Jonathan Di Carlo
Jonathan (He/Him) is a scholar of American and Canadian 2SLGBTQ+ legal history. His research focuses on the history of police power and constitutional law as applied by the legal systems in Canada and the United States to the Queer and Trans community. His S.S.H.R.C.-funded M.A. thesis, “Blue Laws Matter: Post-Jim Crow Police Power, Stop and Frisk, and the Agents that Populated the Carceral State,” focused on the role of the United States Supreme Court in legalizing the police practice known as Stop and Frisk.
Jonathan is also a passionate advocate for 2SLGBTQ+ rights and a survivor of the discredited practice of conversion therapy (a.k.a. SOGIECE). His advocacy work contributed to the national criminalization of conversion therapy practices in Canada in 2021. He has appeared on CTV News, CBC News, CBC Radio, the Voice of America, Le Soleil, Le Devoir, and the Ottawa Citizen.
People Type:
Legal History; 20th Century U.S. History; 20th Century Canadian History; Constitutional Law; History of Sex, Gender, and Sexuality; State, Politics, and the Law.
Program:
Cohort:
Lavender Laws seeks to uncover the legal dimensions of Queer resistance to abuse of police power by the state between 1969 and 1992 in Canada and the United States. It explores narratives of legal resistance to police violence by Queer and Black Queer individuals. It also explores how lawyers in the progressive legal movement partnered with members of the Queer community to resist the selective enforcement of arbitrarily applicable laws against vagrancy, vice, deviancy, and sodomy through litigation. This dissertation also seeks to examine how these laws were challenged and what legal frameworks and novel constitutional arguments were used to do so. In examining the legal history of litigation by Queer individuals challenging the police power of the state, this research will use the history of the law as a lens through which to scrutinize social history scholarship and narratives of social progress.
