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Please see below for a brief personal history of the
Bill 7 Award prepared by founding member Regan McClure. Bill 7 Award 2009 In 2009, Bill 7 was once again pleased to be able to present four Awards of $2000 each to four recipients, Oneil McClure, (Transitional Year Programme, University of Toronto), Mike Snider (Bachelor Science – Human Nutrition, University of Guelph), Mariko Reilly (Honours Neuroscience Co-op, Year 1, Brock University, and Nazareth Harfoush (Arts and Science, Queen’s University).
Bill 7 Award 2008 In 2008, Bill 7 in recognition of support from ExeQutive presented four Awards of $2000 at ExeQutive’s meeting on October 29th, 2008 at the Verity Club. This year’s recipients were Felicia Byron (photography, OCAD), Joey Leuw-kalalat Soehardjojo (Bachelor of Commerce, McMaster University), Samantha Crow and Thompson Jamal (University of Windsor).
Award recipients Felicia Byron, Thomson Jamal and Joe Leuw-kalalat Soehardjojo at the Verity Club. The Bill 7 Award Trust was thrilled to receive a
donation in the amount of $1325 from ExeQutive (a
Toronto organization for LGBT executives and business
leaders) to support the Bill 7 Award Trust. Bill 7 Award Trust Chair Carol Thames
accepts donation from ExeQutive chair John Clifford ExeQutive member
and Bill 7 Award Trustee Greg Johns Bill 7 Award Trust Chair Carol Thames Bill 7 Award 2007 This year’s recipients were a 3rd year Social Welfare
and Gender Equality Studies at Nipissing University, a
student in 1st year Political Science and Government at
York University, and a student at York University with a
double major in French Studies and Hispanic Studies. All
three recipients for 2007 asked to remain anonymous for
personal reasons which provided us with a clear
indication that there is still work to do to empower our
youth to be out in our community. Bill 7 Award 2006 In 2006 for the first time the Award was able to grant four Awards for $2000 each. This year’s recipients were Caleb Nault (Brock University), Kandace Texeira (Trent University), Andrew Tardif (University of Ottawa) and Andrea Corte (George Brown College). Bill 7 Award 2005 In 2005, four Awards of $1000 each were presented to
Kenny Khoo (Biochemical and
Environmental Engineering program at the University of
Western Ontario), Nic Weststrate (4th year at University
of Toronto at Mississauaga, Psychology and Philosophy),
Bill 7 Award 2004 In 2004, three Awards of $1000 each were presented to Ruban Lawrence (Computer Systems Engineering, Carleton University, Ottawa), Jennifer Metherall (Mathematics, University of Guelph) and Javier Ortiz (Graphic Design, George Brown College, Toronto). The Awards were presented during the Out & Out Club (www.outandout.on.ca) annual general meeting at the Winchester Hotel in downtown Toronto. Special thanks to the members of Out & Out for their hospitality! The presentations were made by sustaining donor, Mark Prior, and Bill 7 Trust chair, Connie Bonello.
Bill 7 Award 2003 Presentations took place during BaBoom! - a fashion show extravaganza celebrating the diverse style of Toronto, on Saturday October 25th, at Buddies In Bad Times Theatre. BaBoom! was presented as part of HYSTERIA: A Festival of Women, co-produced by Nightwood Theatre and Buddies In Bad Times. Deepest thanks to the organizers of Hysteria and BaBoom! for their support and hospitality! 2003 Award winners each received a $1,000 educational bursary. Huda is enrolled in the Child & Youth Worker Program at George Brown College, and is also an active participant in SOY's various programs for LGBT youth. Calvin Lau is studying Journalism at Ryerson University.
Bill 7 Award: Forte Concert Fundraiser 2003 On Saturday, June 7, 2003, Forte - The Toronto Men's Chorus (www.forte-chorus.com) presented Steam Heat – a benefit concert for the Bill 7 Award. Steam Heat: a musical journey based on actual events that led to the recognition of the gay community as a legitimate part of the community, and the establishment of the annual Pride Celebrations in the City of Toronto. Our most sincere appreciation goes out to the board and members of Forte for their creativity and generosity! Bill 7 Award 2002 Three Awards of $1000 each were presented as part of the Bent On Change conference at Jarvis Collegiate in November. The Awards were presented to Nathan Hauch (Humanities, Carleton University, Ottawa), Jennifer De Meis (Television Specialist, Loyalist College, Belleville), and a 24 year-old woman in Business Management at Ryerson University, who chose to remain anonymous for privacy reasons.
Bill 7 Award 2001 In 2001 we had two recipients of the Bill 7 Award who received $1,000 each. The official presentation of the awards were at the December Singing OUT concert.
-------------------------------------------------- A brief personal history of the Bill 7 Award Regan McClure July 16, 2008 I started the award while I was still a student at the University of Toronto in 1987. I had come out when I was 14 and still in high school, and thought I would finally get a chance to connect to a community when I was 17 and arrived at U of T in 1984. There wasn’t much to see. I was underage and so the bars were off limits to me. I haunted the bookstore, a few social groups (where I was the youngest person by decades) and the gay group at U of T where I one of three or four lesbians in attendance. The men’s community was deep in the chaos of trying to respond to the AIDS crisis and all its energy seemed headed in that direction. Women were largely subsumed in feminist organizing where they remained a constant minority. Looking for some way to express myself, I cut my teeth on political organizing in 1985 to establish the Women’s Centre at U of T. Women’s centres and gay groups were popping up at universities all across Canada, and they were the gathering point for a great deal of political organizing. Creating public spaces for the queer communities was a crucial step to providing the venue to come together and start claiming political clout. It was there that I heard about the Coalition for Gay Rights in Ontario. The Women’s Centre invited Chris Bearchell to speak about John Damien’s case and the coming fight for inclusion in the Human Rights Legislation. John Damien (who had been fired from his job as a racetrack steward in 1975) was CGRO’s first test case, and he was still fighting for his rights in court in a case that was consuming his life, his finances and finally his health. There were more and more politically-focused and queer-specific groups emerging up in every community, and there was increasing dialogue about working together on a single issue that would affect everyone. Getting included in the Human Rights Legislation was that issue, and Chris told us that the Bill 7 Campaign was the community response that would make it happen. That history is recorded elsewhere; so I will only say that the Bill 7 Campaign was a big, grown-up action that inspired me to name the award after it. I felt that as I had come of age, so had the community in which I immersed myself. It was the culmination of decades of hard work and sacrifice that I was privileged to witness, even by playing a bit role of ‘student idealist with placard’ at rallies. Coming down off the high of winning the right to be myself in public, I noticed that the casual discussions at the Women’s Centre quickly focused on what would soon become the next big thing – the future years of coming out and identity politics. No one else working on the campaign planned to put their experience on a resume, partners who lost their lovers to AIDS went unrecognized and unsupported and we all knew students who’d been cut off from their parents’ financial support. Outside of the courtroom it seemed like the fruits of the Bill 7 Campaign remained out of reach. People needed something more immediate, some refuge from the storm that came with living publicly as queer. Some money, perhaps… like a scholarship for queer youth. Once I had the idea it was easy to organize. I typed out the constitution on the new ‘good luck’ electric typewriter in the back office at the Women’s Centre and rounded up groups to oversee the administration of the Award. I wanted balance on the board – enough large, funded groups to give it legitimacy and stability, but enough grassroots groups to give representation to new voices and diversity. I especially wanted people of colour, youth, people living in isolation in small communities and working class groups to be represented on the board. Since the Award was meant to soften the blows of discrimination, it had to be accessible to those who might face it most harshly. A group serving on the board provided a volunteer for the meetings to select a recipient, but the group itself also promoted the Award, to find both donors and applicants. I approached 6 groups to serve on the first Board of Directors and none of them turned me down. I think, in many ways, it felt good to have a meeting about something positive like giving out an Award, instead of battling the growing number of AIDS deaths or planning yet another protest in response to discrimination. We had a meeting to introduce the future board members to each other, and they were a little awkward but enthusiastic about meeting each other. How was it possible, everyone marvelled, that the community seemed so small and yet here were people we’d never met before? I could feel the community stretching a little wider as we chatted. Then, on November 12th 1987 I cycled around Toronto getting signatures on the constitution that I would submit to the process of becoming a charitable organization. The initial groups on the Constitution were the Black Women’s Collective, Zami, the Lesbian and Gay Community Appeal, the Toronto Counselling Centre for Lesbians and Gays, the Women’s Centre at the University of Toronto and Lesbians of Colour. We had been told it was very difficult to get charitable status. I was painstaking in my reading of the charities act, but it was my first application to create a charity. I had followed everything needed to qualify as a charity, and also sent a letter of support from Svend Robinson. However, I still received several phone calls from mysterious offices in Ottawa asking me if this was really an award for homosexuals, how would we propose to find students willing to be labelled as such, how would we find funding for this award and so on. There was very clear direction in the charities act that it was acceptable to establish a scholarship targeted at any given group of people – third year engineering students, Slavic students and so on. It was obvious that they were struggling with the concept that we deserved to be legitimized in the same way. Perhaps it was the name of the award itself, with the campaign fresh in everyone’s mind, that made it possible. We were awarded charitable status and started collecting donations. Jane Rule was one of our first donors from all the way in B.C. and she wrote a fundraising letter for us urging others to donate. Retrospectively, the name hasn’t aged all that well. There have been many other Bill 7s since then, and once a Bill becomes law it gets renamed, but I had the Bill 7 Campaign itself in mind when I made the name for the award… my community that stood together and supported each other as we took our place in the public world. |
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Carol Thames, Calvin Lau (recipient), Connie Bonello and Clare Nobbs at the 2003 Award presentation 
