Author delves into Canada’s first gay film

In the wake of recent release, Drive Back Home, a film about New Brunswick’s queer history, Canada’s first gay film was screened in the province. Audience members speculated that this might have been the first time the film was shown in New Brunswick.

The remastered film Winter Kept Us Warm (dir. David Specter, 1965), often referred to as the “first gay film in Canada,” was shown in Fredericton on Feb. 4, 2025. This film was lauded by many, including renowned filmmaker (and a classmate of Specter’s) David Cronenberg who stated: “Winter Kept Us Warm is the most influential film of my life.”

Sabine LeBel from the Department of Culture & Media Studies at the University of New Brunswick welcomed attendees, and introduced the film and Chris Dupuis, author of a study of the film who was visiting from Toronto. In the opening conversation, preamble to the film, Dupuis set the stage for the film.

Dupuis’ book, by the same name, is meant to accompany anyone wanting more information on the film. This is Dupuis’s first adventure in writing about film and John Greyson, one of Canada’s foremost independent filmmakers, wrote the introduction to the book.

It is published in 2024 in a collection called “Queer Film Classics,” at McGill-Queen’s University Press. Already a dozen in, the collection endeavours to publish a total of 30 books about queer films from all over the world, Dupuis clarified.

Dupuis was aware of Winter Kept Us Warm, made in 1965, but realized it had “virtually disappeared” from the Canadian cannon.

.When researching the film for the book, Dupuis had to search to find the director, David Specter, who was working in California at the time. He then interviewed him for around 40 hours, along with some of the actors and the film’s producer.

Specter was a student when he made this film in Toronto, where there was no film school at the time. The independent film was made for a budget of $8,000, with a largely amateur team of students working with time constraints. The finished product in the remastered copy does not show any amateurism at all, however.

In an interview, Spector told Dupuis that “he didn’t have time to write a script” and most of the work was improvised and filmed “as a single take” because they didn’t have enough film stock, which was very expensive.

Dupuis “was hoping for a lifechanging experience” when he saw the film for the first time and, despite an initial disappointment, grew to love the film and see its importance to queer film history in Canada.

Inspired by the French New Wave, the film, according to Dupuis’s analysis is “a portrait of queer attraction.” The historical moment when the film came out, the mid 1960s, was very difficult in Canada for homosexuals; it was before 1969 when Everett Klippert was the last Canadian condemned by the courts for his sexuality.

Dupuis spoke of his own experience coming out in the 1990s in Toronto, after the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, an important time in history where “subtle examples of queerness” like Winter Kept Us Warm were rare.

Filmed on University of Toronto campus, the film centers around the friendship that develops between two young male students over a year. True to the time it was made, it speaks subtly about unrequited love and male desire.

When it was finally finished, Winter Kept Us Warm was screened at the Commonwealth Film Festival in Cardiff, Wales, and was even shown in Cannes with great success. At the time, student-made film was gaining in popularity but still very rare.

This event was co-sponsored by the University of New Brunswick Faculty of Arts, the Department of Culture and Media Studies, The 203 Centre for Gender and Sexual Diversity, and the Queer Heritage Initiative of New Brunswick.

Sophie Lavoie is the chair of the Department of Culture and Media Studies at the University of New Brunswick and a member of the NB Media Co-op editorial board.