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

There is a pressing need to reconfigure national history along with national belonging or citizenship, and sexuality - or what Jeffrey Weeks refers to as "the sexual citizen" - has a role to play in that transformative process.14 Michael Bliss would have us believe that our interest in subjects such as gender and sex, coupled with our supposed retreat from the public sphere, have privatized historians' minds. This, however, is a fundamental misreading of the past thirty years of social, economic and political change. It is the public sphere that has become increasingly privatized after decades of drift towards the right, while that which has in the past been considered private - gender and sex - has become loudly and visibly public since the rise of the feminist and gay/lesbian movements. The sexual citizen is very much the product of these economic and political transformations of the public and private, and as such is well-placed to respond. As Weeks explains, "the idea of sexual citizenship ... is about enfranchisement, about inclusion, about belonging, about equity and justice" (39). In Canada, the sexual citizen of the First Nations calls for indigenous people to "reclaim the sexual and the erotic" as part of the "process of decolonization" (Akiwenzie-Damm 97). The sexual citizen from the ranks of youth demands enfranchisement, including full sexual rights. The sexual citizen as hockey fan demands an end to the unchecked power of coaches and the game's ingrained culture of violence, homophobia and sexual assault. The poor or working-class sexual citizen struggles for economic justice and resists the nation's attempts to unload its social and economic responsibilities back onto individuals and families. The gay/lesbian/queer sexual citizen is here to point out the power of so-called pedophilia to push politics, and to warn that ignoring this fact only leaves us ill-equipped to understand and respond to something that by times occupies national political attention and foments serious social tensions. (Over the course of writing this paper the Supreme Court of Canada handed down its decision on a challenge to the law prohibiting the possession of child pornography, provincial ministers of justice launched a campaign to raise the age of consent, the leader of the federal opposition used taxpayers' money to defend himself in court after libelling a lawyer for defending a man charged with a child-related sex offence and a Toronto-area teacher had her teaching license revoked for sending love-letters to a 14-year-old male youth. Do we need further evidence of the powerful place of "pedophilia" in political and social life?)

As for national histories, we have at least two different visions from which to choose. We can have Granatstein's limited and mean-spirited national history, one that excludes women, workers, First Nations, gays and lesbians and many others. Or we might choose instead to embrace some version of Berton's more expansive vision of national history, one more congruent with the notion of sexual citizenship and premised on the protection of minorities from the tyranny of nations and their exclusionary impulses.