The Regulation of Desire: Homo and Hetero Sexualities. Rev. ed.

Sara Stratton teaches history at York University.

This is a revised edition of Kinsman’s courageous and pathbreaking The
Regulation of Desire: Sexuality in Canada, which first appeared in 1987.
Courageous, because Kinsman wrote the first edition of this study while
still a graduate student and at a time when no one else in Canada was
willing to touch the subject. Pathbreaking, because it laid the
groundwork upon which many scholars have built up an increasingly
coherent history of lesbians and gay men in Canada.

Kinsman argues that the state, acting as “sex police,” tries to
regulate sexuality through legislation and oppression. For a long time,
gays and lesbians had no option but to acquiesce. Gradually, however,
they built communities of resistance. The decriminalization of
homosexuality in 1969 was a watershed event in the further development
of these communities; the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s brought on
further radicalization in the form of “queer” activism.

Kinsman has been criticized despite his status as a pioneer. For one
thing, the subtitle of his first book was misleading; the work was more
about male homosexuality than about sexuality as a whole. In the second
edition, he has made more reference to the experience of lesbians and
heterosexuals, but the book remains primarily a history of gay men in
Canada. Kinsman offers a weak defence for this imbalance: “Given that
I am a gay man, however, I focus more on erotic activity among men and
what this tells us about sexual rule in general.” Better to have
tightened the focus of the book and titled it for what it is. The fact
that Kinsman is a sociologist who is writing history brings us to the
contested terrain of “jargon.” The writing in this edition, like
that in the first, is at times labored and full of terminology familiar
to sociologists but perhaps less accessible to the average reader. Yet
to criticize Kinsman for using the language of his discipline is unfair,
especially since he translates it for the reader.

Kinsman has expanded his section on sexuality in the 1980s and added a
section on sexuality in the 1990s. These are vital additions, because
the last several years have been a period of intense gay and lesbian
activity in the areas of AIDS activism and agitation for civil rights.
Actively involved in these struggles himself, Kinsman makes them come
alive for the reader. Sections on the 1950s and 1960s are also
strengthened by Kinsman’s current research into the “heterosexual
hegemony” of that period. The addition of a thorough index is another
positive revision.

This combination of state and community history is still not the
comprehensive history of sexuality in Canada that we need, but it
remains a pioneering work that should be read by anyone interested in
the history and sociology of sexuality in Canada.