As with our own Chris Brickell’s Mates and Lovers this year, one can only sigh at the amount of LGBT social history that remains to be unearthed in the most unlikely of places. Thus it is with a forthcoming Canadian documentary short film about the trial of two Sikh labourers entrapped and threatened with deportation over ‘gross indecency’, although celebrated Canadian independent gay film makers John Greyson and Richard Fung, and their collaborator, Ali Kazimi, are likely to produce a nuanced and intelligent piece about it.

So, why is the trial of Naina and Dalip Singh particularly interesting in the context of Canadian gay social history? Vancouver area social historian Brett Ingram became fascinated by the case as he delved in it, and discovered that ‘gross indecency’ cases were not uncommon in Canada during this period. Sikhs were British Imperial subjects, which conferred rights and privileges on them, so British Columbia’s governing class tried to discourage them through such acts of harrassment. Indeed, as Ingram, Greyson, Fung and Kazimi all note, there is doubt whether Dalip and Naina Singh actually even had sex with one another.

As with Chris Brickell’s discoveries about our own historic and legal context, Ingram and his cinematic counterparts note that prosecutions for ‘gross indecency’ marked an expanded scope for antigay criminalisation laws, expanding their ambit from anal sex and same-sex male rape to encompass broader forms of gay intimacy and sexual behaviour. Greyson notes wryly that some of the trial transcripts are rather racy as well!

The forthcoming film was filmed in Toronto’s Old City Hall, which is used as a courtroom still, and poses a series of questions about the context and prosecution. Given Greyson’s previous cinematic work, there’s an inevitable musical segment between the documentary segments, and does deal with ambiguities about whether or not the men entrapped were even guilty of the ‘crime’. Were Dalip and Naina Singh ‘just’entrapped by contemporary police and judicial racism? As with much New Zealand gay social history, such discourse is fragmentary, and research often raises more questions than it answers.

Moreover, as Chris notes in our own context, there was no coherent medico-legal concept of ‘the homosexual’ until the twenties or thirties in Canada, and these trials preceded that. Even more intriguingly, Chinese mine labourers had been similarly targeted. As one can agree, these trials and this documentary all represent a fascinating investigation in the intersection of racism, homophobia and law in Canada in the early twentieth century- as well as raising questions about whether parallel legal and judicial strategies were used in New Zealand, Australia and other contexts.

Recommended:

Matthew Hays: “Unearthing the Ignored and Forgotten” Xtra 13.08.08: http://www.xtra.ca