“I thought she was nuts when she said I’d be a judge.”

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n 1976, when Harvey Brownstone told his mother he was gay, she became “volcanic” and kicked him out of the house. He spent five years on welfare, without stealing – much. Somehow, though, he got a law degree from Queens, clerked for a young Rosalie Abella, and became Canada’s first openly gay judge in 1995. Now, in retirement, his celebrity interview show has 70 000 YouTube subscribers, and the memoir he just released is being made into a movie starring David Arquette.

As Pride season begins, Harvey joins the pod to discuss his cinematic life, the clubby Canadian legal world of the late 20th century, and the role of the judge as public educator.

Notes:

• Without Prejudice: My Life as a Gay Judge by Harvey Brownstowne
• Harvey Brownstown Interviews…
• Find out about CBA Pride initiatives and the CBA’s Sexual and Gender Diversity Alliance Section (SAGDA)

Verdicts & Voices is a legal current affairs podcast presented by the Canadian Bar Association. With her retinue of expert guests, host Alison Crawford keeps listeners up to date on news, views, and stories about the law and the justice system in Canada.

Views expressed are not necessarily those of the CBA.

Transcript

Welcome back to Verdicts and Voices, your regular legal affairs podcast from the Canadian Bar Association. And I'm your host, Alison Crawford.

In 2026, most Canadians see equality for gay people as a given, but it hasn't really been that long since coming out drew public harassment and discrimination. It ended some careers and drove people to hide their true selves along with the people that they loved.

Today's guest decided to come out in the first year of law school at Queen's University in the 1970s. While the campus was always a safe space, Toronto's legal fraternity was not. Especially on Bay Street and in many courtrooms. Now, if you haven't guessed, I'm talking about Canada's first openly gay judge, Harvey Brownstone, a member of the Ontario Court of Justice for 26 years.

Last week he published a blazing, candid memoir called Without Prejudice: My Life as a Gay Judge.

Harvey, welcome to the podcast.

Harvey Brownstone

Thank you so much, Alison, for having me on your podcast. It's a real honour and a privilege.

CBA Podcasts

Thank you. Well, I have to ask you when it was that you decided that you had to write about your life.

Harvey Brownstone

It was a long time coming, but the reason I decided to do it is because after my show, my interview program, became really quite successful and we got televised in the UK, I started being asked for interviews of me, which was kind of new. I mean, I was the one interviewing celebrities --

CBA Podcasts

This is Harvey Brownstone Interviews. This is a great show that we should just let our listeners know at this point so they know what we're talking about.

Harvey Brownstone (01:51.212)

Yeah, I decided after retiring that I would try to follow my lifelong dream of being a talk show host and it turned into a real career. And so when I started giving interviews and people wanted to know my story, I told them in a nutshell, you know, that my parents had thrown me out because I'd come out and that I was on welfare and I had a lot of homophobia and all that. And everybody kept saying, you gotta write a book.

CBA Podcasts (02:19.955)

Yeah.

Harvey Brownstone (02:20.333)

Because not just because of what you went through, but somehow you found this way to channel and harness all of this anger and pain and heartbreak and you turned it into a recipe for success, and everybody kept telling me that they thought this was something that could help other people. Maybe they're not gay, but they've been bullied, they've been rejected, they've had issues with their parents, they've dealt with professional jealousy, all kinds of things that make you feel like you're on the outside looking in. So I sat down a year ago and decided to see if it could all come back to me. And I put myself in a zone and I wrote it. And then I contacted the publisher of my first book and said, I don't know if you're gonna be interested in this, but would you like to see it? And like two days later, the publisher phoned and said oh yes.

CBA Podcasts (03:11.806)

So had you kept diaries throughout your life because your recollection is impeccable.

Harvey Brownstone (03:20.959)

I did. I kept a journal. I think it's therapeutic, especially if you've been through incidents that you weren't powerful enough to deal with the way you wish you could have. You know, when you can write it all down and create this fantasy in your head of what you wish you had done and how you wish you had handled it, I found that therapeutic. So I did keep journals.

CBA Podcasts (03:33.48)

I feel like the skeleton of your book really aligns with your mother. she's such a central character. She was a Holocaust survivor and she had an immense amount of courage to leave Paris and move to Hamilton, Ontario as a single mom with you. And she almost immediately started a very successful Parisian style clothing boutique. Like she was a real marvel, but she possibly had the worst reaction to you coming out than I could have ever imagined. Can you tell us a bit about that?

Harvey Brownstone (04:22.711)

My mom was really quite a force of nature, and she was a person certainly from whom I inherited all of my drive and my ambition and my need to be somebody in life. And I knew that she and my dad would be disappointed when I told them I was gay because it was 1976. Nobody talked about these things. I remember seeing Liberace on TV and thinking, okay, that guy's definitely like me, but then again he's not. But I remember people saying, Liberacci, you know, he's queer, he's a faggot. And I had been pegged as gay right from the time of grade four. So I when I told my parents, I kind of thought they might already know. I mean, I'd never dated girls in high school. I was not… I mean, everybody seemed to think I was gay because I was a little flamboyant and I was a little effeminate and I wasn't athletic and you get the picture. I was a pretty much stereotypical gay boy. But my mother was beyond volcanic. I can't explain the decibels of screaming and wailing and hollering and crying that went on when I told my parents. My dad, of course, couldn't get a word in edgewise, but my mother, my mother got it in her head that if she threw me out, that was tough love and I would come to my senses because this couldn't be happening. This was not the son she raised. She wants her real son back. Suffice it to say that it launched me into a real crisis because I was an only child with no family, no money, no place to live. And I was nineteen years old. When you're nineteen years old and you're hungry and you want to make something of yourself, you do whatever you have to to survive. And I will tell you this, Alison, it made me a better judge.

CBA Podcasts (06:38.587)

Well, absolutely. You know, you described in the book very well how, you know, you turned to cleaning houses and even going to… dressing up in a suit to raid a conference table at a convention you weren't attending. You know, those buffet tables where I confess I've grabbed the odd muffin. But you really, you earn sort of the lived experience that many judges of your generation certainly did not experience.

How did you how did that shape how you dealt with the people who eventually appeared before you at court?

Harvey Brownstone (07:15.851)

Well you just said a mouthful. I remember at my interview before the Judicial Appointments Committee, I told them. I said, I'm willing to bet that I'm the only person you will ever interview who spent five years on welfare. Because the truth is, and maybe it's different now, but certainly when, you know, my first decade or 15 years as a judge, most of them went to private schools. They lived very privileged lives. These people wouldn't know a poor person if they fell over one. And I wanted the committee to know that I was different. I knew what it was like to be on the outside looking in. I knew what it was like to be poor. And I can't tell you how many times in court I would have people say, Well, you're a judge, you're rich, you don't know what it's like to be on welfare. And I would say, I was on welfare before you were born. So it did change my way of dealing with people because I empathized and I understood what motivated some people to commit to behave in a way that wasn't appropriate, that was antisocial. It doesn't mean that I didn't apply the law and didn't make it clear to them that they had to find a different way to deal with their pain. But the fact that I had experienced some of the pain that people had experienced when they come before me, I think gave them a sense that I that they could talk to me, that I understood them. You know, I also contemplated suicide. I also had to do things to get meals that I would never have done otherwise. You know, I also… And as you mentioned, I mean, I found ways to get free food. I didn't steal much, but I did live a life very much on the outside, trying to get myself through law school. And I really think that if you're going to be in a position in criminal court or family court where you have to understand what motivates bad behavior, it does help to have had the background I had. And I'm grateful for it.

CBA Podcasts (09:23.001)

Yeah, I agree, you know, and it's certainly, these days, you know, representation, you know, across the entire spectrum, is certainly something that matters when it comes to people who are on the bench.

You had, you named through your book many guardian angels, people who were in your corner. And I think a lot of people who've grown up with a lot of privilege don't experience that, like the gratitude that you have for someone when they really help you in a time of need. And one of those people was Rosalia Abella, the retired Supreme Court Justice. Can you give me a sense of what she did for you?

Harvey Brownstone (10:02.327)

Can you imagine, Alison, how lucky I was? I got this summer job in 1979. They, well, first of all, I got really lucky because one of my classmates at Queen's Law School, I mean, this is like right out of a movie. One of my classmates was dating the chief judge of the family court. Her name was Judy Ryan, and she was dating Ted Andrews. She was a mature student. She had been a social worker and decided she wanted to be a lawyer. So there she was in her 40s, going to law school. We became friends because she was an established person and she fed me a lot. And she really took an interest in me and my struggles just to get fed. And somehow she met Ted Andrews. Ted took a liking to me and he said, I'm gonna get you a summer job at the family court in Toronto. You're gonna be a clerk for the summer. Alison, considering the awful jobs I'd had before that, most of them at the steel company in the blast furnace, this was this was a dream come true. And who do I get assigned to but Rosie Abella, who at that time was in her early 30s, she was a brand new judge, she was full of excitement, she was full of enthusiasm, she was different than any other judge in that building. She saw her role as a problem solver. She wasn't interested in being a scholar, although heaven knows she proved herself to be one. But in those days, she just wanted to roll up her sleeves and say to people in court, directly to them… She talked to the lawyers, but then she turned to the litigants, which was unheard of. And I was smitten, mesmerized. And one day she asked me, you know, Harvey, you never talk about your life or your family or anything. Like I don't know anything about you. You're like a big question mark. So I took a deep breath and I said, Rosie, I'm gay and my parents kicked me out. And she was mortified. And she said, This is not okay. And I'm gonna call, I'm gonna call your mother. I said, you don't know what you’re… My mother is really… I mean, if you took my mother to Marineland and she looked at the sharks, she'd say, Well do they come with fries? I mean she was tough.

Anyway, the conversation with my mother is all in the book, and it was pretty bad. And Rosie said to me, you know what? You don't need her. You don't need anybody. You just keep working hard. I believe you're gonna be a great lawyer, and I think you could even be a judge. Because we had talked a lot about her decision. She liked to pick my brain, and she felt I had some kind of a sense about about justice and about how to decide disputes.

So she became a mentor and she encouraged me. And when you're a person in my situation who was being told by law professors that I'd never get a job because I should have stayed in the closet, can you imagine having a woman like that, a judge, telling me that… I mean, I thought she was nuts when she said I'd be a judge one day, but I… I didn't think I'd get a job even as a lawyer.

CBA Podcasts (13:15.526)

But you did. You had so many different jobs as a lawyer. You know, you were working as duty counsel during the infamous Toronto Bathhouse raids of 1981. That sounds incredible. But then you also, you know, articled or tried to get jobs articling for law firms on Bay Street and you encountered a great deal of homophobia there and in courtrooms. And I kinda wonder when you're looking at that old boys' club model, like was that culture inorance, or do you think it was also about preserving privilege, the privilege that they had?

Harvey Brownstone (14:03.756)

Oh, it's both. Absolutely both. You know, the thing is, I got a scholarship at Queen’s. The only way I could get through school is that that a wonderful man who was another guardian angel got me a scholarship. And I had to get straight A's to keep that scholarship. So I really, really worked hard and I did graduate with straight A's. And so I just assumed… like, all the other students kept telling me, you're gonna go to Bay Street, you're gonna go, you're gonna go to those big carriage trade firms, they're gonna want you. And Alison, I got lots of interviews at all the top firms on Bay Street because I was a straight A student. But when I got there, these were… And I'm not kidding you, there wasn't one… I never met a woman, I never met a person of color, I didn't meet anybody under the age of 55. They were clones of each other. They were wearing gray pinstripe suits. They had this poindextery kind of look to themselves. They didn't ask me one question that had anything to do with the law. They wanted to know where my people came from. Did I play softball? Because there was a team that the law that the law firm had. Did I play golf? Because a lot of their clients played golf and they made deals in the golf course. Did I have a wife that would fit in with their social circle?

I mean it was clear I was a fish out of water and the book details some of my hilarious experiences. I remember one guy said to me, well, you know, our clients are big shots, you know, these are he-men, you know, they're macho industrialists. You gotta be a man's man to work at this firm. And I threw my arms in the air and I said, Sir, I am the walking definition of a man's man.

To this day, I don't think he got what I was saying. They were totally in the dark.

CBA Podcasts (16:03.388)

Yeah. And you were appointed to the bench, much like Rosalie Abella, in terms of being young, you know, and not having taken sort of the traditional route to get into the legal community. What difference did you learn that it meant to your colleagues, to counsel who appeared before you and members of the public, to finally have that representation on the bench? Although of course there were gay judges and lesbian judges serving, but they weren't out when you were appointed.

Harvey Brownstone (16:35.649)

Well, in terms of being young, that was quite an eye-opener. I think on my first day of court, I had this drunk guy come in front of me and he said, you're the judge, like, how old are you? And I said, I'm 38, sir. And he said, I got things older than you in my fridge. And I said, Well, are they a bit off too? So you know, I had… And my colleagues… They assigned me to the Etobicoke court. There wasn't another judge there under seventy. I think the chief did it on purpose. He put me on this court with a bunch of old farts. This was the court that just Judge Hryciuk came from. And these judges were all strongly supporting him. And so that's the environment I got into. So they didn't know what to make of me, and they called me the kid.

And it being young, I think they took they were a little bit protective and fatherly towards me because I think I won them over. But being gay, they just couldn't get it. And one day three of them took me to a strip club because they thought they could do some conversion therapy, and that's in the book too. It was a very unusual time. I don't think young people today, or even young judges today, understand what the mentality was like for women, for anybody who was.

A member of a minority. I mean, it was a different, you know. I'll tell you. Can we talk? I'll tell you something. About two weeks after I started as a judge. This isn't in the book, but this is what it was like back then. I'm in the lunchroom, and one old fart of a judge walks in and says, you know, I'm in the middle of a trial.

CBA Podcasts (18:04.952)

Yes, we can talk.

Harvey Brownstone (18:23.073)

with this guy who's charged with beating up his wife. But after I heard that woman testify, I wanted to slug her myself. That's what it was like back then.

CBA Podcasts (18:35.95)

Have gone over well with you considering your long history in family law. You know, which I I think it's you know, you said you love criminal law, but you were ultimately drawn to family law. and I I thought that was beautiful the way you explained that in the book. Now, retiring from the bench after 26 years has obviously afforded you the freedom to speak more freely than judges, especially Canadian judges do.

And you your your book is full of advice on everything from social media and dating advice to ne the need to reform the criminal justice system and to pay more attention to the the the sort like the roots of of some of the mental illness and the addictions that really plague the justice system today. what what like you you offer sort of advice to every audience who could possibly be reading the book, which I think is fascinating.

But when it comes to the criminal justice system, you know, people have been saying for years that people have to get to the roots of the problems that, you know, drive cr crime, especially low level crime, that we w you know, clog our courts. No one's really doing anything. Like what do you think needs to change? And how how could it happen?

Harvey Brownstone (19:56.248)

Well, I'll tell you, I took the opportunity in the book to critique the criminal justice system and the family justice system, and I also feel very, very strongly, and I thank you for this question, it bothers me immensely that judges who are in the best position to speak out about law reform, about justice system reform, about the delivery of justice services don't do it.

I do not agree that because they're judges, they can't speak out. I agree they can't get involved in politics. I agree they can't get involved in speak openly about individual cases or about legal issues that they're going to have to adjudicate over. And I'm not suggesting that that should be done. I didn't do it myself. And I wrote a book as a judge, and I had a TV show as a judge, and I never ever did anything that was inappropriate for a judge. But judges are

public educators, at least they should be. They're not just adjudicators, and they are in a unique position and a privileged position to be able to say, look, this system doesn't work. We are not achieving anything in the criminal justice system to warehouse people who have obvious needs that could be addressed in such a way that they would not commit crimes. We are spending a fortune on correctional services and prosecutions and probation officers and parole and all of that.

police when the

White the big elephant in the room, and every judge knows it, every criminal lawyer knows it, is that we're not really achieving anything. And because we're we're spending so much time on people whose main issue is mental health or addiction or homelessness or other things that we could be addressing, we are not spending the time we need on the real criminals, the real bad guys, the ones that we really should be focusing on.

Harvey Brownstone (21:56.754)

system's broken and I don't even understand why retired judges don't speak up. I mean where are they? I'm you know I retired in 2021 but there must be thousands of judges that retired over the over the last 50 years that know very well. Sure, some of them have written books. They're all about what great judges they were and what interesting cases they had. But

What about talking about how broken the system is and how badly it needs to be fixed? And so I did it.

CBA Podcasts (22:28.463)

Yeah, you certainly did. And there are a few out there. we recently had Justice former Chief Justice Neil Sharkey on the program to talk about GLADU principles and all that that stuff in Nunavut and but they're they're very few and they're far between and you know it's it i it it can be frustrating. Now look, these days you host a podcast called Harvey Brownstone Interviews, and your guests are often

Entertainers who were popular in the seventies, eighties and nineties. I I watched your interview with Crystal Gale that came out this week. I have to ask you, were you ever a fan of El Wee Yoast and Saturday Night Pardon me?

Harvey Brownstone (23:08.605)

Very much so. Very, very much so. Because he got to interview these cinematic legends. And I was a talk show junkie when I was a kid. So every interviewer, Barbara Walters and Johnny Carson and David Frost and Dick Cavot. Well, Dick Cavot came on my show and passed me the torch. That was the greatest highlight of my life.

CBA Podcasts (23:29.595)

That's amazing. When was that?

Harvey Brownstone (23:32.417)

But yes, that he Dick Cavit was on my show two years ago. He's also in the feature film. I should mention that my book has already been made into a Hollywood movie, which will be coming out in the fall.

CBA Podcasts (23:34.937)

Yeah. Okay.

CBA Podcasts (23:43.801)

What? That was alluded to in some of the promotional materials, but I I looked for something and I hadn't seen it. So Okay.

Harvey Brownstone (23:51.346)

it's all over the internet. The I am portrayed by three different actors in the movie. The movie's directed by Shane Stanley. It will be premiering in the fall. And the story of how this book became a movie before the book even came out is another conversation. But David Arquette plays Harvey the Judge.

CBA Podcasts (24:08.858)

Wow.

Harvey Brownstone (24:09.601)

David Mazooz, who starred as Batman in a TV show called Gotham for five years. He plays young Harvey, the one that gets thrown out and struggles through law school and as a young lawyer. And then Little Harvey, the one who's bullied terribly as a kid, is played by a a young ten-year-old actor by the name of Asher Alexander. And my mother is played by Rochelle Lefebvre, who co-stars in a TV show called Twilight. My father is played by Joe Lando, who was Jane Seymour's love interest in Doctor Quinn Medicine Woman.

CBA Podcasts (24:14.319)

Yeah, yeah.

CBA Podcasts (24:33.38)

Yes.

Harvey Brownstone (24:40.116)

So the movie the movie is quite it's quite an eye-opener, I'll tell you that.

CBA Podcasts (24:45.887)

okay. Well I can't wait to see that. That's wonderful. Well, you know, we could talk about your book and your life for probably several hours, but we can't do that on a podcast, sadly. But I just wanna tell you how much I I enjoyed your book and I enjoy your podcast as well. And it's been an absolute pleasure to speak with you today. Thank you.

Harvey Brownstone (25:07.447)

Thank you so much, Alison, for this wonderful conversation. I really, really appreciate you.

CBA Podcasts (25:14.277)

Harvey Brownstone Harvey Brownstone's new memoir is fresh off the presses and it's called Without Prejudice, My Life as a Gay Judge. It's published by ECW Press and you can buy it pretty much anywhere. If you're interested in tuning into Harvey Brownstone interviews, you can find them all on YouTube. I hope you enjoyed this lively conversation. Next sh next week's show is our last of the season, and I'll be talking to three law students about school, summer jobs, artificial intelligence.

and more. Verdicts and Voices is produced by the Canadian Bar Association and I'm your host, Alison Crawford. Wonderful Harvey

Harvey Brownstone (25:53.162)

I am