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.

To our everlasting shame

 

The brutal legacy of the Indian Residential Schools is Canada's great shame. The recent discovery of the remains of 215 Indigenous children at the site of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School, which closed in 1978, is a horror, but it's not a new horror. It's an old horror, and it's a persistent horror. It's a reminder of decades and decades of white Canadians looking the other way, either out of some passive notion that the schools were "probably for the best," or an active belief that "killing the Indian in the child" as the infamous phrase went, was a good, necessary thing in order to maintain the social order. In either case, it's an example of a collective national sociopathy that has allowed us to disconnect from the unimaginable suffering of thousands of thousands of Native children ripped from their parents, at least 4,100 of whom died in the residential schools to which they were transported. Until we, as a country, come to terms with the cultural genocide that was perpetrated in our name by successive governments, and with the eager, gruesome complicity of the Church, we will never fully attain or embody the ideals we claim as our own, and which we hold dear. The notion that some human beings are disposable because of their colour, or their culture, is an undying obscenity. It's the premise that beats at the dark heart of genocide and slavery, and has done so since time immemorial. Let ours be the first generation not to look away, and let it end with us. 

The Scream by Kent Monkman, Acrylic on canvas,  84” x 126”, Collection of the Denver Art Museum.

Lilacs on a Monday

I found a lilac blossom reaching over a fence this afternoon as if it were trying to touch me. I stopped, put it against my face, and breathed deeply. I was almost delirious at the delicacy and the heady sweetness of the scent. Every once in awhile I'm reminded of what a privilege it is to be some small part of creation, particularly in spring.

Two Helens: a Mother's Day diptych

1.

Helen Hardt Rowe was born in Dunkirk, New York on July 29th, 1930. She had a love for children's theatre and poetry. She studied the former at Fredonia State University and Middlebury College in Vermont; the latter at Bread Loaf, with Robert Frost. It wasn't until after she died that I came upon a folder in a locked box among her things, and discovered what a talented writer she actually was. 

When she met my father, a Canadian broadcaster working in Kingston, Jamaica for the JBC, she was a vacationing American schoolteacher on holiday in Bermuda. They fell in love over three days of riding around the island on my father's mint-green Vespa scooter. 

After they married, the two of them moved to Holland. Dad became an English language announcer at Radio Nederland. As a team, they photographed calendars for KLM and did freelance radio interviews. Alongside my father, she interviewed, among others, Sophia Loren, Eleanor Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, and Jayne Mansfield. 

When they returned to North America so he could do his Master's degree at Northwestern, as part of his plan to enter the foreign service, she supported my father by working as a schoolteacher in Evanston, IL. 

When he did, she became a diplomat's wife, with all the attendant unpaid labour. She didn't particularly care for the rigid protocol that was the heartbeat of international diplomacy, but she learned it cold. She loved travelling, and meeting and entertaining accomplished, interesting people. She relished introducing my brother and I to the wider world, always reminding us that we were just a very small part of it, and to treat it, and its citizens, and their cultures, with the all the respect of guests towards hosts. 

She was an accomplished porcelain painter who did delicate florals. I loved her violets in particular. She adored walking, and nowhere more so than roaming any of the world's beaches. She was simultaneously a woman of her time, and a woman very much ahead of her time—an actively anti-racist member of the Baha'i Faith at a time when a degree of genial social bigotry was often the norm, even in otherwise exalted circles. A woman who chafed at pomposity or smugness in any form. 

She raised two very different children, one of whom—me—presented her with challenges, the meeting of which did not always come naturally. We sometimes clashed, but lack of love was never even a question, and she gave me a lot of space to be the person I was, and became, and am, even though it was sometimes difficult for her to do so. 

Like many ex-children, it took me decades to learn that when she fell short of my expectations, it wasn't because she hadn't tried. There was a useful lesson in humility there for me. 

The night of her funeral, I slept in the guest room of my parents' house on Vancouver Island. In my father's room, the radio was turned way, way up. Listening at his door, I realized that he was trying to muffle the sound of his savage weeping. Whatever clashes my parents had with their children, they were an indissoluble team to us, and with a united face. 

My memories of my mother are set in amber. Closer to sixty than fifty, I remember her love and tenderness with gratitude, and I remember the rest with tenderness of my own, and with an awareness that forgiveness is a mutual prospect, and that I have needed it, and will need it again. One should never ask for something one can't oneself give. 

Love is the embers in life's grate; neglect will put the fire out, but memory, gently applied, can bring in back to full flame

2.

Helen Oliver, who never didn't refer to herself as my "second mum," came into my life sometime in the late 80s, as an adjunct to my then-nascent friendship with her son, Ron. 

A natural mother, she swept me under her wing without a look back. In my mid-twenties, it had not occurred to me that there was room in my life for a second mother, or that I might need one, least of all a glamorous, sun-struck ex-model who, at times, seemed only marginally older than her three children. But we all of us fit together like an esoteric puzzle, and in no time at all I had acquired not only a "second mum," but also three siblings—a relationship that endures to this day. 

She never forgot my birthday, my anniversary, or any other holiday. For my part, I never forgot to reach out on Mother's Day. When my books came out, or I received a literary award of some kind, Helen couldn't have been more of a cheerleader. There was always a call, a message waiting for me on the answering machine, or a card in the mail. She celebrated all her children's achievements, and mine were no different in her eyes. 

She became an indispensable part of our Christmases in California over 30-odd years, first in L.A. and then in Palm Springs. 

Her elegance and her kindness raised the tone of every gathering and, in Palm Springs in particular, onlookers often had the impression that she was perhaps a retired film star whose face they couldn't quite place. More than a few of the leading men Ron's film's were quite taken. 

I can't remember the last time she called me "Michael." I was always "dear," or my nickname, "the Duchess" (except she spelled it “deer” and "the Dutchess" when she wrote it, so that became the official family spelling.) For my part, I nicknamed her "Helen Wheels." 

She was one of the brightest lights in my adult life, and a shining example of the literal currency of maternal love: how loving your children and teaching them that they are wonderful and powerful can make then just that. I rag my deer Ron mercilessly, but he learned all about obstacle slaying at the feet of his mother, to whom he was perfect. 

Helen died while I was at my last NeCon writer's conference in Rhode Island. Distance has never felt crueller or more palpable than it did on the afternoon I heard she was gone. 

That Christmas, in Palm Springs, she was a soignée ghost in black slacks and matching turtleneck, and cherry red blazer. I heard her soft laugh around every corner, and caught the scent of her perfume, and counted myself obscenely blessed to have known her, and known her love. She still haunts my heart, and never more than at Christmas, and on Mother's Day. 

Most people only have one mother. I can't imagine not having had two.

It's been ten years now

Ten years ago today, I was in Austin, Texas at a literary convention. I'd get up in the morning, have breakfast, return to my hotel room to work on Enter, Night, come down for lunch, work on the novel until the evening, then have dinner and socialize with my friends and colleagues at night. Not the idea way to spend three days, but the writing process on that first novel was incredibly hard, and quite fraught. I still managed to leave Texas with some wonderful memories of the conference, but it could have been a hundred years ago as easily as it was ten. This photo is from the book launch that October with my dear friend, novelist Lauren B. Davis, and the legendary Haitian-Canadian writer Dany Lafferière.

Throwback Thursday, magazine edition: 4/22/21

Throwback Thursday, Magazine Edition: In 2007, The Advocate flew me to San Antonio, to interview Marine Staff Sgt. Eric Alva, the first U.S. serviceman casualty of the Iraq war. Alva lost his leg when his unit parked in a minefield for lunch on the first day of the war—a tragic metaphor for the duration, as it would turn out. It was my first time in Texas, and I was struck by the tattered, sun-faded "W" stickers on the backs of pickup trucks. Interviewing Eric Alva about his new war—against "Don't Ask, Don't Tell"—was a profound honour, and it was the cover story of that issue. Later, during the writing, I got into a very, very heated discussion with a senior Pentagon press official regarding the condescending boilerplate statement about the non-role of LGBT servicemen and women in the U.S. military they handed out to every press venue asking them for a comment on "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." It ended with me telling the official that unless they addressed the callous travesty of their official response to "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" in light of the literal first sacrifice of the Iraq war having been made by a gay Marine, I would frame the article harshly in that light, and take it as far as we could go in a magazine that was, at that point, generally accepted as the queer newsmagazine of record, quoted by Time and Newsweek, and elsewhere. As diplomatically as possible under the circumstances, an editor at the magazine suggested that I had perhaps gone too far in that interaction, and that my threat might possibly impact future access. The next day, the Servicemen's Legal Defence Network (SLDN) emailed the magazine that the Pentagon had inexplicably released its first-ever revised version of the boilerplate media response, adding a "promising" sentence stating that gay and lesbian service members "have the opportunity to continue to serve their nation and national security by putting their abilities to use by way of civilian employment with other federal agencies, the Department of Defence, or in the private sector, such as with contractors." In 2007, that passed for compassion. The piece was eventually a co-finalist for a GLAAD Media Award, and 2007 feels like several centuries ago at this point. Eric Alva remains one of my favourite and most memorable interview subjects—and I loved San Antonio.

Magnolias

 

A sudden gust of spring wind blew down the street, scattering magnolia blossoms, and a momentary burst of unearthly fragrance literally stopped me in my tracks. I closed my eyes and breathed in deeply. It was a momentary bulwark against plague, lockdowns, involuntary solitude, a culture of cruelty and suspicion, and the creeping winter-of-the-soul in which so many of us have been engulfed for more than a year. For a moment, it smelled like love, friendship, hope, possibility, and miraculous renewal. The scent feathered away, but the brightness remained like a warm handprint.

A gift in today's mail

 

In today's mail, a gifted 8-year old artist of my acquaintance sent me this beautiful rendering of Beckett. It's a given that I will treasure it always, and get it properly framed in due course. One of the truest things about homemade gifts from children is how much of the heart they put into things is on display. They haven't yet learned the social artifice of adulthood, so when the love is there—like it is here—it's a bolt of light, straight to the heart.

Ramadan Mubarak

 Alhamdulillah. 

A melodic sort of twitter, for a change

My brilliant godson Michael, who is 16, was born with an instinctive eye for beauty. He is as deft and skilled with a camera as he is with a football. An embarrassment of riches. He sent this to me this morning, and it was exactly the palate cleanser I needed.

For shame

 

Over and over, I've meditated upon the specific connection between anti-mask entitlement, and the sort of xenophobic, anti-Arab tirade displayed in this horrifying video from Florida—both of which are on display here—(complete with central-casting white female victimhood, and ending with a weepy "Please don't do this to me!" plea to the cops when they arrest her for terrorizing an Egyptian woman and her husband, who were just trying to shop.) The best I can come up with, regarding the connection, is a sense of nearly sociopathic entitlement, an expectation that literally everything occurring in their personal space should be pleasing to them—what they see, what they hear, what other people expect of them, where other people are from, what colour those people are, what they wear, what they say, who they are. When it's not pleasing to them, they've been taught, by politicians and churches, that their "rights" are being infringed upon, and they're entitled to act out in any way they see fit, and that doing so is wholesome and patriotic, even noble. And if it comes down to it, that they'll be acclaimed as justified for this obscene behaviour, and/or forgiven, whether it's murdering an unarmed person of colour in the street, or terrorizing one in a Walgreens. If that's "overthinking" on my part, so be it. It's a way of counting down from 100 until the craving for retributive violence eventually dissipates, because that's no way to be in the world either.