'Coming Out in Politics'

Christopher Guly, a veteran journalist based in Ottawa who sometimes reports on Parliament Hill for The Tyee, has crafted a documentary about Canadian politicians who have gone public with their queer identities.

Coming Out in Politics, which premiers on OUTtv on April 20, offers a fascinating series of interviews. One of the interesting characters that emerges is British Columbia’s political culture, past and present.

The film features former NDP MP Svend Robinson who became the first openly gay Canadian MP on Feb. 29, 1988, while representing his Burnaby constituency. He paid the price for his silence shattering, including being evicted from his Ottawa rental and receiving death threats.

Some verbal attacks particularly stung, like the school official who called Robinson “a bad role model” and not fit to address children. But that didn’t stop him from being the longest serving B.C. MP of his era, from 1979 to 2004 — when a ring-stealing scandal that he said was tied to “accumulated stress” caused him to step away.

By then, however, Robinson’s legacy of relentless pressing for LGBTQ2S+ rights was secure.

Another British Columbian profile in courage featured in the documentary is Amita Kuttner, the former interim leader of the Green Party of Canada and Canada’s first transgender leader of a national political party.

Others interviewed by director Guly are three members of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s cabinet: Seamus O’Regan Jr., Randy Boissonnault and Pascale St-Onge, the first out lesbian cabinet minister in Canadian history.

Viewers also meet Alberta New Democrat Blake Desjarlais, who is Métis and Canada’s first Two-Spirit MP, and Ontario Conservative MP Eric Duncan.

Duncan says in the film he has “a lot of respect for that generation that came out when it wasn’t easy to do so. They’ve made it easier for me to be who I am, doing what I’m doing in the House of Commons.”

Credit in good part, then, 70-year-old Robinson, who now lives with his partner in Cyprus. In Coming Out in Politics, Robinson said he was moved to reveal he was gay years before any other elected Canadian politician had come out because of “the incredible homophobia around the HIV-AIDS pandemic.”

He adds, “I had been attacked, long before I came out publicly, as being a faggot, anyway, by my political opponents.”

As director Guly notes in a recent piece about making the film published by the Hill Times, “It takes courage to enter politics. Having a thick skin helps, especially if you want to stay true to your convictions.

“There is no skin thick enough, though, to protect against attacks that are deeply personal.”

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'Coming out in Politics' is streaming on OUTtv’s streaming platforms worldwide, which in Canada include OUTtv.com, the OUTtv Prime channel and the OUTtv Apple TV channel.