Maple Leaf (Gardens) forever: Sex, Canadian historians, and national history, The

Charlotte: Was She or Wasn't She?

The excavation and politicization of residential school abuse by First Nations communities and historians is one example of the life-saving link between a public and its history. Still, throughout Who Killed Canadian History?, Granatstein maintains that most Canadian historians, with our heads buried in the "private," have "withdrawn from public dialogue" and lost touch with non-academic audiences (67). Here, as in so many other places in his polemic, Granatstein ignores the evidence. Consider the case of Charlotte Whitton and lesbian/gay history.

In February 1999, Whitton, a historical figure of some importance to both national and social history, became the cover girl for Capital Xtra!, Ottawa's lesbian and gay monthly newspaper. The muscle boys and apple-cheeked lesbians who usually adorn the front cover of this community publication were pushed aside and replaced by an old black and white photograph of a very prim and proper-looking Whitton. The occasion was the opening of the last of 134 boxes of personal papers Whitton deposited in the National Archives, a box she had told the Archives must remain closed until 1999, well after her death. The much-anticipated box contained dozens of letters Whitton wrote to Margaret Grier, her housemate and longtime companion of 30 years. The letters revealed an intimate and loving relationship between the two women and immediately sparked debate: was Whitton a lesbian? The question was put in Ottawa's mainstream daily newspaper to several prominent Canadian historians not unsympathetic to lesbian/gay history but who none the less rushed in with reassuring historical explanations about asexual Boston marriages and romantic friendships ("Charlotte Whitton's secret letters" Al and "Love letters of a popular politician" Ag). The gay press also seized upon the Whitton story and called upon lesbian/gay historians to answer the same "was she or wasn't she" question. In the context of a community forum, it was possible to recast the simplistic terms of the question, introduce debates over the roots of modem lesbian identity and argue that we could claim Whitton for lesbian history without forcing an identity upon her and without ignoring her complicated, conservative political impulses (Meade; Hannon). While both Bliss and Granatstein tend to view the private and public as mutually exclusive, the Whitton affair demonstrated the potential of "private life" to make history open out in interesting "public" ways. This may not be history that matters to Granatstein, but it is one example of the way history matters to lesbian and gay communities.

Arthur Lower's Political Love

Granatstein likes to say that historians` interest in "trivial" topics like Charlotte Whitton's sex life and the related death of Canadian history are products of the rise of social history since the 1960s and 1970s. But it would be wrong to imagine that current historians of sexuality, those of us reared on feminist and gay/lesbian history, were the first to write sex into Canadian history. Indeed, it was none other than Michael Bliss who wrote more than thirty years ago in one of the first articles on the history of sexuality in Canada about the "conspiracy of silence about sexuality in Canadian history" (Bliss 1970, 106).11 But we can go back further still.