AIDS Activist: Michael Lynch and the Politics of Community

John Stanley is a senior policy advisor in the Corporate Policy Branch
Management Board Secretariat, Government of Ontario.

This biography is the first monograph devoted to a member of the
remarkable Body Politic collective that shaped Canada’s gay movement
in the 1970s and 1980s. Michael Lynch (1944–91), academic, poet,
journalist, activist, organizer, belonged to the tight little group that
ran the newspaper, but also made his own significant contributions to
Canadian gay life, particularly in the struggle to ensure better
treatment for people with AIDS.

Lynch arrived in Toronto from the United States in 1971, at the
beginning of a period that saw the blossoming of gay life in Toronto.
Lynch always maintained close ties to the United States and was heavily
influenced by events there. He never appears to have felt truly
comfortable in Canada, considering Toronto “bovine” while remarking
on Canadians’ “emotional lassitude.” Seventeen years after coming
to Canada, he confessed, “I’m an American ego wanting American
strokes.”

While he was instrumental in establishing a number of
organizations—Gay Fathers Toronto, AIDS Action Now!, and the Toronto
Centre for Gay and Lesbian Studies—he invariably became bored and
dropped out, leaving it to others to carry on these important
initiatives. While he produced little scholarship in his many years as a
professor, his journalism represents an important legacy for Canada’s
gay community.

This biography places Lynch’s life against the backdrop of the AIDS
crisis in North America. In her choice of emphasis, the author provides
much detail about the crisis and the community that arose to address it.
Certainly, Lynch (who had AIDS) was in the vanguard of this movement.
However, Lynch himself often disappears from his biography for pages at
a time, as AIDS events with which he was linked only slightly or not at
all are discussed at length. There are also some organizational
problems; while the material is discussed in chronological order,
certain events, such as the death of Graham Campbell (a friend of
Lynch’s), pop up in a number of places in the book.

AIDS Activist is based on a rich resource base, including Lynch’s own
diaries. Silversides has provided her readers with useful footnotes, but
no bibliography to reflect all of her meticulous research. Despite its
heavy emphasis on one aspect of Lynch’s life, this work is an
important beginning. It is the first book-length treatment of Lynch; let
us hope that it is not the last.