“More Than Two Is a Crowd”: Mononormativity and Gross Indecency in the <i>Criminal Code</i>, 1981-82
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 1969, the Trudeau Liberals partially decriminalized homosexuality by allowing homosexual acts to take place provided that only two people were present. The idea that only two people could be present stems from the concept of mononormativity, or in other words, the idea that sexual relations are acceptable when only two people take part, preferably within the confines of a monogamous relationship. This essay examines the role of mononormativity in shaping the debate over Bill C-53, a proposed reform to the Criminal Code in 1982, which would have removed the “only two person” requirement of the code’s exception clause that regulated homosexual sex. Fully galvanized in the wake of the 1981 Toronto bathhouse raids, members of the Right to Privacy Committee carried the message of “We Demand” gay activists from 1971: that these provisions of the Criminal Code needed to be repealed. C-53 failed to pass because while Canadian society was willing to accept a limited decriminalization of homosexuality, it was not willing to accept any further breaches to heteronormative, monogamous sexual behaviour.
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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 | 0.007 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.030 | 0.078 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".