Strangers in Our Midst: Sexual Deviancy in Postwar Ontario (review)

Reviewed by: Strangers in Our Midst: Sexual Deviancy in Postwar Ontario Mariana Valverde Strangers in Our Midst: Sexual Deviancy in Postwar Ontario. Elise Chenier. University of Toronto Press, 2008. Pp. 384, $75.00 cloth, $35.00 paper It was only yesterday, historically speaking, that historians of sexuality made a living from part-time teaching and community [End Page 346] activities: academic jobs were nonexistent. While tenure-track jobs in the history of sexuality are still rare, reflecting on Chenier’s insider critique of certain trends in ‘gay history’ points to a more general conclusion: despite the precariousness of our wins, it has become necessary to critique our own quasi-institutionalization. Like Chenier, I too have been part of the move to make room in the academy for sexuality studies, but I am increasingly unhappy with the assumption that sexuality is a distinct field of human activity and governmental concern. Chenier’s book is thus wonderfully timely, since, beyond the particular findings about the postwar period, its methodological arguments will provoke self-critical reflection. Substantively, Chenier’s book contributes greatly to the interlinked histories of criminal justice, psychology/psychiatry, and sexuality. It does so by focusing on a time and place (postwar Ontario) in which age-old populist fears about ‘strangers in our midst’ coexisted with a remarkable, historically specific optimism about the ability of science and medicine to identify and treat various forms of ‘deviance’ – and an equally specific faith in enlightened, welfare-oriented solutions promoted not only by experts but also by citizens’ groups such as the Toronto Parents’ Action League. Without theoretical fanfare, Chenier shows that the rich postwar category of ‘sexual deviancy’ cannot be properly understood as simply another chapter in ‘the history of sexuality,’ much less as an episode in ‘gay history.’ The ‘deviancy’ question turns out to have included within it all manner of other issues and problems, from child abuse to adult homosexuality to the role of ordinary citizens in the elaboration of Canada’s postwar welfarist consensus. Challenging conventional views of the postwar period as a time of oppressive conformity, unchallenged medical expertise, and moral narrowness, Chenier documents the activities of parent groups that –unlike similar groups today – promoted enlightened, therapeutic approaches to both criminality and sexual diversity. She also maps the efforts made by some psychiatrists and psychologists to provide sympathetic therapy to prisoners as well as to private patients, in an account that will forever revise the standard gay-liberation account of the medical horrors of the fifties. Unlike in the United States, Canadian psychiatrists advocated the decriminalization of homosexuality, and Chenier shows that, contrary to the One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest scenario, most treatment provided to homosexuals for their ‘deviance’ was driven by patients’ own requests. As it happened, the views of the specialized psychiatrists did not prevail: the 1954 Royal Commission on the Criminal Law Relating to Criminal Sexual Psychopaths sided not with psychiatry and its popular supporters but [End Page 347] rather with the law-and-order views that were prevalent in the Ontario ministries responsible for law enforcement. But the views of the commissioners were not necessarily representative of either medical opinion or even popular opinion. If Chenier’s book presents a serious challenge to the simplistic view of the 1950s put forward by gay-liberation researchers, it simultaneously challenges the conventional criminological picture of the recent past. In mapping the prehistory of the current category of ‘dangerous offender,’ Chenier uncovers some very sharp conflicts between the therapeutic approaches favoured by many social workers and psychologists, on the one hand, and the ‘tough on crime’ approach of top Ontario correctional officials – conflicts sometimes culminating in mass resignations. This is methodologically important, since Canadian criminal justice policy is usually discussed as if every era could be characterized by a single unified mentality, and as far as I know nobody else has studied the records of Ontario’s postwar correctional system in such detail. Chenier’s Strangers in Our Midst is a remarkable work that will be of interest to a very broad range of scholars (in women’s studies, in criminology, and in sexuality studies) and also to those who are today participating in community activities...

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