A new documentary is shining a light on Everett Klippert’s story one year before the 50th anniversary of the decriminalization of homosexuality in Canada – an event in which Klippert played a central role and a story that played out in the NWT.
“It’s really important that Everett’s story not be forgotten,” says Kevin Allen, a Calgary-based researcher and the host of Gross Indecency: The Everett Klippert Story, produced by TELUS STORYHIVE.
Allen started the Calgary Gay History Project in 2012 to chart the history of the city’s gay community and quickly ran into the story, with which he was then unfamiliar, of a man raised in the city who would become the last person jailed for homosexuality in Canada.
Klippert, a bus driver in Calgary, was jailed for four years in the early 1960s for “gross indecency.”
After his release in 1964, he found work as a mechanic’s helper at Pine Point. In 1965, he was questioned by RCMP during an arson investigation in 1965. While he was cleared of involvement in the fire, they arrested and charged him with four counts of gross indecency after he admitted to being gay.
“He always thought honesty was the best policy when dealing with the state and the state had it in for him,” says Allen.
Klippert, by all accounts a kind and caring man, could perhaps be faulted for a bit of naivete, says Allen.
Klippert pleaded guilty to all four counts, and was given three years on each to be served at the same time. NWT Justice J.H. Sissons soon after declared Klippert a dangerous sexual offender, a designation that carried with it the equivalent of life in prison.
After an appeal to the Supreme Court was rejected, then NDP leader Tommy Douglas brought up Klippert’s story in the House of Commons in outrage. Almost immediately, the process began to decriminalize homosexuality in Canada. Then Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau would famously declare, “There’s no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation.”
While homosexuality would be decriminalized in 1969, Klippert would languish in prison until 1971.
Allen’s research into Klippert helped Calgary playwright Natalie Meisner stage Legislating Love: The Everett Klippert Story in the city this spring, and when filmmaker Laura O’Grady decided to pursue a documentary on Klippert, she twisted Allen’s arm to play a central part of it on camera.
“We're very fortunate in the fact that it's had a great reception and we've had a lot of national interest in it in the press from Vancouver to Ontario,” says O’Grady, adding that it won Best Alberta Short at this year’s Calgary Film Festival.
Allen’s happy with the reception the film has gotten, and with the reception his research and blogs on Klippert have gotten – and the people who’ve reached out to him because of it.
Earlier this year, Klippert’s former boss Robert (Bob) Johnson, 93, got in touch with Allen to talk about Klippert and what the folks at Pine Point thought of him.
According to Allen, Johnson told him, “Everybody loved Everett. He was such a damn nice guy.” When the local RCMP officer, to whom Klippert had lent his car multiple times, told Johnson he’d have to arrest Klippert, Johnson told him, “That is the dumbest thing I have ever heard,” and when Klippert was in court, a group of Pine Point residents showed up to support him.
Klippert died in 1996, and was given a posthumous pardon in 2016. Gross Indecency: The Everett Klippert Story is viewable on YouTube.