February 16, 2010 Features

On ‘manifesse’ contre les Jeux Olympiques

A history of subversive surveillance

by Laura Beeston

The Olympics has a long history of sweeping social minorities, civil rights, dissenting politics, and protestors out of the streets GRAPHIC VIVIEN LEUNG

The history and solidarity of queers and other so-called subversives in the face of increasing surveillance and repression during the Olympics was the topic on the table during “Street Clean-ups, Street Protest: Criminalization and Resistance from ‘76 to 2010,” a lecture hosted by Q-team and Quebec Public Interest Research Group-McGill on Feb. 7.

Though much has changed in the 34 years since Quebec hosted the Olympic Games and many miles separate Montreal and Vancouver, important patterns of social struggle are repeating themselves, according to activists and authors, giving context to national issues that have been thrust into the forefront as Canada basks once again in the world’s spotlight.
“At the moment, the feeling in Vancouver has various aspects to it that were the same that [Montreal] had in 1970s,” said Patrizia Gentile, who launched her book The Canadian War on Queers: National Security as Sexual Regulation at the lecture.

Through the rhetoric of security, Gentile said, “Olympic clean-ups today are really about the same things: silencing anyone who is speaking from a place of anti-imperialism, anti-colonialism or anti-capitalism.”

Reported by various alternative media sources since B.C. won the bid, the human rights-related issues playing out in Vancouver encompass themes of increased police repression, criminalization of minority groups and suspicion of anti-Olympic organizing.

What’s happening in Vancouver today can be compared to an Olympic-era Montreal in the ‘70s, where gay bar raids and lefty-inclined organizations were surveyed and interrogated in the lead-up to the opening ceremonies.

“[Surveillance] was actually on a much larger scale than we really imagined—even in our wildest, most paranoid conversations,” said Ross Higgins, founder of Archives gaies du Québec and professor of sexuality studies and queer theory at Concordia University. “They were basically keeping track of what we were having for breakfast,” he joked.

“We are able to show, through Access to Information requests, the way in which the Montreal police force were in constant communication with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, trying to get surveillance on gay bars and radicals living in Montreal,” added Gentile. “[They] were particularly interested in the left movement and used the Olympic clean-up campaign not just to silence the queer community, but also to find whatever connections it had to ‘the left’ in order to create records and collect names.”

Searching through a massive amount of declassified documents from the government in researching Canadian War on Queers, Gentile also discovered an attempt by the RCMP and Canadian military to exempt themselves from the guaranteed anti-discrimination rights outlined in Section 15 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

“They argued that homosexuals were basically operationally ineffective to securing the Games,” said Gentile. “It’s amazing that we’re able to trace this history. You can also find that the Canadian Security Intelligence Service has lists and lists, hundreds of pages of groups put under surveillance—from housewife committees right down to the revolutionary Marxist groups—and any student group is on these lists as well. [Students] are also seen as subversive because of our arguments against the nation.”

“We actually owe the security apparatus a very big debt, because [they] documented things we weren’t at the time, and now we have all these notes,” added Higgins.

These major crackdowns and anti-queer purges were a major part of state formation, the panellists argued.

“Gentrification, moral and social cleansing initiatives and criminalization were national campaigns,” Gentile contended. “They are still very much queer issues, and were queer issues in 1976.”

Bridging the disconnect between different generations of queers and different eras of Olympic Games reveals important patterns of intersecting social turmoil and institutional interests.
“We were and we are in a position of struggle,” said Gentile. “Especially around the time of the Olympics, where issues of nationalism are always at the forefront.”