The gross indecency of criminalizing HIV non-disclosure

Abstract

This article complicates the narrative that the Canadian carceral system no longer targets queer people. It does so by reading two moments beside each other. One is 1969, when the Parliament of Canada, following the Supreme Court of Canada’s gross indecency decision in Klippert v the Queen, reformed parts of the Criminal Code in an ostensible liberalization. The other is 2017, when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau issued an apology to queer people against the backdrop of the ongoing criminalization of people who have sex while living with HIV. By reading these two moments beside each other, the article aims to track the criminal law’s regulation of queerness, examining the push and pull between the appearance of seemingly new carceral dynamics and the persistence of tropes of promiscuity, deviance, and pathology from earlier periods.