This is a timeline of notable events in the history of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and Queer (LGBT) community in Canada. For a broad overview of LGBTQ history in Canada see LGBTQ history in Canada.
1600s 1648: A gay military drummer stationed at the French garrison in Ville-Marie, New France is sentenced to death for sodomy by the local Sulpician priests. After an intervention by the Jesuits in Quebec City, the drummer's life is spared on the condition that he accept the position of New France's first permanent executioner. As only the drummer was placed on trial, the widespread consensus of many historians is that his sexual partner may have been a First Nations man who was not subject to French religious law. In his 2006 book Répression des homosexuels au Québec et en France, historian Patrice Corriveau identifies the drummer as "René Huguet dit Tambour", although other historians have challenged this identification as no known historical records place a person of that name in New France any earlier than 1680. 1691: Military officer Nicolas Daussy de Saint-Michel and two commoners, Jean Forgeron dit La Rose and Jean Filliau dit Dubois, are arrested on charges of sodomy. Saint-Michel, highly knowledgeable about the law, refuses to cooperate with the investigation, successfully arguing that under France's Grande ordonnance criminelle of 1670 a charge of sodomy could only be investigated by the Sovereign Council of New France rather than the local bailiwick; the case is transferred to Quebec City, where the council ultimately finds all three guilty. Dubois and La Rose are sentenced to additional time in the military, while Saint-Michel is fined 200 livres and exiled back to France.
1800s 1810: Alexander Wood, a merchant and magistrate in York (which will become Toronto in 1834), is embroiled in a sex scandal when he investigates a rape case by personally inspecting the penises of the suspected assailants for a scratch left by the woman who filed the rape charge. 1832: Private Flowers, an infantryman, is sentenced to death for having sex with another man. His case remains virtually unknown until the premiere Private Flowers in 2023 created by mixed-media artist HAUI featuring Rodney Diverlus and Jera Wolfe. 1838: George Herchmer Markland, a member of the Legislative Council of Upper Canada, is forced to resign his seat after facing allegations of making sexual advances towards other men. 1842: Patrick Kelly and Samuel Moore, the first two men in Canada historically recorded as having been criminally convicted of sodomy for what the court records clearly describe as consensual sexual activity, arrive at Kingston Penitentiary. Both men were sentenced to death, although their sentences are commuted on August 22; Moore is released from prison in 1849 and Kelly is released in 1853. 1869: Buggery is no longer punishable by death in Canada, replaced instead by a maximum punishment of life in prison.
1900–1950s
1918 Montreal writers Elsa Gidlow and Roswell George Mills launch Les Mouches fantastiques, a mimeographed underground magazine which is the first known LGBT publication in Canadian and North American history. At least five issues are published before Mills and Gidlow move to New York City in the early 1920s.
1943 In the Montreal literary magazine First Statement, John Sutherland publishes a review of the poetry of Patrick Anderson, intuiting homoerotic themes and accusing Anderson of "some sexual experience of a kind not normal". Although Anderson would in fact come out as gay later in life, he was married to a woman at the time; he threatened to sue, and First Statement printed a retraction in its following issue.
1949 Jim Egan, a Toronto native who would later become a co-plaintiff in the landmark legal case Egan v. Canada, begins writing letters to newspapers and magazines protesting depictions of homosexuality and calling for reform of laws regarding homosexual Canadians. He writes his letters until 1964, when he and his partner move to British Columbia.
1960s The RCMP, throughout the late 1950s and the entirety of the 1960s, kept tabs on homosexuals and the patrons of gay bars in Ottawa and other cities. The force also worked with the FBI's own surveillance of homosexuals and alerted the FBI when a suspected homosexual had crossed the border to the United States.
1962 Jackie Shane, a rhythm and blues singer from Toronto, has a chart hit with "Any Other Way". The song's lyrics include an explicit and deliberate play on the dual meaning of the word "gay". Shane, who performed in female clothing despite being male-identified at the time, would later come out as transgender, although this was not confirmed on the record by a media outlet until 2017.
1963 The RCMP Directorate of Security and Intelligence's A-3 Unit (a unit dedicated to rooting out and removing all homosexuals from government and law enforcement, itself a subsection of the A Unit dedicated to finding out character flaws in government employees in the aftermath of the Second Red Scare) produced a map of Ottawa replete with red dots marking all alleged residences and frequent visitations of homosexuals. However, the map was soon filled with red ink and was disposed, and after two larger maps of the city being used to a similar purpose and outcome, the mapping soon ended.
1964 Canada sees its first gay-positive organization, ASK, and first gay magazines: ASK Newsletter (in Vancouver), and Gay (by Gay Publishing Company of Toronto). Gay was the first periodical to use the term 'Gay' in the title and expanded quickly, including outstripping the distribution of American publications under the name Gay International. These were quickly followed by Two (by Gayboy (later Kamp) Publishing Company of Toronto). Journalist Sidney Katz publishes "The Homosexual Next Door", one of the first articles in a mainstream Canadian publication ever to portray homosexuality in a relatively positive light, in Maclean's.
1965 Winter Kept Us Warm, a gay-themed independent film by David Secter, becomes the first English Canadian film to be given a screening at the Cannes Film Festival. Poet Edward A. Lacey publishes The Forms of Life, credited as the first volume of openly gay-identified poetry in Canadian literature. George Klippert, the last person in Canada ever to be imprisoned for homosexuality before its legalization in 1969, is arrested and charged with four counts of "gross indecency" after admitting to a police investigator that he had consensual sex with men.
1967 Writer Scott Symons publishes Place d'Armes, one of the first notable gay novels in Canadian literary history. John Herbert's play Fortune and Men's Eyes, an important landmark in the history of both LGBT literature and general Canadian theatre, premieres at the Actors Playhouse in New York City. December 21: Justice Minister Pierre Trudeau introduces the Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1968-69, an omnibus bill reforming the Criminal Code, which liberalizes Canadian law around social issues such as homosexuality, abortion and contraception. Trudeau's characterization was captured in the statement that there was "no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation."
1969 May 14: Canada decriminalizes homosexual acts between consenting adults with the passage of the Criminal Law Amendment Act first introduced in December 1968. It receives royal assent on June 27. October 24: The first meeting of the University of Toronto Homophile Association is held.
1970s
1970 Poet Ian Young launches Catalyst Press. Several of Canada's most noted early gay liberation groups — including the Community Homophile Association of Toronto, the Front de libération homosexuel in Montreal, the Gay Alliance Toward Equality and the Vancouver Gay Liberation Front (GLF), in Vancouver and Gays of Ottawa — are launched. April: Dianna Boileau undergoes sex reassignment surgery at Toronto General Hospital, and is reported to be the first transsexual woman in Canada. Later accounts have cast doubt on this claim, though she was at least the first trans woman to have her story told publicly and the first to have transition-related surgery covered by the Ontario Health Insurance Plan. April 29: Claude Charron and Guy Joron, two of Canada's earliest known LGBT officeholders, are elected to the National Assembly of Quebec in the 1970 Quebec general election. Neither man was out to the general public during his time in politics, although both were out among their caucus colleagues in the Parti Québécois. Both went on to serve as cabinet ministers when the Parti Quebecois formed government in 1976. November 11: Richard Hatfield is sworn in as Premier of New Brunswick. Although it was already something of an "open secret" that Hatfield was gay, he never officially came out as such, and only after his death in 1991 did biographers and journalists start discussing his sexuality on the record.
1971 August 28: We Demand Rally, Canada's first gay public protest, occurs in Ottawa on Parliament Hill. November 1: The Body Politic begins publishing.
1972 A group led by activist Gens Hellquist incorporates the Zodiac Friendship Society, the first major LGB group in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Regina, Winnipeg, and Edmonton also see the formation of their first LGB organizations, local chapters of the national Gay Alliance Toward Equality. February: Peter Maloney, an unsuccessful candidate in the 1971 Ontario provincial election and later a prominent businessman in Toronto's Church and Wellesley gay village, officially comes out as gay at a Liberal Party of Canada policy conference. Later in the year, he becomes Canada's first known openly gay political candidate, when he runs for a seat on the Toronto Board of Education. June 29: A demonstration is held at Queen's Park to protest the omission of sexual orientation from a package of proposed reforms to the Ontario Human Rights Code. September 11: Maclean-Hunter's cable community channel in Toronto airs the first episode of Coming Out, Canada's first television series about LGBT issues. December: Cameron Frye, one of Canada's earliest politicians to come out as gay (see December 1980), is elected to the municipal council of Tecumseh, Ontario."Hate mail clouds campaign in town that promotes love". Toronto Star, November 2, 1980.
1973 A collective in Montreal establishes Librairie L'Androgyne, the city's first LGBT-oriented bookstore and of only four ever established in Canada."L'Androgyne closing: Move to Gay Village wasn't enough to save bookstore specializing in materials now sold online or at Indigo". Montreal Gazette, July 20, 2002. May 10: The first Canadian play about and starring a drag queen, Hosanna by Michel Tremblay, is performed at Théâtre de Quat'Sous in Montreal. August: The Canadian Gay Liberation Movement Archives are launched. August 17–26: Pride Week 1973, a national LGBT rights event, takes place simultaneously in several Canadian cities.Peters, Rob. "Pride and Prejudiced: A history of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender milestones, in Vancouver and around the world". The Tyee, August 4, 2006. Accessed on September 25, 2008. October 6: The first national conference of LGBT organizations is hosted in Quebec City by the Centre humanitaire d'aide et de libération. October 10: Following a lobbying campaign by the Gay Alliance Toward Equality, Toronto City Council adopts a policy forbidding discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in municipal hiring, making the city the first jurisdiction in Canada to do so.
1974 Both Newfoundland and Labrador (Community Homophile Association of Newfoundland) and New Brunswick (Gay Friends of Fredericton) see the formation of the first gay groups in their respective provinces.