John Alan Lee

John Alan Lee (24 August 1933 – 5 December 2013) was a Canadian sociologist who produced the first prominent taxonomy of love styles and became one of the first professional men in Canada to come out publicly as gay. His 1973 book The Colours of Love sorted loving into six styles arranged on a colour wheel, a scheme that other researchers later turned into the standard questionnaire used in relationship research. Lee spent his career at the University of Toronto, published more than three hundred articles and books on love, sex and gay life, and ended it as an advocate for the right to die.

Introduction

Lee is unusual among the figures in this field in that his two reputations — love researcher and gay-rights activist — were built in the same decade and fed each other. The 1970s gave him both: the book on love styles in 1973, and his public coming-out on Ontario television in 1974, at a point when a university professor could lose a career for it. He exploited the second to make the first possible, appearing on television more than fifty times over the following decades.

What he did in the study of love was typological rather than experimental. He described varieties of loving and gave them names that stuck; he did not measure them, and the psychometric work that made his scheme testable was done by others after him. That is the right way to read his contribution — a vocabulary that organised a messy subject, handed on to researchers who could then find out whether it held up.

Early Life and Education

Lee was born in Maxville, Ontario, on 24 August 1933. His father abandoned the family, and his mother was unable to care for him and his brother David alone; he grew up a ward of the provincial Children's Aid Society, in its care until he was twenty-one. He worked in a factory and was active as a trade unionist in his youth, and stood as a Cooperative Commonwealth Federation candidate in the Toronto riding of Broadview in the 1958 federal election.

He took an undergraduate degree in sociology at the University of Toronto in 1956 and then spent years away from the university — working, writing and organising — before taking a Ph.D. at the University of Sussex in 1971. He was thirty-eight when he entered academic employment.

Academic and Professional Career

Lee joined the University of Toronto in 1971 as a member of the sociology faculty at Scarborough College, and taught there until his retirement in 1999. His first book that year was not about love at all: Test Pattern: Instructional Television at Scarborough College was a study of teaching by television, reflecting an early interest in educational technology that ran alongside his other work.

He was known as a deliberately provocative teacher. A former student recalled him opening a class in the 1980s with "I am Professor John Lee and I'm gay, and those of you who don't like that can leave," and in 1984 his students boycotted a final examination after he had discussed with them the arbitrary nature of examinations — receiving zeros for it.

Activism

From 1964 Lee worked as what he called an "undercover gay activist," writing letters to newspapers and magazines protesting biased coverage of homosexuality, at first anonymously or under a pseudonym. He gave that up on 14 February 1974, when he came out on TVOntario's The Judy LaMarsh Show, becoming one of the first professional people in Canada to do so on television. Later that year he helped organise the first "Gay Days" picnic at Queen's Park, an ancestor of Toronto's Pride events.

In 1975 he was the founding chair of the University of Toronto's Gay Academic Union, which later became the Lesbian and Gay Academic Society and ran programmes at the university for a decade. In 1979, during a period of sustained police harassment of gay men in Toronto, he organised a three-day sit-in in the offices of the provincial Attorney General, Roy McMurtry, demanding equal treatment, and followed it with a kiss-in in the Ontario Legislature. After Operation Soap — the 1981 Toronto bathhouse raids, in which police arrested more than three hundred men — he became chair of the Right to Privacy Committee, formed to fight the charges and the raids.

A Quaker with civil-disobedience training, Lee was also active in the Sierra Club, Amnesty International and anti-war and labour organisations.

Later Years and the Right to Die

In retirement Lee campaigned with Dying with Dignity, the Canadian right-to-die organisation. He was in poor health but not terminally ill, and argued publicly that he should have the right to end his life on the grounds that it was complete and he had nothing further he wanted to accomplish — a position that placed him at the controversial edge of the Canadian debate, since it did not rest on terminal illness or unbearable suffering. From 2004 he published his autobiography, Love's Gay Fool, as a free document on his own website, eventually running to thirty-two chapters plus appendices. He wrote his own obituary for The Globe and Mail. He ended his life on 5 December 2013, aged eighty, in Toronto.

Major Contributions to Psychology

The Colours of Love

The Colours of Love: An Exploration of the Ways of Loving (1973; a widely circulated edition followed in 1976) was the first prominent attempt to treat love not as a single thing that varies in quantity but as a set of qualitatively different ways of relating. Lee built his scheme from a long reading of Western writing about love combined with open-ended interviews, and presented it as a set of ideal types: descriptions of ways people love, not boxes that people belong in permanently.

The organising device is a colour wheel. Three styles are treated as primaries, and three as compounds of pairs of primaries — a piece of geometry that is elegant, widely repeated, and metaphorical rather than empirical.

The Six Love Styles

  • Eros — passionate, idealising love, strongly physical, and the style most people mean by being in love.
  • Ludus — playful, uncommitted love, pursued as a game, with multiple partners and no expectation of permanence.
  • Storge — affectionate love that grows slowly out of friendship and companionship.
  • Pragma — Ludus combined with Storge: practical, "shopping list" love, in which a partner is chosen against a set of requirements.
  • Mania — Eros combined with Ludus: obsessive, possessive, jealous love, veering between elation and despair.
  • Agape — Eros combined with Storge: selfless, altruistic love given as a duty, asking little in return.

Lee's own framing matters here: he described these as styles a person might adopt toward a particular partner at a particular time, not as fixed traits. That made the scheme psychologically supple and harder to measure, since the same person can be eros with one partner and ludus with another.

Getting Sex

Lee's other well-known book, Getting Sex: A New Approach (1978), was a study of gay sexual cruising — the pursuit of anonymous sex in public places — based on interviews with the men who did it. At a moment when such activity was criminalised and almost never written about except as pathology or scandal, treating it as a social phenomenon with its own rules and meanings was itself a claim. The book made his reputation for frankness and cost him standing with more cautious colleagues and with parts of the gay movement.

Major Publications

  • Test Pattern: Instructional Television at Scarborough College, University of Toronto (1971)
  • The Colours of Love: An Exploration of the Ways of Loving (1973)
  • Lovestyles (1977)
  • Getting Sex: A New Approach (1978)
  • RCMP vs. The People: Inside Canada's Security Service (1979)
  • Gay Midlife and Maturity: Crises, Opportunities, and Fulfillment (1991)
  • Love's Gay Fool (autobiography, published online from 2004)

Impact and Legacy

Lee's name survives attached to the six love styles, and those styles are now measured by an instrument he did not build. Clyde and Susan Hendrick's Love Attitudes Scale (1986) — forty-two items, seven per style — produced six clean factors in two samples of 807 and 567 respondents with low intercorrelations between scales, and it remains the standard measure in the field. Lee's typology also set the terms for the later work of Robert Sternberg, whose triangular theory of love is the main rival framework, and it gave relationship researchers a vocabulary that maps onto the older distinction between passionate and companionate love found in interpersonal attraction research.

There are real objections to the scheme.

It was never derived from data. Lee built the typology from literature and open-ended interviews and did not attempt to establish that there are six styles rather than four or nine. The colour-wheel arithmetic — that Mania is Eros plus Ludus, and so on — is a diagram, not a finding.

The instruments do not fully support it. Hendrick and Hendrick's own validation work found that the scales predict relationship quality well for Eros, Agape, Ludus and Mania but poorly for Storge and Pragma, and the Hendricks themselves conceded in 1989 that research using the scale may be measuring "some combination of love constructs and non-love constructs" rather than romantic love. Sternberg's critique goes further: Eros and Storge, treated by Lee as distinct primary styles, look more like passionate and companionate love, which are not mutually exclusive and may be components of a single experience rather than alternatives.

The differences it predicts are unstable. Men were reported to score higher on Ludus and women on Storge and Pragma in early work, but later studies found the only clear gender difference to be on Eros, and several found none at all. Cross-cultural work has produced partly conflicting results; one study found Indian students scoring higher than British and Portuguese on Pragma, Mania and Agape, while failing to replicate an earlier finding that collectivist cultures score lower on Eros.

And the life complicates the reputation. Getting Sex sits awkwardly now: it documented a criminalised subculture at some risk to the men in it, and it was celebrated and criticised in equal measure for making public sex legible. Lee's radicalism eventually alienated more moderate parts of the movement he helped build; David Rayside, a colleague at Toronto, put it as "it almost became his persona, shocking people." His final campaign, for a right to die that did not require terminal illness, was the same instinct applied to a subject where many of his allies did not follow him.

He was inducted into the National Portrait Collection of The ArQuives, Canada's LGBTQ2+ archive, in 2005, with a portrait by Norman Hatton; the archive holds his papers and nearly two metres of records, which he donated weeks before his death. He fathered two children.

Learn More

References

  • Lee, J. A. (1973). Colours of Love: An Exploration of the Ways of Loving. New Press.

Last updated: 2026-10-22

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