Winter Kept Us Warm is English Canada's first gay film. Following the story of a campus friendship that blossoms into a queer romance, the film is also Canada's first ever English-language entry at the Cannes Film Festival.

As Thomas Waugh opined on the pages of The Body Politic in May 1982 :

Winter Kept Us Warm was made on a shoestring at the University of Toronto by Secter, [then] a 22- year-old English major from Winnipeg. It wasn't easy. After Student Council money launched the filming of Secter's script of an 'ambiguous' (as they used to say in the sixties) male friendship in a campus residence, finishing grants were predictably refused by the Canada Council, the Ontario Arts Council and the National Film Board. But Secter persisted and went on to prove the bureaucrats wrong.... Winter Kept Us Warm still looks good today. It is sad but strong, rough edged but movingly tender and honest. To see it is to rediscover not only an unjustly neglected Canadian film, but also a poignant moment in gay history - an image from those winters in Toronto that we must never forget."