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	The Body Politic and Visions of Community
	Page 4 of 14 / Appx 820 words

So, what is community?
Some tentative definitions

This, I guess, is the biggest question, one called up for debate every time we utter the phrase "gay and lesbian community." Is there such a thing? Just one? OK, so we'll say "communities." Maybe it's two; maybe more than two. And if so, am I allowed to belong to more than one?

Maybe "community" is the wrong word altogether, so vague that we can casually say "heterosexual community" and think it has some separate-but-equal meaning. I remember going home once with a man who told me he was "a member of the investment community." I had to ponder that one.

But we don't have space or time here to follow that question to all the places it might lead (too bad: that would be fun). For the moment I'll use a definition I got from George Hislop, whom we can safely call a community activist, one who's been at it for years. George says that what people must have to constitute a community is "shared interests, background, turf, and adversity."

I'm not sure that's all there is to it, but for the moment it will do. My man from the "investment community" may have had a point. (Think about it.)

But by these criteria "heterosexual community" is clearly a misnomer. People are not brought together in any common cause simply because they're heterosexual: their interests and backgrounds are otherwise too diverse; the whole world is their turf and they don't face adversity based solely on the fact that they're straight. A "heterosexual community" could exists only if the world were at least half gay.

The real point of community, I suspect, is common identification as distinct -- different, set apart. That distinctiveness must be valued -- something to be enhanced, preserved, defended; most valued when it is at risk. Of George's four criteria, maybe the most important one is adversity. The idea of distinct and embattled cultures seems to me a central one, too: cultures of resistance.

But I also like turf. I've often seen our political struggles as struggles for space, space where differences can thrive. Space can be psychological, intellectual -- it can even be cyberspace now. But our clearest sense of space as we've struggled for it in the world has been physical: the space of our bodies on our own turf.

This idea of turf is not without its ambiguities. We want the world to be our space and we fight for it all -- but we know we won't win it all any time soon. In the spaces we have won for our distinctiveness we sometimes put out signs that say only one kind of distinction is allowed. Sometimes that's been intentional and even necessary, the only way to make the space our own.

But more often it's been only half-conscious, casually implied and warily inferred. This is the modern "ghetto" debate (we'll see there's an older one): have we created liberated zones, or well- appointed gulags? And either way: is there a dress code? Or an age limit? A colour bar, a gender ban, a language barrier -- or just that flight of steps at the door?

Actually, I think we've done better than most of the world in making space not just for difference, but for different kinds of difference. Of course that's not saying much. Still, it's a sign of our sense of community, a limited sense if still a valuable one, that we say "community" when we speak of a neighbourhood, "community" when we talk of groups, services, churches and sports teams. We say we've built community. And we have.

George Hislop has another line about this. In Track Two, a film made after the February 1981 Toronto Bath Raids (for more on the raids see Our Stonewall? below), he says that even by then we'd achieved a kind of "institutional completeness." Gay life had once been a floating world: one corner of a bar here, a stretch of park or a theatre back row there; house parties if you could get an entrée. John Grube, who lived through it and then researched it in the early '80s Foolscap Oral History Project, writes of "queens and entourages," "mentors and protégés," and the closet not as a form of self- denial but as code of honour: we protect our own.

Building community was, in part, a matter of nailing down this floating world, creating institutions of some permanence, more fixed means of connection and support available even to those not bearing letters of introduction. These institutions, quite diverse in purpose and constituency, are, as much as anything, what we think of now when we use the word "community."

One of those institutions, classically, is a community newspaper, and The Body Politic certainly became an institution. But what interests us here is how it saw other institutions as they grew, and how, over time, it saw the floating world that had created them.

Next: The movement as community: Solidarity in the Seventies