Jane Rule

So much more than ‘the only lesbian in Canada’

Five years before homosexuality was ostensibly decriminalized in Canada, when same-sex sexual activity was still punishable by a multi-year prison sentence, Jane Rule published Desert of the Heart. It was a landmark of lesbian literature that was groundbreaking for its portrayal of a lesbian romance that was — boldly and unprecedentedly — positive. Rule received an influx of fan mail from women across the globe who had never had the privilege of reading a book they believed truly captured their experience, and the novel, which follows a woman seeking a divorce in Nevada who falls for a younger casino worker, was adapted into the acclaimed 1985 movie Desert Hearts. “I became, for the media, the only lesbian in Canada,” said Rule, who used the newfound attention to become an advocate for LGBT rights in Canada — regularly contributing a column, essays and reviews to The Body Politic, and living openly with her partner, Helen Sonthoff, for more than 45 years until Sonthoff’s death in 2000. Throughout her career, Rule published several novels and short stories, as well as a volume of criticism entitled Lesbian Images, and was the subject of the 1995 documentary Fiction and Other Truths: A Film About Jane Rule.

Lynne Fernie, filmmaker and film festival programmer:

Brilliant conversation, a fabulous sense of humour, a love of scotch and her profound belief in human rights made Jane Rule a delight to know. She is one of the brightest stars in our Canadian firmament.

Kent Monkman

Playfully and radically queering the Canadian landscape

Half-Cree, two-spirit artist Kent Monkman, who is a member of the Fisher River band in northern Manitoba, often channels his subversive view of history through the trickster lens of his campy, gender-bending alter ego Miss Chief Eagle Testickle. And no one else could have celebrated Canada 150 quite like Monkman and Miss Chief. In his exhibit Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience, the artist depicts moments in Canadian history in a way that balances bite with humour, often placing Miss Chief directly into the scenes; the painting The Daddies, for instance, sees her nude atop a Hudson’s Bay point blanket as the Fathers of Confederation look on in awe. The sublime images that grace Monkman’s canvases draw on the sweeping vistas of George Catlin and Paul Kane — painters who commonly documented Indigenous life — while upsetting the binaries of colonial settler and colonized subject, straight and queer, fact and fantasy. The painter makes public appearances as Miss Chief from time to time, and his work has traveled the world, always offering a playful, radical and undeniably queer reimagination of the Canadian landscape.

Allysin Chaynes on
Craig Russell

A worldwide superstar decades before RuPaul

“Thank you Craig Russell for being an absolutely incredible, influential, amazing Canadian queer icon that everyone should know about. Voices like that can’t be lost to time and it’s important that people can still enjoy and respect this work that was made a long time ago and still holds up to this day.”

Allysin Chaynes is a Toronto drag performer (and was featured on the first season of the CBC Arts series Canada's a Drag).

Michel Tremblay

Pushing Québécois theatre’s boundaries since the 1960s

While Michel Tremblay’s output draws directly from his upbringing in the then-working-class Plateau neighbourhood of Montreal, his hilarious and heartfelt plays have resonated with audiences across Canada. As an adolescent, Tremblay found himself a Québécois in a predominantly Anglo country and a gay teen in a largely intolerant society. The budding playwright began to write scripts as a way of probing that sexual and cultural identity, which led the way to his breakthrough work Les Belle-sœurs — a show about a clan of Montreal housewives who get together to paste trading stamps into booklets — in 1968. Another of Tremblay’s standout (if later controversial) works is Hosanna, which portrays the complicated relationship between the titular character — described as a "cheap transvestite, touching and sad, exasperating in her self-exaltation" — and her biker boyfriend one Halloween night. Tremblay’s plays are considered revolutionary for incorporating Quebec joual into mainstream theatre — and he did much the same thing with queer characters.

A revolution on the page: Poet Dionne Brand’s contributions to culture are unparalleled

by Rinaldo Walcott

(Photo by Frank Gunn/Canadian Press)

That smile of hers! It is sly and inviting, and knowingly filled with a self-possessed, quiet joy of intellectual restlessness. Among many people, simply saying the name Dionne Brand — a name always said in full — brings smiles to faces, too. And then there is her voice: its tone, its rhythm, its smooth, sensuous timbre. Try reading her poetry out loud, and you will begin to hear how her words inhabit you and how you begin to sound just like her. There is something about how Dionne Brand writes a sentence, a line or a lyric that makes it burst out of us in her voice. The truth is, Dionne Brand is an original.

Dionne Brand is one of Canada’s best living poets. She is also a daring and challenging novelist, a politically thoughtful essayist, an editor and filmmaker. And if that were not enough, Brand is a professor of creative writing at Guelph University, and a teacher and mentor to young women poets, artists and intellectuals. Putting all of those things together, Brand is an intellectual whose range and reach is breathtaking and whose contributions to contemporary culture are unparalleled.

Brand’s oeuvre is a testament to how writing from the self can provide a poetic ethnographic testament — but not one that is sentimental or meant to represent us in some kind of reclaimed accuracy, telling some story not told before. Instead, her writing marks the centre of Black life as its own centre, never parting a fictional curtain to reveal some aspect of Black life to and for an assumed audience who is also not assumed to be Black. It is the ease of her writing from a Black queer center that enthralls us, that brings us into community — and, of course, as a Marxist, community or the communal without explanation or exception is, in many ways, an intellectual foundation of her craft and broad intellectual project. Here, at the centre of the Black world, the one she gives us, you too are a part — an ethical part of a world that we are making together. It’s a world that Brand provides us with the language to both notice and bring into further existence together.

To fully grasp how special Brand and her writing are, one must read across her work as it moves from her local geographies to the global. In long poems, in novels, in essays and in films, Brand has given us maps that mark Black complexity — our laughter, our sorrow, our hurt and our joy — and, in doing so, she has written the ordinary story of our Black queer existence without ever spectacularizing us as other than we might be. It is with what the critic Christina Sharpe has called an “ordinary note of care” that Brand gives us her queer characters. Brand’s queers, most often women, are never offered up as something special and apart, but rather as being just so — just so as in both simply belonging and also being the source of insight, thought and action. In this way, Brand’s queer sexuality and sensuous writing has never stood out as surprising or attempting to write/right some wrong, or fix up Black community, or register an inventory of queer abuse; rather, she has penned for us the beautiful ordinariness of queer life simply occurring. It is from that ordinariness that Brand’s work is spectacular, singular and special.

Because Brand does not write sexuality as spectacular, her writing is especially close to the heart of readers who encounter the women in her pages loving, laughing, resisting, rebelling and fomenting revolution. Dionne Brand, herself, has made less of her personal sexuality (never hiding it, mind you) and more of the ways in which her intellectual project for Black life, and thus all life, requires an ethical accounting of how we might live together differently. It is a queer ethic that demands we live differently from how we presently inhabit this globe and that we work toward bringing into existence what we all long for. Dionne Brand is a queer hero like few others can be.

Rinaldo Walcott is a professor at the University of Toronto.

by Kevin Hegge

Photo by Daria Marchik

With her debut album, Peaches delivered a synth-punk kick to the balls of the music industry and the men who ran it. Lyrically, The Teaches of Peaches took all the painful, mournful, angry, horny, awkward, gnarly and unspeakable elements of sexuality, shoved them into hot pink PVC short shorts and made them the centrepiece of the conversation — all of which was a big no-no for a female artist to do at the time. Little did we know that this strange but seminal beast of a record would eventually permeate the mainstream, rearing its head in cheap (but very lucrative) knock-offs by the likes of Madonna and Lady Gaga, and in perhaps the best-case scenario, as Liz Lemon’s ringtone on 30 Rock.

Upon its release, the album seemed to be very well-informed of its subcultural predecessors. It encompassed the sneering bravado of the early punk era, the minimal electronic pop experiments of Giorgio Moroder and Kraftwerk, and the genre-defiance of New York’s no-rules no wave scene — all fuelled by the take-no-prisoners revolutionary politics of the riot grrrl movement.

Peaches’s music was altogether its own force, and although she quickly became absorbed into the electroclash movement, it was clear she was very much on her own path. Still, the genre — however frequently invalidated — provided a much-needed spit-and-glitter counterpoint to the boring, boy-heavy indie rock that dominated the record store scene of the early 2000s. It also seared through the fat of popular music, yet delivered one of its generation’s defining anthems: Peaches’s jaw-droppingly bold track “Fuck the Pain Away.” Very abruptly, a new, DIY-friendly form of punk shoved its way to the forefront of nightlife — this time, led by women, gender-defiant freaks and a pint-sized punk named Peaches.

The music on TTOP demands participation. With lyrics detailing gender-bending romance, soundtracked by raw electronics, Peaches zeroed in on the historical trauma of inhabiting female and queer bodies — and fucked it right away. In a live context, Peaches’s confrontational performances bordered on performance art. She took the energy of the male-dominated punk pit, with its promise of physical contact, and replaced the violence with safe, celebratory space. The sexual repression of the punk scene was replaced with sexual exploration. Fucking was painful but also fun.

Born in Toronto by the name Merrill Nisker, Peaches — perhaps surprisingly — began her musical path as a folk singer. Since then, her career has very much been defined by evolution. As game-changing as her first record was, Peaches followed up her debut with a drastically more uncompromising statement record, which, in her typically defiant fashion, was titled Fatherfucker. Despite potentially having access to higher production value, Peaches instead created even more gnarly, snarling and raw beats, reminiscent of the 1977 debut record by the NYC-based band Suicide. With cover artwork featuring a portrait of Peaches boldly dawning a full beard, the album continued her exploration of themes of sexuality and gender that few had the audacity to commit to so blatantly.

With her following albums and performances, Peaches has tirelessly and fearlessly continued to challenge not only her audience but her own limitations as an artist. In 2010, she staged a borderline masochistic one-woman performance of the entirety of Jesus Christ Superstar. Two years later, she curated a cast of international freaks and misfits to create the epic autobiographical stage show Peaches Does Herself, which she went on to develop into a feature film. And in 2015, Peaches delivered an album that explored one of the most surprising themes in her career: her own naked vulnerability. That album, Rub, featured songs that brazenly laid down the shield that is her character of Peaches and, with chillingly real songs like “Free Drink Ticket,” confronted personal experiences of pain, loss and rage. It’s this ceaseless brand of generosity that makes Peaches a truly one-of-a-kind artist.

Predating and forecasting a slew of trends in current social dialogue and popular music, The Teaches of Peaches still sounds as raw and ready as the day it was released. The arrival of Peaches into pop culture truly served as a communiqué from the future telling the past to fuck off. As is true with all of her records, to this day The Teaches of Peaches remains a sneering, horny, minimal masterpiece that defies eras and genres; it is, as the kids like to say, still punk as fuck.

In her own words:

“I’m an everlasting iconoclast / I came to destroy the past / My stargasm makes the blast / Shake the system, then surpass / Liberate en masse / Eliminate the class / All humans, free at last / So much beauty coming out of my ass”

It’s about time that we, as a nation, honour Peaches as one of Canada’s most challenging and fearless artists of all time, and take a minute to thank our forefatherfucker.

Kevin Hegge is a filmmaker and freelance arts and culture writer based in Toronto.

by Barr Gilmore

(Photo by Rodney Werden)

AA Bronson, Felix Partz and Jorge Zontal were my mentors, my friends and my gay dads.

I moved to Toronto from Vancouver in the late ’80s, after graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from UBC, and after the death of my father from liver cancer and many of my gay friends and lovers from AIDS. It was a rough go at first — but as luck would have it, I eventually found myself working as the video/media coordinator at Art Metropole. AM was one of the oldest artist-run centres in Canada, which General Idea started in 1974 after having published FILE Megazine since 1972. My job was to view every one of the 650-plus artist videos in the archive, write a description of each video and a videography of each artist (if one didn’t exist) and design and compile the Art Metropole Video Archive Catalogue 1991.

AA Bronson, Felix Partz and Jorge Zontal were my mentors, my friends and my gay dads.

It was a monumental task, but in the end, I had strangely become an expert on video art internationally and had caught the attention of the members of GI, who asked if I would be interested in becoming their studio assistant as they prepared for their international touring retrospective Fin de siècle. AA and Jorge lived and worked in New York; I worked with Felix in their Toronto studio on Simcoe Street. Both Jorge and Felix had been diagnosed as HIV-positive and were determined not to let the virus prevent them from creating their work on a daily basis. It was my job to leave my ego at the door and put myself at Felix’s creative mercy every day.

I saw AA every now and then when he came to Toronto, but our main communication with the New York studio was via the studio landline and fax. It wasn’t until the first installation of Fin de siècle in 1992 at the Württembergischer Kunstverein in Stuttgart that I actually met Jorge (and Jenny, their mischievous Tibetan terrier). I didn’t fully understand the power of GI’s trinity until our dinner that night, where I witnessed the humour and intelligence that bounced back and forth across the table between them and how they often would finish each other’s sentences. I went back to my hotel room that night and wept openly at how lucky I was to be a part of something so magical.

In Europe, GI were rock stars, and I was their roadie. The touring retrospective continued through 1993 with a final stop at The Power Plant in Toronto. At that point, AA and Jorge had decided to move back to Toronto, so GI rented a deluxe penthouse with a swimming pool, greenhouse, multiple decks and ample studio space atop the glamorous Colonnade on Bloor Street W. Both Felix and Jorge’s physical health was in rapid decline, but we continued to make artwork daily and mount exhibitions all over Europe and North America, right up until their dignified deaths in 1994. I worked with AA for another year, organizing the GI estate and looking after Jenny and the penthouse while he went on a sexual spiritual journey at the Body Electric at Wildwood, north of San Francisco, for several months after Felix’s death.

The five years that I spent with General Idea was tough emotionally, but I matured during that time as a young gay man/artist/designer, and was blessed to have had the chance to join the GI family and take the red carpet ride through the contemporary art world that was their life’s work. 25 years on, I still look back fondly on this unforgettable time.

Barr Gilmore was the Studio Assistant to the renowned Canadian art collective General Idea (1991-95), a Senior Design Associate at Bruce Mau Design (1996-2005) and is now Professor of Integrated Design at the Haliburton School of Art + Design.

by Shaun Brodie

(Photo by John Greebe)

One of the first things Wayson Choy told me about himself was that he had once been in a music video with David Bowie. We were meeting for the first time, over breakfast, to discuss a collaboration centred around music and memory, when Wayson recounted standing on a downtown Vancouver pier in 1983 amidst a makeshift Chinatown set: planes zooming overhead, capturing aerial footage; Bowie, arguably at the peak of his fame, chatting casually between takes.

It’s just one of several remarkable anecdotes from the life of the late Wayson Choy, the beloved, bestselling and award-winning author who recently passed away at the age of 80. As an openly gay person of colour, Wayson broke the CanLit mould in 1996 when his debut novel, The Jade Peony,, shared the Trillium Prize with Morning in the Burned House by the firmly established Margaret Atwood. While Wayson was already 57 years old at that time, this would be only the start of a distinguished writing career — and he would eventually leave behind a legacy as a trailblazing author who helped make space for younger generations of queer Asian writers.

Wayson always marched to the beat of a different drummer. Fresh out of UBC, where he had studied creative writing, a young Wayson pointed himself eastward and raised his thumb. Shucking off the expectations of the Vancouver Chinatown community where he had been raised — where the hope for young men was to get a good job in business or government and start a family — he had opted, instead, to hitchhike to Ottawa. The civil rights protests being led by Martin Luther King Jr. at the time inspired Wayson, who was determined to make it to Parliament Hill and get the attention of prime minister Lester B. Pearson. Wayson had recently been denied a green card to the U.S., and the reason he was given was that they already had enough “Chinese” applicants. A Canadian-born citizen, he felt the sting of injustice and lingering anti-Asian sentiment, and hoped to get Pearson’s ear to convince him to petition for the rights of a fellow citizen.

Later in life, at 56, Wayson discovered that he had been adopted at birth, that his biological parents were very young at the time and that his biological father was part of a Cantonese opera company in Vancouver. It made sense to Wayson that he was descended from the theatre; his unique love of storytelling and vivid imagination now seemed like part of his lineage. As a young aspiring writer, his mother had worried about how he would make a living, and his growing collection of novels and lack of interest in marriage had perplexed the Chinatown elders. They warned Wayson’s mother that he would die alone if he didn’t marry and have children. Wayson had marched on.

There is a queerness in this quality, this gentle stubbornness and refusal to conform to heternormative expectations. Yet we all experience it to some degree — facing the default expectations that are put upon us, summoning the courage to resist them and clear our own path. I don’t think young Wayson had any sense that he wouldn’t live and die alone (how can any of us when we break from the ingrained norms that surround us growing up?), but he believed in watching for signs, and in good fortune, and in the millennia-old Confucian philosophy: what you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others. These values guided Wayson toward a fulfilling life, rich in friendships, chosen family and generations of admirers.

Since his death in April, I have seen clearly how deeply Wayson was loved and how extensive his community ran. Wayson did not live alone. For decades, he shared two homes — one in the city and one in the country — with two families that included three godchildren between them. He was cared for by his families and friends through two near-fatal illnesses in his 60s — surviving, it seemed, by the sheer will of those who loved him.

Wayson later wrote a near-death memoir, equal parts moving and funny, entitled Not Yet. In it, he writes that in the time after leaving the hospital from his first illness, whether he was out to dinner with friends or seeing a new blockbuster, he found himself continually remarking, “Wow, I could have missed all this.” Deeply appreciating another 18 years of moments, Wayson gave those of us who were yet to meet him the invaluable gift of his company, his stories and his affection. And to his many readers, he continued to give his work, dedicating Not Yet: “To all who understand love has no rules.”

Shaun Brodie is the artistic director of the Toronto-based Queer Songbook Orchestra.

by Michael Yerxa

(Photo by Jerry Lampen/Reuters)

There is a photo of k.d. lang that hangs on the wall in the office where I work. I sometimes stop in front of it and enjoy a moment of quiet reflection (and complete adoration). I take a moment to draw inspiration and channel any ounce of her greatness, strength and talent into my own being as I continue to push through the mundane aspects of my day. Kathryn Dawn Lang is not only the greatest voice I’ve had the privilege of hearing in my life, but she has also been a tremendous, trailblazing icon who has led the way for so many who are considered outsiders and those who haven’t fit a mould. She’s a force, and we are lucky to have her.

My first introduction to k.d. lang was in the classic Pee-wee’s Playhouse Christmas Special, which featured her unforgettable rendition of “Jingle Bell Rock.” Even as a child, I was drawn to her androgynous energy and absolute star power. She felt mysterious, special and one of a kind — I could sense that even then.

Now, as an adult, I’m floored when I think back on what k.d. lang was able to accomplish. She was able to navigate the conservative world of country music, come out of the closet (against her label’s wishes) and give the world a true lesbian anthem with “Constant Craving,” all while never compromising who she was. It seems I might need to turn the photo in my office into a full-blown shrine.

k.d. feels like someone that only Canada could produce. Born in Alberta, she got her musical start in country and western venues across the Prairies, developing a personal style that was part cowboy, part punk. She first gained international recognition in 1988 after performing “The Alberta Rose” during the closing ceremonies of the Winter Olympics in Calgary. That same year, she was named Woman of the Year by Chatelaine magazine (which we know later inspired a true classic of the Canadian songbook). k.d. is as quintessentially Canadian as the Calgary Stampede or the Canadian Rockies.

I have personally never been more proud to be Canadian than during her sublime, otherworldly performance of the Leonard Cohen classic “Hallelujah” at the opening ceremonies of the 2010 Vancouver Olympics. There she stood on a platform in the centre of the stadium, bare-footed in a white suit, delivering perhaps the greatest performance of one of the most beautiful songs ever written. Since then, during every Olympic opening ceremony, I make it a point to message her on Twitter and let her know how powerful a moment that was for me and for our entire country. She always replies with gratitude and prayer-hands emojis.

What I truly love about k.d. is her unwavering commitment to being her authentic self. She wasn’t traditionally feminine-looking, so she didn’t present traditionally female. She had her own unique personal style. She might wear a wedding dress while accepting a Juno, or western dresses with fringe, or crisp suits, or short hair, or no shoes. It was entirely her choice. If she was feeling particularly badass, she might even sit in a barber’s chair and have her face shaved by Cindy Crawford for the cover of Vanity Fair. She didn’t conform to the expectations of others, which is truly rare in the music industry. She also never hid her identity to sell records. In being her uncompromised self, she subverted a genre of music and made people focus squarely on her incredible talent.

In a time when there were very few openly gay celebrities — especially lesbian celebrities — k.d. lang led the way. She told NPR that she was motivated to come out at the time to help take the heat off of those who were being outed for having AIDS and being gay. She wanted to deflect the attention onto her. (We are truly not worthy.) k.d. lang is a true queer icon because she gave so many people the permission to be themselves. She owned it and truly inspired others to own it as well.

The photo of k.d in my office is from a 1992 televised concert. I often think about how much has changed for LGBTQ-identified people in Canada since that photo was taken — and how k.d. lang has played a large part in that.

I thank her for her velvet voice, her perfect album Hymns of the 49th Parallel and for leading the way for so many of us. I will continue to stop by the photo in my office every time I need some inspiration. Prayer-hands emojis.

Michael Yerxa is a queer documentary filmmaker, a television producer, a former MTV Canada talking head and a figure skating super fan.

Not giving a Schitt about viewer expectations

Last year, a Globe and Mail journalist criticized Dan Levy’s presence on The Great Canadian Baking Show for its “feyness” — and Levy clapped back. He called out the critique for being “offensive, irresponsible and homophobic,” adding: “To all the ‘fey’ kids/people out there who read that and were made to question whether their ‘feyness’ is deserving of criticism, it’s not. You are loved for who you are.” But before serving as co-creator, star and showrunner of the CBC sitcom Schitt’s Creek, Levy says he felt self-doubt about his abilities as a writer and actor. Cast under the shadow of his father Eugene’s immense legacy, he first rose to prominence on MTV Canada, co-hosting MTV Live and an aftershow for The Hills, but the work ultimately left Levy feeling unfulfilled. “I just realized I’d rather be the person somebody wanted to ask questions to than the person asking the questions,” he told Interview. All that changed when Levy debuted his hit character David, the fashion-forward, sharp-witted prodigal son of the show’s Rose family. Initially presumed to be gay, Levy subverted viewer expectations by giving David an unforgettable coming out episode, where he used his all-inclusive taste in wine — “I like the wine and not the label” — as a nonchalant metaphor for his pansexuality. Levy has been vocal about his intention to depict a queer character who doesn’t come up against judgment or homophobia, deciding early on that David’s sexuality would be a non-issue — and isn’t it nice to imagine a world a little more like that small town?

Salvatore Antonio, Schitt’s Creek writer:

Dan’s brilliance as a creative is that he writes for the world we should live in — a world without hatred or bigotry. It’s an exercise in queer world-making that shows us all how things could be, but Schitt’s Creek never crosses the line into preaching — instead, Dan leads with heart and humour and, above all, characters whose quirks are matched by their decency. With Schitt’s Creek, he’s created a world that somehow feels both completely singular and relatable to people from all walks of life.

How Ivan Coyote taught me the importance of self-love (and making a killer roast chicken)

by Heath V. Salazar

(Photo by Robin Toma)

There’s an Ivan Coyote T-shirt that lives on a shelf in my closet, and when my mum first handed it to me, I couldn’t help but giggle. She had always purchased my clothes a couple sizes too big when I was a child so that I could grow into them, and, even though I was entering my mid-20s at the time, her old habit had endured. She’d always been practical, so it stood to reason that my couture — which read Tomboy Survival Guide in bold orange writing — would be oversized. But that was only part of her decision, which had also been influenced by Coyote themselves.

Ivan Coyote first came into my life two years ago via fellow queer icon Belle Jumelles. The Toronto International Festival of Authors was taking place at the Harbourfront Centre, and Belle had an extra ticket for the night. The evening was dubbed “In Conversation with Ivan Coyote,” which was both incredibly vague and straightforward. Coyote, an award-winning author and short film creator who has released multiple albums that combine storytelling with music, was there to talk with acclaimed journalist Rachel Giese. As the pair discussed Coyote’s eleventh book Tomboy Survival Guide, Coyote was asked about their thoughts on masculinity. You could feel the breath in the room hold itself — the way it would right before a belly laugh or a much needed sob — as Coyote called language into themselves. They proposed that given masculinity’s history with toxicity, perhaps we’d come to a place where masculinity could no longer exist without forever being tethered to it — that the term itself encompassed all that it had been until now and that it was time for new terminology. You could hear fingers digging through distressed denim pockets in search of pre-dampened tissues. Coyote had taken a question about society and language, and answered it with a vision of a new future.

As the evening came to a close, the audience was given the opportunity to ask questions, and one of the first ones was an inquiry into how Coyote takes care of themselves as an activist. I felt my blood slow down, waiting, making sure not to stir too quick so as not to miss a second of their response. Every activist in the room listened deeply, awaiting their Holy Grail of self care. A harmony of giggles and confusion spread through the room as they responded by telling us...they make a killer roast chicken. Yes, roast chicken. Ivan Coyote is a warm person — you can feel it in their writing — and in person, they can make an entire room feel like they’re at a family reunion. They shared with us the importance of making a meal, the importance of sharing that meal with others and the importance of checking in. Coyote explained that working as an activist can be very tiring and that it doesn’t come with a punch clock — so they’ll make roast chicken and take it to their friends, who are also activists, and have a nice meal together. We had all thought we were going to get a how-to guide on self care, but what we received was a lesson on the power of community and the reminder that we’re people — mortal, fleshy, hungry people. And the way we make sure we stay strong can be as simple, and as loving, as making and sharing roast chicken.

Tomboy Survival Guide, thanks to Coyote’s multidisciplinary artistry, takes on a variety of forms, one of which is a live performance — a performance my mother got the chance to see at The Fredericton Playhouse. The piece is described as “part anthem, part campfire story and part instructions for dismantling the gender stories we tell ourselves and each other.” There are creators in this world who move you and others who give you hope, but very seldom do you find a creator who manages to rearrange foundational parts of your self. Knowing my mother had attended Coyote’s show moved me, but I knew there was something even greater at play when, after seeing the performance, I noticed her pause after using my birth name. She’d had my permission to use it since I came out to her as trans non-binary and told her of my name change, so she had no reason to pause — but that day, she did. She looked up at me and said quite simply, “Oh, no, I need to use the name you chose. I learned that in the play.” My mum is a badass. She’s lived beyond the scope of my imagination, and she’s fought for me in every moment I didn’t know how to fight for myself. As the words exited her mouth, I stood witness to what happens when greatness gets to share space with greatness: it dismantles every system taught to keep us in our place and builds us a home.

Ivan Coyote saves lives on the daily. The way they share their story invites people to want to get to know themselves, to befriend themselves and to fall in love with the core of themselves. Ivan Coyote has shown me that we have a right to challenge the language and notions we thought we were obligated to live by because they were made by us to begin with. Ivan Coyote is the reason I show up to my friends’ houses with grocery bags full of their favorite snacks. Ivan Coyote is also part of the reason my mom bought me a T-shirt just a few sizes too big. While she is definitely practical, my mum had known I’d started taking testosterone and that my body would be going through changes, and she wanted to make sure I received a T-shirt I could grow into. I put on the T-shirt this morning, and, as it turns out, it fits. Why is Ivan Coyote one of my Super Queeroes? Because my mum thought of me that day as exactly who I am. I think she learned that from their play.

Heath V. Salazar — also known as their drag alter ego Gay Jesus — is a Dora Award-winning Latinx performer and writer.

by Sarah Liss

This may be revisionist history, but in my first recollection of Will Munro, he’s dressed in a head-to-toe chicken suit. An homage to Clara the Carefree Chicken — one of the original New York City club kids — the suit was garish and feathered and (if memory serves) involved absurd, Muppet-calibre feet. Will wore it while working the door and the stage and the floor one night at Vaseline, his cult queer rock ‘n’ roll party at the El Mocambo, a gloriously rundown club on the fringes of Toronto’s Kensington Market. (Later, under pressure from Unilever, the name morphed, becoming Vazaleen.)

What I remember is this: walking in past dingy, mottled black walls graffitied with the ghosts of punk shows past, my shoes sticking to a floor shellacked with several decades’ worth of beer and sweat, the guttural thrum of an indelible guitar riff echoing through the sound system (“Ça plane pour moi,” maybe, or “Kids in America”) and feeling awestruck by the masses of beautiful misfits. Everywhere in the bar, in denim, leather, ornate costumes, sequins and sparkles, and various states of undress, people of myriad genders milled and moshed, danced and drank. It was maybe 20 minutes away — 10 by cab — from Church and Wellesley, the city’s “official” gay village, but this celebration of unfettered perversity and glorious weirdness couldn’t have been further removed from the stoic conformity that dominated in the mainstream clubs on the strip. And there, in my mind, is Will — a yellow-feathered beacon in a sea of undulating bodies and joyful chaos.

I don’t know if Will really wore the chicken suit on that particular night in the fall of 2000, the first night I was dragged by a (cooler, gayer, more libertine) friend to Vaseline, the party that transformed my conception of what queer culture could be — what queer community could be. But he did wear it often: to go out dancing, to run errands around the city, to visit the Black Eagle, a Church Street leather bar. And in my mind, that captures so much of the spirit that defined his life’s work: hilarious and absurd, slightly twisted, oddly affecting, entirely without shame. It was a strike against propriety, against arch expressions of coolness, against conventional notions of sex and desire. And it was a tribute, in its way, to a way of being and a mode of creating that had come barely a generation earlier.

That spirit was ever-present in his artwork, which reframed recognizable icons (Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon album cover recontextualized with the insertion of ACT UP’s “Silence = Death” motto), revisited traditionally “feminine” practices (the meticulous sewing, crocheting and textile wizardry he used to produce everything from bespoke briefs to a patchwork sex sling) and drew on the cut-and-paste aesthetic of zines and classic rock-show posters. It shaped his DJ playlists, the performers he brought to town and the intergenerational mix of people who hung out at The Beaver, the hybrid café and club he co-founded on a proto-gentrified stretch of Queen Street W. in 2006.

The peak years of Will’s club nights coincided with the very earliest pokes and likes of the social-media era, but he could be ridiculously rooted in his analog ethos. Even though he had an email address, he rarely checked it. If you were hoping to weasel your way onto the guest list for one of his events, you had to call his landline, leave a message and hope he checked his voicemail before you showed up and had to negotiate a huge lineup that likely included at least three of your exes. Still, most of the time, miraculously, his old-school system worked.

Will died of brain cancer in 2010 at the age of 35. Three and a half decades doesn’t seem like nearly long enough for the scope and depth of everything he accomplished (then again, his busyness was legendary), nor does it seem like an adequate lifespan for someone who had so much more to make and say and do. Will was transformative — and I mean that in the most literal, non-hyperbolic way. His genius, his magic, came from a place of wanting to effect change on every level. He was a vegan, punk, feminist, anarchist, sissy, homo hero; a kid from the suburbs who worked to create a haven for other freaks; an iconoclast and a superfan; a tender maverick who carved out public spaces where a startlingly diverse collection of people could feel validated in their most private selves. And that’s all any of us want, isn’t it? To feel safe and beautiful in our own skin — or chicken suit.

Sarah Liss is a writer, editor, and cultural critic who lives in Toronto with her family.

by Adrienne Crossman

(Photos by Christina Zeidler and Deirdre Logue)

Who are Allyson Mitchell and Deirdre Logue?

Educators. Community builders. Activists. Mentors. Feminist trailblazers. Artists. Curators. Writers. Organizers and facilitators. Intersectional. Political. Unabashedly queer.

Logue and Mitchell have contributed in innumerable ways to the contemporary art landscape. They’ve also inspired a generation of queer, feminist, experimental and just plain weird artists, makers and thinkers in Canada and beyond.

They’re based in Toronto, where they co-founded and co-direct the Feminist Art Gallery (FAG), an exhibition and community space located in their west end backyard. The duo has described the project as a “political potluck, free-schooling, backyard screening, axe grinding, directed reading, protest sign-making, craft den, incantation, herbal tea and gluten-free muffin top artist talk sensation.” Its mandate is to promote sustainable feminist and queer art — and also to build community. According to the artists, FAG exists as “a response, a process, a site, a protest, an outcry, an exhibition, a performance, an economy, a conceptual framework, a place and an opportunity.” In addition to hosting exhibitions and events, Mitchell and Logue advocate for and support invisible and emerging artists from their backyard. FAG also has both a local and international reach, collaborating with large institutions including the Tate Modern, SFMOMA and the Art Gallery of Ontario, and smaller, artist-run galleries and archives in Toronto, Vancouver and Singapore.

          WE CAN’T COMPETE
          WE WON’T COMPETE
          WE CAN’T KEEP UP
          WE WON’T KEEP DOWN

These are the words of CAN’T/WON’T (2012), a series of protest banners shown during FAG’s 2015 residency at the AGO, which Mitchell and Logue used to question what success means within hierarchal structures and contemplate how we can “both resist and reconcile our participation” in oppressive systems.

What, then, does it look like to carry the kind of legacy that Logue and Mitchell have forged in the world of contemporary art?

For queer artists, it often involves pushing boundaries and challenging the status quo in ways that could hinder one’s potential for mainstream success (especially if one is not thin, white and male). It involves making people uncomfortable, and shedding light on issues that are difficult and often avoided. It involves being political, not shifting one’s work to read as more palatable to a wider audience and not compromising one’s vision or message for financial gain. And most importantly, it involves meaningful collaboration with one’s community — to speak and do as well as listen and learn; to act as both mentee and mentor, fostering intersectional dialogues and forging cross-generational relationships. At the end of the day, it is often other marginalized and queer folks who are the ones who will understand, find value in and support the work of queer and feminist practitioners.

Independently and collectively, Logue and Mitchell continue to leave an undeniable impact on the political and contemporary art landscape on a local, national and international scale. Their influence can be felt and seen in the practices of artists such as Hazel Meyer, Madelyne Beckles, Brette Gabel, the late Will Munro and curator Lucas Cabral (just to name a few).

Mitchell’s political recontextualization of traditional craft practices and the subversion of the domestic into the realm of the political serve as a precursor to exhibitions such as Productive Discomfort curated by Lauren Cullen, which took place at Xpace Cultural Centre this past March. The work consisted of a series of “unwelcome mats” created through rug hooking that addressed “anti-colonial, anti-racist and feminist queer crip perspectives,” and asked how rug hooking can serve as a disruptive force.

In 2017, the Images Festival focused its Canadian Artist Spotlight on Logue. Rather than screening a collection of her own works — predominantly gestural self-portraits that rely on performing for the camera — she provided space to eight artists and academics, some whom she had an intimate relationship with and others who existed in her periphery. Logue chose to highlight the work of individuals who have influenced her, whom she has influenced and whom she has admired from afar, as well as those who have critiqued and looked up to her throughout her career.

If I attempted to list the myriad ways that Allyson Mitchell and Deirdre Logue have influenced and challenged the Canadian art landscape — including how they have informed and impacted my own practice — I would be far exceeding my word count. Their creative work has helped to define the contemporary queer aesthetic, and their political action continues to push both personal and institutional boundaries in ways that will have an impact for years to come. I am thankful for the labour they have done and continue to do, as we are all the better for it.

Adrienne Crossman (she/they) is a Hamilton-based artist, educator and curator exploring queerness, affect, and the influence of media and popular culture on contemporary society and identity formation.

In a decade, Xavier Dolan has changed Canadian cinema with films that are vibrant, messy and alive

by Oliver Skinner

(Photo by Joel Ryan/Associated Press)

After a bad day of school back in 2010, I typed the name Xavier Dolan into my Facebook search bar and sent the filmmaker — or whoever owned that account — a dewy-eyed plea. My message opened: “I know that this may be a shot in the dark, but I feel that you might be able to relate to my situation.” I proceeded to congratulate him on the success of his debut feature, J'ai tué ma mère, recount how miserable I was at school and propose that we were kindred spirits because we shared the same taste in cinema. “I may seem young and fairly inexperienced,” I wrote, “but I’m sure you can relate with the Truffaut-like need to leave school and make movies.” I then asked for his permission to run away from home and work on the set of his next film.

A year prior, I had discovered the band of critics and filmmakers who launched the movement known as the French New Wave. I most fashioned myself after François Truffaut, who ditched public education at 14 to homeschool himself using every book and movie he could get his hands on. My fixation on those auteurs distorted my views and viewing habits to the point where I temporarily held the pretentious belief that the only cinema worth pursuing had already come out of 1960s France. Any window for the contributions of my contemporaries was firmly closed; peak cinema had long flickered out into the night.

Then, out of nowhere, emerged Xavier Dolan, a young director whose work was as free-spirited and convention-defying as the New Wave trailblazers who had come before him. I’d be lying if I claimed that it was anyone but Dolan who first caused my cynical, 15-year-old self to realize that Canadian cinema could be as vibrant and messy and alive as the mid-century classics my eyes were glued to, night after night, fragmented into 10-minute pieces on YouTube.

Dolan’s origin story is cut from the same autodidactic cloth as Truffaut’s. While so many of us spend the decade between 20 and 30 rifling around in search of who we are and the place we belong, Dolan was always gearing up to take his rightful place in film history. At least, it would appear that way: after getting a head start as a child actor in Jean Coutu commercials, dubbing the voices of Hollywood actors for their films’ French-Canadian releases and a teenage turn in the gory horror flick Martyrs, he dropped out of college and set his sights on Cannes — the most Nouvelle Vague pilgrimage destination conceivable — to premiere J'ai tué ma mère. The eruptive, semi-autobiographical tale of a sensitive gay teenager perpetually at odds with his single mom announced Dolan as an assured new cinematic voice.

When I sent that naive Facebook message, I can’t remember if I’d even gotten the chance to lay eyes on that actual film, or whether I’d just obliterated the replay button tearing through every interview, movie clip and bande-annonce I could locate on the internet. Set to a tempestuous Vivaldi composition, the trailer’s frantic energy seemed to mirror my life as an angst-ridden, closeted teenager enduring the claustrophobia of living with a divorced parent. Xavier Dolan also bore a particular intrigue because he was so young — only five years my senior — and openly gay.

A few months after surfacing from high school, I moved to Montreal to study literature. Placing my professors’ coursework on the back burner, I found a job at a multiplex and spent most of my days off smoking cigarettes or slouched in the front row of whatever movie was playing, chasing an image of the melancholic heroes that had been impressed upon me not only through European arthouse fare, but now through homegrown, decidedly queer visions, like Léa Pool’s Emporte-moi or C.R.A.Z.Y. by Jean-Marc Vallée.

During my first week away, I saw Laurence Anyways — Dolan’s rapturous saga of a trans woman coming into her own in Montreal throughout the ’90s. I began to misdirect energy I should have reserved for penning academic papers toward blog posts about movies I loved and hated. Soon, thanks to the guidance of very generous editors, I figured out a way to land side gigs scribbling words about Canadian cinema, or queer cinema, or, naturally, Canadian queer cinema. The subject of monsieur Dolan — who put out a new film each year without fail — was practically unavoidable.

It didn’t stop there. Whenever I travelled and wound up at film festival events or gay bars and told new acquaintances I’d come from Montreal, they instinctively asked for my thoughts on Xavier Dolan. In many ways, he wasn’t merely a reminder of the validity of my national culture but a gateway to heated debates and lasting friendships.

What are my thoughts on the guy, then? In just 10 years, he’s crafted an eight-film corpus that most auteurs would kill to call their own. His career has witnessed some of the highest highs and lowest lows of any filmmaker that has barely scratched 30. It’s almost the default to resent his achievements, at least a little. But the Dolan house style that vaults a film like Mommy to sky-high triumph — a soundtrack crammed with nostalgic pop, fierce female leads and frequent sequences of domestic conflict — is made up of the same DNA that seems to have inhibited The Death and Life of John F. Donovan from soaring wide (I wouldn’t know, since it hasn’t yet received a distribution deal in Canada).

Every one of Dolan’s films is unmistakably a product of his suburban Quebec upbringing, reverence of ’90s family dramas, grim sense of humour and manic creative temperament. And, save for Mommy, each of these films draws on those amplified emotions and uses them to show a queer experience that is textured, authentic and riddled with heartache — not just for the main characters but for everyone whose lives they touch.

Dolan sought out the work of gay authors for Tom à la ferme and Juste la fin du monde, two play adaptations that deal with homophobia and secrecy in close family quarters. His outspoken views on the designation of his work as “queer” have been met with equal parts derision and applause: he rejected the 2012 Queer Palm award, accusing such awards of being ghettoizing, and of his latest, Matthias & Maxime, he declared: “I don’t think that the two protagonists are aware that it’s gay love. It’s love.”

In the episode of The Filmmakers looking back on J'ai tué ma mère, actor-director Connor Jessup noted how rare it is to get to witness “a film about a 17- or 18-year-old made by a 17 or 18-year-old.” I’d like to offer another dimension to this rarity: seeing Xavier Dolan’s films as 15-, 16- and 17-year-olds reared a new generation of filmmakers unafraid to dream big and venture to tell their own small stories. I didn’t need to board a midnight Megabus to Montreal, thankfully, because simply replaying videos of a gay Canadian kid giving interviews at Cannes was enough, at that point, to transport me from my teenage bedroom — a mundane movie scene I so seldom believed the cameras of my life were ever going to cut away from.

Oliver Skinner is a writer and filmmaker living in Ontario.

by Stéphanie Verge

(Photo by Christian Côté/Radio-Canada)

I moved to Montreal in 2000 on a whim, at the tail end of a big love. Over my first weekend in my new city, I climbed the stairs of a triplex on Ste-Catherine Street into the world of Sisters, a lesbian hangout I’d heard of but never visited. Looking out over the knots of women drinking and dancing, I wondered what they were all about. Would any of them come to know me? Would I come to know them?

A few months later, a new friend I was desperate to impress suggested I read Les Nuits de l’Underground, a study of Montreal’s lesbian scene in the 1970s. (Reader, I married her.) The novel’s protagonist, a sculptor named Geneviève who splits her time between France and Canada, falls for an aloof Austrian doctor named Lali. Their affairs — with each other and with others — play out against a backdrop of late nights full of young and lively Québécois women.

The novel is teeming with romantic operatics befitting its dyke-bar setting, but it’s the author Marie-Claire Blais’s fascination with the Other that captivated me. It extends beyond the book’s most obvious example — queer women and their sexuality — to envelop differences related to class, ethnicity, culture and language.

The writer’s abiding interest in the outsider, in the marginalized, in the savage turns life can take, are a constant in her work. She exploded onto Quebec’s literary scene in 1959 at 20 years old with the novel La Belle bête, the story of a violent relationship between an ugly sister and her beautiful brother. Proof of its enduring popularity: the book won Le combat des livres (Quebec’s Canada Reads) in 2014, defended in French by the anglophone musician Paul Cargnello.

Blais’s cross-cultural appeal is well established, even if her name doesn’t resonate with the mainstream as emphatically as some of the province’s other queer artistic giants (such as Robert Lepage and Blais’s longtime friend Michel Tremblay). Her writing has been translated into more than a dozen languages, and she’s the recipient of numerous international honours, including the Prix Médicis, two Guggenheim Fellowships and the Prix France-Québec. Blais has lived in the United States on and off for decades and currently makes her home in Key West, Fla. Published in April, her essay “À l’intérieur de la menace” — one of her dozens of essays, novels, plays and collections of poetry — is an indictment of her adopted country, one that would tear migrant children from their families and not only nominate but confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.

Taking a stand never seems to intimidate Blais: Une saison dans la vie d’Emmanuel, her 1965 novel that is still mandatory reading in college classes across the province, was rejected by various editors for its less than rosy vision of rural Quebec at the turn of the 20th century. But how can we ever know ourselves, how can we ever do better, if we aren’t honest about who we are and who we’ve been? she seemed to challenge through her opus. Once published, Une saison placed her in what is now referred to as the “famous quartet of 1965” — literary poster children for Quebec’s Quiet Revolution. (The group also included Hubert Aquin and his Prochain épisode, Gérard Bessette and his L’Incubation and Jacques Ferron and his La Nuit). Not bad for a writer whose only formal training was a few night classes at l’Université Laval.

Blais, who turns 80 in October, creates work that both informs and is informed by questions related to civil rights, feminism, nationhood and individual responsibility. Her writing, regardless of when it is released, is relevant. In this era of Trump, she revisits themes explored in her 10-volume series Soifs (1995–2018), set in the late 20th- and early 21st-century. She continues to caution against the dangers of intolerance and its great enabler: indifference, which normalizes oppression and encourages apathy in the face of cruelty.

Blais’s nearly six decades of work have shown us that it is our duty to revolt against such cruelty. Time and again, when she has delved into anger and heartbreak, violence and injustice, she has shown us that there can also be room for hope. Indeed, “hope” is the last word in Une réunion près de la mer, the final book in her Soifs saga. Blais believes in humour, in light, in lyricism, and, above all, in compassion.

Stéphanie Verge is the former co-editor-in-chief of LSTW, a Montreal-based bilingual magazine for queer women, and the current executive editor of Reader's Digest.

by Peter Knegt

The summer of 2000 will hopefully remain an all-time low in terms of both my self-esteem and self-glamour. I was a closeted, overweight 16-year-old working as the “night maid” at a Holiday Inn off the side of Highway 401 near Trenton, Ont. I had to wear hospital scrubs that very much did not flatter my body and my job was essentially to deliver towels or toiletries to any room that needed them between the hours of 6 p.m. and 2 a.m. If there were no deliveries to make (as was often the case), I was supposed to vacuum the hallways and clean the windows. Instead, I would sneak into a vacant hotel room with some chips from the vending machine and watch TV. It was in one of those rooms where I discovered Thom Fitzgerald’s 1997 debut film The Hanging Garden.

I had been aware of the film since its release three years prior, largely because of how many awards it had received (an awards geek through and through, I had been watching the Genie Awards every year since I was 12). But I was too scared to ever try to rent a VHS because I knew the lead character in the film was gay and assumed the clerk at the video store would think I was too and tell my parents (although, given that I’d rented Erin Brokovich at least five times that same summer, in retrospect I suspect they already knew). So I was thrilled when I read in TV Guide that it would be airing during one of my shifts.

Set in rural Nova Scotia, The Hanging Garden follows gay 25-year-old Sweet William as he returns to his parents’ house for his sister’s wedding after a decade-long absence. As it turns out, his sister is marrying the man Sweet William was caught having sex with when he was 15 — a catalyst for their alcoholic father offering him a horrifying ultimatum: run away to the big city, or hang himself from a tree in the garden. The film uses magical realism to explore alternating and sometimes interspersing realities in which Sweet William makes either decision. This didn’t exactly make for an easy watch for a depressed, overweight closeted teenager with an alcoholic father — but it certainly was an impactful one. The Hanging Garden has always stuck with me, perhaps because it was one of the first films I saw that I felt truly reckoned with the emotional hellscape of the teenage closet, and certainly the first I saw that did so from a Canadian perspective.

I would continue to follow Fitzgerald’s career despite my first cut of his work being a little too deep. Eventually I got the nerve to rent his follow-up, the even more explicitly gay — at least in terms of wonderfully excessive male nudity — Beefcake, an homage to 1950s muscle magazines that stars Fitzgerald’s fellow Super Queero Daniel MacIvor. And by 2003, I was studying film at the University of Toronto and saw his heartbreaking AIDS drama The Event in a proper movie theatre as an openly gay man myself.

When I graduated a few years later, a pretty extraordinary thing happened when I was looking for a summer job a few steps above the paygrade of Holiday Inn night maid. A friend had recently moved to Halifax and gotten a job working for Thom Fitzgerald’s production company, Emotion Pictures, and managed to wrangle me a summer position (thanks, Brad Horvath!) as the company’s assistant. So I headed east — and soon the man responsible for that experience in the hotel room six summers earlier was signing my paycheques.

Within a few weeks, Thom and I had become friends (the story of watching The Hanging Garden in that hotel room had made for a good icebreaker). He seemed impressed with my rather encyclopedic knowledge of film, and asked me if I would rather spend my summer doing something a little more exciting than filling out spreadsheets for him. “Like what?” I asked. He replied: “Like starting a queer film festival in Halifax.”

I obviously had no idea how to start a queer film festival, and honestly, neither did he. But together — and in just a few weeks — we manage to take our Reel Out Film Festival from wild idea to successful execution, opening with an outdoor screening of The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert on Halifax’s waterfront and then closing five days later with the raunchy Another Gay Movie. To this day, it remains one of the most exciting professional experiences I’ve ever had.

I know that I am absolutely not alone in my admiration for Thom. For over 20 years, his work (including the wonderful 2011 lesbian road trip movie Cloudburst and last year's rural Nova Scotia homecoming film Splinters) has been a beacon not just in terms of its contribution to Canadian queer cinema but also in his determination to be a leader in Nova Scotia's film industry, even as it goes through its recent challenges. On behalf of all of us: thank you, Thom Fitzgerald.

Peter Knegt is the writer of Digital Publishing Award-winning CBC Arts column Queeries, the producer of the CBC Arts docuseries Canada’s a Drag, and a filmmaker, author and occasional stand-up comedian.

The inimitable lion of the contemporary dance world

Leaving home in search of oneself isn’t an unfamiliar chapter in any queer individual’s origin story. At 19, Christopher House left his birthplace of St. John’s to move to Ottawa because it was where the budding choreographer most believed he could “become the person I [wanted] to become.” House eventually graduated from York University and joined the Toronto Dance Theatre in 1979, going on to become the company’s artistic director in 1994 — a post he’s held for the last 25 years (House just announced earlier this month that this will be his final season). The link between his passion and his identity is clear: “Dance, by its very nature, is queer,” he told In Magazine in 2013. “Men of my generation have searched for expression, vulnerability and sensuality.” And he’s helped those who have come through TDT find just that. Throughout House’s time as the head of the company, he has played an integral role in building its image, contributed more than 60 original works to its repertoire and made time to frequently collaborate with artists from other disciplines, including indie band The Hidden Cameras and theatre-maker Jordan Tannahill. Whether he’s carefully choreographing original movements or making room for improvisation to allow his dancers greater freedom, House’s entire oeuvre is suffused with depth and expression.

Michelle Mama, showrunner of In The Making (which will feature House next season):

Possessed of the cool precision of a scientist and the fiery passion of an artist, Christopher House is the inimitable lion of the contemporary dance world. His stubborn resistance to the status quo and his innovative collaborations with creatives of every stripe create a frisson and magic that can only occur with great risk. He queers traditional notions of dance by pushing against conventional methodologies and staying curious and open. His commitment to presentness and being “embodied” in his work is deeply meaningful and inspirational. As a dancer, artistic director, choreographer and collaborative queer elder, House continues to forge an authentic creative path that we all enthusiastically follow.

More than a band: The sad, joyous, sexy inclusivity of The Hidden Cameras

by Owen Pallett

(Photo by Alp Klanten)

I can’t think of a better song than “Smells Like Happiness,” which sings about the stereotypes of young gay life in a way that is equally titillating and self-critical; in this regard, it is a Hollinghurst novel as a song. “In our minds our fathers have died and we realize / that cities have bars and we like to get drunk / and high from the smells we inhale in dirty wells / and the neck of a boy who smokes cigarettes.” When I asked Joel Gibb what his tone was when he sang this, he said, “It’s meant to be kind of sad.” It feels sad, and joyous, and sexy at the same time — “The Smell Of Our Own” is a document of the explosive sexuality of young gaydom, in its beauty and its sadness.

This Kid in the Hall was a fabulously gay jolt to comedy

When Scott Thompson came of age, openly gay male comedians were more or less unheard of. Buddy Cole — Thompson’s celeb-name-dropping, martini-swirling gay socialite alter ego — was a big part of changing that. The comic recently toured the country with Après Le Déluge: The Buddy Cole Monologues, his one-man show that revives his iconic Kids in the Hall character known for scandalous rants about the queer community and his personal life. “I feel sorry for young gay men today,” Thompson screams in the opening monologue. “Now they’re expected to get married, to have children, to be...mah...ma-nah...maaaa...monogamous.” In an interview with CBC Arts last year, he spoke frankly about the fact that in the decades since's Buddy's debut, there still isn't an openly gay male star in comedy. “I think the level of self-loathing with gay men is a lot higher than people think,” he said. “And as a result gay men have a very difficult time giving it up for other gay men.” Whoever makes it, he’ll have Buddy to thank.

Andrew Johnston, comedian:

Growing up in the ’90s, out gay male characters in film or TV who weren't cautionary tales were rare. I think there was Christian in "Clueless" and that might have been it. Visibly out gay male comedians? Well, there was only one, and that was Scott Thompson. The first time I clapped eyes on Scott doing any one of his countless singular, brilliant character creations on Kids in The Hall was a five alarm, this-is-not-a-drill, siren song that this was possible for me, and I can solemnly swear that I would not be doing comedy had I not seen Scott do it first. Were I a woman in song paying tribute to a trailblazer, Scott would be Aretha Franklin, Patti Smith, Madonna, Lauryn Hill and Ariana Grande all rolled into one — he's that iconic. Eons before his time, he has been ballistically bent on communicating the gay male sensibility through comedy and diving off every edge he can find, and I'm thrilled to say he still very much is. On behalf of myself and every other gay male stand-up, sketch and improv comedian to come after...Scott: we love you and thank you for letting us stand on your shoulders.

Intuitive, evocative, critical: To know Stephen Andrews is to know poetry

by Bojana Stancic

(Photo: stephenandrewsartist.com)

And it’s not just the poetry of the exceptional and canonical; it’s also the poetry of the everyday. And it’s not just on the paper or in the mouth; it’s also on the lips. It’s often accompanied by good wine and even better friends, and maybe an oyster or two. It’s not unlike...an earth-shattering whisper of love.

The words are by Rumi and Rilke, Ling Huchu and Anne Carson — but it also goes beyond words to include the poetry of his gaze. What that feels like is reminiscent of an effortless weight of an individual pixel in his laborious renderings of well-known artworks, but holds space, too, for the expansive, zoomed-out image of all your good and not-so-good complexities to be embraced. Like the lights or the flares or the smudges, it allows you access to a timeless dimension.

We have been in a particularly committed long-term relationship since 2015, when he had an exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario and I was working on programming a night dedicated to him. The exhibition was called Stephen Andrews POV, and the show’s breadth was as eclectic as his vision. It incorporated his newly found love of ceramics; drawings of politically pregnant and oftentimes difficult imagery (rendered, however, with a unique tenderness); series of vitrines holding various collectables from his global travels; and a new body of paintings relating to the butterfly effect.

While he is a well-recognized artist with a long exhibition history, he made a new piece specifically for our night: an animation called The 1st part of the 2nd half, a series of images put together from work spanning from 2001 to 2015. Unmistakable highlights include a young Stephen blowing up a yellow balloon; John Greyson, his long-term partner, as portrait of one, then as part of a portrait of many; and a mysterious, strategically placed blackout circle covering up a rhythmic to and fro of what could be (and I think was confirmed as) a genital embrace.

The 1st part of the 2nd half, he later explained, was a title related to his coming out on the other side of the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the late ’80s and early ’90s not unscathed, but having a second opportunity at life with the advancement of drugs that had become available. This is also when he first told me about Alex, his beloved boyfriend who passed away in 1993 and who still remains one of the forever tended-to pillars of his love.

I had already wanted to give him everything I could, I was so enamoured — so when he said, “You know, what I would really love is for Mary Margaret O’Hara to do the soundtrack to the film,” I thought, “Mary Margaret, of course!” Another alchemist but in the vocal medium, a Canadian icon and all-around foundation of any real artistic devotional cult. It wasn’t only that I also loved her; it was the ingenuity of the idea to bring her glowing presence in proximity to his that made me short of breath. I had no idea how to reach her — but I knew I had to, especially since Stephen shared that Miss America was the album that offered the soundtrack, but also a possibility of redemption, to the numerous funerals of his young life and most major losses.

Stephen’s work is oftentimes discussed as dealing with grief, and it is in some of his most major works. But in his presence, the feeling of life is palpable and blinding. He recently wrote me to tell me that he had learned of a word describing the beauty of sadness, to which, of course, I had ample other untranslatable words to offer in return, having been curious about the same symptom of life. His reply was charming to the brim, exacting in wit and totally to the root of everything I appreciate about him. He said, “Sadly, we all have to understand these words if we intend to live our lives with any verve at all.”

Mary did the show, and new poetry was written between them, balloon images were played and life’s possibilities were somehow, and irretrievably, multiplied.

This is not just a love letter; it’s an instructional manual, like all poetry is.

Bojana Stancic is the programmer of cross-disciplinary projects at the Art Gallery of Ontario.

The caped crusader of the Indigenous renaissance

“Canada, you are in the midst of an Indigenous renaissance.” So began Jeremy Dutcher’s rousing acceptance speech for the 2018 Polaris Prize, which he was awarded for his debut album Wolastoqiyik Lintuwakonawa. Dutcher’s boldly original album grew out of research he did into traditional Maliseet songs that were recorded more than 110 years ago by an anthropologist who visited the Tobique First Nation in New Brunswick. The album is Dutcher’s response to the music of his ancestors, and the entire album is recorded in Wolastoq, a language now spoken fluently by fewer than 100 people. At the 2019 Juno Awards, Dutcher arrived draped in a flowing floral cape, took home the award for Indigenous music album of the year and used his speech to protest Justin Trudeau’s approach to reconciliation with the Indigenous population. Dutcher identifies as two-spirit and has also spoken out about colonialism’s suppression of the queerness that has long existed in the Indigenous community. “I think it’s really important to acknowledge that two-spirit people and Indigenous queer identity have been a part of this landscape for a very, very long time,” he told CBC Arts last year. “Long before colonization.”

Sean O’Neill, host of In The Making (which will feature Dutcher next season):

I had the opportunity to visit Jeremy Dutcher on a rare trip back to the shores of the Wolastoq river this spring, where I saw gloriously camp pictures of his high school musical theatre days, heard his parents describe with touching pride his show-stopping teenage talent show performance of “Bohemian Rhapsody” and listened to him play Mehcinut on his family's upright piano, with mementos from the explosive eighteen months he's just spent at the forefront of contemporary music hanging on the walls around him. It was a moving, intimate, humbling time — as a settler invited into private spaces to witness his most sacred relationships, and as a fellow queer who watched this sweet man navigate all of his relations: with his boyfriend, his parents, his elders, our crew, the river itself — with remarkable care and consistency. Wherever Jeremy goes, and whenever he sings, it’s all there, all at once: his compassion, his mischievous humour, his vulnerability, his deep respect for his elders, the worldview that’s shaped him, his moral clarity and his immense talent. Jeremy Dutcher is the real deal, and like all great artists, he sings of a future that many of us are only just beginning to imagine.

Jane Rule

So much more than ‘the only lesbian in Canada’

Kent Monkman

Playfully and radically queering the Canadian landscape

A worldwide superstar decades before RuPaul

Michel Tremblay

Pushing Québécois theatre’s boundaries since the 1960s

by Rinaldo Walcott

Jackie Shane

A queer R&B legend rediscovered

Tegan and Sara

These lesbian sisters are no con

Rae Spoon

A multi-talented, non-binary Prairie wind

by Kevin Hegge

Faith Nolan

Singing the stories of Black Halifax

Adrian Stimson

His notes on camp confront colonial violence

Paul Wong

The Chinese-Canadian Andy Warhol

A brave, strong voice for queer actors

Rufus Wainwright

Turning queer desire and heartbreak into song

by Barr Gilmore

Billy Newton-Davis

A soulful gay presence in Canadian music

Vivek Shraya

Thriving as a trans woman in today’s world

Ann-Marie MacDonald

From feminist liberation to Oprah’s Book Club

Storming comedy stages in a straight man’s world

Attila Richard Lukacs

A provocative canvas for exploring the male body

by Shaun Brodie

Mado Lamotte

The royal highness of Montreal drag

Syrus Marcus Ware

Going boldly where few trans men have gone before

by Michael Yerxa

Sky Gilbert

Canadian theatre's buddy in bad times

Dan Levy

Not giving a Schitt about viewer expectations

Evergon

Confronting sexuality with his camera for four decades

Re:orienting perceptions of queer Asian identity

Nicole Brossard

A writer of desire, of flesh, of the body

by Heath V. Salazar

Makeda Silvera

Ensuring the stories of queer women of colour are heard

Breaking down the stage door for LGBTQ voices

Joe Average

Committing himself to art in the face of HIV

Léa Pool

These lesbian film narratives go straight for the heart

by Sarah Liss

Tomson Highway

A pioneering voice in Indigenous theatre

Michel Marc Bouchard

Probing what it means to be queer in Quebec and beyond

Making trans women’s lives visible through deep lyrical joy

Shyam Selvadurai

Finding a home in the Asian diaspora

Lorraine Segato

She rose up to become the soundtrack of the queer movement

Jordan Tannahill

The Canadian stage’s “kind-hearted, wayward angel”

by Adrienne Crossman

John Greyson

Zero patience for convention

A kind soul enters an extraordinary second act

Midi Onodera

Her “tiny movies” empower the disenfranchised

by Oliver Skinner

Bruce LaBruce

An enduring hardcore shock to polite Canadian sensibilities

Carole Pope

The crotch grab heard around the world