A recent international survey has indicated that 17 per cent of Canadians would not want a homosexual living next door to them.
The survey, entitled Love Thy Neighbour: How Much Bigotry is there in Western Countries, was conducted by John Mangan, Professor of Economics at the University of Queensland in Australia and Vani Borooah, Professor of Applied Economics at the University of Ulster in Ireland. The survey asked respondents whether they would object to having certain kinds of people as neighbours. Over 32,000 people in 23 Western nations were surveyed.
Homosexuals were more likely than any other group to be shunned by a potential neighbour. Just over 17% of Canadians said they would not want a gay person living next door. Of the 2,048 Australians surveyed, 24.7 per cent said they didn’t want homosexuals as neighbours, while in New Zealand, where 1,201 people were surveyed, 22.3 per cent registered objections.
Those figures were exceeded by survey respondents in Portugal (25.6 per cent), Austria (26.7), Greece (26.8), the Republic of Ireland (27.5), and Italy (28.7), with Northern Ireland being the highest (36 per cent).
The least prejudiced was Sweden, where only six per cent said they would object. The overall average who were opposed to having a homosexual neighbour in the countries surveyed was 19.6%,
Other minorities fared somewhat better, with only 4.6 per cent of Australians saying they were opposed to people of a different race, Jews or Muslims being their neighbours and 4.5 per cent objecting to immigrants or foreign workers. In New Zealand, three per cent of those surveyed said they would not like neighbours of a different race, while 5.4 per cent said they would object to immigrants or foreign workers next door.
Northern Ireland also held the strongest views on immigrants and foreign workers, with 19 per cent saying they were not desirable neighbours, with Italy coming in close at 15.6 per cent.
Canada, long thought to be among the more liberal countries, indicated that 6.5 per cent of the 2,000 Canadians surveyed would object to having a Muslim neighbour. Surprisingly, the survey also found that Americans were more tolerant of Muslims than most Western countries. Not surprisingly, that acceptance was not extended to lesbians or gay men.
In the United States, 10.9% of people did not want a Muslim next door compared with an overall percentage of 14.5% in western countries with the highest percentage being in Greece at 20.9%.
Canada, at 6.5 per cent was amongst the lowest, with many European countries, many considered to be liberal democracies, scoring much higher. Britain scored 14.1 per cent of the population opposed to having Muslims next door; Belgium scored 19.8, while Norway and Finland scored 19.3 and 18.9 per cent, respectively. The percentage of negative responses across all western countries averaged 14.5.
Canadians appear not to be quite as liberal as many of us would like to think. Certainly having 17 per cent of the population being opposed to living next door to us should give us pause. What does that pleasant but distant neighbour really think about us? And would this antipathy to having us move into the neighbourhood spill over into harassment or even violence directed against our persons and/or property?
In recent years, at least in the major centres of Canada and the US, there has been a gradual but steady move away from living in "the village." The Gaybourhood, The Ghetto, the Gay Village – call it what you will – evolved throughout the 1970s and 1980s as lesbians and gay men started building real communities and increasing our visibility.
Entire neigbhourhoods became known as "gay"; The Castro in San Francisco, West Hollywood in Los Angeles, The West End in Vancouver, St. Catherines in Montreal, and Church and Wellesley in Toronto. Here in Calgary, The Beltline, located between the CPR tracks and 17th Ave SW, while not quite a Village, for many years has been home to a high percentage of gay men, along with our clubs, cafes, shops, bathhouses, parks, and bars.
As property taxes and rents skyrocketed, fewer and fewer could afford to live in "our" inner cities and usually now-gentrified neighbourhoods. We followed the mainstream trend of buying cheaper housing in the suburbs or otherwise spreading ourselves throughout the cities we lived in.
Many heralded this as the dawning of a new age, where homosexuals weren’t confined to aging inner city neighbourhoods but could live anywhere we damn well chose and be accepted. Now, it seems, we aren’t quite as welcome in those neighbourhoods as many of us thought.
Whatever the faults of "the ghetto," and there are those who believe there are several to be sure, such environs awarded us the certain level of security of knowing it was our turf, that we could go about our daily business without having to worry too much about the neighbours or disapproving looks if we appeared "too queer." Gaybourhoods gave us a sense of belonging, of connectedness to our own that, I believe, is lacking when we are living amidst heterosexuals in suburbia (or elsewhere, for that matter).
Life is difficult enough for many of us. If we feel ostracized or unwelcome in neighbourhoods, where ever they might be - if we are met with hostility or the cold shoulder by our neighbours, or 17 per cent of them - how can we feel secure and comfortable in our homes?
There is much to be said for the creation and maintenance of queer space, and this includes carving out our own neighbourhoods. Various minorities before us have done so, thereby adding to the cosmopolitan flavour of a city. Shopping in Little Italy, or going for Dim Sum in Chinatown, or whiling away the afternoon enjoying potato latkes and cream cheese blintzes in a Jewish Deli are experiences that add to living in a city.
Mind you, I fully admit to a certain bias in favour of gay villages (which to me would also include not just gay but LBTQ as well) and the various permutations such space creates. Such spaces are "ours."
This bias is reinforced knowing that 17 per cent of my fellow Canadians don’t really want me or my partner as neighbours. Maybe we should let them have their boring little neighbourhoods and expend our famous energy in creating our own space, and in the process help create a more vibrant, open and diverse city, as contradictory as that may sound.