ESC: English Studies in Canada

In the 1960s and 1970s, the Royal Canadian Mounted Polic (rcmp) participated in and contributed to an international campaign to monitor queer people across North America. Part of this campaign involved tape recording queer people's private conversations in Canada and creating archives of these audio data to build cases that would incriminate them and regulate their behaviours (Kinsman and Gentile 121). Conversely, in 1969, Canadian Justice Minister and Attorney General Pierre Elliot Trudeau passed Bill C-150 to decriminalize homosexual acts, which was followed by his now infamous public declaration, "There's no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation." While the bill may have improved some of queer people's lived conditions, the public declaration reinforced the closeting of homosexuality as a private matter. During the same period, queer and feminist writers participated in public literary readings during which they listened to, and recorded, each other read and discuss poetry. What may have begun as literary gatherings evolved into opportunities for these writers to discuss their lived experiences as queer people and their political concerns. For instance, during The Poetry Series held at Sir George Williams University (hereafter sgwu) in Montreal from 1964 to 1975, which featured performances by canonical writers such as Margaret [End Page 85] Atwood, George Bowering, Irving Layton, Al Purdy, and bpNichol, several queer and feminist writers participated in recorded poetry readings that critiqued heterosexist social norms. While most of the series' programming foregrounded the work of heterosexual white men, an issue not unique to The Poetry Series,¹ the series included queer performances by feminist writers Phyllis Webb in 1966, Margaret Avison in 1967, and Dorothy Livesay in 1971. Notably, in 1969 and 1970 the series saw an increase in performances by queer male writers as it showcased the work of five gay male writers (Robin Blaser, Robert Duncan, bill bissett, Allen Ginsberg, and Stan Persky) and two queer women (Muriel Rukeyser and Daphne Marlatt). Whereas the rcmp may have listened to these performances to extract incriminating information, how might a queer listening practice rooted in queer perspectives amplify the ways in which 2slgbtq+ people publicly articulated their lives prior to and after the decriminalization of homosexuality in Canada?

To address this question, this article will closely engage with reel-to-reel tape recordings of these readings that the SpokenWeb research network began being digitized in 2007. At the time of their recording, the reel-to-reel tapes functioned as a form of self and community archiving. Now, they provide researchers insight into the ways that the series forged literary exchange across social barriers. How then might listening to performances of queer and feminist writers reveal the lived experiences of being queer or "out of line" (Ahmed 103) at the time of these events? As archival scholars indicate, the archive can be a site of political activism for contemporary social movements (Eichhorn x). Specifically, the archive can be a site of "affective power" (Cvetkovich 241), grounded in emotions tied to being queer, that facilitates the documentation of queer history (241) and creates opportunities for holding the past accountable to enact social justice today (Morra 4). Moreover, the literary archive can facilitate the reconstruction of literary events and create opportunities to examine those events' social significance (Camlot and McLeod 10). In engaging with literary audio collections, Deanna Fong and Karis Shearer have conducted what they call a "feminist close listening" to "trac[e] citational networks of women's contributions—recognizing their labour and re-membering histories with their names." Building on the recent body of feminist scholarship attending to the archived literary event, this article considers what queer listening can offer for recuperating queer contributions to The Poetry Series, unpacking writers' queer affective power, and [End Page 86] documenting sociocultural challenges affecting queer people at the time. As I postulate, through this listening practice we can gain insight into the ways that queer people publicly articulated their homosexuality as well as feminist perspectives in the series. We can also hear the material evidence of the affective power of...