The Queer Frontier: Male Same-sex Experience in Western Canada’s Settlement Era
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The essay documents and interprets episodes of male same-sex sexuality at different localities and moments in time across Western Canada during its settlement era, circa 1870-1945. Drawing upon the theoretical frameworks of Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau, it seeks to explain same-sex experience in relation to the production, strategic, and tactical use of space. Utilizing court, jail, and police records, among other sources, it documents the recurrence of homoerotic desire across the West in this period, the places where men connected with other men, and their resourcefulness in accessing and reclaiming space to express their sexual imperatives. The data and analysis suggest a comparative laxity in moral regulation of male homoerotic relationships in the early frontier era, followed by entrenched police surveillance and repression by 1930-45. A provisional conclusion is that the frontier era afforded men some latitude within which to produce same-sex space, notwithstanding developing homophobic regimes and the risk of discovery, ostracism, and incarceration.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.035 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".