ARTICLE 3.00: NO DISCRIMINATION: “SEXUAL ORIENTATION”

In the summer of 1978, when I arrived at Acadia to take up a position in Classics, the First Collective Agreement had just gone into effect. It contained, of course, a “No Discrimination” article. However, instead of listing “sexual orientation” as one of the prohibited grounds of discrimination, it specified, rather curiously, “lawful sexual acts.” Apparently, so I heard later, the representatives of the Board of Governors, did not feel comfortable with the term “sexual orientation” and thus insisted on a phrase that, I would surmise, was also meant to cover heterosexual common-law relationships. Did the discomfort with “sexual orientation” exist on account of the suggestion of “homosexuality” that was transparent in it? In any case, in the next Collective Agreement, if I remember correctly, the standard term “sexual orientation” replaced “lawful sexual acts.”

My settling down in Wolfville to live with my male partner could leave little doubt with anyone about my sexual orientation, although at that time, more than a quarter century ago, I regarded this fact as well as the nature of my relationship as a strictly private matter. However, incidents of verbal harassment, which were instigated mainly by male students living on campus and were directed at both Scott and myself, accumulated over the next few years and made it impossible to stick to this initial resolve. Things came to a head in the fall of 1979 with a physical assault on Scott just off-campus by a few (male) Acadia university students. There was no established procedure at that time for registering complaints and initiating a formal disciplinary process for verbal and physical harassment, and there was certainly no one with the authority and competency of an Equity Officer. The administrator whom we saw was very sympathetic and even promised to write a little blurb in the Athenaeum (which he did), but he also told us that it was out of the question to associate the incident in question with “homosexuality”: he would just use the term “political beliefs” in the Athenaeum, since it was his judgment that the Board of Governors would not want the University be associated, in any way at all, with “homosexuality.”

I should say here that when the incident became public knowledge, we did receive a lot of support from students and faculty alike, and, to make a long story short, the matter was finally taken care of through the police and the courts.

It will be obvious to all of you that the progress made at Acadia since then has been immense. Already in 1985, Matt Hughes of the School of Music and I felt emboldened to apply for spousal benefits (mainly medical) for our respective partners. Although Maritime Medical, the insurance company principally affected, balked at this for a long time and there was also some last-minute blustering from the full Board of Governors, by the spring of 1987 these benefits were in place. Here the vigorous support we received from the beginning from AUFA was crucial to our success, and with this great victory, Acadia became the second Canadian university (after York) to remove a major barrier of discrimination.

I think it is fair to say that in the student community, too, there has been a lot of progress over the past few decades. Already in the late eighties there was a lesbian and gay student group operating on campus; this was also open to faculty as well as members of the wider community. It, however, was still a semi-covert affair that permitted and enjoyed little publicity. By contrast, since the mid-nineties a much more vigorous and open “Acadia Pride” student organization has been active on campus.

These great strides forwards at Acadia, of course, reflect the great progress made in our country at large. Even so, there is no reason for complacency or profuse self-congratulation. A student, Gary Owen Porter, writing in the Nov. 3 issue of the Athenaeum (p. 5), speaks of the “homophobic remarks” he has overheard from students and the insulting “graffiti found in and around various residences.” This may not impinge as directly on us as faculty, but ultimately, as the Mission Statement of our university proclaims, we and our students are bound up in the same community of learning, and thus we cannot argue that the displays of homophobia still turning up among our students lie outside our sphere of active responsibility; that, after all, we have an Equity Officer now to deal with these. We should always be prepared, both in our teaching as well as in our more informal contacts with our students, or indeed in any opportunity that offers itself, to make it clear that any form of discrimination, whether officially targeted (as in Article 3.00) or not, in fact any expression of hostility and prejudice, has no place whatsoever in a civilized community, and certainly not in one that professes the ideals of a liberal education.

Beert Verstraete

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