Special Issue

Community and Belonging in the Body Politic (1971–87), Canada’s First Gay Liberation Newspaper

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Abstract

The cover of the second issue of the Body Politic (1971–87), Canada’s first gay liberation newspaper, featured a photograph of a large house that would become Toronto’s Gay Community Centre. In retrospect, the house foreshadowed what the Body Politic would become in the years to follow — not a house made of brick, but a house all the same, a shelter, a refuge, a ‘meeting spot’ for the gay community in Canada and beyond. The Body Politic and/as community is at the center of this article, which attends to the physical copies of the paper as well as unpublished correspondence between the readers and the Collective to argue that, through their editorial activism, members of the Body Politic Collective and the Body Politic itself fostered affective readerly communities locally, nationally, and transnationally. In my thinking of affective readerly communities, I draw on Sara Ahmed’s theorizing of ‘affective economies’ and Fionnuala Dillane’s discussion of affect, ‘periodical encounters’, and ‘affective ruptures’ to show how editorial labour at the Body Politic encouraged affective relations in and outside the physical pages of the paper.

Keywords: Canadian print culture, the Body Politic, gay liberation movement, Canadian newspapers, affective readerly communities, community, editorial activism

How to Cite:

Markowicz, M., (2025) “Community and Belonging in the Body Politic (1971–87), Canada’s First Gay Liberation Newspaper”, Journal of European Periodical Studies 10(1), 75–87. doi: https://doi.org/10.21825/jeps.92007