The year is 1949. World War II was as recent as the start of the Covid-19 pandemic is to us in 2025. Gay relationships were illegal in Canada, and would be for another two decades. Gay civil servants were being purged as threats to national security.
 
Jim Egan starts writing letters to newspapers protesting their degrading portrayal of homosexuals. He does so under his own name.

​Jim Egan was Canada’s first gay activist.

[This article is a companion piece to a YouTube video I co-wrote with my friend and colleague on Museums and Sex. You can find the link at the end of this blog post.]

​In December 2022, my girlfriend and I took a day trip to Boston, during which we visited the Museum of Fine Arts. While browsing the collections on display, we came across this portrait, Nude Study of Thomas McKeller by John Singer Sargent. At this point, I was already aware that some saw Sargent as a queer man, so I was excited to see how the museum handled that. It was therefore very disappointing to see that there was very little discussion of that side of him, opting instead to simply gesture at the debate rather than engage directly. Sexuality was even given the last word in the accompanying label.