Connecting Struggles

Every life is a meandering stream, with intersecting currents, challenges, and serendipity that shape the choices made and paths taken.

 

Growing up in southern Ontario in the 1960s, I didn’t know a single gay person and remained convinced I was the only one. It was the sense of profound exclusion that led me to leave my community.

 

My journey took me first to Belgium and France, where I met refugees fleeing the military regimes in Chile and Argentina.The stories I heard impacted me deeply, fuelling a political awakening and engagement with Latin America that continues to this day. In the early 1980s, I spent a semester in Guatemala as a student. The country was on the cusp of the Rios Montt dictatorship, the most brutal period of Guatemala’s armed conflict. I witnessed army press gangs grabbing Indigenous youth from buses and heard accounts of growing repression.

 

Returning to Canada, with fellow students at the University of Guelph, we formed a Latin America solidarity group. This coincided with my own “coming out”as a gay man and to a parallel engagement with the emerging movement we now call the LGTBQ2 movement (lesbian, gay, trans, bisexual, queer, and two-spirited).

 

As a student activist and then as staff of a Canadian human rights coalition, I helped raise awareness about the widespread human rights violations taking

place throughout Latin America. During frequent visits to Chile, Peru, and Colombia, I met with victims of torture or people searching for their disappeared loved ones, and helped bring their stories to light in places such as the United Nations Human Rights Commission.

 

With few exceptions, the human rights community I encountered on my trips didn’t focus on LGBTQ2 issues. But the suffering was there, and in response, the movement was strengthening. These separate calls for justice – both profoundly human rights struggles – began to intersect more in my life, and more widely.