Remembering Queer Resistance at Montréal ’76 w/ Ross Higgins

As Montréal approaches the 50th anniversary of the 1976 Olympics, much of the city’s attention is turning back to the Games’ legacy, in a surprisingly positive light. Much of the conversation in the decades since has centred on the Games’ enormous cost, but the lead-up to Montréal ’76 also included an aggressive social campaign to “clean up” the city for an international audience.In the years before the Olympics, police intensified raids on gay bars, bathhouses and other queer spaces, part of a wider crackdown on communities seen as undesirable or embarrassing to the city’s image. These raids caused a critical shift in the queer community. People rallied together to resist the violence of police by mobilizing like they never had before.For this episode of Local 514, we speak with longtime activist and historian Ross Higgins about that history, the queer resistance it helped galvanize for decades that led to the shift in social opinion, and what Montréal leaves out when it remembers the Olympics of 1976.