Famous gay Canadians is a list of famous gay, lesbian, and bisexual people who are from or raised in Canada. Famous gay men and lesbian women born in Canada include musicians Rufus Wainwright and Indie Rock duo Tegan & Sara. In addition to these gay and lesbian Canadian singers, there are also a multitude of gay Canadian actors, athletes, and other gay celebrities from Canada on this list of gay Canadians.
Who are the most famous gay people from Canada? These gay Canadian celebrities represent some of the best known members of the Canadian LGBT community. You can build your own list using these properties from the Canadian born gay and lesbian list by clicking the Build A List link to the right.- Ronnie Burkett, OC is a Canadian puppeteer, best known for his original theatrical plays for adults, performed with marionettes. Burkett, who hails from Medicine Hat, was the puppeteer for Ralph on the TV Ontario series Harriet's Magic Hats during seasons three and four. After winning a regional Emmy Award in 1979 for the puppets in "Cinderrabbit" on PBS in the US, Burkett formed his own theatre company in Alberta in 1986. His early works included Fool's Edge, Virtue Falls, The Punch Club and Awful Manors. In 1994, his work Tinka's New Dress was his international breakthrough, winning two Dora Awards, four Elizabeth Sterling Haynes Awards and a special citation from the Obie Awards. Performed internationally, Tinka's New Dress was the first part of a trilogy which continued with Street of Blood in 1999 and Happy in 2000. He also won a Chalmers Award in 1996 for Old Friends, a piece commissioned by the Manitoba Theatre for Young People. In 2009, Burkett received the Siminovitch Prize in Theatre for design. In 2015, Burkett was the recipient of the Distinguished Artist Award from the Lieutenant Governor of Alberta Arts Awards for his contributions to the arts in Alberta. His work, Provenance, was performed for the first time in October 2003, premiering at Theatre Network in Edmonton. In November 2007, he finished touring his show 10 Days on Earth that premiered at CanStage in Toronto in April 2006. In October 2008, he premiered his quasi-autobiographical show, Billy Twinkle: Requiem for a Golden Boy, at the Citadel Theatre in Edmonton; the show toured several cities in Canada, the UK, and Australia through late 2009. In 2011-12, he did an extensive Canadian tour of his new play, an apocalyptic comedy, Penny Plain. His latest work, The Daisy Theatre, inspired by underground Czech marionette theatre, is part improvisation and part cabaret and includes short vignettes penned by other Canadian playwrights. Burkett usually writes his own scripts. Appearing onstage throughout each performance, he manipulates and is the voice of every character, from newborn ducks to dying mothers, Christ and Satan and everything in between. Openly gay, Burkett lives in Toronto with his partner, jazz singer John Alcorn.
- Michel Tremblay, CQ (born 25 June 1942) is a French Canadian novelist and playwright. He was born in Montreal, Quebec, where he grew up in the French-speaking neighbourhood of Plateau Mont-Royal; at the time of his birth a neighbourhood with a working-class character and joual dialect - something that would heavily influence his work. Tremblay's first professionally produced play, Les Belles-Sลurs, was written in 1965 and premiered at the Thรฉรขtre du Rideau Vert on August 28, 1968. It transformed the old guard of Canadian theatre and introduced joual to the mainstream. It stirred up controversy by portraying the lives of working class women and attacking the strait-laced, deeply religious society of mid-20th century Quebec.
- David Secter is a Canadian film director. He is best known for the 1965 film Winter Kept Us Warm, the first English Canadian film ever screened at the Cannes Film Festival. Widely considered a key milestone in the development of Canadian film, Winter Kept Us Warm was a gay themed independent film written, directed and funded entirely by Secter, who is gay, while he was a student at the University of Toronto. Secter subsequently released a second film in Canada, The Offering in 1966, and entered discussions with CBC Television to produce a drama series for the network. However, before that series was launched, he moved to New York City to pursue opportunities in the much larger American film and theatre industry. He was initially slated to direct Cher's 1969 film Chastity, but dropped out of the project. In New York, he lived with several other experimental filmmakers in a clothing-optional, drug and sex-friendly commune, and worked as a theatre director. He released the low-budget sex comedy Getting Together (also titled Feelin' Up in some releases) in 1976, and subsequently moved to Los Angeles. He did not work on another film until Cyberdorm in 1997. In the early 1990s, Secter's nephew Joel rented Getting Together from his local video store in Winnipeg, not knowing that his uncle had directed films. After discovering his uncle's name in the credits, Joel contacted David to discuss his career in film. These discussions culminated in Joel Secter's own debut as a filmmaker, the 2005 documentary The Best of Secter & the Rest of Secter. In the film, David also revealed that he is HIV-positive.Also in 2005, David Secter directed and released a documentary film on the Gay Games, Take the Flame! Gay Games: Grace, Grit, and Glory.He is interviewed in Matthew Hays' Lambda Literary Award-winning 2007 book The View from Here: Conversations with Gay and Lesbian Filmmakers.
- Peter Elliott (born 19 May 1954 in St. Catharines, Ontario) is a Canadian priest. He is currently the rector of Christ Church Cathedral and Dean of New Westminster in the Anglican Church of Canada. Elliott grew up in St. Catharines, Ontario. In 1976 he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in English literature and philosophy from Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario. Subsequently, he attended and graduated from the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 1981 he was ordained a priest in the Diocese of Niagara. Prior to coming to Vancouver he was Director of Ministries in Church and Society with the Anglican Church of Canada. In 1994, Elliott was made rector of Christ Church Cathedral and Dean of New Westminster.
- Hugh Brennan Scott Symons (July 13, 1933 โ February 23, 2009), known professionally as Scott Symons, was a Canadian writer. He was most noted for his novels Place d'Armes and Civic Square, among the first works of LGBT literature ever published in Canada, as well as a personal life that was often plagued by scandal and interpersonal conflict.He was openly gay at a time when this was very difficult, publishing his first novel, Place d'Armes, which dealt directly with homosexuality, two years before gay sex was decriminalized in Canada. He was an avid diarist, and many of his observations and episodes from his life found their way into his novels. His writing style was marked by experimental forms and structures, with one of his novels being published as handwritten pages packaged in a box, and by a blurring of the lines between fiction and non-fiction.
- Jeremy Fisher (born Jeremy Binns, December 15, 1976) is a Canadian singer-songwriter. Fisher is based in Ottawa, Ontario, and was previously based on Vancouver Island, B.C., Montreal, Quebec, and in Seattle, Washington, US. Fisher's work is heavily influenced by folk and blues music, and his songs feature accompaniment by acoustic guitar, slide guitar and harmonica.
- Wayson Choy (ๅด็ถญๆฐ Pinyin: Cuฤซ Wรฉixฤซn ; Jyutping: Ceoi1 Wai4-san1) (April 20, 1939 โ April 28, 2019) was a Canadian writer. Publishing two novels and two memoirs in his lifetime, he is considered both one of the most important pioneers of Asian Canadian literature in Canada, and an important figure in LGBT literature as one of Canada's first openly gay writers of colour to achieve widespread mainstream success.
- Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay (born September 25, 1973) is a Montreal-born artist and diarist. Since 2000 his creative gestures in video, sound and text have contemplated the history of song, the rendering of love and emotion into language, and the resurrection and manipulation of voices โ sung, spoken or screamed. Early video work concentrated on critical mimicry of material from popular culture, with references to Madonna, American Idol, Tatu, Franรงoise Hardy and Kylie Minogue. Recent work focuses on re-examinations of seminal texts, films and video art from queer and art history, working with material by Audre Lorde, Colin Campbell, Rosa von Praunheim, and Harry Hay. Nemerofsky's work has screened in festivals and galleries across Canada, Europe and East Asia and has won prizes at the Hamburg Short Film Festival, the Kasseler Dokumentarfilm und Videofest and the Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen (all in Germany), the Toronto Inside Out Film and Video Festival as well as first prize at the Globalica Media Arts Biennale in Wrocลaw, Poland. His work is part of numerous private collections as well as the permanent collection of the National Gallery of Canada, the Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna and Thielska Galleriet, Stockholm. His works include an unconventional audioguide for POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, which starts by telling visitors to leave the museum, and then spins a mix of folklore, truth, and lies about Warsaw.Nemerofsky is openly gay.
- Kaj Hasselriis (born January 4, 1974 in Winnipeg, Manitoba) is a Canadian journalist, community activist and politician. Hasselriis is a lifelong Winnipegger and earned a sociology degree from the University of Manitoba in 1995 as well as a journalism degree from Toronto's Ryerson University in 1997. From 1997 to 2002, Hasselriis worked as a reporter and producer for CBC Television. Most recently, Hasselriis created an English-language monthly in Lima, Peru called Limazine. As a political organizer, Hasselriis served as the Manitoba campaign manager for Jack Layton's leadership bid in 2002. He also played a key role as a member of Toronto mayor David Miller's 2003 campaign team. In 2004, Hasselriis gained prominence in Winnipeg by leading the fight to keep Winnipeg's Bus Rapid Transit system. The city eventually cancelled the program, to the dismay of public transit activists. On July 17, 2006 Hasselriis declared his candidacy in the October 2006 municipal elections against Winnipeg mayor Sam Katz. His campaign was endorsed by several prominent figures in the city, including musician John K. Samson and activist James Beddome. On election day, October 25, 2006, Hasselriis received 22,401 votes, or 13.22 of the total count. He placed third to Katz, who was re-elected, and Marianne Cerilli, a former NDP MLA in the Manitoba Legislature.Hasselriis, who is openly gay, was the national spokesperson for Canadians for Equal Marriage in 2006. He was appointed interim executive director of Egale Canada in January 2007, following the resignation of Gilles Marchildon, and served in that capacity until he was succeeded by Helen Kennedy in the fall. He currently contributes to the Xtra! chain of LGBT newspapers as a Winnipeg-area reporter. He also wrote a series of travel essays on gay life in India while travelling in that country over the winter of 2008-2009 for both Xtra! and its gay travel magazine The Guide. As well, he is an occasional contributor to CBC Radio, including Definitely Not the Opera.
- Jim Rondeau (born April 6, 1959) is a politician in Manitoba, Canada. He has been a member of the Legislative Assembly of Manitoba since 1999, and served as cabinet minister in the provincial governments of Gary Doer and Greg Selinger from 2003 to 2013. Rondeau is a member of the New Democratic Party. In April 2015, Rondeau announced he would not seek re-election.
- Billy Newton-Davis (born April 26, 1951 in Cleveland, Ohio, United States) is a Canadian R&B, jazz and gospel singer and songwriter.
- Laurier L. LaPierre, (November 21, 1929 โ December 16, 2012) was a Canadian Senator, professor, broadcaster, journalist and author. He was a member of the Liberal Party of Canada. Fluently bilingual, LaPierre was best known for having been co-host with Patrick Watson of the CBC's influential public affairs show This Hour Has Seven Days in the 1960s. After the show's much publicized cancellation, LaPierre moved to politics as a "star candidate" for the New Democratic Party in the 1968 federal election. The party was hoping that he would help achieve an electoral breakthrough in Quebec, but he came second in the riding of Lachine with 19.5% of the vote. He returned to teaching, broadcasting and writing until his appointment to the Senate in June 2001. As a member of the Liberal caucus, LaPierre was an outspoken supporter of Jean Chrรฉtien against supporters of rival Paul Martin.
- Andy Quan (born 7 July 1969), is a Chinese-Canadian author who now lives in Sydney, Australia. In his writing, he frequently explores the ways in which sexual identity and cultural identity interact. Quan is openly gay.Quan was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. In addition to his writing, Quan is a musician and community activist. He was the first ever full-time paid employee of ILGA and has worked as a policy writer and project manager on issues related to the global HIV epidemic. He now works as an editor and copywriter.
- Max Valiquette is a Canadian culture and media expert and commentators. A marketer by trade, he was the president of Youthography, a Canadian youth marketing agency, which is where he gained renown. He is now employed by an advertising agency Bensimon Byrne as the Managing Director of Intellectual Property. Valiquette is best known as a TV host and commentator and a public speaker. He focuses primarily on media, youth and popular culture, and marketing. He is a regular contributor to CBC Radio and also a featured commentator on the television programme "What's in a Name." He hosted TVOntario's VoxTalk, a youth-issues talk show, and has appeared everywhere from MuchMusic, to CBC Television and Global TV. He is a speaker on issues pertaining to media and marketing in Canada and around the world, as well as the author of numerous industry articles. He has served three times as Chairperson of Strategy Magazine's "Understanding Youth Conference". He is a former Director of the Board of the Canada Media Fund.He previously performed as a sketch comedian in Toronto, including a performance at The Second City. He is a former Central Canadian Debating Champion.Valiquette was born in Ottawa, Ontario, in 1973. He studied at the University of Ottawa where he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree. In 2005, he was named one of Marketing Magazine's 100 Most Influential People in Canadian Communications.
- Ember Swift (born in Ontario, Canada) is a Canadian singer-songwriter and guitarist who has been writing songs since she was nine years old and performing since she was ten. In 1996, she released her first self-titled album. After graduating from the University of Toronto with a degree in East Asian Studies in 1998, Swift and regular band member Lyndell Montgomery (electric violin) began touring North America, Australia and later, New Caledonia. These live shows featured the additional talents of Toronto-based percussionist and drummer Cheryl Reid as of 1998. Later, the duo began working with Michelle Josef (also of Toronto) and finally, Adam Bowman (of Elmira, Ontario) on drums and percussion. Cheryl Reid continued to work with Swift and Montgomery until 2008 as a part-time player. She has continued to work directly with Swift from 2008 until the present. In 2008, Ember Swift and Lyndell Montgomery, who were also life partners, went their separate ways and ceased their working relationship. Swift had always dreamed of going to China. She had visited in 2007 and had fallen in love with the country and culture there. In 2008, she moved to Beijing and continues to live and work part-time in Beijing, China and Toronto. In Beijing, she assembled a new band consisting of Zac Courtney of Australia on drums, Paplus Ntahombaye of Burundi (Africa) on bass, and China's Wang Ya Qi ็้ ็ช on the traditional Chinese instrument, the erhu. All of the members are long-time residents of Beijing. Tours now include many stops throughout in Asia.
- Ian Iqbal Rashid (born in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania) is a poet, screenwriter and filmmaker known in particular for his volumes of poetry, for the BBC TV series This Life and the feature films Touch of Pink and How She Move. His current projects include creating television series in many genres for international markets. In the U.S., Rashid is currently developing a police procedural television series for Lionsgate Television and Showtime Network. He is also creating a historical miniseries set in East Africa for Sonar Entertainment. In Canada, he is developing a medical drama series for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. And in the UK, he is writing a romantic comedy series for ITV. Of Indian ancestry, Rashid's family lived in colonial and post-colonial East Africa for generations. In his early childhood, his family was forced to leave Tanzania. After failing to secure asylum in the UK and US, they settled in Canada. Rashid began his career as an arts journalist and critic and events programmer, particularly focussed on South Asian diasporic, Muslim and LGBTQ cultural work. In the late 1980s, Rashid was a regular contributor to the Canadian LGBT magazine Rites, and the cultural journals "Fuse" and "TSAR". He published the poetry collection Black Markets, White Boyfriends and Other Acts of Elision, and made the short documentary film Bolo Bolo!. The film, part of an HIV/AIDS educational series called The AIDS Cable Project, resulted in the series being pulled from Rogers Television after complaints about sexually suggestive content, though it had a long and healthy life at film festivals. In 1995, Rashid was the Guest Editor for Rungh magazine's Queer Special Issue.In the early 1990s, Rashid returned to London, Britain, where he lives today with his partner, the writer and curator Peter Ride. Touch of Pink, his first feature film, spent 12 years in development. In 2003, he finally had the chance to direct the project as a Canada-UK co-production. It premiered at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival to great acclaim, a bidding war, and eventually, a sale to Sony Picture Classics. How She Move received a similar reception at Sundance Film Festival. Directed by Rashid in 2007, the film is set in the world of step dancing. It was nominated for a Sundance World Cinema Grand Jury Prize and purchased by Paramount Vantage. The film opened to great reviews and strong box office: another indie success story to emerge from Sundance. Self-taught as a film-maker, Rashid began his career in the late 1990s, working as a writer in UK television. His credits include the soap, London Bridge (Carlton Television for ITV), and the cult hit BBC2 series This Life for which he received the Writer's Guild of England award. Rashid has written two award-winning short films, Surviving Sabu (1999, Arts Council of England) and Stag (2001, BBC Films). He wrote and read his short story "Muscular Bridges" for BBC Radio 4's HMS Windrush Anniversary. For BBC's Woman's Hour Programme, Rashid wrote and directed Leaving Normal, a comedy serial about gay adoption starring Imelda Staunton and Meera Syal.Rashid has written three award-winning books of poetry. The most recent is The Heat of Yesterday. His poems "Another Country", "Could Have Danced All Night", "Hot Property" and "Early Dinner, Weekend Away" appear in John Barton and Billeh Nickerson's 2007 anthology Seminal: The Anthology of Canada's Gay Male Poets.He has also curated film programmes and exhibitions for venues such as the National Film Theatre, the Institute of Contemporary Arts and Experimenta. He was the founder and first director of Desh Pardesh, Canada's first arts festival focusing on diasporic South Asian arts and culture. Amongst many awards and festival prizes, Rashid has received the Aga Khan Award for Excellence in the Arts. Ian was selected as one of 2010's Breakthrough Brits on the prestigious UK Film Council (BFI) programme.
- Paul Bellini (born September 12, 1959) is a Canadian comedy writer and television actor. Bellini is well-known figure in the Canadian television comedy industry for his work on The Kids in the Hall and This Hour Has 22 Minutes. He has worked on several projects with Josh Levy and PJ DeBoy. He has appeared in small parts on television shows and films.
- Micah Barnes (born May 30, 1960) is a Canadian pop singer-songwriter. He has performed both as a solo artist and with the bands Loudboy and The Nylons. Born in Vienna, Barnes is the son of composer, conductor, and jazz drummer Milton Barnes, brother of drummer Daniel Barnes and cellist Ariel Barnes. He attended Oakwood Collegiate Institute in Toronto, and then studied voice with Josรฉ Hernandez and Bill Vincent, and sang in Toronto cabarets and nightclubs during the 1980s while appearing in theatre, film, television and radio productions as an actor. He was subsequently a member of The Nylons from 1990 to 1996, and later moved to Los Angeles.In 2003, he collaborated with the house music duo Thunderpuss on the hit dance track "Welcome to My Head", which reached number one on the Billboard club charts. He has also had some roles in film and television, including guest acting roles in the television series Katts and Dog and E.N.G. and a supporting role in the short film The Fairy Who Didn't Want to Be a Fairy Anymore, and as a vocal coach in the Canadian edition of How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?. Barnes is openly gay. He was the partner of dancer and actor Renรฉ Highway, who died of AIDS-related causes in 1990.
- Joel Gibb (born 28 January 1977) is a Berlin-based Canadian artist and singer-songwriter who leads the "gay church folk" group The Hidden Cameras. He was born in Kincardine, Ontario.
- Glen R. Murray (born October 26, 1957) is a Canadian politician and urban issues advocate. He served as the 41st Mayor of Winnipeg, Manitoba from 1998 to 2004, and was the first openly gay mayor of a large North American city. He subsequently moved to Toronto, Ontario, and was elected to the Legislative Assembly of Ontario as a Liberal Member of Provincial Parliament (MPP) for Toronto Centre in 2010, serving until 2017.In August 2010, he was appointed to the provincial cabinet as Minister of Research and Innovation. Murray was re-elected in October 2011, and appointed Minister of Training, Colleges and Universities. He resigned from cabinet on November 3, 2012 in order to run as a candidate in the 2013 Ontario Liberal Party leadership election. He became Ontario Minister of Transportation and Minister of Infrastructure on February 11, 2013. In a cabinet shuffle following the 2014 election, Murray was moved to the portfolio of Minister of the Environment and Climate Change. He announced his resignation from Cabinet on July 31, 2017, and his resignation from the legislature, effective September 1, 2017, in order to become executive director of the Pembina Institute in Alberta. He resigned from the Pembina Institute in September 2018 after serving as executive director for one year.
- Mรกrio Silva may refer to: Mรกrio Silva (footballer) (born 1977), Portuguese footballer Mรกrio Silva (athlete) (born 1961), Portuguese middle distance runner Mรกrio Silva (cyclist) (born 1940), Portuguese Olympic cyclist Mario Silva (politician) (born 1966), Canadian politician Mario De Silva (born 1935), Italian Olympic wrestler Mario Silva, host of La Hojilla, an opinion program that airs on Venezolana de Televisiรณn
- Shaun Proulx (born August 1, 1968) is a Canadian media entrepreneur, speaker, authour, publisher, interviewer and radio personality, who currently hosts the weekly The Shaun Proulx Show on SiriusXM's Canada Talks. In late September 2013, during a live interview with the CBC Radio's Matt Galloway, Proulx publicly disclosed that he was diagnosed HIV+ in 2005. He has contributed to The Globe and Mail and to Toronto's LGBT newspaper Xtra!, and was the afternoon radio host on 103.9 PROUD FM (CIRR-FM). DecAIDS โ Anything Is Possible, a documentary he produced, won "Best Social Documentary" at WorldFest in 2007, won "Best Full Length Feature" at the New York AIDS Film Festival in 2007, and was an official selection of the Hollywood Festival the same year. Proulx also works as a keynote speaker and coach.
- Brett Josef Grubisic (born 1963) is a Canadian novelist and editor, and Sessional Lecturer of English at the University of British Columbia. He obtained degrees from University of Victoria (B.A., M.A.) and the University of British Columbia (Ph.D.) He has edited one anthology of gay male pulp fiction, and co-edited an anthology of upcoming Canadian writers. The former collection highlights stories that represent lives outside the urban middle-class mainstream; the latter, featuring such acclaimed writers as Annabel Lyon, Steven Heighton, Camilla Gibb, Michael Turner, and Larissa Lai, aims to redress an absence the editors claim to have noticed in Canadian literature: sexually frank fiction. Grubisic's debut novel, The Age of Cities, was published in 2006, and was a finalist for the City of Vancouver Book Prize. Set predominantly in the late 1950s, the novel-within-a-novel traces the uncertain evolution of a librarian as he struggles between two disparate choices, one urban and the other rural. This Location of Unknown Possibilities, Grubisic's follow-up novel, appeared in 2014. Satirizing university campus and film production politics, it recounts the comic but transformative experience of two anti-heroic protagonists, Marta Spรซk, an English professor, and Jakob Nugent, a film production manager, as they travel from Vancouver to British Columbia's Okanagan Valley in order to work on a television biopic about Lady Hester Stanhope. Understanding Beryl Bainbridge, Grubisic's comprehensive study of the British author's fiction, was published in 2008; it examines Bainbridge as a blackly comic novelist as well as a writer of historiographic metafiction. Appearing in 2009, American Hunks: The Muscular Male Body in Popular Culture, 1860-1970, a pictorial social history co-authored with David L. Chapman, charts changes in the depictions of and attitudes toward the nude and semi-nude male body in North America. National Plots: Historical Fiction and Changing Ideas of Canada, co-edited with Andrea Cabajsky, was published in 2010. The authors of the collection's fourteen essays explore the diverse ways that a wide range of historical fiction (published between 1850 and 2005) contributes to the formation of national identity. Co-edited with Gisele Baxter and Tara Lee, Blast, Corrupt, Dismantle, Erase: Contemporary North American Dystopian Literature takes NAFTA as a starting point; the volume's essayists interrogate the work of Canadian, American, and Mexican authors whose novels and short stories envision various North American realities through a dystopian lens. The second book of Grubisic's projected River Bend Trilogy, From Up River and For One Night Only is set over a six-month period in 1980-1 and describes the misadventures of two sets of siblings, high school students who decide to form a New Wave cover band and enter a Battle of the Bands contest. The Vancouver Sun reviewer described it as "filled with hope and exuberance" and "Lovingly and delightfully told, and completely without sentimentality, Grubisic's autobiographical novel is a long ode to youth, to unquenchable life and, yes, it's nostalgic but in the best possible way". He has written about film, books, and writers for the Toronto Star, Literary Review of Canada, National Post, the Vancouver Sun, The Globe and Mail, Maclean's, and Xtra!. He served on the jury for the 2015 Dayne Ogilvie Prize, selecting Alex Leslie as that year's winner.
- Orville Lloyd Douglas (born September 26, 1976) is a Canadian essayist, poet and writer.
- Kenneth Zeller (died June 1985) was a teacher and librarian in Toronto, who was employed by Davisville Public School, Williamson Road Junior Public School and Western Technical-Commercial School. He was the victim of a homophobic hate crime when he was beaten to death by five youths in Toronto's High Park. Five young offenders were convicted and sentenced to prison. The crime received media coverage and was the subject of a play called Steel Kiss, written by Robin Fulford and produced by Buddies in Bad Times theatre. John Greyson also produced a movie called The Making of Monsters, which analyzed the incident through the lens of radical queer activists disrupting the production of a heavily sanitized commercial movie of the week about the incident. It was never released for general viewing. The incident also spurred the Toronto District School Board into implementing a program designed to eliminate discrimination based on sexual orientation.The murder of Zeller was dramatized on Killer Kids.
- Billy Merasty (born 1960) is an Aboriginal Canadian actor and writer of Cree descent.
- Peter Gregory McGehee (October 6, 1955 โ September 13, 1991) was an American-born Canadian novelist, dramatist and short story writer.Born in Pine Bluff, Arkansas to Frank Thomas and Julia Ann May McGehee, Peter moved with his family to Little Rock when he was six. He was the second of three children. McGehee played the trombone at Parkview High School in Little Rock where he graduated in 1973. McGehee studied at Southern Methodist University in Dallas before moving to San Francisco to work in theatre. While living in San Francisco, he wrote his first play and first comedic musical revue The Quinlan Sisters, and later met Canadian activist Douglas Wilson, who became his partner. He moved to Saskatoon in 1980 to be with Wilson, and subsequently the couple moved to Toronto in 1982. However, due to the lack of recognition afforded to same-sex marriage at the time, he often faced potential deportation because of his citizenship status, twice entering marriages of convenience with female friends. He briefly moved to New York City in 1984, but had returned to Toronto by 1986.He published his first novella, Beyond Happiness, with Stubblejumper Press in 1985, and premiered his second revue, The Fabulous Sirs, in 1987.In 1988, McGehee and Wilson were both diagnosed HIV-positive. McGehee subsequently wrote two novels, Boys Like Us and Sweetheart, and a book of short stories, The IQ Zoo. Boys Like Us was published in 1991, shortly before McGehee's death of AIDS-related causes; Sweetheart and The IQ Zoo were both published posthumously. The novels focused on the life of Zero MacNoo, a character who much like McGehee himself was an American living in Toronto, and his family and circle of friends.Using notes that McGehee had written in preparation for his third novel, Wilson subsequently wrote Labour of Love before his own death in 1992. That novel was published in 1993.
- Daniel Allen Cox (born February 3, 1976) is a Canadian author and screenwriter. Cox's novels Shuck and Krakow Melt were both finalists for the Lambda Literary Award and the ReLit Award.
- Maurice Vellekoop is a Canadian artist and illustrator. His work has appeared in publications such as Drawn and Quarterly, Time, GQ, Vogue, Cosmopolitan and Wallpaper, as well as in the books ABC Book: A Homoerotic Primer, Sex Tips from a Dominatrix, Mensroom Reader and Vellevision. Vellekoop attended the Ontario College of Art and Design from 1982 to 1986. He is openly gay.
- Jack Nichols (1921โ2009) was a Canadian artist from Montreal, Quebec. He worked for a time with Frederick Horsman Varley and Louis Muhlstock. For a few summers during the early 1940s, he worked as a deckhand on cargo boats plying the Great Lakes. In 1943, the National Gallery of Canada commissioned him to depict the activities of the Canadian Merchant Navy and he left on a mission to the Caribbean with Michael Forster. He enlisted in the Royal Canadian Navy in February 1944 and worked as an official war artist from April 1944 to August 1945. Most of his works depict the landing operations at Normandy and destroyer movements off Brest. He obtained a Guggenheim fellowship that allowed him to travel and paint in United States in 1947 and 1948. He taught at the Vancouver School of Art in 1948. He won a prize at the Second International Exhibition of Drawing and Engraving in Lugano, Switzerland in 1952. Lithographs by Nichols, along with works by James Wilson Morrice, Jacques de Tonnancour and Anne Kahane represented Canada at the 1958 Venice Biennale. He was made a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts. He lived in Toronto.
