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

When the Maple Leaf Gardens scandal first broke, people were forced into what for many was the disconcerting realization that sex had penetrated one of the most sacred arenas of Canadian nationalism. It shouldn't have come as such a surprise for sex is a national issue and nations depend on sex. Put another way, nations require particular sentiments of attachment, ones that often rest at least in part on the erotic. In the national anthem customarily sung before a Canadian hockey game, the libidinal affect that binds citizen to nation is called "true patriot love."

In view of the imbrication of sex and nation, it is bewildering to learn there are those who believe that the writing of sexuality's past has tom asunder the story of Canada's national history. One of the first to make the charge was the defender of Maple Leaf Gardens, Michael Bliss. In his much-cited article "Privatizing the Mind: The Sundering of Canadian History, The Sundering of Canada," Bliss drew attention to the shift in historical writing away from national history, defined as political and constitutional history, towards what he characterized as "non-national connections ... towards the private and personal." As one example of this trend, Bliss pointed to Mackenzie King. According to Bliss, historians and the public, both with a penchant for the prurient and the perverse, had reduced the once great leader to a "sexual wimp." Rather than regard King, as Bliss did, as "the most important Canadian politician in the first half of the twentieth century," Canadians were content to view the prime minister as little more than a pathetic and comic foil against which we could measure our "sexual ... superiority." Summing up historical work on the "private" King, along with similar studies of other leading Canadian politicians, Bliss dismissed them as reflections of a "narcissistic" culture's "concern for private lives, states of mind, relationships, self-fulfillment" (Bliss 1991/92, 6, 10-11).

If Bliss believed that historians' unseemly attention to private life represented an indecent assault upon Canadian history, others held social history responsible for more murderous plots. In Who Killed Canadian History?, J.L. Granatstein indicted social historians for wanting "to write about ordinary people, not the leaders, the boring old white males who dominated the traditional history." Labour and women's historians were the most culpable, but so too were historians of "cities and towns, the Maritimes and the West, the immigrants and the sojourners, the gays and lesbians." In the long, slow death of Canadian history, things had degenerated to such an extent that it had become more important "to document gay men's experiences in Toronto bath houses than to study the boring lives of prime ministers" (56, 59). Gay bathhouses? A fascinating topic, but, to my knowledge, there exists no work on gay bathhouses in Canada done by social historians? But let's take the gay bathhouses Granatstein fantasized as a clue he suspects the history of sexuality in the death of Canadian history.