AUGUST 25-28
Curated by Peter Dickinson

On August 28, 1971, some two hundred lesbian and gay activists gathered on Parliament Hill in Ottawa to demand the federal government bring an end to laws and practices that criminalized, marginalized and stigmatized lesbians and gays. Acting in solidarity, Vancouver activists staged the same action on the steps of their city’s Court House. The “We Demand” protest (named after a brief submitted at the time to the federal government) was the first recorded national political action undertaken by gay liberationists and lesbian feminist activists in Canada.

This “We Demand” film series has been programmed to parallel a landmark conference of the same name that will take place at the Coast Plaza Hotel in downtown Vancouver August 26-28th, 2011. Organized by the Canadian Committee on the History of Sexuality, the conference is the first in Canada since 1993 devoted to the history of sexuality. The aim of both the conference and the film series is to facilitate, promote, and expand the study of sexuality and activism in Canada from a historical p

erspective. Designed to commemorate the 40th anniversary of those first national gay liberation actions in Ottawa and Vancouver, the “We Demand” film series includes a cross-section of rarely-seen narrative and documentary, feature-length and short films and videos made in Canada between 1971 and 2011 that speak directly to the three terms that make up the conference’s subtitle: History/Sex/Activism.

Peter Dickinson is Professor of English at Simon Fraser University, where he teaches courses in film and performance studies, Canadian literature, and gender studies. He is the author of several books, including Screening Gender, Framing Genre: Canadian Literature into Film (2007).

Generous support for the “We Demand” conference and film series has been provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Simon Fraser University, the University of British Columbia, Bill Siksay, and Pink Triangle Press.