Never Going Back: A History of Queer Activism in Canada is the first comprehensive history of its kind. Drawing on over one hundred interviews with leading gay and lesbian activists across the country and a rich array of archival material, Tom Warner chronicles and analyzes the multiple - and often conflicting - objectives of a tumultuous grassroots struggle for sexual liberation, legislated equality, and fundamental social change.

Warner presents the history of lesbian and gay liberation in a Canadian context, telling in the process the story of a remarkable movement and the people who made it happen. His history encompasses efforts to attain legislated human rights for gays and lesbians, significant regional histories, autonomous lesbian organizing, and the histories of lesbians and gays of colour, two-spirited people, and those living outside the urban mainstream of lesbian and gay life. It also recalls the crises confronting the movement: the backlash against queer activism from social conservative 'family values' campaigns, state and police harassment, and the exigencies of responding to AIDS.

Moving beyond the discussions of equality-rights campaigns, Never Going Back delves inside the movement to look at dissent and debates over liberation and assimilation, sexual expression, race, the age of consent, pornography, censorship, community standards, and an identity forged from a common sexual orientation.

Tom Warner has been a gay activist for over thirty-five years. He got started in 1971 by helping to found the Gay Students’ Alliance at the University of Saskatchewan and, in 1971–1972, the Zodiac Friendship Society, which later became the Gay Community Centre of Saskatoon. After moving to Toronto in 1973, he helped to found the Gay Alliance Toward Equality and served as the group’s president from 1976 to 1977. Tom is the author of the widely acclaimed Never Going Back: A History of Queer Activism in Canada.

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