Through the policies of its Censor Board, police and Canada
Customs, Ontario has made international headlines and gained a
reputation for being one of the most restrictive jurisdictions
with regard to censorship anywhere in the Western world. The
state of censorship in Ontario was seriously compared to that in
(apartheid era) South Africa by internationally renowned film
director Dusan Makaveyev at an illegal screening of his work in
Toronto.
A certain level of violent and sexually explicit material is
tolerated within the mainstream milieu, and even within the
mainstream art community. Images of women being raped or images
of people being tortured are tolerated within certain
circumstance. The rape of the Sabine Women, the Martyrdom of St.
Agathe and the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ are iconographic
pictures which many artists throughout history have depicted and
are consistently represented within art museums. Meanwhile, it
is when artists challenge our dominant culture, and when their
work is a site where sex, particularly queer sex or a place where
sex and race intersects, that we face resistance and censorship
due to sexism, racism and homophobic reactions from our dominant
culture.* At the same time degrading
images, particularly of women, can be found widely in mainstream
society in everything from mainstream advertising to "wank"
magazines. Some of the most obscene images I have ever seen were
in a wank-mag for heterosexual men that is classified as and
supposedly about "art photography" - descriptions of which are
not worth repeating herein.
Police and customs have interpreted the Butler decision in a
distinctly non-feminist fashion and pursue a selectively
homophobic policing practice. When the long unaccountable arms
of government censor work which I can identify with as a gay
man, everything from a film by Bruce La Bruce to an exhibition by
Evergon, they censor part of what I am. It is as though they'd
rather burn me for being "obscene", but failing that, they'll
burn everything about me.
Canada Customs targets deliveries to certain destinations. Glad
Day Bookstore, Canada's first and largest Gay and Lesbian
Bookstore must endure having roughly 75% of their shipments
opened, delayed, lost, forgotten and occasionally sent back
without more than a handful of Canadians even knowing about it.
Glad Day simply lacks the financial resources to take each case
to court. In the case of The
Joy of Gay Sex, Glad Day won the right to read and sell
the book after an exhausting and costly $20,000.00 court case.
Coles Bookstore, which also carried the book, was never charged.
The tactics of Canada Customs have become very sinister. In late
1991 Canada Customs were forced to pay $2,157.74 to Glad Day "to
compensate for books that were damaged or lost." The
reimbursement resulted from a civil lawsuit launched by Glad Day
in 1990 against the Ministry in federal court.
Many other Canadian bookstores which take a visible political
stance against censorship, such as Pages in Toronto and Le
Derneir Mot in Montreal, have been specifically targeted by
Canada Customs. What makes the targeting of Canada's four gay
and lesbian bookstores particularly outrageous, is that those
people who would be offended by the material in question are not
likely to be shopping at one in the first place!
At its most basic level, I can not understand why government
bureaucrats get to see material that they forbid the rest of us
to see. Not only do they not have to pay for the material in
question, we actually pay them to see it. If the rational for
censorship under the Butler Decision is that "obscene" material
automatically corrupts minds and produces anti-social behaviour,
then what, I ask, is the same material doing to the minds of
Canada Customs officers?
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