The Identity Project: Deputy Mayor Shawn Lewis

London Deputy Mayor Shawn Lewis is pictured at the rainbow crosswalk at Wellington and Dufferin streets outside city hall in London, Ont. on Friday, April 28, 2023. (Bryan Bicknell/CTV News London)

Shawn Lewis didn’t run to be the first openly gay man elected to London city council — he just is.

However, the recent rise of intolerance and hate directed towards the LGBTQ2S+ community has motivated the deputy mayor to be outspoken in combating hate.

Lewis was born and raised in Wallaceburg, Ont.

“Not a place where in the 80s it was okay to be a gay kid,” he recalled. “It was a time when you were afraid, you were shameful, you had self-doubt, a lack of self-value because of the attitudes of the people around you.”

“The fear is that you are going to lose your family, you are going to lose your friends. There was somebody I did confide in who I lost as a friend. That was a lesson not to share this with anybody else,” said Lewis.

After living in Windsor and Winnipeg, he eventually settled in London. It wasn’t until his 20s that he felt safe to be out.

Struggling and on the verge of poverty, Lewis said his decision to stick it out in London was because he had no other options.

“It was a miserable time to be a member of the LGBTQ community in this city. Not just with the mayor’s refusal to proclaim Pride and the Ontario Human Rights Commission charges that stemmed from that, but also with London police.”

“At the time, Chief [Julian] Fantino was in charge and we had persecution of the LGBTQ community, raids of gay-friendly bars, the Project Guardian false flag that claimed somehow they were protecting the community from grooming and child pornography — none of which was ever substantiated,” said Lewis.

Lewis praised a few “brave souls” who were successful challenging city hall at the Human Rights Commission over the refusal to declare Pride Weekend in 1995. He also credited several local politicians who challenged the status quo of the 90s.

“I think about people like Megan Walker, who absolutely did not side with the mayor at that time,” he said.

And from a distance Lewis watched other politicians begin to attend Pride events. “You started to see people like Cheryl Miller, who was a city councillor at the time, and Irene Mathyssen who had been a Member of Provincial Parliament.”

Working at a factory, Lewis was inspired to take a more active role with the union. His confidence began to grow along with a sense that he could play a larger role, so he began volunteering with Pride London.

“I remember going with the board chairs at the time to present Gina Barber with a pride flag that flew for the first time at city hall and how much that meant.”

Lewis had admired Gina Barber after working on some local NDP campaigns.

Later he took a role working with London-Fanshawe MP Irene Mathyssen helping serve the people of her riding in the London office.

“Helping with correspondence, organizing websites, helping with social media coordination. I was part of a team. It’s a team effort. It also started to give me the idea that I might also, someday, be able to be in elected office too. That it wouldn’t always have to be working in the backroom and managing things from behind the scenes,” said Lewis.

But Mathyssen’s pending retirement from politics left him with a decision to make about his future.

“I served a couple of terms as chair of my community association. I was volunteering with minor hockey. [Being gay] wasn’t an issue. It didn’t come up. That’s when I started thinking that if I can be out and open on the community association board, at the hockey arena, I can be out and open politically too.”

In 2018, Lewis announced his candidacy to represent Ward 2 on city council — but that would require defeating an incumbent who held the seat for more than two decades.

“I didn’t seek this office to be that flag waving, here I am a gay person being elected in the city. I did it because I wanted what was best for my neighbourhood.”

He knocked on every door in his ward twice, and started a third lap around the streets of Argyle during the campaign. It totalled more than 20,000 doors.

Lewis said intolerance answered the door exactly twice. “It was sort of like, ‘I know who you are, I know what you are.’ Then a slur and they’d close the door,” he recalled.

Lewis credited a thick skin developed over several decades for the resiliency it took to knock on the next door after being confronted by hate.

“It still hurts, but not to the extent that it would have bothered me 10 or 15 years ago, because I also realize those folk are in the vast minority and the rest of the community doesn’t share those feelings.”

Lewis won in a landslide, receiving 63.9 per cent of the first ballot votes.

After re-election in 2022 with 88.9 per cent support, he was asked by Mayor Josh Morgan to take on the added responsibility of serving as deputy mayor.

Recently, he rose in council chambers to take aim at the decisions of municipal councils in Norwich Township and some other communities near London that passed bylaws that only permit government flags to fly on municipal property — in effect excluding pride flags and other symbols of inclusion.

“When I saw what was happening in Norwich, I had to sleep on it at first because my initial reaction was so red-hot angry.”

Lewis believes that for a time many Londoners had a false-sense that LGBTQ2S+ equity had been achieved.

And on the surface it looked that way.

The annual London Pride Parade was being well attended and included corporate floats, police participation and local politicians.

“The haters have not gone away,” he warned. “What has happened, especially in the last three or four years, is that social media has empowered people who are few in number.”

He believes the isolation and increasingly angry tone of social media posts during the COVID-19 pandemic played a role.

“They were just in hiding. The fact that they felt emboldened enough to start being public about their beliefs again, to be public with their hate again, has been a wake up call to the LGBTQ community itself, as well as allies,” said Lewis.

He understands that his role as deputy mayor and city councillor puts him in a position to lead like the local politicians he admired in the past.

“It is a bit of a passing of the torch. When I was first speaking out against what was happening in Norwich, I actually had two people who were involved in challenging Mayor Haskett at the Ontario Human Rights Commission in the 90s reach out to me and thank me for speaking out.”

Lewis described it as standing on the shoulders of those who came before him, for the sake of those young people who will come next,