A Short History of Sexuality in Canada

For a long time, Canadian historians concentrated on politics, the economy, war and transportation, and sexuality received comparatively little attention. Since the late twentieth century, a growing body of scholarship has examined how laws, religion, medicine and community life shaped intimate behaviour across the country.

The subject spans many regions and communities, and its main themes include regulation, resistance and changing public attitudes.

Indigenous societies and colonial rule

Indigenous nations had, and continue to have, varied understandings of family, gender and sexuality. Some communities recognized roles for people who combined or crossed gender categories, and the modern term Two-Spirit draws on that heritage. European colonization brought church teaching and legislation that imposed different norms, and policies such as the Indian Act and residential schools are widely described as having disrupted Indigenous family structures.

Moral regulation in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

The Criminal Code of 1892 included offences touching on obscenity, prostitution, same-sex activity and the promotion of contraceptives. Enforcement fell unevenly on different groups, and public debate over birth control, venereal disease and censorship was active in the decades that followed.

Reform and rights

A major change came in 1969, when an omnibus criminal law bill decriminalized private sexual acts between consenting adults, removed restrictions on contraceptives and allowed abortion under conditions. Police raids on bathhouses in Toronto in 1981 prompted large public protests and became a landmark in organizing by gay and lesbian communities. In 1988 the Supreme Court of Canada struck down the existing abortion provisions of the Criminal Code, and the Civil Marriage Act of 2005 extended marriage to same-sex couples nationwide.

How the subject is studied

Scholars in history, sociology and gender studies draw on court records, newspapers, medical texts, community archives and oral histories. The Canadian Historical Association, the national professional body for historians, has supported research and discussion in this area, and university presses and local archives hold a growing collection of work. Historians continue to debate the weight owed to official records, which reflect regulators, compared with accounts from the people who were regulated.