Sangria nights

 

Sangria nights: on this evening in 2015, drinking sangria at Café California and watching the crowds go by on Church Street. My friends Vince and Leticia Moneva owned the restaurant from 1988 until 2013, when the sold it and retired to Spain.

I always miss their iteration of the restaurant, but never more so than during the summer months. Cafe C. was my unofficial headquarters for more than two decades. I dined with friends, or alone with a book and a notebook. Vince and Leticia were family to me, and their daughter, Angie, a niece of the heart.

I wrote about Angie and the restaurant in Other Men's Sons. One of my friends who worked there was the model for one of the characters in Enter, Night. The boys on the staff became friends, and many of them are still in my life today. It was a privilege, in many cases, to watch them grow up in front of me, and to make note of it.

When the second iteration of Café C. went out of business some years back, it was the second end of an era. Those years live in memory now, like amber.

But this picture brings some of those memories back. It was a hot, humid night. The boys set me up at the best "people watching" table on the patio, and kept the sangria coming. So many friends were walking on Church Street. They stopped by the table to exchange a hug and say hello. 

There wasn't an untended moment that glorious night.

In the sharp medicinal fog of the current post-pandemic PTSD, that joy—that innocence, really—seems almost impossibly halcyon, and almost impossible to access. I can't imagine ever getting back to that place in my mind, or in my heart. We're all struggling to regain our equilibrium.

Thank God for the transportive power of photographs, and all praise for the gift of beloved friends far away.

Still burning

Fifty-seven years ago tonight, activists Andrew Goodman, Mickey Schwerner, and James Earl Chaney were murdered by the KKK near Philadelphia, Mississippi, during the Freedom Summer of 1964. I can't help but think these three young men would have wanted us to be further ahead than we are.

The wolf painting jumped off the wall. It attacked me without provocation.

 

I have the oddest feeling that Philippe Mora's Communion (1989) is not a very good film, but I love it anyway, because it makes me nostalgic. It makes me nostalgic for New York in the 80s; for ridiculous "word processors;" for horror writers supporting their families in Manhattan apartments with just their work. Yes, the special effects are hokey. Yes, the actors (starting with Christopher Walken as Whitley Strieber as interpreted by Christopher Walken) all seem to be doing a hammy, slightly ironic Greenwich Village rep theatre read instead of a Hollywood film about alien intercourse. Yes, the screenplay is over-the-top. Yes, the Eric Clapton soundtrack is pretentious. But it all works somehow anyway, and the random moments when it's frightening are actually little slivers of terror embedded in an otherwise merely uneasy tableau about a marriage disintegrating because There's Something Wrong With Dad.™ I was thrilled last night to find that it was finally for sale on iTunes Canada, and I'm going to time-travel backwards with it tonight.

True and honest, etc.

From the October 2003 issue of The United Church Observer, a short essay about our legal marriage on June 15th of that year—18 years ago today, in fact.

We don't celebrate today as an anniversary, because when we married at the Metroplitan Community Church on August 24th of 1985 we did it in spite of the lack of legality or societal support. All we had was love and faith, the love of friends, and a matrimonial concept that was inconceivable to most people, queer and non-queer, in the mid-80s. But it worked for us, and still works. That was our wedding, and 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡'𝑠 our anniversary.

"But this is the "anniversary" of the day we became one of the first same-sex couples in Canadian history to marry, and almost certainly the first to marry inside a United Church of Canada. While our "first" wedding was about our lifetime commitment to each other, this "second" one was about stepping into the river of history, and claiming certain rights that had been denied to queer people throughout Canada's history, as a duty as much as anything.

The ruling from the Ontario court came through on a Wednesday; the federal government announced it would decide to appeal, or not, the following Monday, which would have halted all same-sex marriages for as long as the appeal stretched out.

But during the four days that it was legal, we decided to take advantage of a window we knew was just as likely to close as not, while we had a chance.

We found an officiant, booked a church, bought suits that fit, hired a photographer, invited the parents of my godchildren and a handful of other intimates, organized some flowers, and organized a lunch afterwards at the Four Seasons, and got married—true and honest and finally legal, as the headline would eventually run.

A minister friend married us, but I had been adamant that the vows we took the second time would in no way negate, or water down, those we took in over the first by virtue of their legality. We'd already had our wedding in 1985. This had been something different. But in all honesty, taking vows at 22 was a lot breezier than taking them at 41, when the weight of what you're saying to your life-partner is something to which life experience is actually attached.

As it turned out, the federal government didn't appeal, and equal marriage took flight, and Canada became the third country in the world where same-sex marriage is legal, so it was all fine. But sometimes, when I hear people complain about how hard it is to plan a wedding, I gently suggest it helps to be queer, with the government holding a legal gun to your head, with four days to get it all done before your literal right to marry the person you love is snatched away. It's like attaching a rocket to the process. And in the end, it's all more than good—we're an inventive lot; we've so often had to be.

That moment when you're sixteen again, and reading Stephen King during a blizzard

I was thrilled this afternoon when the postman dropped off my copy of the trade paperback of Stephen King's most recent novella collection If It Bleeds, and I found an excerpt from my 2020 Boston Globe review used as a blurb. I've blurbed books before, but for a sometime horror writer, this is the gold standard.

I'd written the review under challenging conditions—because of COVID-19, the U.S. mail service had become untenable, and repeated efforts to get galleys to me for the review failed. I therefore had to read the entire book on my laptop, from some version of a PDF, which is, literally, my least favourite way to read anything. 

I absolutely adored the If It Bleeds, and my review was published in April of that year. The paper had given me an unheard-of 1000 words. I wish I'd had 2000, to do it proper credit.

Looking at my name on the inside flyleaf took me back—way back. As I've written before, I discovered King in 1975 when a beloved babysitter loaned me a hardcover copy of Carrie, rightly thinking that it would appeal to my sensibilities. That novel, and Salem's Lot as well, became cherished friends, read and re-read many times in the coming years. 

Fast-forward to 1978. I was at boarding school in western Canada, a very rugged milieu that had very little time for who I was, and what I loved. I was sometimes lonely, but I had a couple of good friends, my imagination, and my books. 

One Sunday afternoon that winter, I found myself staying behind at the school on a Sunday afternoon instead of going into Winnipeg with my schoolmates. I can't imagine why that was, but the memory is a particularly pleasant one, with no bad associations, so it can't have been a gating or a similar punishment.

That Sunday, I read King's first short story collection, Night Shift, from cover to cover. It might have been the sheets of white snow outside, or the preternatural silence of the school without the boisterousness of adolescent boys, but I utterly lost myself in that book. 

The narratives became my consciousness for those hours, or the other way around. The story "One For the Road" was particularly resonant. A sort of postscript to my beloved Salem's Lot, it took place during a blizzard in Maine that was more or less perfectly mirrored by the one on the other side of the windows of the school's library where I was reading. 

There have been several moments where I'd "decided" to become a writer, as a kid, so I've stopped trying to find the ur-moment. But that afternoon, reading King, was one of them. And I still love Night Shift with a passion. 

If I could time-travel, I would pop into that library on that afternoon, tap that young person on the shoulder in all his loneliness and bafflement about life, sexuality, and gender identity, and tell him everything was going to be OK. I'd point to the blurbs for Night Shift and tell him that if he could just hold on and not do anything drastic, he would become a writer, with books of his own, and, someday, he'd review a book by his then-favourite author, and his name would wind up on the cover.  

While nothing could have made that perfect, snowy day better than it was, it still might have lightened the burden of the few years he still had to negotiate before his real life started. 

 

 

The sweetest marking of the passage time

Imagine the poignancy last night to learn that niece-of-the-heart Kylee, of my Massachussets extened family, is engaged. This morning I am pleasantly haunted by the memory of the tiny size of her, the way she fit so comfortably in the crook of my arm in this picture from the early 1990s, and of the vividness of the intelligence shining in her eyes. In 2012 I was privileged to attend her graduation from Phillips Exeter over the course of a magical New England summer weekend, and then she was off to Tufts, then to medical school. Now, in 2021, she's engaged. In my parents' day, long-distance extended family relied on mailed photographs and announcements to follow the growing-up of beloved children; today, we have social media. I suspect, however, that the effect is the same: joy, pride, and an ineffably sweet, utterly painless awareness of the passage of time—perhaps the only painless awareness of the passage of time—mixed in with a sense of deep blessing at being able to participate in it all, even from a distance. Thank you, Kylee, for allowing me to share a photograph of this moment, and deep love and congratulations to everyone involved, to you and Tim, to your families, particularly your sister, Kaci, and your moms, my beloved Diane and Pam.

Why we do it

 

One of the ugliest, most predictable, most shopworn tropes that gets trotted out when LGBT people stand with the Muslim community during a tragedy is, "Well, you know that there are Muslim countries that kill people like you, don't you?"

It's always offered in conspiratorial just-between-us-westerners tone, and it's usually offered by people who don't give a flying fuck about queer people at any time, but always dust off the obscenity of ISIS throwing gay men off walls to score a cheap anti-Muslim dig, as though it was just as likely to be perpetrated by the Muslim family down the street in the centre of Pleasantville, Anywhere, USA, or Pleasantville, Ontario.

Here's the thing, darling: We know. We know all about it.

We don't need Bill and Mary Six Pack to explain the fact that some countries' courts will sentence us to death for just being who and at we are—countries the politicians you vote for support, and the business leaders you idolize make billions from. Trust us: you have absolutely nothing to teach us about homophobia or transphobia, or how it can lead to torture, or murder, or worse, for our brothers and sisters abroad.

For the record, it can lead to murder here, too. We've heard you loud and clear from your pulpits, your seats of government, and in your schools. We've heard your jokes about identity. We've seen how preoccupied you are with where we pee, and who we take to the prom, and who gets to wear what.

And you don't care about us, so please don't pretend you do. You'd just like to own the libs a bit, exploit a tragedy, and hopefully pit two groups you dislike—Muslims and LGBTs (or, as you'd call us, "homosexuals" and "transgenders"—against each other.

The other thing is, when one of you attacks another visible minority and kills them for what they are, we emotionally align with them, not with you, because it could be us you kill and maim next time.

We stand with the Muslim community right now because they are the vulnerable ones right now, and they need decent people standing with them. We're not afraid they're going to throw us off a wall—we're afraid YOU'RE going to throw us off a wall.

In a moment of pain like this one, we're not thinking about the fact that they might not "approve" of us. We're letting them know that we're part of a bulwark standing between them and you—a highly visible, impossible-to-miss rainbow-hued bulwark. And we're an inflexible bulwark at that.

If they don't need us, or want us, that's cool; we're there if they do. Kindness, decency, and intersectionality are not transactional. These are are our neighbours, our friends, our fellow citizens, and a fellow minority, and right now they're frightened of violence being perpetrated against them because of what they are. Believe me, we get it.

So, we're here, and we stand with them. If we make some new Muslim friends along the way, that'll be wonderful, too. If not, so be it.

But please—in the name of decency—don't try to use our pain against their pain. It's a shitty, ugly tactic, even for banal, uninteresting bigots, especially during Pride Month. And it really does say everything about you that you think you're keeping secret.

A hate-crime in London, Ontario

 

This is the Afzaal family. They emigrated from Pakistan to Canada in 2007 to start a new life. That new life ended on Sunday, June 6th, 2021, when they were murdered in London, Ontario, the city they called home.

The family was taking a Sunday walk together when they were mowed down by a black pickup truck driven by a 20-year old man named Nathaniel Veltman, a home-schooled Evangelical Christian part-time egg processing plant worker, who frequently quoted the Bible at work, and who, police say, targeted the Afzaal family because they were Muslim.

They are, left to right, Yumna Afzaal, 15, Madiha Salman, 44, Talat Afzaal, 74, and Salman Afzaal, 46. Their 9-year old son, Fayez, described as "a shy third-grader" remains in hospital, and has now been told that his entire family is dead.

In 2001, I watched in horror as George W. Bush weaponized anti-Muslim hatred in America to help sell a war, after 9/11. I watched Trump tend it like a noxious, poisonous garden. I've watched Canadian right-wing politicians do a particularly ugly Trump-lite direct-to-video Canadian version, particularly in Quebec where it led to a mosque massacre in 2017.

I watched the former Canadian PM, Stephen Harper, in 2011, try to draw a line between so-called "old-stock Canadians" and newer ones, as a racist dog whistle to shore up votes. The irony of Canadians whose grandparents couldn't speak English when they first arrived in Canada railing about "immigrants" would have been funny if it wasn't so grotesque and pernicious.

And I've watched western organized religion become a dependable source of dangerous anti-Muslim rhetoric, with the imprimatur of sanctity attached to it like a rocket. Conservative politicians and religious leaders wear this hate like a lapel pin. Ambivalent liberals tend to watch what they say, but when they want to indulge a bit, they tell themselves it's really about 9/11, or the troops, or more recent Middle East conflicts, or about how "oppressive" it is when observant Muslim women voluntarily wear hijab as a sign of their faith, even when the women tell them it's their choice, and their joy.

I've seen people who can't even find their own countries on a map casually substitute "Muslim" for "terrorist" in conversation, online of course, but also in person—and occasionally, they're not even the “bad" people, but the “good" people , the ones who just don't think about what they say. They're the people who might be chagrined, or confused, when it's pointed out to them.

So poisoned is the cultural groundwater on this topic that things roll off our backs now that would have horrified and shocked us 25 years ago.

I have said before, and will likely say again, and again, that the lack of empathy in this era—an era where we have every tool extant to create empathy—is killing us as a society. And much worse, it is driving us mad in the process of the very long, very painful death of decency,

Lack of empathy—the literal inability to put ourselves in the place of people who are different from us, and to find a common humanity by instinct—is behind racism, homophobia, transphobia, religious bigotry, and any other number of lethal prejudices that seem to leave otherwise intelligent people scratching their heads and wondering "how" this happened.

The four members of this family murdered on Sunday are far from the first victims of this type of hatred, and they will by no means be the last. But until we all start speaking out against this with one voice—all of it, not just the parts that affect the groups with which we personally identify, or which we deem worthy of our social and political voices —this blood, and all the blood still to flow, will be on our hands.

To the Afzaal family: may Almighty Allah dwell your beloved dead in Jannatul Firdaus.

To the rest of us: may we all find some way to acknowledge what we've allowed to fester in our midst, name it, atone for it, fight it, and keep it from happening again.

We can all tell ourselves "we're better than this" after we've done so, not before. Until we do, we're most emphatically not better than this. We are this.