One of Canada’s longest standing openly gay film critics, Indiana-bred, McGill-trained Aitken co-founded Montreal’s L’Androgyne bookstore in 1973. An incisive, uncompromising commentator on movies on the CBC as well as in mainstream and queer print media such as TBP, Aitken’s purview is international cinema, queer and otherwise. As a scriptwriter, Aitken’s contribution to Canadian queer cinema was a futile St. Sebastian subtext in the 1996 Japanese rowing co-production Rowing Through (Masato Harada), an endless and repressed Chariots of Fire imitation. His novels such as the erotic, memoiresque Terre Haute (1989) have fared much better.