Book Review: Prairie Fairies: A History of Queer Communities and People in Western Canada, 1930-1985
This article was originally published in the Autumn 2017 edition of Folklore Magazine.
Book Review: Prairie Fairies: A History of Queer Communities and People in Western Canada, 1930-1985
By Valerie J. Korinek
Published by University of Toronto Press, 2018
528 pages, 30 illustrations, softcover
Price: $42.95
ISBN 978-0-8020-9531-2
I was excited when I first heard that Valerie Korinek was writing a history of queer people on the Prairies. Needless to say, I had eagerly awaited its arrival on bookstore shelves. My eagerness also came from waiting for any work that recognized the region as part of a larger national queer history. I was not alone in my excitement. A history of queer people on the Prairies offering a queer perspective is long overdue. Indeed, Korinek herself writes Prairie Fairies “opens a window into a vibrant, larger queer world that has flown under the historical radar for far too long” (6). The book many have been waiting for is here and it has certainly been worth the wait.
Valerie Korinek’s Prairie Fairies is her first monograph on queer history in the west, and one of her many publications on the subject of the history of gender and sexuality in twentieth-century Canada. Using over eighty oral history interviews as well as archival collections Prairie Fairies specifically “seeks to historicize same-sex desire in the Prairies” (4). And Korinek does so successfully by bringing stories of queer communities to the forefront and extinguishing the assumption of heterosexuality as the “default” within the region’s history.
Indeed, Korinek applies a queer perspective in this book, which utilizes terminology and labels of identity offered from historical actors themselves. As Korinek explains, history from a queer perspective is different than a “gay history” in that it uses the narrators’ own understandings of the world to build a conceptual framework. Korinek breaks with overused contemporary “binaries of gay or straight, “out” and closeted” (6), enabling her to discuss a history of queer people before 1969, when openly identifying as queer was not safe or legal. By using a queer perspective, Korinek brings the Prairies into a historical narrative that has largely focused on urban centres in Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal.
In the same vein, Korinek critiques the historical trend of urbanizing sexuality – a trend that ties sexuality to urban centres. She highlights that this understanding of sexuality and queer life as inherently urban makes rural, small town, and western queer people, communities, and activism invisible. Breaking with this trend, Korinek highlights the ways the unique regional context of the West shaped queer persons’ experiences.
Focusing on five Prairie cities – Saskatoon, Regina, Winnipeg, Edmonton, and Calgary – Prairie Fairies exposes networks between rural communities and these urban spaces, as well as networks between these cities themselves.
For example, Korinek highlights that there was little room for separatism in queer communities and organizing on the Prairies, thanks to smaller populations spread out across a vast and diverse geography. That being said, Korinek also offers analysis of fractures within queer communities based on struggles around class, race, gender, and levels of education.
Korinek divides Prairie Fairies into three parts, organized chronologically and topically. The first part “1930-1969 Queer Spaces and Opportunities” explores the history of queer life on the Prairies before the formal formation of queer spaces in the 1970s and onward. This section highlights stories of queer life in urban and rural spaces. Ranging from bath houses in Winnipeg to lesbian couples living together rurally, the section “captures individuals who did not fit into present-day categories of sexual orientation and affords a more nuanced portrait of queer lives on the prairies” (23). The first chapter centres on Winnipeg and how queer life thrived in the city from the 1930s through the 1960s. The second chapter turns to rural and urban Saskatchewan prior to 1970, engaging with stories of “double lives,” cross-dressing, sexual play, homosocial spaces (spaces for social relationships between persons of the same sex that are not romantic or sexual, such as friendships), and a variety of other experiences.
Part two, “1970-1985 Communities, Community Building, and Culture,” examines the formation of “explicitly gay and lesbian organizations, spaces, and culture” (23) in the Prairies. Each chapter in this section focuses on specific urban centres (Winnipeg, Saskatoon and Regina, and Edmonton and Calgary, respectively). Taken together the chapters in this section highlight the important work of queer people to establish services and spaces for their communities. Korinek describes community building on the Prairies as people working together and, no doubt, driving long distances to ensure survival in harsh conditions (weather) despite a dispersed population. She argues this shared history of community survival shaped queer organizing and community-building strategies. Therefore, Korinek illuminates the distinctly Prairie approach to sharing resources, knowledge, and people power. Korinek explains that after 1969 distinctly queer centres, clubs, religious groups, newsletters, and bars, emerged and that queer events like Metamorphosis attracted rural and urban dwellers alike.
The third and final section of the book, “1970-1985 Activism, Reaction, Visibility, and Violence,” focuses on activism in the region. Within the individual chapters, focusing on Winnipeg, Saskatoon, and Edmonton, Korinek interrogates how activists mobilized in reaction against homophobia, violence, raids, and queer-bashing, while also including activism of pride events and campaigning for “rights.” She reveals how some of these cases strengthened relationships between queer and straight people, while in other cases individuals chose to maintain “forms of discreet subcultural life” (25).
Korinek’s examination of the unique way queer communities and activism were established on the Prairies offers a nuanced understanding of queer people and communities. As Korinek herself attests, the stories in Prairie Fairies “ironically fit beautifully in the Prairie historiography at the very same time that their existence challenges everything we thought we knew about these provinces” (26). Prairie Fairies is a must-read for Canadians – Prairie folk, Central Canadians, and coastal dwellers alike.
Karissa Robyn Patton
KARISSA ROBYN PATTON is a historian of gender and sexuality, health, and medicine. She grew up in the Canadian Prairies and earned her PhD at the University of Saskatchewan where she studies feminist reproductive health activism in 1970s Southern Alberta. She is currently working as an Interdisciplinary Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh.
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