Pink Awards 2026

Tim McCaskell is a writer, activist, and educator. For over twenty years, he worked at the Toronto Board of Education, developing and delivering programs on racism, homophobia, class bias and sexual harassment.

From the mid 70s to the mid 80s, he was a member of the collective that produced The Body Politic, Canada’s first national magazine for Lesbian and Gay Liberation, where his focus was international news. He chaired the Public Action Committee and was part of the steering committee of the Right to Privacy Committee which galvanized community response after the 1981 bath raids. Later in the 80s, he was part of the Simon Nkodi Anti-Apartheid Committee, a queer solidarity group that supported the struggle against apartheid South Africa.

In 1988, he was a founding member of AIDS ACTION NOW!, the Toronto activist group that fought for access to experimental treatments, funding for medications, ethical clinical trials, and the participation of people living with HIV in the development of national and Provincial policies. In the early 2000s, he was part of the Ontario Working Group on Criminal Law and HIV Exposure.

From 2009 to 2015 he was part of Queers Against Israeli Apartheid which did Palestine solidarity work in the queer community. He is author of Race To Equity: Disrupting Educational Inequality, (2005) a history of the struggle for equity in Toronto schools, and Queer Progress: From Homophobia to Homonationalism, (2016) a history of queer activism in Toronto. He was an editor of Any Other Way: How Toronto Got Queer, (2017) a collection of writings on Toronto queer history.