Less happily, however, Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who formed a minority Conservative Alliance government in 2006, announced that his party would revisit the question of same-sex marriage despite predictions by Constitutional law experts that repeal of the same-sex marriage law would result in legal chaos.

Sponsor Message.

In December 2006, Harper kept his promise by introducing a bill that would have directed the government to prepare a bill to repeal the same-sex marriage law while at the same time allowing those marriages already conducted to stand and to permit civil unions. Widely perceived as a sop to the Conservative Alliance's religious base, the proposal was soundly defeated on a vote of 175 to 123. Shortly after the vote, the Prime Minister announced that the matter was settled and would not be reopened.

Pride Festivals

The cheers for the passage of Bill C-38 on July 19, 2005 were echoed at Montreal's gay pride festival, Divers/Cité, held a few days later. Like many pride celebrations across the nation, Montreal's, which dates back to 1992, began as a small parade and has grown into a week-long event. Some 200,000 people participated in Divers/Cité in 2005.

The Toronto pride festival began in 1981 as a protest by gay men against police harassment but is now a week of celebration of glbtq culture. Public officials, including the mayor, members of parliament, and the chief of police, took part in Pride Week 2005, which organizers said attracted around a million people, thus making it one of the largest celebrations in the world.

The success of the glbtq pride festivals mirrors progress in Canadian society at large. Although prejudice remains, there have been positive developments such as the sponsorship of the National Film Board of Canada for the work of lesbian and gay directors, including Lynne Fernie, Aerlyn Weissman, and David Adkin, whose films not only document Canada's glbtq heritage but also focus on educating young people about the problems faced by glbtq youth and necessity for acceptance--a full acceptance that is now not only ethically but also legally required in the wake of the passage of Bill C-38 and other pieces of legislation affirming the rights of glbtq Canadians.

In the new millennium, Canada has emerged as one of the world's most tolerant nations, a society committed to actually making real the ideals of justice and equality that other countries espouse but too often fail to practice. As a consequence, Canada has also become home to thriving glbtq communities and a welcoming destination to glbtq visitors.

Since the rise of the homosexual emancipation movement three decades ago, a handful of Canadian artists have confronted issues of gay and lesbian sexuality in their work.

Since the 1960s, Canadian gay and lesbian writers have produced a vibrant body of fiction, nonfiction, drama, and poetry.

The portrayal of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, and queer people in English Canadian television programming has been sporadic, but the advent of PrideVision promises to increase the number of shows developed for a glbtq audience.

The queer community has used documentary film to resurrect historical memory and to permit the marginalized to bear witness, as well as to build an image base that reflects our diversity and counters distorted representations.

Evangelical Christians, who tend to be fundamentalists and socially conservative, have not been welcoming to glbtq people.

Lutheranism is riven into numerous denominations, which vary widely in their attitudes toward homosexuality and in their acceptance of gay men and lesbians as full participants in church life.

In the last two decades, Montreal has become friendly to and supportive of its glbtq citizens and visitors.

Early in the gay rights movement activists challenged organized labor to broaden its struggle against discrimination to include sexual identity; consequently labor unions became some of the first mainstream organizations to call for equal rights.

Although gay and lesbian Québécois literature has only a fifty-year history, it has flourished and seems destined to merge into mainstream Québécois literature.

Historically, the Roman Catholic Church may be the institution most responsible for the suffering of individuals involved in same-sex sexual relationships.

Lesbian and gay couples have been fighting for the freedom to marry since the dawn of the modern glbtq struggle for equality; despite some success abroad, progress toward same-sex marriage in the United States has been slow.

Sodomy laws, which provided the legal basis for police harassment of sexual minorities, were conclusively overturned by the United States Supreme Court in 2003, after more than half a century of efforts at reform.

Toronto's glbtq community has gone from being a hidden subculture to a power base in politics, the economy, and the arts.

The United Church of Canada has been instrumental in the increased acceptance of glbtq rights, including same-sex marriage, in Canada.

With a constant influx of immigrants and a vigorous and adaptable economy, Vancouver is a progressive city with a large and active glbtq community.

Edward Carpenter, a champion of both women's and homosexuals' liberation, was one of the great socialist visionaries of England at the turn of the twentieth century.

One of Canada's first gay activists, Jim Egan began demanding respect and equal rights in the late 1940s; in his later years he mounted a challenge to Canada's law on spousal retirement benefits.

Henry Havelock Ellis--British psychologist and writer--was one of the first modern thinkers to challenge Victorian taboos against the frank and objective discussion of sex.

Canadian filmmaker Lynne Fernie has had a varied career in the arts, but is best known as the co-director of the celebrated 1992 documentary Forbidden Love: The Unashamed Stories of Lesbian Lives.

André Gide, one of the premier French writers of the twentieth century, reflected his homosexuality in many of his numerous works.

Elsa Gidlow, known to many as the "poet-warrior," was unabashedly visible as an independent woman, a lesbian, a writer, and a bohemian-anarchist at a time when such visibility was both unusual and potentially dangerous.

Senior Pastor of the Metropolitan Community Church of Toronto, the Reverend Doctor Brent Hawkes has worked with fervor and dedication to secure equal rights for glbtq Canadians.

An early leader of the Canadian gay rights movement, George Hislop was an indefatigable fighter for equality.

The most important sex researcher of the twentieth century, Alfred C. Kinsey contributed groundbreaking studies of male and female sexual behavior in America.

Olympian Brian Orser, known for both his athleticism and artistry, led a resurgence of Canada as a force to be reckoned with in men's figure skating; after being outed in a palimony suit, he has become an advocate for glbtq rights.

The first world Outgames, held in Montreal in the summer of 2006, inaugurated what promises to be a quadrennial athletic and cultural event that combines the pursuit of athletic excellence with the joyous celebration of community.

Marcel Proust is the author of A la recherche du temps perdu, one of the major achievements of Modernism and a great gay novel.

In his novels about hustling, preeminently City of Night and Numbers, John Rechy moves from the world of homosexual behavior into the world of gay identity.

Though dealing forthrightly with lesbian and gay subjects, the novels and criticism of Jane Rule are deliberately nonpolitical in their commitment to diverse communities and a range of experiences.

Edward Sagarin, writing as Donald Webster Cory, produced important books that prepared the stage for the gay liberation movement, but under his own name he later attacked the very movement he inspired.

Admired through the ages as one of the greatest lyric poets, the ancient Greek writer Sappho is today esteemed by lesbians around the world as the archetypal lesbian and their symbolic mother.

Olympic medalist Mark Tewksbury was closeted throughout his competitive swimming career, but since coming out has become an advocate for glbtq rights.

Celebrating an ideal of manly love in both its spiritual and physical aspects, Walt Whitman has exerted a profound and enduring influence on gay literature.

Oscar Wilde is important both as an accomplished writer and as a symbolic figure who exemplified a way of being homosexual at a pivotal moment in the emergence of gay consciousness.

Canadian human rights activist Douglas Wilson is also remembered as the life partner of American-Canadian writer/performer Peter McGehee; together they married activism with art and entertainment.

The Wolfenden Report, a 1957 British government study, recommended that homosexual behavior between consenting adults in private no longer be criminalized in England.