Svend Robinson on being Canada’s first out gay MP

A new biography about Robinson was released last year

By Xtra Editor • January 6, 2014 11:50 am EDT

Svend Robinson talks about his experiences as Canada’s first out member of Parliament.

Seven-term MP Svend Robinson recently spoke to Xtra about the new authorized biography Svend Robinson: A Life in Politics and the challenges of coming out as gay in the late 1980s.

“It was not always easy, I got incredible volumes of hate mail, death threats. The day after the Toronto Star ran a front page story saying that I was going to be coming out . . . my office was destroyed.”

Robinson, who now lives in Switzerland, was in Toronto as a the keynote speaker at Awards for Action, a benefit for the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network.

Read more about Robinson and his new biography here.