What Makes a Gay Icon?

Pity the poor editor trying to wrangle an essay collection into something that stays true to its theme. Queers Were Here: Heroes and Icons of Queer Canada, edited by Robin Ganev, a history professor at the University of Saskatchewan, and history scholar R.J. Gilmour, has a very promising title, the kind that draws a queer bibliophile like myself in a flash. But this is a wildly uneven set that rarely introduces us to subjects that Canadians—of whatever sexuality—should know about. That is because the original mandate, as articulated by the editors, provides an unsatisfactory definition of hero. Here, it is anyone who had a profound influence on the writer’s understanding of their sexuality.

And that is a problem. What is a hero, anyway? It is a term I would not necessarily throw around blithely and, quite honestly, would not apply it to the first woman I slept with, or even the first person who introduced me to the first woman I slept with. To do so dilutes...