Charges such as sodomy and gross indecency have long been used to explicitly target and persecute gay men and, in at least one case, a woman in Yellowknife . Historical records from the Royal Northwest Mounted Police indicate charges of indecency and sodomy as early as 1905 in the new provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan. In several cases, gay men were often designated as dangerous sexual offenders or psychopaths for no other reason than having intimate relationships with someone of the same sex.

In 1965, a Calgary man named Everett George Klippert became the last person in Canada to be arrested, tried, and imprisoned for gross indecency before the partial decriminalization of homosexual acts in 1969. Klippert was deemed “a criminal sexual psychopath” by the courts and incarcerated indefinitely until his release in 1971. Klippert’s release from prison was mainly due to the significant media attention drawn to his unjust imprisonment. After his release, Klippert lived in Edmonton until he died in 1996.

The persecution of gay men has a long and complex history in Edmonton, with early reports of men being charged with gross indecency at seasonal mining camps dating back to 1880. In 1942, the RCMP and Edmonton city police investigated ten men connected to Edmonton’s Strand Theatre, eventually laying thirty-seven charges of gross indecency, which resulted in nine men being convicted, six of whom served jail terms. As journalist-turned-Senator Paula Simons reported, the police “seized private love letters as evidence” and used the fact that one of the men had ordered a book by Oscar Wilde as evidence of “criminal perversion.” There was some speculation as to whether the accused men could receive a fair trial, as the charges “would naturally make all decent people in Edmonton apprehensive and disgusted.” In 2015, Edmonton author and playwright Darrin Hagen wrote, produced, and directed “Witch Hunt at the Strand” based on these events, using court records to recreate the overt homophobia and hysteria of the time.

Gross indecency charges against gay men were the subject of widespread media attention throughout the 1940s and 1950s in Canada. Police were particularly cunning when it came to eliciting confessions from those accused of gross indecency. In fact, in 1948, an appeal was allowed on a gross indecency charge in Edmonton after a judge found that a confession to a police officer by a man who had slept with another man was inadmissible on numerous counts. The 1940s and 1950s also saw a renewed interest in obscenity laws and pornographic materials available at newsstands, including anything LGBTQ2-related. The panic over indecent literature in Canada reached Edmonton in 1966 when The Edmonton Journal ran a story about a dinner held by the Edmonton chapter of Youth for Christ, where the organization’s national president, Wes Aarum, decried “clerics” who were said to be “encouraging teenagers to live in sin” by exposing them to homosexuality, “twilight pornography,” and “skin magazines.” He also bemoaned restricted adult films which were becoming more “sex orientated.”

In December 1967, the Federal Government introduced sweeping changes to the Canadian Criminal Code on issues related to sex and gender, including homosexuality, abortion, and divorce. Bill C-150, which received royal assent on June 27, 1969—coincidentally, on the same day as the Stonewall Riots in New York City—partially legalized same-sex sexual intercourse for consenting adults aged twenty-one and over and for all married persons regardless of age. These laws were changed again in 1987 when the charge of gross indecency was finally removed from the Criminal Code, and buggery was changed to more specifically refer to anal intercourse. However, the national hype surrounding the 1969 criminal reforms has recently been criticized by queer historians as being overzealous. The changes actually “recriminalized” homosexuality insofar as the omnibus bill only decriminalized anal intercourse in “private” and then only with no more than two persons present—this left group sex, public sex, and even bathhouses wide open for criminal persecution.

Nevertheless, the first national recognition of legal rights for LGBTQ2 Canadians was important and awakened a new societal consciousness, one that would insist on visibility and further equality under the law. This was a watershed moment, and there would be no looking back. In some cases, it seemed like LGBTQ2 equality moved two steps forward and one step backwards. Government policies and laws were almost always fraught with contradictions and half measures, the longstanding gay blood ban being but one modern example .

The 1970s, 80s and 90s saw several legal ups and downs for the LGBTQ2 community. Large bathhouse raids occurred in Montreal, Toronto, Edmonton, and Calgary as late as 2002. The Edmonton Police Service even had its own specialized investigations team called the Morality Control Unit, which investigated, sometimes with questionable tactics, what it believed to be vice crimes, which often included anything deemed to offend the moral standards of the community, including prostitution, pornography, gambling, lewdness, obscenity, and anything to do with homosexuality.

In 1975, two exotic dancers dressed in drag simulated live sex at Chez Pierre’s cabaret in downtown Edmonton and were arrested for immoral theatrical performance, a rare charge in the Criminal Code’s “corruption of morals” section. After an appeal and retrial, both performers were convicted. Then, in January 1980, Edmonton police confiscated the pornographic horror-comedy Dracula Sucks from the Jasper Cinema Centre even though the provincial censorship board had approved it. The cinema’s ownership group appealed the conviction to the Supreme Court of Canada, which ordered a retrial on the basis that the trial judge erred in law by confusing his own personal distaste for the film with the supposedly more objective “community standards test.”

In the early morning hours of May 30, 1981, after a months-long undercover operation, the Edmonton Police Service raided the Pisces Health Spa with assistance from the RCMP. The heavy-handed police raid, which led to dozens of charges brought against gay and bisexual men under Canada’s “bawdy house” provisions, proved to be a “watershed moment” for Edmonton’s LGBTQ2 community, as it helped to galvanize a new sense of community spirit and activism. Unfortunately, the fifty-six “found-ins” and owners of the Pisces were not treated fairly in a legal system, which was rife with homophobia. The found-ins were arrested and shuttled to a covert overnight arraignment at the courthouse, which took place at 5 a.m. The accused were denied legal counsel and encouraged to give evidence against each other. The men charged were issued fines, and if they pled guilty, they also received a criminal record, which for some still stands to this very day.

Police harassment and targeting of the LGBTQ2 community was a common occurrence, with gay men a frequent target. In 1976, two young men were charged and arrested for the crime of kissing in a parked car at 5 a.m. in Queen Elizabeth Park. Over a period of one month in the summer of 1988, almost twenty men were charged with committing indecent acts based on covert police operations in Victoria Park, Government House Park, and the washrooms at Borden Park. Alleged complaints from the city parks department were said to have prompted the investigations. Constable Stew Dickie, a member of the city park patrol, said he estimated 400 gay men “occasionally or often [visited parks] for sex in public washrooms, on park trails, and in secluded areas off the trails.” When a so-called “flood of complaints” began a new investigation in 1992, police tried a similar tactic they had used before in the Pisces Spa raid; they went undercover. This dragnet resulted in multiple men being charged, this time not only for indecent acts but also for sexual assault. Assault charges were laid when police officers claimed they had been groped while undercover. Accusations of entrapment and community outrage over these questionable tactics were significant factors in establishing the Edmonton Police Service’s Gay and Lesbian Liaison Committee in 1992. Ultimately, the charges were mostly dropped. However, reputational damage was done when the Edmonton Journal published the names of the men arrested in the park raids, mirroring their actions of more than a decade earlier during the Pisces Health Spa raid media coverage. Apparently, no lessons were learned.

Edmonton’s Law Courts were often the first line of defense against police harassment, questionable tactics, and trumped-up charges. The courthouse was also a place where media attention shone a spotlight on both the charges and the accused—often with dubious ethics and devastating results. As the years passed, the media’s portrayal changed, reflecting a growing public awareness and acceptance of LGBTQ2 people.

Thanks mainly to members of the LGBTQ2 community who stepped forward to help educate, advocate, and hold them accountable, the police and courts have also changed. However, more work remains to be accomplished. The fight for justice is far from over, especially for Indigenous, racialized, and trans members of our community.