Some thoughts on Mike Flanagan's Midnight Mass, now that I can breathe again

 

I promised to tackle some further thoughts about Midnight Mass as soon as I settled down, following the end of the last episode of Saturday night. It's taken me four days to regulate my sleep cycle, for instance, not because I was "too scared to sleep," but rather because those days following the viewing were like swimming underwater, emotionally, in a lake where a tremendous impact, or a storm, had stirred up the loam and rendered the visibility—in this case, emotional visibility—nil.

Colloquially, I was utterly wrecked. And for all the best resons.

I've never seen issues of faith, or lack of faith, handled as deftly and searingly in horror, in either fiction or film, as well as Flanagan handled them in midnight mass. Entirely absent is any hint of shrillness or can't, and the various questions regarding faith and humanity open into each other like the jewel tones of a kaleidescope. I was deeply moved by the existential question of whether being alone in the universe was something beautiful or something terrifying.

And as a recently self-identified agnostic, I was chilled by the eternal question of what religion truly is, what separates harmless religion from fanaticism, and whom we would be if all the cages in which we contain our true selves were suddenly unlocked.

Sourpusses and snobs can say "it's all been done before," but it has absolutely never been done quite this way, or with this power.

And as a horror fan, I was particularly gratified, because it's occasionally scary as fuck.

Like a lot of people, I seem to have "discovered" veteran actor Rahul Kohli in Midnight Mass, even though I had seen, and loved, his performance in Bly Manor. As I'm not a Muslim, I will leave to the many Muslim fans on Twitter and FB the descriptions of how moving was his performance as a Muslim sheriff on an island full of Catholics, or how beautifully and subtly he showed what it's like to be a minority in an environment where your every natural thought or action, or moral impulse, is subject to the approval of a committee of the majority, and what a modern, current, searingly accurate portrait it actually is.

Likewise, the multideimenisonal performances by Zach Gilford, Samanthal Sloyan, and the epic Annabeth Gish, all of whom were tasked with playing characters that could have easily slipped into caricature in less deft hands.

And Kate Siegel made me cry, quite unabashedly, twice. One of her scenes in particular tore me to pieces. Can we just give her the Emmy now? Thanks in advance.

It's impossible to go any deeper without spoilers, and I've sworn not to. I unfollowed a horror page today to which I was quite devoted, because the only people more annoying than the ones who use the phrase "slow burn" negatively, without really knowing what it means, are the ones who are so stupid that they reveal key plot points without even realizing it, and feel virtuous about their cleverness.

I'm looking forward to one-on-one talks with friends who have seen it later, but my page is a spoiler-free zone.

How's this? Midnight Mass is one for the ages. It contains some of the most beautiful writing I have ever seen or heard in film, and it was directed by a man who knows how important it is for characters are open and transparent and real enough for the audience to care about them, so they can mourn them authentically—a man who understands anguish, which is subtly different from almost any other kind of pain.

It is, frankly, a masterpiece. I feel both renewed in my dedication to beautifully crafted writing, and subtly changed by what it's taught me, or reminded me, about the possibilities, both negative and positive, of being human. And of being afraid. And of being redeemed.

Kudos to the entire team, particulary my friend Jeff Howard, who co-wrote my second-favourite episode.

If you haven't watched this yet, run to your television now, and add Midnight Mass to your Netflix queue. You won't regret it.

Wild Fell in the wild, in Mike Flanagan's Midnight Mass, on Netflix

 

I was beyond flattered last fall when director Mike Flanagan, a longtime friend of Wild Fell, reached out to invite the novel to make a “book cameo” in his then-upcoming Netflix series, Midnight Mass. Now, several episodes into what critics are calling his most powerful and personal work to date (an assessment with which I heartily concur) I don’t have the words to express what an honour it's been to have Wild Fell be even a fraction of a frame of this utter masterpiece. Having taken the Midnight Mass fan vow of silence, I have no spoilers except these two: first, as a viewer, having your heart broken by a piece of filmed art is never a bad thing; secondly, I'm renewed in my longstanding belief that, at its best, horror is the clearest lens through which to explore the mysteries, agonies, joys, and terrors of human existence. And Midnight Mass is horror at its absolute best.

I have only slipped away into the next room: Remembering the gift of light that was Sean "Moose" Schwartz

 

Sean Ryan Schwartz (1993-2021) 

In the days since receiving the news last week of the abrupt, cruel death of our friend Sean Schwartz in the pre-dawn hours of September 4th, I've moved through my own life in a daze of grief—occasionally feeling as though it was someone else's life, one that I was observing from a distance. 

I'm told this is not uncommon when the loss is at a geographical distance, when rushing to the side of the people you feel you most need to be with at that moment—the ones who share your grief—is somehow impeded, in this case by the practical logistics of crossing borders in the age of COVID-19. 

In that sense, distance can be its own anaesthetic, but like all anaesthetics, it eventually wears off. 

Often at the start of a particularly violent storm, you will see a blinding flash of silent lightning so bright that leaves a ghost-imprint of the objects around you behind your eyes, and you will still be in that state of momentary blindness before a thunderclap that shakes the window glass in its casements. 

The light makes you blind, but it's the thunder that makes you startle. So it is with the news of untimely death, particularly the untimely death of a vibrant, beloved twenty-eight-year old man at the threshold of nearly any life he could have chosen. The shock of the news is the lighting. The thunder is the grief, and it rolls on and on.

Even writing these words makes me cringe a bit, and feel the most dreadful imposter syndrome. 

Of  Sean's mourners, I probably knew him the least well, and in the most limited capacity. But in a way, that was one of the things that made Sean unique. The phrase "to know him was to love him" may be a bit of a shopworn cliché, but in Sean's case it went a step beyond. The obverse was also true: to love him was to know him. To be let into Sean's golden orbit, even for a short time, was to know true decency, and a much more complex and nuanced young man than might have been immediately apparent on first meeting.  

The pathways to the constructions of families of the heart are as varied as the families themselves, and this is an abbreviated version of how we became one. 

Sean's mother, Lynn Palutke, is the lifelong best friend of my great friend Laurie Braun. 

Laurie and her late husband, Mark, and their three children, Alexis, Kyle, and Jessica (all of them now parents, and well into adulthood) define the concept of family of the heart. When Mark, whom I loved like a brother, died in 2012, I wrote and delivered the eulogy at his funeral. When Jessica married in 2016, I walked her down the aisle in Mark's stead, in the traditional role of father of the bride. One of Jessica's twins, born this summer, bears my surname as his middle name. 

As so often happens in those situations, those whom they love became those whom I love, which is where Lynn and her three children, Sean, Addie, and Trisha (now also adults) entered my life, and my heart. 

The week of Mark's funeral is a blur. I can tell you exactly where I was when Kyle telephoned me to tell me that his father's motorcycle had crashed. I can tell you which table I was sitting at in which restaurant. I can tell you the position of my left hand on the table as my right hand held my cell phone, almost tight enough to break it. 

But I have no memory of booking a plane ticket to Chicago. I have a faint memory of Jessica picking me up at the airport. There are flashes of Laurie and I together; her ocean of grief; my often incoherent attempts to be there for hers while keeping my own in check as much as possible in order to be strong. It was a bruised, pulpy time, those swollen, sodden days after my arrival in Chicago, and so much of it is literally inaccessible in my memory today. 

Clarity begins for me with the arrival of Lynn and her children two nights or so before the funeral. 

My dominant impression is of a car pulling up to Lauren's house and offloading three utterly gregarious, glorious young people with even features and beautiful smiles—warm, lovely, maternal Trisha, glamorous Addie who, even then, struck me as having fallen out of the pages of a sophisticated fashion magazine, and Sean, the handsome, laconic eighteen-year old brother, who seemed a bit shy on first meeting, but who, in short order, revealed himself to be less shy than possessed of a quality of inner stillness that vastly belied his relative youth.

In any case, the effect of their arrival was electric. 

Inside the house, it was as though someone had opened a window on the gloom and the grief and let in some much needed light; or if a black and white film had been abruptly colorized. I'd never seen that effect before, nor have I seen it done since. 

With every deference to our shared grief, the three young people simply lifted it as though it were a weight they made easy work of as a trio. They clearly adored each other, and the joy they took in each other's company seemed to be on tap and there was enough for all of us. At the centre of it seemed to be Sean, in whom everyone present seemed to take a particular delight. 

In short order, we were laughing. The reminiscences became tinged with joy. For a brief moment, it seemed possible to imagine life beyond this wall of sadness. 

And I distinctly remember thinking: Mark would have loved this. He would have loved what these kids are doing in his house, and for his beloved Laurie.

I was still writing Mark's eulogy in the chapel office an hour before I was to deliver it, squinting with raw, red eyes to read the words in splotched ink. 

At one point, recalling a particularly tender memory of Mark, I utterly lost it. I wept great wracking sobs. In the end, the act of writing Mark's life, and our love for him—including my particular love for him—unleashed all the tears I had been holding back. 

At that moment some of the kids, Sean included, were in the chapel office. As one, they rose to their feet and walked over to me and put their arms around me. There were no words. There was just a silent, strong wall of empathy. They held me until I stopped sobbing and began to write again. Once they saw my pen move across the paper they released me and let me finish. I delivered the eulogy an hour later, and they were all sitting in the front pew as I read. 

I confess I felt a pang when the kids returned to Wisconsin after the funeral. As they drove away, the brief, unexpected glitter of sunlight was subsumed by the clouds we'd always known were there waiting. 

During subsequent visits to Chicago, I came to know Sean better, and grew to like him immensely. Even within the parameters of the things that separated us—for instance, he primarily (and correctly) placed me in the context of his mother's and Laurie's lives—the intelligence and curiosity I sensed in him on first meeting allowed an actual friendship based on mutual curiosity and respect to blossom.

Having no children of my own, I've always taken a deep interest in the children of my close friends. As a novelist, my primary material is families, and I was absolutely fascinated by the dynamic between Sean and his sisters. The love they shared was startling. It was like oxygen they passed between the three of them. At one point I had to remind myself that Sean and Addie weren't actually twins, even though their energy was utterly twin-like. They finished each other's sentences, literally and metaphorically. 

Sean was one of the most wonderfully unpretentious young men I had ever known, and this was reflected in many of the private conversations he and I had over the years. 

I once asked him in an email how he got the nickname "Moose." It seemed curiously on-point as a nickname even though there was nothing mooselike about him. 

"I don't remember exactly," he wrote by way of reply. "I was sitting in class with friends and we were watching a movie in environmental bio. We were goofing around mimicking the video and I got a detention after mimicking the moose mating call which made everyone laugh really loud getting us all in trouble by the substitute teacher."

Flawless.

In many ways, he was what you most want to imagine when you imagine young midwestern manhood, at least based on the established ideal: grounded kindness, generosity, self-effacement, instinctive self-respect well-grounded in dignity, and, as I mentioned, genuine, respectful curiosity about others. He played sports, he attended church, he loved his family, and he loved his friends. 

I was intrigued by the depth of his faith, which I nonetheless admired, as he never made it an issue. I occasionally had a sense of him perhaps trying to impose order on the chaos life naturally throws at all of us, but it was a neutral thought, and I never got around to asking him about it—something I very much regret in the aftermath of his death.  

I was fascinated by how anyone who might have appeared so ordinary on paper could be so extraordinary in person.  

In 2012, I wrote to ask him if he'd like to be a character in my second novel, Wild Fell, a ghost story set in northern Ontario cottage country. He readily agreed, and, with typical grace, asked me to make sure I let him know where he could buy a copy, as though the thought that I was grateful to him for allowing me to sketch a version of him in the novel had never occurred to him, or that I would send him one of my author copies immediately when I had them in hand. Because, of course, it wouldn't have occurred to him. He would have considered it hubris on his part. 

In December of 2013, I received an exquisite hand-written card from Sean congratulating me on the book. The sentiments and insights he expressed in the card were stunning, and they moved me beyond measure. I replied via email, "I must say, for a stoic young man of seemingly few words, you are a master of them when you take pen to paper. I'll treasure this card forever."

Sean was delighted to learn, in 2014, that Wild Fell was being published in French by Editions Bragelonne in Paris for the global French language market. "That's huge!" he congratulated me. "I can't believe that your book will be read around the world."  

When the translator didn't flinch at the name "Sean 'Moose' Schwartz," leaving it as it was, we noted with some humour that the untranslated "Sean 'Moose' Schwartz" would be literally unpronounceable to the majority of French-speaking readers, which would make him all the more unforgettable in the long run. 

As I sat down to write this elegy, I took Wild Fell down off the shelf and re-read the opening section in which the ultimately doomed Sean "Moose" Schwartz character features. He looks like Sean (certainly to the writer), he has Sean's kindness and humour, and he plays Sean's sports (except the character also played hockey—it's a Canadian ghost story, after all.) The intent was a lighthearted one, a tribute, something he could laugh about and smile about, and maybe one day show his children. But as a depiction, it only worked as long as he was here with us, alive and laughing, finding humour in it, joking with me about which famous twentysomething superstar hardbody would play him in the movie. 

As I started to sift through pictures of Sean, I realized what a mistake it had been to look to words in order to remember someone I'd also made into a fictional character in a novel. There's a truth in pictures that often eludes writing, particularly (and perhaps by definition) fiction, and never was that more true than in Sean's case.

Photographs, on the other hand, capture it all, particularly that smile of his, the smile that was itself a sort of embrace. 

Pictures of Sean and his sisters are an unassailable documentation of a kind of sibling love relatively few of us ever find. Pictures of Sean with children are a testament to how much he loved them, and how naturally they loved him back, and what a magnificent father he would have been. One photograph in particular, of Sean and Laurie on the back of an ATV, moves me to tears, primarily because Laurie's joy is palpable in it, and Sean is like a battery of joy. And the individual portraits of Sean say more about who he was than anyone's words, least of all mine, ever could.

Among my own photographs of him, one in particular stands out: it was taken on the day Jessica was married. In it, Sean is lifting Julian, Jessica's nephew, and swinging him around the room. Sean's face is half-covered by Julian's back. The story is in Julian's laughing face: he's being lifted and swung by a man whose love for him, and whose strength to hold him, is not in question. Julian knows he's not going to be dropped, or fall, and consequently feels free to let his utter joy soar. 

If I had to distill my impression of Sean's essence down to something, limited as it is by my own experience of it, it's this: All of us could soar in his company. None of us were afraid of being dropped. The only unimaginable outcome was his absence. 

If human life is a house, it's a mansion with many rooms. None of us ever enter all the rooms of someone's life. While many of those rooms are the warm, brightly-lit ones into whom we are welcomed, others are the locked rooms, rooms containing heartbreak, or fears, or demons kept safely at bay, or at least out of sight. 

Of the latter type of room, we all have those. The only variance is the security of the locks we keep on the doors, and how successfully we keep our demons imprisoned on the other side. 

I was welcomed into certain rooms of the mansion of Sean Schwartz's life. Others were welcomed into other rooms. A cursory reading of the powerful, heartfelt elegies by his family and his friends online in the days since his death hints at the vastness of those corridors; indeed, how twenty-eight years of deliberate living and loving was more than enough time to deeply imprint on the lives of many, many disparate people, some of whom will go through life never knowing each other, but who are nonetheless united by their love for Sean, and by feeling marked for life by that love, and the concomitant sense of terrible severing now.  

In death, he's put his arms around all of us, and made us all kin—the final gift of a young man who was himself a gift.

So great is the affront to the natural order when the old bury the young that western literature is full to the brim with poetry, ballads, songs, and lamentations on themes of the untimely deaths of young men. 

As a writer and an agnostic, I was more inclined to look to literature than to scripture to understand best how to express Sean's loss. 

I was first drawn to "To An Athlete Dying Young" by the British Victorian poet A. E. Houseman; but the poem, though powerful and entirely apropos in so many ways, is so floridly British, romantic, and upper-class that there was nothing of Sean's gentle, profoundly American stolidity to be found there. I imagined Sean's face as I tried to explain to him what an "early-laurelled head" was. He would have been polite about it, I'm sure. 

Ironically, I eventually found what I was looking for in "Death Is Nothing At All," a resolutely straightforward piece by yet another Victorian poet, Henry Scott-Holland, a 19th century priest at St. Paul's Cathedral in London. 

It's this, in all it's clean, poignant truth and yearning: 

Death is nothing at all. / It does not count. / I have only slipped away into the next room. / Nothing has happened.

The darkness in which we currently find ourselves notwithstanding, Sean was a light-bringer. He was a thousand candles. He brought warmth and humour and joy to the people around him as guilelessly and open-handedly as a child with fresh-picked wildflowers. Any man would have been proud to have had him as a son. 

As unbearable as is the loss of that light to all of us who loved him—in particular, his mother and his sisters—I cannot shake the feeling that he would want us to imagine him close by, in the next room. 

Sleep well, gentle soul. And thank you for touching my life, however briefly. Thank you for making a room for me in your house. 

Sean with Julian, Streamwood, IL, 2016

The first page of the first edition of Wild Fell, 2013

Sean and his sisters, Addie and Trisha, at Jessica Braun's wedding, 2016. 

Sean with Laurie Braun, 2016 

Sitting at the top of the hill with the Labrador, watching the sun go down

As the weather evens out from a summer of cruel heat and constant rain, I have taken to sitting at the top of the hill at Riverdale Park with Beckett every evening. We did this when he was a baby, around the same hour, but we lost the habit of it.

We watch the baseball players, or the soccer players, or the Ultimate Frisbee players. I speak softly to him and finger-comb his coat. He sits very still, or licks my hand, or just lays down and watches the games, and the the other dogs, and the people. It's a very personal communion; we sit very close together and just...connect.

I was thinking about the pandemic this afternoon, how unmooring it all was to have the dailyness of our lives pulled out from under our feet. It's an old plaint, and I'm bored with going over it. But in this case, it was part of a larger thought. That very unmooring contained a hidden blessing.

It allowed me to separate myself emotionally from people, places, and things that I wanted terribly, but which were never meant for me. It allowed me space to forgive betrayals even as I said goodbye to the people who weren't what I'd hoped and believed them to be.

At the same time, I found myself steadily and surely returned into my own actual life, my own space, my own time. I was filled with new love for the people who had never wavered in their love for me, and who had always been there—the heart-bricks of my true house as it were; the true keepers of my true memories. Most tellingly I was reconnected with my own cherished hopes and dreams, my sense of myself as...well, 𝑚𝑒.

Tonight, on the way to the park, I met a friend I hadn't seen for more than a decade. He was one of the brightest lights of a very happy, very cherished, very specific garland of memories. I was delighted by how well I fit into his embrace, and how familiar he felt, and how familiar the joy I felt in his company was. We parted company with plans to have dinner soon, and we will.

I approached the top of the hill with a very light heart.

The sun was setting, and the games were winding down. Beckett flopped down on the grass as I began to pet him (the only break from that peace was the hog-wrestling I had to do with him to get this shot of us.) As the light faded from the sky, I spoke softly to him and pressed my face into his fur, and remembered how, a nanosecond ago, he was a small, sleek, impossibly shiny puppy. He still smelled the same to me, and the rhythm of his breathing had only very slightly changed.

In that moment, there was literally nothing more important than this communion with a beloved Labrador who wasn't always going to be with me. There was nothing more important than the joy of rediscovering my friend after all that time, and finding my love unchanged. I don't know if I missed this before, or if I always knew it, but it all rang deeply and resonantly new, and true.

So, of course, fuck you, COVID, for what you did to all of us. That's a given.

But also, thank you.

Thank you for locking me in a small room with my own life for a year and half, and not letting me out until I'd made some peace with some of it. Thank you for the reminder of what, and who, is actually important, and how much of the rest of it was me playing a part in someone else's narrative for so long that I'd mistakenly begun to believe it was my own script all along.

Thank you for reunions with long-absent friends. Thank you for later-summer evening sunsets. Thank you for 11-year old Labradors who hate having their picture taken, but who still, inexplicably, smell like puppies. Thank you for clearer sight going forward, and all the lessons that go with that. Thank you for second chances. Thank you for open roads.

Listening to Carly on a hot afternoon in July

I spent the summer of 1992 in Cambridge, MA, and this album was my soundtrack. It brings everything back—the dreams, the fears, the friendships, the writing work, the weekend trips to the shore with pals, and all the goals and plans for my life once I got home, a few of which I was actually able to achieve over the next 29 years.

I think Have You Seen Me Lately (1990) is my favourite of her albums of that era because it's solidly about a fully adult woman with a complex life, dealing with so many of the issues that come from life, and from complicated adult relationships with complicated adult men. While the romance of it is piercing, as the best of her work always is, it's also tempered. I'm not going review all the themes it encompasses, but it was absolutely the album I needed in the last summer of my 20s. 

Thanks, Carly.

Jock whispering

I have a story I wanted to tell when Carl Nassib came out earlier this summer.

I kept it to myself at the time because I was overjoyed about Nassib's coming out and I didn't want the focus off him on my page in case he was a temporary one-off in terms of pro-athletes coming out, especially in traditionally macho, conservative sports.

With Luke Prokop making NHL history today, I'm surer that we're at the start of something, and I'm more confident in the merits of telling this story here, now.

Decades ago, before the novels, or before the essays, or before 𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝐴𝑑𝑣𝑜𝑐𝑎𝑡𝑒, and well before the entertainment profiles, I had a brief, precious moment when I was a young sports journalist.

This was the early-to-mid-80s, near the start of the AIDS epidemic, in a very different world—one that some readers of this post were born too late to know. I’d even earned a modest reputation as a "jock whisperer," someone who could get athletes to open up about their feelings, and their fears, and then write about those feelings and fears with respect and sensitivity, along with the rest of their story.

The interviews I conducted during those years were among my favourites of my career, and they left me with a lifelong respect for the men and women who've trained their bodies like kinetic art, particularly the Olympians, of whom I knew several.

I wrote about athletes for a variety of magazines, big and small, some long out of business and some still thriving in one form or other today.

One evening, I was doing an interview with an athlete [for the purposes of this post, out of respect for the athlete, no gender pronouns, no names, and no identifying details of their sport or event, and no confirmation of the sex of the athlete] that ran late into the night. We'd liked each other instantly, and a trust and rapport was established at a speed that was unusual. The interview ran very, very late.

At one point towards the end, the athlete told me they were gay. The athlete knew I was non-heterosexual, and clearly felt I was someone to whom they could unburden themselves.

Thinking back, the relief probably lasted five minutes before the terror started to set in—the terror of having made a terrible mistake, of having handed a journalist a secret that they’d been keeping from their fellow athletes, their family, and the public.

Tears ensued, and none of my assurances that I’d keep their secret out of the story would calm them. They were inconsolable.

Finally, I took off my wedding ring and pressed it into their hand, and told them to hold onto it until the story came out; they would keep my most precious possession, and I would keep their most precious secret.

If I betrayed them, I said, they could throw my wedding ring into a gutter and tell everyone about my lack of integrity, even kill my nascent career by branding me as untrustworthy and dishonest to sports editors, publicists, coaches, and the athlete's own peers.

By taking on vulnerability myself, I was able to unburden the athlete of some of their own.

Four months later, the article was published, the ring was back on my finger, and the athlete in question still had their secret. They could choose to share it or not, and when. I hope they eventually did share it, and that they went on to have a long, happy life of peace and acceptance, and, most of all, love.

It wasn’t my story to tell, or my secret to share, and all the journalistic “rights” I had to tell it just because I had it on tape didn’t trump the possibility of annihilating another queer person just to sell magazines, especially not at that time.

Integrity is not situational; it’s either real, and you have it, or it isn’t, and you don’t. There is no space on a true moral compass for destroying someone's life.

Jocks were the bane of my existence when I was a young, feminine queer child. They tormented, terrorizd, and belittled me, and bullied me beyond endurance. One of my choices, as an adult, was to close the door on those memories, and the class of people who made them.

The other choice was to open myself to them, to get to know them, to understand them, to forgive them, to not be afraid of them anymore, and to see if there was something there to love. And, as with most human beings, there was.

Years later, jocks and metalheads are still among my favourite company.

When Nassib came out, there was a lot of cynical nastiness online, the sole aim of which was to diminish the cultural impact of his coming out. A lot of insididous, homophobic sneering about “cis white gay men,” and how his coming out today, even in a traditionally homophobic milieu, was a cakewalk, and irrelevant.

Even, God help us, his "handsome privilege," and the odious phrase "passing privilege," which should have been retired decades ago.

Even the epic L.Z. Granderson weighed in and (very) politely suggested people dial it back, and he did it much more kindly than I would have.

I’m bracing myself for more, now, this time about Luke Prokop.

The thing is, it 𝑖𝑠 a big deal. It’s a 𝑚𝑎𝑠𝑠𝑖𝑣𝑒 deal. It 𝑖𝑠 culture-changing. One of the advantages of looking beyond your smug, judgemental, self-righteous, brittle little box of a life is realizing that other people have different challenges than yours, and just because you don’t have them yourself, or understand why they’re challenges, doesn’t make them any less burdensome or terrifying.

The homophobic and transphobic mob, both online and off, doesn't care if you think sports are "stupid," or whether you think athletes are "privileged." No one carrying a secret they're afraid to share is overly burdened by privilege, especially when they could lose everything by disclosing it. Just because you're so insulated that you don't see their vulnerabilities doesn't mean that they're not searing.

I can still see that young person sobbing on the sofa, clutching my wedding ring, terrified that they’d just ruined their life by telling their precious truth to someone with a tape recorder.

Until our realities as queer people don’t put us in danger, all of this matters. Every coming out story matters. And coming out stories in milieux where disclosing can either have a terrible cost, or else change a harsh climate by making it temperate and welcoming, matter most of all.

Good for Nassib. Good for Prokop. Good for all those yet to come. Good for any young queer athlete who's inspired or comforted enough by these adult athletes' openness to sit his or her teammates down for a talk about who they really are.

That’s how we leave a better, safer world for kids who’ll never know how hard it all used to be

Welcome, and the world is waiting to meet you

I'm beyond delighted to introduce Vincent Rowe Sowinski, who came into the world at 5:25 PM yesteday, followed by his brother, Logan, at 5:26PM. Vincent's mother, Jessica, is the daughter of my late friend Mark Braun, whom we lost in 2012. I had the unmatched privilege of standing in for him at Jessica’s wedding to Joe Sowinski in 2016, walking her down the aisle and delivering what would have been the father of the bride’s speech on his behalf, and on behalf of his wife, my beloved Laurie, and the family. I’m honoured that Vincent will carry my last name as his middle name, but mostly I feel very close to Mark’s memory this afternoon, and the love and respect we shared. I feel very blessed. Life truly is cycles of birth, death, and rebirth. Hold the people you love close to you, and never pass up a chance to tell them that you love them. It’s never wasted. Congratulations, Jess and Joe. I love you both very, very much. And welcome, Vincent and Logan—I can’t wait to meet you.

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.