Sleep deeply, dream sweetly, Brianna

 

In Manchester, UK today, two teenagers, a male and a female, were sentenced to 20+ year terms in prison for the sadistic murder of a 16-year old trans girl named Brianna Ghey last year. In a text, one of the two murderers said, "I want to see if it will scream like a man or a girl." In court, another of the murderers said "I wanted to see what size of dick it had." Brianna Ghey was stabbed with a hunting knife 28 times in her head, neck, chest and back

My friends on my FB friend list are good people—I rarely accept random friend requests, and I'm generally able to place any name on my list in some sort of context when I see it. That said, my friends have friends, and they have friends, and some of them are not very good people.

To my friends I beg this—the next time you encounter transphobia on this site, either casual or vindictive, please call it out. It's dangerous. It's not just "a personal opinion." Reporting hate seems minimally effective on Facebook in 2024, because the official policy is not to care very much. It's also a growing social policy in countries like Canada, the U.S. and Great Britain.

If Brianna had been a member of some other minority group, including gays and lesbians, and not a trans teenager, this ghastly story would have been on the cover of TIME, accompanied by a prizewinning think-piece about how it was time for a "reckoning," and that a "national dialogue" was needed.

But she wasn't. She was a member of an ultra-vulnerable minority group comprising 1%-2% of the population of Great Britain, and therefore, in the minds of many, utterly disposable, and, in their minds, probably brought it on herself by being herself.

While conservatives in Alberta, Canada spend this weekend gloating about how they've just implemented the most vicious. most un-Canadian anti-transgender legislation in our history, and while pick-me gays and lesbians throw trans people under the bus hoping that it will take some of the heat off themselves, and while self-righteous TERF campaigner in England loudly bray about how Pride flags in a national railway station "are a threat to women's rights," somewhere tonight Brianna Ghey's grieving mother and father will find cold comfort in the fact that their daughter's murderers will spend the next two decades in prison. Their arms will always be empty, and the ache and loss they feel will be with them until the day they die, like every parent of every child lost to monstrous bigotry turned violent that someone, somewhere, thought was their right to indulge.

Monsters don't all wield knives. Some of them wield words and lies, spoken aloud or gleefully share on social media.

We've all heard at least some of the words: "troon," "t*anny," "he-she," "groomer," "pedo," and worse, whether they come from dirtbags on Twitter, right-wing politicians, carefully camouflaged by bestselling children's authors, or brazenly trumpeted by billionaire comedians who validate the exact hate that led to this murder, and call it "comedy," and make it seem somehow righteous. The blood-drenched end result is all too tragically often the same.

She was a teenage girl, full of dreams about the possibilities of her own life. She could have been any of our daughters or granddaughters.

Rest in peace, Brianna. And love and comfort to all parents of murdered children who will be mourning them tonight.

Queen's U, here I come

 

I'm delighted and honoured to share that I'll be speaking a Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario at the Jack.Org annual summit, on February 10th, 20204 at 1:00 p.m. 

ThinkPad glory days

Re-reading Dan Simmons' A Winter Haunting this evening, I came across a mention of an IBM ThinkPad, and it sent me down an unusually deep rabbit hole of memories.

I loved my IBM ThinkPad. I wrote a significant number of my articles on one when I was still a working journalist. It travelled well, it was small, and I could work on it for four hours or so during cross-continental flights between Toronto and L.A. or Toronto and Vancouver.

Of course, a lot of that had to do with the fact that pre-9/11 airline seating was much more humane, and you weren't in perpetual danger of having the person in front of you slam his seat back and wreck your laptop.

At some point I acquired a Vaio, which I loved. I wrote the first version of OCTOBER on that Vaio, as well as the bulk of Other Men's Sons.

My friend Ron Oliver  once kindly said that the Vaio was the laptop for non-Mac users who should be on a Mac (which was his unusual attempt at sensitivity, when what he meant was "Join the 21st century and get a fucking Mac.")

And he was right, of course. I probably should have paid attention to that fact years before, after the two of us collaborated on a piece of short fiction and learned, the hard way, how difficult it was to get an IMB and a Mac to cooperate.

Eventually I did get a Mac. I wrote both Enter, Night and October on a MacBookPro, and my Mac laptops are now basically extensions of my hands. I'm even keenly eyeing the "space black" 16-inch model, which is gorgeous, and which I categorically do not need...yet.

But weirdly tonight I miss my old ThinkPad, with the screen I tinted dark pink. It went everywhere with me on assignment from New York, to L.A., to Grand Manan New Brunswick, and even to Transylvania.

I suspect what I'm missing is less the Think Pad, which is a totem, or a relic-talisman (much like my beloved Filofax and my tiny red Motorola Razr phone, or my No. 801 Reporter's notebooks, or my tape recorder ) but rather the thirtysomething edition of me—the resilient magazine journalist who could write all night, sleep till 11:00 a.m. then get back at it no worse for wear, and who dreamed of being a fiction writer. The fearless, relatively unscarred, limitlessly optimistic guy who looked sexy when unshaven, not merely sweetly untended.

Those things, much like old model laptops, are replaced, as we age, by newer-model strengths and virtues—resignation, deeper understanding of fragility and a concomitant desire to appreciate it and protect it in others, forbearance, tolerance.

And the fearlessness is replaced by a kind of resignation that simultaneously understands fear and is able to put it in it's proper mental file—a much more secure and helpful place than he emotional floppy discs of past decades.

But man, it was fun remembering my tough little ThinkPad, both the literal and the metaphorical one, tonight. Thanks Dan Simmons, and for the fun ghost story too.

 

Someone else is cradling a dead child

My only goal today is to turn down ugly voices—whether they're political commentators on television, or social media chatterboxes blithely dismissing unspeakable agony being endured on the other side of the world. Or casually discussing it like it as a video game, or a reality show. Or cheering it on as though it were a football game for which they, as fans, paint their faces in team colours and call for the "death" of the players on the opposite team, all the while knowing that they're doing it in safety and comfort, from a barcalounger in front of their television, or in a chair in front of a laptop, utterly immune from concomitant injury.

The fact that millions of them self-identify as "people of faith," whatever that faith, merely makes their casualness all the more ghastly. They're inured from the cruelty and the inhumanity of their own words, partly because they're written or spoken in a self-validating echo chamber; but mostly because their words ultimately have no effect on the people's lives being blown apart, literally and metaphorically.

All of that is happening to someone else, somewhere a long, long, way away. Someone else is cradling a dead child. Someone else is trying to shield their family from a hailstorm of rockets and bombs. As Yeats wrote, "the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

How to help, via NPR

 

https://www.npr.org/2023/10/13/1205235922/help-israel-gaza-humanitarian-organizations

Hate has no home here

I got up early this morning to join the "No Space For Hate" protest at Queen's Park, the counter-protest response to the one-day anti-trans gatherings that are occurring all over the country today. I have a lot of feelings that I'll probably need to sit with for awhile, but a few do come readily to mind.

First off, it feels surreal, as a 61-year old gay man, to still be protesting against these shitty people who hate us so much. This is a sentiment I've heard time and time again from women and POC my age, who likewise wish that folks had learned a bit more over the past half-decade or so.

We're still here, but they've raised a new generation of hate mongers who are as cruel as their parents, in their sentiments.

Likewise, it's amazing to see how well so any of our old protest slogans have been repurposed, and that silence still equals death, just a different kind of death at this point

I was also struck by the naked cynicism of the conservatives who organized this hate jamboree, exploiting every fissure and crack in Canadian society, uniting them in hate and ignorance.

Perched high on a statue in the middle of the park, a very young woman in an abaya and a hijab waved a sign that read "I BELONG TO MY PARENTS." Next to her, a twenty something white man brandished his own sign, "VACCINES ARE POISON." On the ground below them, others screamed obscenities and wielded "FUCK TRUDEAU!" placards, and signs with Bible verses, and even the tedious "GOD MADE ADAM AND EVE, NOT ADAM AND STEVE."

It was cold comfort that the messages on our side were messages of support for trans kids and trans youth, messages about freedom to me ourselves, and the right to dignity and self-determination of our lives and bodies.

I asked the permission of every single person whose photograph I too, and towards the end of the march, I asked a very young person if I might take a picture of their sign. They hesitated to a moment, then said, in a trembling voice, "Only the sign, OK?"

As a recent queer elder, it broke my heart to see that our youth can still, even in a modern city like Toronto, even in 2023, be that frightened by the possibility of being photographed carrying a very benign, very loving protest sign.

And the most prevalent, lingering feeling was this one: not since our AIDS marches and protests in the 80s and 90s have I felt I was in the presence of people who would be just as happy to send queer people, especially trans people, to camps.

Or to simply have us...disappear.

For gay men and lesbians of my generation, who'd like to wash their hands of the virulent anti-trans movement, I urge them to pay attention: the language being used against trans people is exactly the same language used against us in the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s, and we have only ever been as strong as our most fragile link.

They are determined to keep their hate alive at any cost, and they know they can't do it without telling lies.

All these words—"groomer," "pedo," "after our kids," "recruiters"—were used against gay men and lesbians in the last half of the 20th century. They know we are no threat to "the family," so they need a scare-narrative to sell their bigotry to the ignorant, degenerate, fearful masses who desperately need an "other" against which to wish violence and direct their hate.

And if they ever did away with "the trans problem," as they call it, you already know exactly who they'd come after next. It is truly well past time for us to all come together.

Even if some of us don't think we belong in the same community, the people who hate us absolutely believe that we do. 

"Faith and the Cancer Journey" speech, Rosedale United Church, Sunday September 17th, 2023

 

I gave this speech at Rosedale United Church yesterday. I had no idea that the church was recording it, but I was delighted to learn they had. This is the link to the Rosedale podcast website. 

My speech begins at the 38:55 mark 

https://www.rosedaleunited.org/podcasts/rosedale-united-services/2023-09-17-september-17-2023

This is what "sincerely held religious beliefs" cost Laura Ann Carleton

 

Some months back, I was taken to task for my satirical "Happy Sunday" posts on my Facebook page by someone who felt that I was mocking people's "sincerely held beliefs." I tried to explain that, as a gay man and a queer person, people's "sincerely held beliefs" did not hold the neutrality for me that they held for, say, a cisgender white straight woman like herself, who fit neatly into their prescribed paradigm. 

Those "beliefs" have never fit neatly for LGBTQ people.

On August 18th, a 27-year old man named Travis Ikeguchi murdered Laura Ann Carleton, a mother of nine for daring to fly a Pride flag outside her own store. She wasn't herself LGBTQ, but she was a vocal, loving, and public ally—the kind of friend of our community that so many queer people know and love personally. 

I have been saying this for years now, but this is the natural end-result of the sewage overflow of words like "groomer" and "pedo" and "transing" into the groundwater of public discourse, particularly when liberally disseminate and shared on sites like Facebook and Twitter.

This is what happens when reasonable people stroke their chins sagely and say, "Well, maybe they have a point" when vicious transphobia is lipsticked up as "feminism," or as concern about "women's bathroom safety" or the "danger" of gender affirming care for trans children and teenagers—which in reality always begins with love, and with listening to them, then providing them with a rigorously monitored, psychological/medical framework that will allow them to be themselves, and not to join the long line of dead teenagers who've decided that no life was better than living theirs. 

This is what happens when gay men and lesbians who find transgender people personally unpalatable for their own reasons join in, and affirm the people who hate trans people, apparently completely unaware that the people who hate trans people hate them, too, and appear oblivious to the fact that those people will come for them in time as well.

This is what happens when people vote for politicians who censor reading material, or tell teachers that they can't identify themselves as queer exactly the way straight teachers identify themselves as husbands and wives, or mothers and fathers, in the presence of this classes, and who tacitly push the "LGBTQ = pedophile" narrative, knowing that it will likely go unchecked for the most part. This is what happens when those same politicians and preachers are allowed to demonize drag queens as "adult entertainers," or "predators," when they read children's books to kids in libraries. 

This is what happens when white liberals who can't get their "BLACK TRANS LIVES MATTER!" banners and Pride "covers" up on Facebook fast enough in June go deadly quiet the rest of the year when a world-famous multimillionaire comedian makes horrific jokes about trans women's genitalia, or makes AIDS jokes, or, worse still, they talk about "free speech," or how "funny" the comedian is, or that "we all have to learn to laugh at ourselves" as a way to provide cover for themselves when they're asked why they, as supposed "allies" didn't speak up, and why queer people are always the very last minority in the queue to warrant their actual, tangible support when it counts.

Laura Ann Carleton, by all accounts a beloved member of her community, and an ally's ally, knew all of this, and she flew the Pride flag anyway, to show us that she loved us. And this man, whose Twitter timeline is full of Bible verses and right-wing Christian talking points, shot her in the head for it. 

So the next time a queer person flinches at these things, do one of two things—either listen to them, and support them, or at least try to truly understand them, or stop calling yourself an "ally." Because queer people can't afford the luxury of any more performative social media "allies" who never seem to have our backs in an actual brawl. 

To the lady who found my "Happy Sunday" posts objectionable—this is what I was talking about with regard to people's "sincerely held religious beliefs." I have no trouble at all believing that Travis Ikeguchi was sincere in his beliefs. 

And to the religious people out there who have suddenly become horribly excited by their newfound platform in the discussion of "protecting children"—we see you. You're just the latest incarnation of the same vile homophobic libel we've seen since the 1950s, and before. We defeated you then, and we'll defeat you now. We see you. 

And, more to your specific point, your God sees you, too. If you truly believe in the afterlife, and the eternity of souls, worry about yours.

Friday night light

 

I was doing some late-night grocery shopping at the Metro on Gould Street, and I noticed a significant number of Muslim families in the store doing shopping that felt, somehow, festive and joyful. Then I remembered that tonight is the end of the holy month of Ramadan. As I waited for my Uber outside the store, the first few raindrops started to fall, and the air was full of that sweetness that sometimes comes before a spring night's rain. Hurrying past me on the sidewalk was a male couple, arm in arm, both wearing beautiful, woven ivory thobes. One looked straight ahead with look of apprehension on his face. His partner pulled him closer and caught my eye, smiling nervously as he walked by. When I returned the smile—a smile of recognition and fraternity, because these two were obviously more than friends—his own smile exploded into something bright and exultant. He raised his free arm slightly in a gesture of something like a wave, or half-salute. They continued on their way, walking more quickly now as the rain began to fall in earnest. All queer people have journeys to make, some easier than others, at different points in our lives, depending upon where that journey started, and what obstacles are placed in our way, often, even with the best of intentions, by families. I feel genuinely blessed to have witnessed a minuscule leg of their journey on this rainy night of the last day of Ramadan, and their joy is still imprinted on me as I type this with the rain pattering insistently on my roof.

"Putin—very smart"

 

"Putin—very smart. Now, he's had probably a bad year. Don't forget, that whole this is not...if he took over all of Ukraine."

—Donald Trump praises Vladimir Putin to Tucker Carlson on Fox.

[Photo: Nina Nikiforovа, 80, cries outside a church after attending the funeral of her son Oleg Kunynets, a Ukrainian military serviceman who was killed in the east of the country, in Kyiv, Ukraine, Saturday, Feb. 11, 2023. Credit: AP/Emilio Morenatti]

The last lunch

 

This photograph is of me at "my" booth, with my young friend Gabriela (she/her/hers), who was the last employee hired by Bar Verde at the Eaton Centre before Nordstrom's corporate overlords in the Pacific Northwestern United States decided to blow up the work lives of 2500 young people north of the 49th parallel.

I stopped by for lunch this afternoon for the last time, and to say goodbye to some staff members who had become friends. My friend Richard, who was the manager there four years ago, came into town to join me for a beer, a reconnection, and a reminiscence.

Over the course of the afternoon, may ex-staff members dropped by to say goodbye to "their" restaurant, and share a drink for their friends and former colleagues—itself a commentary on what kind of a place Bar Verde was, and what sort of people it attracted, both as customers and as staff.

Folks said some very, very lovely things to me, personal things that wouldn't make sense to anyone who wasn't familiar with the situation and circumstances, but which, at sixty, I treasure vastly.

One pithy observation, however was too good not to share: my friend Clint noted that I was like the late Queen, in that I'd had almost as many Bar Verde managers as she'd had Prime Ministers.

A very bittersweet afternoon, all told. I was glad to walk home through the extended, pre-spring sunlight after saying my goodbyes. This would not have been the ideal moment for pitch-black skies and wet snow.

Harbingers

There are red-winged Blackbirds in the cemetery. I realize that sounds like the first line of a ghost story, but it actually means spring is right around the corner.

The Bible says I cannot support the gays

    

My driver this afternoon was a former refugee who's been in Canada for some years. He had a warm, generous face, even when I could only see half of it in the rear-view mirror, from which hung a plain cross that proclaimed that he was one of the 3% of Christians who formed the population of his homeland.

His sister had named her daughter "Michael," which he said was unusual where he was from. It was a nice opener, and our conversation flowed easily and pleasantly from there.

We touched on the peripatetic and often solitary lives of refugees, be they persons displaced by war, or natural disasters. We talked about the kind of courage it takes to lose everything and start again, alone, in a foreign country. Friends of his had encountered anti-immigrant and neo-nazi violence in Germany, and the terrible sense of dislocation that comes from being so clearly unwanted and resented.

He mentioned that early on in his refugee journey, he had tried to kill himself by slashing his wrists when the loneliness of the desolate interim town in which he found himself became too unbearable.

I suggested that Canada had always been a country of immigrants and refugees, and our history is one of people from somewhere else—wherever else—joining a human tributary that became a country, which became a nation, and that it made us stronger, and how happy he was to be here. Every non-Native is from a family that has come here from somewhere else.

I can't remember exactly how the conversation turned to religion, though it might have had something to do with our discussion of the imperative implicit in Christianity to welcome the homeless and the displaced, and how often that was a dismal failure, for very human reasons.

"I hope I am not offending you by saying this," he said tentatively, "but I cannot support the gays. The Bible tells me it is wrong. I respect them, and would help them, but I cannot support them. It is not in my heart."

It took me a moment to realize that he thought he was unburdening himself to another straight man—a straight man he assumed would share his views, or at least be sympathetic to them.

It felt like very familiar territory to me. I've had forty years of situations like this one in one way or another, and I've reacted in a variety of ways over those four decades. I'm proud of some of those ways less proud of others.

I let him continue for a few moments more, and then I interrupted and gently said, "Well, you know, I AM gay, but I'm grateful that you trusted me enough to share your feelings."

It might seem an odd response, but it had two aims.

First, first, to let him know the he'd just expressed his prejudices to an actual gay man without knowing it—which might not have been the most useful thing he'd ever done, especially in this particular climate—and to let him know it in a way that didn't shame him.

Secondly, to reassure him that he was safe, and that there wouldn't be any retaliation.

The first aim honoured my dignity as a queer person. The second aim honoured his vulnerability as a man who had very likely endured indignities and horrors of which I can barely conceive, and who still occasionally felt very far from home.

His stunned, mortified silence was like a electric shock inside the car.

Every time he apologized I came back with warmth and reassurance. I touched his arm and told him that, from everything he told me, he was a very good, sincere man, and that he probably hadn't met the right gay man yet.

He laughed a bit at that, and the conversation shifted to more neutral things as the ride came to an end. But In the rear-view mirror, I could still see a trace of concern in his eyes—grave concern that he'd inadvertently truly offended.

At the end of the ride, we shook hands. I told him how much I'd appreciated our conversation, and how much richer I felt for having known him, however briefly, and heard his story.

He told me that he was likewise grateful for our talk, and that no one ever talked to him on these rides. To most people, he was a back-of-a-head, getting them from one point to another.

No one is obligated to take another person under their wing for fifteen minutes, or to listen, or to care. In fact, doing so flies in the face of the urban ethos we think of as common sense. We're generally taught to avoid it, and no one would judge us for avoiding it.

But I had space this morning. His vulnerability was as visible as a spray of stars in a summer night sky. His need to connect was guileless and without any agenda other than connection. And he was a good man, his momentary misfire notwithstanding. I could see that as clearly as I could see the sun on the sidewalk outside the car window.

I didn't live with cancer for ten months without learning a thing or two about human frailty, or the miraculous healing power of kindness, compassion, and openness. There's always time to be a comforter and a conciliator, and to make space for the possibility of someone else's pain.

Maybe the next time he thinks about "the gays" he'll remember our warm conversation instead of whatever he's been taught. Maybe he'll recall our fifteen-minute friendship and realize he doesn't know enough yet about queer people to buttress his negative image of us.

Or, maybe not. In either case, it cost me nothing but good faith.

As for his clumsiness with the gay thing—people are sometimes clumsy. There are different types of activism. After forty years of roaming this earth I'm more convinced than ever that love and compassion are the most radical forms of activism of all.

Calling for genocide, but "not really"

In an odd way, I applaud Michael Knowles for placing his genocidal fantasies front and centre, in a way that even the Nazis didn't quite dare to do in the beginning.

Knowles' position is a lot more honest than that of the folks hiding behind specious, purposefully-vague "threats to women's spaces," or sports, or bathrooms, or classrooms, or scary stories about "experimental surgeries," or "radical hormone treatments," or "radical gender agendas," or "dangers to children." 

Or, in the case of Ted Cruz, warnings about transgender witches piloting jetliners and not knowing how to keep them from crashing.  

Last year, 6000 children in America died by gun-related violence. You can guess how many gun laws have been introduced to protect children from guns. On the other hand, two months into this year, 340 anti-LGBTQ+ bills have been introduced in statehouses across America. 

Anti-trans idealogues have never cared about "protecting women," and they have used children as human shields in their crusades. This has ever been about anything other than the eradication of a vulnerable 2% of the population that they find aesthetically distasteful. 

I'll say one thing for CPAC—even if it's the place where decency fears to tread, if you want an up-close, unvarnished, unapologetic, stripped-of-artifice look at what 21st century Republicans are really about, that's the place to see it. 

Answering the Knock at the Cabin

I wanted to sit with my feelings about M. Night Shyamalan's Knock at the Cabin (2023) for a bit before rendering some thoughts

First off, I loved the film in the way that you can afford to love a film when your memories of the superb novel upon which it as based, in this case, Paul Tremblay's The Cabin at the End of the World, are locked away in your mind. 

Mr. Shyamalan did, in fact, take several liberties with the story, which has understandably disappointed some folks, though they bothered me less than I expected they would.

I found the essence of the story—the devastation of a very 21st century family under unimaginable emotional assault—to be intact. That was the most important thing to me, along with sterling performances by Jonathan Groff as Eric, and Ben Aldridge as Andrew. There was a surprisingly solid one from Dave Bautista, and Kristen Cui was wonderful as Andrew and Eric's daughter, Wen.

Would I have preferred that the film hew to Tremblay's novel more closely? Of course I would. The novel is, frankly, perfect, and, in the film, I missed the nearly-intolerable tension and mounting dread that undergirded it. 

But to be completely fair, Shyamalan still made an excellent film that packs an emotional wallop nonetheless, one that stands on its own merits and didn't dishonour the source material.

I think people should absolutely see Knock at the Cabin, but I feel strongly that they should also read The Cabin at the End of the World as well—preferably first. 

As for me, my copy of that glorious novel is right where its supposed to be—on my bookshelf and in my heart. No film, however skilfully rendered, can touch the experience of having read it.