach out to and to offer a sympathetic ear. It is maybe hard to imagine these days but 1972 that was just like a miracle, a really vital service this organization was offering. They also established a publication. So, they began publishing and this was the origins for what we have now in the form of Waves you know, but we still have a publication that speaks about our community. They also decided to begin a fund-raising campaign in order to purchase their own building as which would then serve as a broader Community Center in Halifax… That was also by the way the moment when we had a stable performance space for those of us who were drag performers.” Dr Frazer said, "I arrived in Antigonish in 2004 and I was coming to Antigonish from Providence, Rhode Island. I went to university doing my PhD work at Brown University." Dr Frazer recalls how he eventually became president of the Queer Grad body and got a chance to organize the very first pride month, which actually lasted six weeks. Dr. Frazer also recalls their meeting with Leslie Feinberg there at an event they organized, and shared their experience of "a whole other level of learning about myself, and about the approach to organizing."

Dr. Frazer said he carried all that experience to Antigonish. "I had intended to behave myself when I got here I wasn't gonna raise a fuss. I wanted to get my tenure I wanted to be in a secure job and finally make some decent income for the first time in my life." He recalls that November there was a gay student from the Bahamas who was hospitalized after a home assault. After that in February, a well-known gay man in the community was also attacked and hospitalized. In March, I got attacked. There were three attacks in a time of six months, and it was pretty queer that something had to be done, he said. "At that time, I was involved with an ad hoc group on campus called the committee against misogyny and homophobia which was mainly feminists and supporters. Again, I come back to this notion about our oppression being intersectional and our necessity to rely on each other as

allies That's when the idea was hashed out to have an LGBTQ advisor at StFX. The then Vice President, Students asked me if I was willing to take on that job and "I think I thought about it for a few minutes and said, yeah I'm gonna do it. As much as I wanted to play it safe and to make sure that I got tenure, there would be no point to it if Antigonish and StFX never became a place that I could live in without having to look over my shoulder or how could I raise my kids in an environment like that. So, you can't. You have to roll up your sleeves and you have to get to work. Well, I was a drag performer, and I was a bit political. So, I knew how to do two things one was to organize protests and the other thing was how to organize shows. I decided I would rely on those talents and so that led to the to the formation of X Pride and the very first Priscilla in 2005."

"We have been growing ever since but still have a long way to go, says Dr. Frazer and we've been going ever since, and we've been growing every year we have a still a long way to go but an awful lot has been accomplished," Dr Frazer said.