Bert Archer

Bert Archer (born 1968) is a Canadian author, journalist, travel writer, essayist and critic.

Archer was born in Montreal and lived in Calgary and Vancouver before attending St. Michael's University School in Victoria, British Columbia, the University of St. Michael's College at the University of Toronto, and Trinity College, Dublin. He was editor of his college's arts journal, The Grammateion in his second undergraduate year, and as editor-in-chief of The Mike, the college newspaper, a year later. The year after that, he was president of the Ontario region of the Canadian University Press, North America's oldest national student organization.

While still in school he worked as an assistant to editor David Colbert at Harper & Collins Canada. In 1994, he was hired as an editorial assistant by Quill & Quire, Canada's national book trade magazine. Two years later, as review editor, Archer was pressured to resign after writing an essay in the Financial Post which some considered derogatory to certain elements in the Canadian publishing industry, specifically, the small presses.^[1] He was subsequently hired as a columnist for the Toronto Star, Canada's largest circulation newspaper, to review books published by small Canadian publishers.

Since then, Archer has been an editor at NOW and Eye Weekly, Toronto's two weekly alternative arts magazines, as well as the Toronto Star and The Globe and Mail. As of 2008, he is a columnist for Toronto Life magazine and writes for The Globe and Mail. His piece about the ethnic grocery market in Canada for Report on Business magazine was part of The Future of Food package that won a 2007 National Magazine Award.

He is the author of The End of Gay (and the death of heterosexuality), published in Canada^[2] in 1999, in the US^[3] in 2002 and the UK^[4] in 2004. The book argues that there is no such thing as inherent sexual identity, and that sexual behaviour is a product of many factors, personal will not least among them. The book became a staple on reading lists for college and university courses dealing with identity politics, sexuality and gender.

Archer has also contributed chapters to several books: "Why Boys Are Better Than Girls" for What I Meant to Say (2006),^[5] Creating a Toronto of the Imagination for uTOpia (2006),^[6] as well as chapters for its follow-up, GreenTOpia (2007),^[7] and a book about water called HtO (2008),^[8] excerpted in the National Post.^[9]

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