Canada takes the state out of the bedrooms of the nation, and Christopher Isherwood is born, who moved to Berlin because of what he could do there.
1969
The Bedrooms of the Nation
The day it stopped being a crime to be gay in Canada
In December 1967 a Canadian government minister stood on the steps outside Parliament and told reporters that the state has no place in the bedrooms of the nation. It is the line every Canadian knows. The minister was Pierre Trudeau, he was in charge of justice rather than the country at that point, and he was defending a bill that would stop the police prosecuting men for having sex with each other.
The bill was known as C-150. It was an omnibus bill, meaning one piece of legislation carrying a lot of unrelated changes at once, and it dealt with divorce, contraception, abortion and homosexuality together. Parliament passed it by 149 votes to 55 in May 1969, and it became law on August 26, 1969.
It was narrower than it sounds. What stopped being a crime was sex between exactly two people, both aged twenty-one or over, in private. Three men in a room was still an offence. So was anything a court decided did not count as private. And twenty-one was five years older than the age of consent for everybody else, so a nineteen-year-old could still be prosecuted for something his straight neighbour was allowed to do.
Britain had done the same thing two years earlier with the same limits. Canada was still decades ahead of most of the world, but the unequal age took half a century to finish off. It was lowered to eighteen, courts kept ruling it unconstitutional, and the section was not actually deleted from the Criminal Code until September 2019.
Christopher Isherwood is born, and waits fifty years to write the true version
Christopher Isherwood in 1973, three years before he published Christopher and His Kind. Photo: Allan Warren, CC BY-SA 3.0. Source.
Christopher Isherwood moved to Berlin in 1929 because of the boys. He said so himself, in print, when he was seventy-two and had decided to stop leaving it out.
He was born in High Lane, in Cheshire, on August 26, 1904. At school he met W. H. Auden, who became one of the great poets of the century and a lifelong friend, and it was Auden who told him what Berlin was like. Weimar Germany between the wars had an openly gay nightlife that nothing in England came close to, and Isherwood went and lived in it for four years.
He left when Hitler came to power, and took with him Heinz Neddermeyer, a young German he had been with since 1932. The two of them spent four years being turned away by one country after another before Neddermeyer was deported back to Germany and arrested by the Gestapo.
What Isherwood got out of those Berlin years was a book. Goodbye to Berlin, published in 1939, is a set of linked stories about the people he knew in the city as the Nazis took over, and it is the book that the musical Cabaret was eventually built from. He moved to America the same year and became an American citizen in 1946.
In 1952, on a beach in Santa Monica, he met Don Bachardy. Isherwood was forty-eight, Bachardy was eighteen, and they were together for the next thirty-four years, until Isherwood died. They lived as an openly gay couple in Los Angeles through the 1950s, which almost nobody did.
In 1964 he published A Single Man, a novel that follows one day of an English professor in California whose partner has died and who has nobody he can say it to. Then in 1976 he wrote Christopher and His Kind, which goes back over the same Berlin years he had already made famous and puts in everything the first version left out - the men, the sex, himself. He died in 1986.
