Calgary LGBTQ History: The hidden struggle that changed the country

[CALGARY, AB] — The next time you grab a coffee at the Starbucks in the 1st Street S.W. underpass, you are standing inside the ghost of a place called "The Pit"—ground zero for a community that spent decades fighting for its right to exist in Cowboy Country.

The Basement Under the Palliser

The Fairmont Palliser's basement tavern, officially the Kings Arms, became an unlikely gathering point for Calgary's gay community in the early 1960s. It wasn't a safe space — it was a gritty beer parlor shared with old-timers and the business lunch crowd, where suspected gay patrons were routinely denied service for sitting too close or wearing the wrong clothes. According to Kevin Allen's Calgary Gay History Project, the friction reached a breaking point in December 1978, when police arrived with six officers and four paddy wagons to evict 20 gay customers after a heated dispute with management. The Pit closed for good on July 31, 1982.

The Year After the Law Changed

A year after Pierre Trudeau decriminalized homosexuality, a community that had been meeting in the shadows finally claimed a room of its own. In 1969, a private gay members club opened in the basement of a building on 1st Street S.W. — but the arrangement quickly soured when the original owner began letting non-members in, exposing the community to the harassment it was trying to escape.

The members boycotted. An executive committee formed, raised donations, and incorporated the Scarth Street Society — named for the old designation of 1st Street S.W. — as a non-profit charitable society to take over the lease. In March 1970, they reopened the space as Club Carousel: Alberta's first legally recognized, community-owned gay club.

Lois Szabo, who had come out as a lesbian in 1964, was one of its driving co-founders. She and fellow activist Jack Loenen had been looking for a space where Calgary's queer community could simply exist without fear. According to Szabo, 90 percent of members didn't use their real names to shield their identities from police and employers. The club's name came from a can of "Carousel" brand paint — with a drawing of a carousel horse on the label — discovered while they were cleaning the filthy basement space the week before opening night. In 2021, the City of Calgary dedicated a park in the Beltline as Lois Szabo Commons in her honour.

The Bus Driver Who Changed the Country

The decriminalization of homosexuality in Canada was not born from progressive goodwill. It was extracted from the justice system by the sheer weight of one man's suffering.

Everett Klippert, a Calgary bus driver, was sentenced to four years in 1960 for consensual sex with men. After his release, he moved to Pine Point in the Northwest Territories, where he worked as a mechanic's helper. In August 1965, he was brought in by local RCMP for questioning about an arson case. He was cleared of the fire — but in questioning, admitted to consensual sex with four men in the community, and was charged accordingly.

Two psychiatrists examined Klippert and testified that he had no pedophilic or aggressive tendencies and posed no danger of physical violence to anyone. But both also concluded that if released, he would likely continue having consensual sex with men — which remained a criminal act. The court took that second finding and ran with it. Judge John Sissons declared Klippert a "dangerous sexual offender" and sentenced him to indefinite preventive detention, classifying him as "incurably homosexual."

In November 1967, the Supreme Court of Canada upheld that sentence in a 3-2 decision. The public backlash was immediate and furious — newspapers from Halifax to Vancouver ran editorials condemning the ruling as a relic of punitive moralism incompatible with any recognizable idea of justice. It forced then-Justice Minister Pierre Trudeau to act. In December 1967, he introduced a sweeping omnibus bill that included the decriminalization of homosexual acts between consenting adults in private. Trudeau's famous line — "There's no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation" — became a cornerstone of Canadian civil liberties. The bill passed as the 1969 Criminal Law Amendment Act, Bill C-150. Klippert, the man whose unjust sentence made it necessary, was not released from prison until July 21, 1971.

The History That Hides in Plain Sight

Calgary's civic mythology leans hard on Stampede ruggedness and conservative prairie roots. But the city's actual history of grit runs through its basements and back rooms — a group of ordinary people incorporating a charitable society the year the law finally changed to give them cover, a bus driver whose unjust sentence forced a federal reckoning, a community that built its own institutions when the city's institutions refused to protect it.

Kevin Allen's Calgary Gay History Project remains the primary keeper of this record. The 2021 dedication of Lois Szabo Commons offers a small, formal acknowledgment from City Hall. Whether Calgary's broader civic memory catches up to that small park in the Beltline is still an open question.

Everett Klippert spent his later years in Edmonton, working as a truck driver and actively avoiding the spotlight of the movement he accidentally helped start. He married, refused to march in Pride parades, and died of kidney disease in 1996. He never asked to be a catalyst. The country changed anyway.