The little-known story behind Canada's first queer film, Winter Kept Us Warm
David Secter's pioneering 1965 film all but vanished from the culture — but this new book will change that
When it was released in 1965, Winter Kept Us Warm was a watershed moment for Canadian cinema. Shot by David Secter, a 22-year-old English major at the University of Toronto, it was both Canada's first depiction of a gay romance and an early success story of indie film.
Along with becoming the very first English-language Canadian narrative film to screen at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival, it received accolades from critics at home and abroad, before touring art house cinemas across North America. But despite its initial success, the film had very nearly vanished from our cultural consciousness a decade after it was made.
Trying to understand this disappearance and what it meant was part of the reason why I decided to write a book about it.
Winter follows two students, Peter (Henry Tarvainen), a shy freshman, and Doug (John Labow), a popular senior, who form an unlikely bond over two semesters at university. Arriving from a small town in Northern Ontario, Peter initially struggles with campus life. After an ill-fated first meeting, Doug takes him under his wing and a fast friendship quickly develops. But when Peter begins dating Sandra (Janet Amos), sparks of jealously fly. At the same time, Doug's girlfriend Bev (author Joy Fielding, who started her career as an actor) becomes suspicious of the boys' friendship, suggesting their connection is more romantic than platonic.
From the beginning, one of the few things I knew about Winter was that none of the cast realized they were making a gay film. I thought this was odd, given how visible the sexual longing is on screen. But as I developed a clearer picture of early 1960s campus life, the secrecy of the production began to make sense.
Most of my generation spent high school in the closet, emerging with an explosion of rainbows and glitter when we started university thanks to queer-positive residences and campus activist groups. For previous generations though, the same spaces that made my coming out possible pushed them deeper into secrecy. University, I learned, was often more homophobic than the real world, with sex segregated dormitories and varsity sports seeding the sexual tension that flowered into aggressive homophobia. This in turn helped me to understand why Secter struggled to get the university's permission to shoot on campus.
Despite the script's queer elements being so cautiously rendered, the higher-ups were terrified that the first film made at the institution might present a degenerate picture of student life.
Canadian society's rampant homophobia also meant that the film's subtlety was critical to having it shown. The Ontario Film Review Board very nearly banned it, an interesting thing to reflect on when you compare it to the kinds of films that skate by with a PG rating today. Along with this, Secter's caution was an act of self-preservation. In addition to the frequent anti-gay violence both on and off campus, being gay was still a crime in Canada; Everett Klippert, the last person convicted of homosexuality here, began his three-year prison sentence in August 1965, the same month Secter was polishing his final edit.
While Secter's cautious approach was critical to getting the film made, it's also part of the reason for Winter's disappearance. Queer film exploded in the decades following its release, first with the post-Stonewall freedom of the early 1970s and again with the AIDS crisis in the 1980s. Within this framework of more explicit queer work, Secter's shy love story faded into the background. Part of Winter's value today is in how it encapsulates gay life in the context in which it was made. It's an expression of queer sexuality produced in a time and place where that sexuality was criminalized, a fact reflected in both the delicate storytelling and the remarkably cautious nature of the production. It reveals how queer stories could be told in this time and place, offering a romantic interest that's never articulated because neither the characters nor the broader culture would have been able to deal with it.
When I started working on a book about Winter in December 2019, I had no idea where the journey would lead. Initially, I thought it would be a simple process of assembling existing writing about the film and then complementing that material with a couple of interviews. Instead, it meant poring over newspaper archives, touring locations around Toronto where it was shot, and having countless hours of conversation with queer activists from that period. Ultimately, the process wasn't just about understanding the film and how it was made. It also meant familiarising myself with the context that birthed it.
This work didn't just give me an appreciation for the film. It also helped me to understand my own position within the continuum of Canadian queer life. As someone who came out in the 1990s, I experienced a life of comparative freedom relative to those who lived through the 1960s. At the same time, I now see the value in passing on both my own stories and those of my elders to queer youth today, helping them understand how they fit into our collective struggle.
None of us will ever fully understand the experience of generations who came before us. But films like Winter can offer Canadians of all stripes a little window into this particular moment of queer history.
Winter Kept Us Warm will be screening at Innis Town Hall in Toronto on May 27th, with the event also serving as a book launch. Chris Dupuis and David Sector will both be participating in a Q&A afterwards. It is a co-presentation with the 2024 Inside Out 2LGBTQ+ Film Festival. The event is free.
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