Northern Life reporter Heidi Ulrichsen spoke with social activist Gary Kinsman recently. The 55-year-old Laurentian University sociology professor cares deeply about poverty, gay rights, the environment, tuition fees, globalization and peace, and he’s not afraid to fight for what he believes in.
NL: You make a comfortable living as a university professor. Why do you care about the plight of the poor?
GK: From my vantage point, I make an obscene amount of money. I now make more than $100,000 a year. What those of us with higher incomes should do is donate money not just to charities but to activist organizations. I donate $250 a month to the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty. I care about poverty because I’ve had a relatively privileged life.
NL: What is the most pressing issue in Greater Sudbury that most people don’t know about?
GK: I think people know about poverty, but it’s still the most pressing issue. Homelessness is a major problem, a lot of people have incredible difficulty surviving on Ontario Works and the Ontario Disability Support Program.
There are a lot of people who are working at minimum wage jobs that are living in poverty as well. People may know about poverty being a problem, but I don’t think they know how significant a problem it is in people’s lives.
NL: What should be done about poverty?
GK: I think the best thing that can be done for those folks who aren’t working for wages right now is to raise the social assistance rates by the same percentage they were cut by the Tories in 1995 – 22 percent. I think the special dietary supplement should be reinstated. I certainly support raising the minimum wage to $10 an hour.
NL: Did you ever have to live on social assistance?
GK: I was on social assistance in the 1970s in the summers when I was trying to move out of home. I was going to university or trying to go to university at the time. I was also on unemployment insurance after I’d had a series of part-time jobs while trying to survive. What I particularly remember about both experiences was being judged and people intruding into your lives.
NL: What other issues are important to you?
GK: Another issue that is really important to me is the Canadian government’s involvement in Afghanistan. The Canadian troops are involved in an offensive military operation in Afghanistan. They’re killing civilians. It really pains me that Canadian soldiers have died, and I think they should be withdrawn immediately.
NL: Have you ever been physically hurt at a protest?
GK: We were at a demonstration against Anita Bryant in Toronto. She was the person leading the charge against gay right ordinances across the United States. We marched up one side of Yonge St. and there were a whole bunch of queer-bashers. I remember a cop preventing us from going onto the street but the queer bashers were allowed to be on the street, and they were punching people over the heads of the cops. The cops did nothing about it.
NL: When did you first know you were gay?
GK: When I started to come out I was in high school. Even before I started to have sexual contact with anyone I refused to laugh at anti-gay jokes. Because of that, the typical greeting I got at school from the male students was “commie-pinko-fag.” They would write that on my locker.
NL: Do you think gay people are treated differently now than they were back then?
GK: Absolutely. There was absolutely no positive reinforcement for being lesbian or gay at that time. It was in the early and mid 1970s when the gay liberation movement was emerging. I want to point out that it is still bad for young people in schools and families.
NL: How much of the improvement in how gay people are treated is due to activism?
GK: I think it’s largely due to activism. Movements were organized and communities became more visible. I think that’s the chief impetus behind the social and legal changes we have seen.
NL: Did you ever attend a protest when you were a kid?
GK: I actually led a quite sheltered life growing up in Don Mills in Toronto. Don Mills at that time was actually a quite different than it is now. It was a very middle class, white suburb. The first thing I remember going to, and I guess I was 15 or so, was a Pollution Probe event. I was interested in the environment. I think we were cleaning up some river valley.
I eventually got more politicized in school. I’m not really sure why. I did really well in school, but I didn’t find it met my needs and I started doing a lot of reading. I read Fidel Castro and Che Guevara.
NL: What post-secondary education do you have?
GK: I went to York University for my undergraduate degree, which I did in political science, and then I went to the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (part of the University of Toronto) for my MA and PhD in sociology. My major teaching gigs were at Memorial University and Acadia University. I was hired at Laurentian in 1994.
