CANADA — North America is a little safer today, thanks to attentive guards bravely patrolling the Canada-US border and protecting it from the scourge of – perfectly legal gay porn. As Canada’s online queer information resource site Xtra.ca tells it, Rick Frenette and his partner, Shawn, were returning to their home in Ottawa after attending a June weekend auto show in Gettysburg, PA. Behind their vehicle was their pet project: a vintage Bricklin.
Unfortunately for the couple, irregularities in the vehicle’s paperwork turned their leisurely drive home into a nightmare of bonus questions – and ultimately, theft – from the Canada Border Service Agency (CBSA).
“They went through our entire truck,” Frenette explains. “They did not go through our toiletries, which we were surprised about – but they opened up the laptop and I guess one of the icons said ‘porn’ on it.”
That one little word apparently meant a great deal to at least one CBSA agent, who demanded passwords from the couple when he discovered that he couldn’t immediately snoop into all of their laptop files.
Ignoring their mobile phones, Blackberry, and bundle of loose burned CDs, the CBSA agent took the laptop into the border office and returned in an hour to give his fellow citizens the bad news: the laptop wasn’t going home with them. Its crime?
“He said it had ‘questionable material,” Frenette reports.
The “questionable material” was precisely the kind that CBSA agents have repeatedly been told by the Supreme Court of Canada to stop confiscating – and which seems especially odd given the country’s legalization of same-sex marriage.
The “questionable material” was gay porn.
While some of the content that apparently triggered the CBSA response included light watersports, the couple insists that there was nothing on the laptop that couldn’t be purchased in a Canadian adult shop – except for the video footage of themselves making love, of course.
Although no terrorists have been caught during the searches, attorney Joe Arvay – who represented the Little Sister’s bookstore in a similar case – stated in 2006 that as much as 70-percent of perfectly legal sexual material confiscated by CBSA agents features gay or lesbian subject matter. This has not merely been pornographic materials, either, but also family photos, written fiction, letters, academic papers, and even bootlicking photos.
While Frenette has chosen to take the high road in the matter, calling the situation a “pissoff” and warning fellow gays to avoid the same mess by wiping their traveling laptops of all erotic material, others take it more seriously.
Xtra.com quotes Jim Deva, who battled the courts for 20 years so that Little Sister’s Bookstore could import gay and lesbian erotica, as asking “How is that going to protect us or keep us safe? What a waste of manpower! What a waste of the security state! Shouldn’t they be looking for knives and guns? Wouldn’t that be a better use of their time?”
According to Deva, most people who suffer property seizures keep quiet about them for fear of repercussions. Many simply hand over their goods and give up on ever retrieving them.
Chief among the activities that motivate CBSA agents to take possession of laptops are images of watersports and fisting, neither of which are illegal or obscene within Canada.
“They have no legal right to keep either of those,” Deva insists. “There is nothing wrong with watersports; it’s not an obscene activity. It’s something that lots of gay couples participate in. And fisting – our court case 10 years ago proved that fisting is not an obscene activity.”
Protected by a cloak of silence and shame, Deva believes that CBSA agents will continue to oppress gays and lesbians. “You don’t want your name flagged when you cross the border,” he assures. “It is a major inconvenience. It’s not just that you’d lose your laptop, it’s that you can’t fly into or connect in any American airport without a lot of hassle, and so people ask themselves if it’s worth it.”
How much is freedom – true freedom – worth?
