A year on

A year ago today, a month post-final cancer surgery, hobbling a bit, but feeling...something. Probably not "joy," because I was too tentative about the future and its possibilities. "Optimistic" is the wrong word too, because "optimism" didn't enter into my lexicon again until this past December. Probably feeling very "at one" with the word on that snowy morning, feeling gratitude. And feeling a sense of smallness, and a oneness with life that I hope I never forget. Truly, looking back at this picture feels like one of those dreams where you're falling into vast space. It's not fear, it's just an utter disconnection from anything I can feel right now.

Second cup

 

Yesterday afternoon, I stopped into the Cherie Bistro for a quick lunch before heading home. At the next table were two young people—one visibly trans, the other gender variant. They were having lunch and speaking to each other in rapid-fire Spanish. 

Something about they way they leaned towards each other, obviously sharing gossip, laughing, and ordering cocktails reminded me of my friends and I in the early 80s, either out with friends or having lunch with co-workers at whatever restaurant was closest to our places of employment. 

The one striking difference was the long-ish periods during which they stared at their phones, tapping away. For obvious reasons, this would not have occurred during those early-80s lunches. But the joy the took in each other's company, and in he possibilities of their own youth, was instantly recognizable and familiar.

After lunch, I went next door to the Second Cup on Church Street to pick up some coffee beans. There has always been a Second Cup on Church Street, from the famous "steps" of the 80s, so immortalized in THE KIDS IN THE HALL and elsewhere. 

The current incarnation, due to yesterday's cutting cold, meant that the patio was obviously close, and the guests were inside, pressed close to each other at the tables, laughing, and the air was redolent with the strong smell of delicious coffee.

As I waited, I looked at the crowd, which was easily 90% older gay men. I don't even mean "older," I mean "old," in every glorious sense of the word—white hair, wrinkles, "old man" clothes and shoes. And again, much like in with the two in next door at Cherie Bistro, their joy in each other's company was palpable. 

It occurred to me how many years queers spend listening to people teach them to dread growing old, telling them that they'll become  "invisible," and "undesirable," and yet there was almost more joy here than there was next door. I loved the idea of youth and age being bracketed by two restaurants, side by side, on what is still he Main Street of Toronto's gay village.

My friends of my own age and I seem to have been largely immune to those teachings. We are obviously part of the "60 is the new 50" generation, so there's that. In addition, we are the generation that survived AIDS, even as we lost some of the people we loved the most in the world. Perhaps living under that shadow has given us more of an appreciation for the gift that life is. Or maybe those lessons didn't damage as many of us as they might have. 

Clearly, and to my delight, both the young friends at Cherie and the older gay gentlemen at the Second Cup were completely in their moment, and in their joys, in their own circles. 

The images moved me enough to jot down some notes about it in my Moleskine as soon as I got home. Everyone has their time, and their times, and life is a series of concentric, overlapping circles of those times, and the luckiest of us know all of them. ☕

Throwback Thursday: MIDNIGHT MASS, 2021

 

Throwback Thursday: The sequence in Midnight Mass where Henry Thomas plucks Wild Fell out of Kristen Lehman's hands in order to dance with her, to Neil Diamond's "Holly Holy," is one of my proudest moments as a grownup horror nerd, let alone as a novelist. It's nothing I could have imagined in 1982, at age twenty, when I watched him play Elliot in ET The Extra-Terrestrial. The entire scene is sunlight in a bottle, and even more so in light of the horror that follows. It looks gorgeous on the new TV, but I've always watched it when I needed a lift. I'm so grateful to Mike Flanagan for reaching out in 2020, and for inviting the book to play a small part in that glorious miniseries, one of my great filmed narrative loves.

PRIDE, coming spring 2024

 

The new book, PRIDE, will be published by Douglas & McIntyre two months from today, just in time for full spring. I'm delighted to be able to share the beautiful cover for the first time. Please follow along for updates as we get closer to publication day.

The brave, cruel death of Aaron Bushnell

 

I am haunted tonight by the story of Airman Aaron Bushnell, who set himself on fire yesterday in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C., and died screaming "Free Palestine."

Quite apart from the fact that self-immolation is one of the oldest, most violent, and ultimately most self-sacrificing forms of political protest, the fact that his death should be a source of mockery and amusement in the gutters of social media should give everyone pause, no matter where they fall on what has been sterilely described as "the Israel-Gaza conflict."

In the absence of evidence that Mr. Bushnell had mental health issues (and no such evidence has been forthcoming) the only available conclusion is that he made himself the ultimate statement of the gravity of his beliefs. Where I land, that makes him a pure martyr, whatever anyone believes about his cause.

Furthermore, unlike other self-styled "martyrs," he took his own life without taking anyone else's. Perhaps unsurprisingly in a culture where so many so-called "believers in democracy" can't be bothered to even vote, the depth of commitment to an ideal that a sacrifice like his represents is most likely incomprehensible to most.

But the people circulating picture of his burning body on Twitter—in many cases, self-identified "pro-God" American Christians—make me wonder, yet again, if the real political divide in our society is between left and right, or if it's actually between the humane and the utterly inhumane—human beings so divorced from their own humanity, and the humanity of their fellow man, that they see humour, and find a source of sadistic disdain, in the tragic, horrifying heroism of a man burning himself alive to protest what he saw as an atrocity inflicted upon people he never even knew.

Airport thoughts, Sunday night

 

Tucked away at the airport with a Bloody Mary, doing some work for the publicist assigned to the new book, and thinking about this spectacular weekend with John Foster and Linda Jones, and the indomitable Coraline. Quite apart from having seen a part of New York I'd never seen before—John and Linda's Brooklyn—the trip was a joy in deeper ways.

After recent events, including my battle with cancer, this series of travels, most lately the visit with John and Linda, finished off a particular series of journeys. Last spring, I visited my deer Ron Oliver in Palm Springs for the first time since the pandemic; then, this past fall, it was Boston and Chicago to visit loved ones there, and attend to important, precious fires that may have burned a bit low during the past few years, and build them up bright again.

Personal adversity and illness focuses life in a way that almost nothing else does. I am cognizant of every single one of the precious people who were there for me during those dark times. I am also cognizant of the ones who, for whatever reason, were unable to extend, however close I may have once thought we were. I genuinely wish them well and send them on their own journeys will authentic love in my heart.

For me, for now, and for the foreseeable future, I will immerse myself in the relationships that sustained, and sustain me, and now that I am well and strong again, I will do my best to pay it forward.

Glorying in John and Linda's warmth, kindness, solidity, and hospitality this weekend—dinners at some of their favourite neighbourhood places, long walks, zipping across the city on the train system I've never really explored before, long, deep talks in their cozy, light-filled, book-lined living room— I was reminded yet again of my favourite Yeats quote: "See where man's glory most begins and ends, and say my glory was I had such friends."

Outside the window of the lounge the sky is New York blue dappled with slender bands of yellow and orange. It's going to be a perfect night for flying.

 

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.