Toronto University Graduate Students Focus On Sexual Diversity Study

Toronto, Ontario (AHN) - The University of Toronto will begin offering starting fall master's and doctorate programs covering a wide range of sex-related topics from literary to public health.

The university will be the first in Canada to offer graduate courses on the subject. Other Canadian educational institutions like Queen's University, McGill University, Universite du Quebec a Montreal, York University and University of British Columbia already offer undergraduate degree in sexuality studies, but most of their programs focus on issues of sexual orientation.

Major U.S. schools like the Universities of Chicago, Yale and Cornell, the New York University and the City University of New York have similar graduate programs.

Scott Rayter, acting director of the Mark S. Bonham Center for Sexual Diversity, said the topic is an emerging field in the academic world and the University of Toronto was fast in recognizing the need for a program on the graduate level.

The initial batch of the graduate program has 12 enrollees, made up of nine males and three females. Among them will be a Chinese student whose senior PhD research will be about how the gay community in China blossomed despite media repression.

The interest of other students in the course include the gay theater in Canada and homoerotics of militarism and peace activism.

Meanwhile, students of Alqonquin College are among the thousands of Canadian youths returning to class next week, even as the school's 480 support workers are on the verge of striking. To announce their intent to walk-off their jobs, members of the OPSEU set up information pickets throughout 24 colleges of the school Thursday.

Algonquin's management and unions both want to settle the signing of a collective bargaining agreement as the support staff contracts end Aug. 31. The offer of management is a two-year agreement with annual pay raises of 3 percent, while the union's counter-offer is a 4 percent salary adjustment on the first year.