I guess I've been out for about six years now. A lot has changed in such a seemingly short period of time. Wearing out my awkward attempt at the spiked 'hit-the-wall' hair and L Word androgyny, I rest my cap somewhere between genderqueer femmecrip and general badass.
If you're not familiar with those terms (including badass) you should look them up. The editorial prefacing this year's Queerlines supplement (found on page 7), written by Trent Queer Collective organizer Hazel Wheeler, lists many more wonderful identities and queer vocabulary.
But I suppose, more accurately I came out more than once. Because the embrace of L-G-B-T didn't include the words I now find home in. And maybe this is your experience too. For me it had a hell of a lot to do with representation.
No, it wasn't until researching in my second year postcolonial theory class at Trent that the internet sent Eli Clare's key note speech from the 2002 Queer Disability Conference to my hyperlinking fingertips. Poet, activist, and queertrans guy I've been lucky to befriend, had this to say to a crowd meeting at the intersections of bodies a little more complicated and invisible than 'gay':
"Not man, not woman: I don't have one word answers for my gendered body, just stories. Learning to knot a tie and look in the mirror at age 32. Being cruised by bears on the Castro, feeling my skin flush warm. Finding pleasure and trouble as my boyfriend and I hold hands on the subway, harassed as fags, even though later that night I'll be called ma'am at the restaurant. Using the men's room often enough to know the etiquette, often choosing to brave a full bladder, rather than risk the women's room. I can only tell my gender in stories. My body, not perverse, but familiar.
Stories about our bodies tangle sexuality, race, gender, class, and disability together. Some theorists and activists seem to like the notion of double (or triple or quadruple) identity, suggesting that our marginalized identities stack up in some quantifiable way. As if I could peel off my queerness, leaving my CP, or peel off the disability, leaving my whiteness, or peel off my white skin privilege, leaving my rural, working-class roots. Or they talk about double oppression, often creating a hierarchy among different kinds of discrimination. As if any of us can tell what the gawkers are gawking at. Are they trying to figure out whether I'm a woman or a man, dyke or fag, why I walk with a shake, talk with a slur, or are they just admiring my polished boots and denim jacket? I'll never know."
In 2002, I was 16 and listening to ska. I lived in a rural southern Ontario town, and gay meant our gym teacher, for whom hand-holding sightings at the grocery store were a pastime. But in the last decade, though I may have missed out on this conference, I have seen a lot of pretty cool shit go down. And also, experienced a lot of pretty traumatizing stuff too.
Wheeler talks about Peterborough as something of a queer Mecca, and as much as there is always continued work to be done, criticism to be found, this city can't be denied as one that has cared for its queers. Gender neutral washroom campaigns, increased presence in the annual pride parade, even the showcasing of contemporary queer art (from Allyson Mitchell, to Kent Monkman, to Daryl Vocat). Spending time in the office this weekend, leafing through old copies of Lilith (Arthur's annual women's self representation publication, from 1983-2000), the language has changed, and so has public policy.
This year saw the tabling of Bill C389 by Bill Siksay, NDP MP of Burnaby-Douglas BC. The act seeks to amend the Canadian Human Rights Act and the Criminal Code to include gender identity and gender expression. After passing its third reading in the House of Commons on February 9, 2011 by a slim 143 to 135, the Tories (nearly unanimously in opposition) are expected to block the private members bill in Senate, as Prime Minister Stephen Harper does not support the trans rights legislation.
This same Prime Minister found in contempt of parliament (see cover story by Chris Chang-Yen Phillips), has announced that he will be running for re-election. And at the approach of the May 2 elections, in the face of the conservative government's forthcoming defeat, a number of new bills and projects have recently surfaced, including, quite curiously, the Rainbow Refugee Committee, a partnership initiated by one Jason Kenney and Canada's queer community, announced last Thursday, March 24.
The pilot project has been instated to aid refugees fleeing persecution from nations for their sexual orientation, of which there are 77 countries continuing to criminalize homosexuality (with five prescribing the death penalty). The department will provide $100,000 in assistance to cover three months of income support, while the Rainbow committee will offer support services, accommodation and other basic needs.
Although I'm definitely excited by this initiative (and its necessary future growth and development), I am wary. After all Jason Kenney is the same Immigration Minister who, not two weeks more than a year ago, blocked any reference to gay rights in a study guide for immigrants applying for Canadian citizenship. When questioned, Kenney was reported as stating, "We can't mention every legal decision, every policy of the government of Canada."
But if you look at the pages of Queerlines this year and those passed, for some it serves in part as a guide. Not on who to be, but of struggles in finding space in the canon of citizenship and representation, in our communities, both municipal, and nation-bound.
"Our bodies as ordinary and familiar: this idea flies in the face of the gawkers and bashers who try to shape us as inspirational and heroic, tragic and pitiful, perverse and unnatural. We don't get to simply be ordinary and familiar very often. And when it does happen, it is such a relief, so rare and wonderful. Don't mistake me: I don't mean that we need to find normal and make it our own. Normal—that center against which everyone of us is judged and compared: in truth I want us to smash it to smitherines. And in its place, celebrate our irrevocably different bodies, our queerness, our crip lives, telling stories and creating for ourselves an abiding sense of the ordinary and familiar."
I return to Clare's keynote often, for sentimental reasons, but also as a document I can see fragments of myself represented in, as a gender-transgressing, disability toting, loud and glittery queer. In the pages of Volume 45 of Arthur, there has been heart-breaking coverage of hate crimes, in our own city of Peterborough, to nations like Uganda. Bashing and homophobia isn't new news of course (even as incidents continue to occur), rather a reality still enshrined in law.
Without Bill C-389, trans and gender variant people can still be persecuted for basic rights like needing to take piss, or presenting their gender in their workplace. Tonight at the Cannery Arts Centre (March 29), you're invited to attend Right On! A show of support of Trans Rights in Canada! an evening of performances and policy talk.
Like in the pages of Arthur, soon electing its 46th Editor(s)-in-Chief, spaces for self-representation are about human rights, not 'partisan bills.'
