Joseph Couture

After initially dropping out of university to work for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Couture went back to school later in life. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree in Sociology in 2010, and a Bachelor of Arts degree in Criminology in 2016, both from Western University.

Couture began working for the CBC’s radio program IDEAS in 1994. His first assignment was to investigate a police investigation into the gay community in his hometown of London, Ontario. His work on the project was the subject of a feature-length "analysis" piece called the "Kiddie Porn Ring That Wasn’t" in The Globe and Mail on March 11, 1995 by then Ryerson journalism instructor Gerald Hannon. The piece reported on how Couture had uncovered the fact that the London police were using the guise of a child pornography ring to harass the gay community in London and throughout the province of Ontario.

Hannon’s piece also reported on the extensive harassment of Couture by the local constabulary. Such persecution of a Canadian journalist was unprecedented and Couture was granted the Hellman-Hammett Award from the group Human Rights Watch in New York in 1996.[1] At the time, Couture was the only journalist in Canada to have won the award.

Hannon’s piece in the Globe provoked such a public outcry on both sides, that both Hannon and Couture were named amongst the top newsmakers of the year.[2] Couture eventually went on to work for CBC television as an investigative reporter for their flagship program "the fifth estate". While there he specialized in forensic pathology and unsolved homicide cases. He also worked for the programs Witness and Newsworld before leaving for a freelance career as a writer in 1998.

Couture published his first book, "Peek: Inside the Private World of Public Sex" in 2008 under the imprint of New York publisher Haworth Press. The book was surprisingly successful for the subject matter and made it onto the Amazon best-seller list in Canada, the United States, Australia and the U.K. He offers regular commentary on the issue of public sex whenever called upon by the media to do so and has appeared in Esquire Magazine,[3] The Advocate,[4] The New York Post[5] and the National Post,[6] amongst others. In press interviews promoting the release of "Peek", Couture set off a firestorm of controversy and criticism in New York after calling gays pushing for same-sex marriage "Borg Homosexuals" who wanted to assimilate everyone and turn gays into boring and indistinguishable drones. The popular gay website JoeMyGod highlighted his remarks and the comments lit up with vicious personal attacks on Couture ranging from petty remarks about his appearance to more vitriolic statements that Couture was going to enjoy being raped in prison.[7]

He wrote in the National Post gay marriage didn't simply mean equal, it meant the same and that was just boring [8] He said gays had lost touch with all sense of their historical roots and did not understand changing attitudes about the role of "real men" and masculinity and were basically bad knock-offs of what they thought straight men acted like.

Couture continued his cultural analysis of trends in the gay community by writing in a Toronto magazine that the Internet was the worst thing to ever happen to gay men. He argued that they now lived essentially nothing but empty virtual sex lives because men seemed to only feel safe hidden behind a computer screen and an anonymous profile [9] He declared the "post-gay-lib world" an increasingly sexual desert and cultural wasteland [10] In the same article he argued there is no such thing as a "gay community." He said they had nothing in common with each other except with whom they sometimes slept and no bond or special allegiance to each other. He said in 1995 he no longer cared to work with many gay activists because collectively they had turned their backs on runaway and throwaway gay youth.

While some people seemed to take particular note of his "radical" views on the gay movement, he found himself repeatedly caught in controversies over what he thought were simple issues. The decade of 2000 to 2010 proved somewhat baffling to him.[11] He wrote on many issues ranging from the environment, poverty, mental health, criminal justice, censorship and whatever else struck him as important and it began to look like no matter what he wrote about or said, it seemed to anger just about everyone. He said they were not correctly called controversies because a controversy requires two or more sides, and there seemed to only be one side, those who disagreed with him. He grew increasingly confused as time went on because even when he wrote in support or defense of some issue in calm and conventional ways, the very people he was trying help were the first to target him with extreme criticism [12]

Couture has publicly discussed the fact that he has completed two other books and has large sections of third manuscript in draft form. The first two books are about his early life which is known to have been difficult. Plans were in the works to publish the first book a few times, but publication by a traditional publishing house never happened for a variety of reasons. He released it briefly in early 2013 as an e-book, only to remove it weeks later. It was reviewed rather extensively during its short life, sometimes favorably, sometimes not. Paul Bellini of Fab Magazine loved the book and said it was a must-read for all journalism students and gay activists alike. He described the book as "Dickensian in its scope and squalor" and said it "burns every bridge Couture ever walked across.[13] Couture says in the book that he ultimately never could decide whether he found it "harder to be lonely at the top, or lonely at the bottom."

In his book "Peek: Inside the Private World of Public Sex" he describes himself as "definitely gay" but also with "some curiosity about women."[14] He writes that he previously believed himself to be "one hundred percent gay", but he realized his attraction to both men and women after viewing heterosexual pornography.[15]

Couture told a reporter from a Boston magazine in 2015 that he had finally concluded that labels were for soup cans, not human sexuality.[16] He then mentioned in passing that he recently had a brief polyamorous group relationship with two other bisexual men and a heterosexual woman.

• https://web.archive.org/web/20160303234156/http://www.stephenwilliamsbooks.com/html/hellman-hammett.html
• http://www.ifex.org/canada/1995/03/13/journalist_joseph_couture_threatened/