Douglas Wilson, poet, teacher, advocate for gay and lesbian rights (born 11 October 1950 in Meadow Lake, SK; died 26 September 1992 in Toronto, ON). Doug Wilson became the first gay public figure in Saskatchewan in 1975, after his attempt to start a gay association at the University of Saskatchewan resulted in Wilson being suspended from his role as a student supervisor. His case was the first concerning gay rights to be heard by the Saskatchewan Human Rights Commission (SHRC). Wilson later became president of the Gay Community Centre of Saskatoon and executive director of the Saskatchewan Association on Human Rights. He also co-founded the Saskatchewan Gay Coalition and founded the publishing company Stubblejumper Press. In 1988, he became one of the first openly gay men in Canada to run for federal office.
Early Life and Education
Doug Wilson was born and raised on a farm near Meadow Lake, Saskatchewan. After high school, he moved to Saskatoon to complete an undergraduate degree in Education at the University of Saskatchewan. He briefly taught in public schools in the small town of Makwa before enrolling as a graduate student in Educational Foundations at USask, where he lectured undergraduate classes and supervised teachers in training.
Court Case
In September 1975, Wilson placed an ad in the student newspaper soliciting interest in a gay campus organization. In response, the dean of the College of Education suspended Wilson from supervising students. He claimed that Wilson’s open homosexuality and involvement in the movement for gay liberation would hurt the program’s relationship with local public schools.
In response, the Committee to Defend Doug Wilson was formed. It brought the case to the Saskatchewan Human Rights Commission (SHRC), marking the first time it accepted a case on gay rights. However, the university filed an injunction and appealed to a provincial court. It determined that although discrimination on the basis of sex was prohibited in the province’s Fair Employment Practices Act, the same was not true of sexual orientation. The SHRC was forced to drop Wilson’s case.
Wilson garnered considerable media attention and public sympathy, however. In March 1976, the university adopted a policy that sexual orientation would not be considered in hiring decisions hiring or the assignment of duties.
Community Groups and Publishing
Now the province’s first openly gay public figure, Doug Wilson decided to drop out of the graduate program and focus on movement building. He eventually became president of the Gay Community Centre of Saskatoon and executive director of the Saskatchewan Association on Human Rights. He also assisted in the founding of the Saskatchewan Gay Coalition, which made an effort to reach gay people in small rural communities. He also founded a small publishing company called Stubblejumper Press and self-published its first book: The Myth of the Boy: Poems (1977).
In 1979, Wilson met his life partner, Peter McGehee, on a trip to San Francisco. In 1983, they both moved to Toronto. In Saskatoon, Wilson had published a newsletter called Gay Saskatchewan, which achieved a broad reach in North American rural communities. In Toronto, he took up similar work by publishing a newsletter called Focus on Equality, as well as a magazine called Rites: For Lesbian and Gay Liberation. Both publications reached beyond the community of gay men to engage with women, lesbians and racialized minorities.
Wilson soon began working in the Race Relations and Equity Office of the Toronto Board of Education (now the Toronto District School Board). He helped develop anti-oppressive school curricula. He also organized an annual student conference opposing apartheid in South Africa.
Political Involvement
In 1988, Doug Wilson entered politics by running for Parliament as the NDP candidate for Rosedale — a riding that included the Gay Village and also one of Toronto’s wealthiest enclaves. This made him one of the first openly gay men to run for federal office. (Vancouver-area MP Svend Robinson had only come out of the closet earlier that year.) In the midst of the campaign, however, Wilson was hospitalized with pneumocystis pneumonia and tested positive for AIDS.
During the campaign, Wilson was reluctant to focus too much attention on the AIDS struggle; as his friend Tim McCaskell later wrote, “He didn’t want to be pigeonholed as a one-issue candidate. His commitment to social justice was far more expansive than gay rights or AIDS.” The following year, however, Wilson would become heavily involved in McCaskell’s group AIDS Action Now!, then the leading organization pushing for proactive policy responses to the crisis.
Death and Legacy
McGehee died in September 1991. The following year, Doug Wilson travelled to New York, San Francisco and Saskatchewan to scatter McGehee’s ashes. Wilson died in September 1992. In 1995, the University of Saskatchewan recognized his contribution by initiating the Doug Wilson Award to honour advocates of gay and lesbian rights at the university. In 2009, filmmaker David Geiss released the docudrama Stubblejumper, about Wilson’s life and work.