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The Current Transcript for July 14, 2017

Host: Mike Finnerty

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

I’m very happy that we have so many Canadian authors now who are well-known. I think in many ways, authors are becoming our best known Canadians and that's the way it should be.

MIKE FINNERTY: The voice of publisher Jack McClelland speaking on the CBC back in 1984. McClelland & Stewart published Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, Mordecai Richler and many more. So how was this Canadian cultural jewel sold to a foreign multinational despite Canada's national ownership rules? That's coming right up. Then we’re in Montreal where filmmaker Arshad Khan joins us to discuss his complicated relationship with his dad—Abu—the subject of this new film and a man who became more conservative as he aged.

SOUNDCLIP

One day I was sitting at Abu’s computer when he came and sat right next to me. He said, “You are a gay. He then proclaimed, ‘You are our son and we love you. But see a psychiatrist about this condition.’”

MF: The pain of reconciling family and sexuality in a conservative immigrant household. I’m Mike Finnerty. Welcome to the summer edition of The Current.

How Canada's book publisher McClelland & Stewart became German-owned: author

Guests: Elaine Dewar, Glenn Rollans, John Degan

SOUNDCLIP

It created a place for Canadians to talk to each other. Without M&S, we would not have the early works of Leonard Cohen, of Mordecai Richler, of Mavis Gallant, of Alice Munro, The Handmaid's Tale. Peter C. Newman's really important work, Pierre Berton, Farley Mowat—all of those people who defined us to ourselves, at one point or another were probably published by M&S.

MF: Elaine Dewar is the author of The Handover: How Bigwigs and Bureaucrats Transferred Canada's Best Publisher and the Best Part of Our Literary Heritage to a Foreign Multinational. Her book tells the story of how McClelland & Stewart—M&S as she called it—ended up being acquired by a German company even though the venerable publishing house should have been protected by foreign ownership rules established in the 1970s.

ELAINE DEWAR: You have to go back 40 years ago, to the period in which these rules that were supposed to defend the Canadian national mind were first invented and brought forward. Way back in the distant reaches of time, Canadians found it extremely difficult to get published in their own country. A country without a literature is not a country and that was the view taken by governments, by all kinds of people interested in the arts and culture. And that led to the whole structure of law and policy that was in place when this deal finally went down.

MF: The deal went down 15 years after a real estate developer named Avie Bennett bought McClelland & Stewart from Jack McClelland. In the late 1990s, Avie Bennett realized that the company was in trouble and he arranged a deal to get out. So how did he sell Canada's most important publisher? Here's Elaine Dewar.

ELAINE DEWAR: Well, the rules of the game were covered by the Investment Canada Act which says thou shalt not sell a Canadian book publisher, a Canadian bookseller, a magazine publisher, a magazine seller to a foreign entity, unless the Canadian minister of Canadian Heritage says, “It's okay. You can go forward.” Well, when Avie organized his exit, what he did was give 75 per cent of the shares of a new entity called M&S to the University of Toronto as a charitable contribution to the U of T and sold 25 per cent to Random House of Canada owned then and still by Bertelsmann, and made a deal between the new M&S and Random House to manage the business. Now if you think about it, what he did was hand the leading Canadian publisher to its major competitor and say, “Okay. Make money for the University of Toronto. That's what we want you to do here.

MF: So why did he involve the University of Toronto?

ELAINE DEWAR: Canadian. Therefore, Canadian ownership and control stayed with a Canadian entity. Therefore, it fell outside the Investment Canada Act.

MF: And how big of a tax credit did Avie Bennett get for what was essentially the donation to University of Toronto?

ELAINE DEWAR: He got $15.9 million.

MF: So how did he do on the whole transaction?

ELAINE DEWAR: Hard to know. I mean we don't know what he put into M&S over the 15 years in which he ran it. Jack Stoddart, who was another very important Canadian publisher in the period, believed that Avie was dropping about a million a year and that probably at the end of 15 years, he was getting his money back.

MF: He's not the bad guy in this book.

ELAINE DEWAR: Nobody's a bad guy in this book, except maybe the Canadian bureaucrats who allowed this to happen.

MF: Is there any blame to assess to Avie Bennett?

ELAINE DEWAR: There's no blame for Avie. I mean Avie put his heart and soul into it for 15 years, put a lot of money into it for 15 years and there is no exit. His problem was I've taken on this company. I'm 72 years old. I can't do this forever. My kids don't want it. What do I do with it now? His answer was give it to the competitor. Get a good price. In the normal market situation, that would be a perfectly reasonable thing to do.

MF: But this was not a normal market situation. The law was supposed to protect Canadian ownership of cultural institutions. In the original deal Avie Bennett made, one quarter of the shares of McClelland & Stewart was sold to Random House which is owned by a German media conglomerate called Bertelsmann. The other three quarters were still Canadian owned by the University of Toronto. But 11 years later, that was no longer the case. In 2011, U of T sold its shares of McClelland & Stewart to Random House for one dollar and today, it is entirely owned by the German company. So are the national ownership rules worth the paper they're written on?

ELAINE DEWAR: No. This was the first of many deals that went through, usually unheralded. I mean one of the things about the Investment Canada Act is all of the little secrecy provisions. So we never know what the actual net benefit to Canada is. We never know what promises have been made to affect these deals because they’re kept secret. So we have a sale of Harlequin books by Torstar. Harlequin—a very large publisher permitted $455 million—sold to HarperCollins. The feds say okay. They have clearly decided that the policy is non-functional. But the politics of getting rid of the policy are too dangerous and too difficult, so they just do it behind closed doors and that’s the end.

MF: What concerns you now about Random House Canada being in control of McClelland & Stewart?

ELAINE DEWAR: Random House Canada has acquired 32 per cent of the trade market for books in this country. A big part of that was handed over with M&S. Two people basically run Random House of Canada. Random House of Canada fits within a very large multinational entity—Bertelsmann in Germany—whose role is to make money. The easiest way to make money in publishing, especially in this country, is to import foreign bestsellers and reprint them here. If 32 per cent of the market is dominated by two people, you have no diversity of ideas and opinions. That's problem number one. But problem number two is they are currently radically reducing the number of Canadian originated projects in favour of foreign originated projects and we're back to where we started in 1974.

MF: Random House Canada, today Penguin Random House Canada. It is owned by the Germans, still publishing Canadian writers, still employs Canadian editors, publicists, designers. How concerned should Canadians be?

ELAINE DEWAR: Well, the problem here is many fold. But diversity of opinion—it’s shrinking to a ridiculous degree. And when you have that kind of market control, you can force down the price you pay for projects. So advances have been going in the tank. Writers get paid less. Agents get paid less. The business, in other words, is contracting very quickly. The real issue is this book is not going to sell a hundred thousand bucks worth of revenue and the leader of Penguin Random House told the Globe and Mail in no uncertain terms that he's really only interested in publishing books in the future that can earn that kind of revenue. Well, that leaves out 94 per cent of what we publish.

MF: Do you think there's hope for publishing in Canada?

ELAINE DEWAR: I think if people get off their butts and start arguing about it that we will actually come up with something that works. I think if we just allow things to continue in this kill it behind closed doors method, we will be in serious trouble.

MF: Elaine Dewar, thank you very much.

ELAINE DEWAR: You're welcome.

MF: Elaine Dewar, author of The Handover: How Bigwigs and Bureaucrats Transferred Canada's Best Publisher and the Best Part of Our Literary Heritage to a Foreign Multinational. It's published by Biblioasis, a publishing house based in Windsor, Ontario. We contacted Penguin Random House Canada for a response and Brad Martin, president and CEO of Penguin Random House Canada answered in writing that the company's purchase of McClelland & Stewart did not violate Canadian content rules and that “McClelland & Stewart was managed by a board that was chaired by Avie Bennett and included two directors from the University of Toronto, two independent directors appointed by Avie Bennett and two directors from Random House of Canada. The board, he wrote, had complete control of M&S from the beginning of the new ownership arrangement. This arrangement was consistent with the regulations governing ownership of Canadian companies and cultural industries. And furthermore he writes, “By 2011, M&S was in untenable financial circumstances. Over the course of a year-long consultation with the Canadian government, it was decided that the best course of action was for Random House of Canada to assume ownership of M&S.” That from Brad Martin, president and CEO of Penguin Random House Canada. We also spoke with the University of Toronto and a spokesperson there said the university was “very proud to be a steward of the company during a difficult time for the industry.” And Canadian Heritage Minister Melanie Joly’s office sent this statement: “Our government is committed to ensuring that foreign investments in Canada's cultural sector benefit Canadians and respect Canadian laws due to the confidentiality provisions contained in the Investment Canada Act. No further information can be provided on specific cases.” So what does this story reveal about the state of the publishing industry in Canada? To tackle that question, we're joined by two people in the know. Glenn Rollans, independent publisher and president of the Association of Canadian Publishers. He's in Edmonton and John Degan, novelist and poet and executive director of the Writers Union of Canada. He's in Toronto. Both of you, hello and welcome.

BOTH VOICES: Hi, Mike.

MF: Glenn, why does it matter if McClelland & Stewart is owned by a German company?

GLENN ROLLANS: McClelland & Stewart was really the flagship Canadian publisher, but it also was the receiver of large amounts of federal investment and provincial investment that helped it reach that position. And we know for example, that between Random House first investing in McClelland & Stewart and when they eventually assumed control of the entire company, that there was probably about seven million dollars additional subsidy that went into the company during those years.

MF: Money that could have gone elsewhere, should have gone elsewhere, you think?

GLENN ROLLANS: I think that money should have gone elsewhere and I think that the market access, the audience access that McClelland & Stewart built up over the years—all of which can be reinvested in Canadian writers and in Canadian readers—all of that money now has gone south.

MF: And John, as a representative of Canadian writers, what difference has the change in ownership made to you?

JOHN DEGAN: Well, I think this is a huge and incredibly complicated story and I think Elaine has done an amazing job of identifying policy problems that we continue to struggle with in Canadian publishing. And for me, as a representative of writers and as a writer myself, the issue always is are Canadian writers being published well? Are they being paid well for their writing? Are these books reaching Canadian readers? Penguin Random House Canada has a great list of Canadian authors. They're publishing great Canadian books. So in that way they're contributing. But this deal stands as an example of sort of this general direction that the landscape has been going for Canadian writers and it hasn't been, let's just say it hasn't been a positive direction.

MF: So what about the next generation of writers now that we are in this climate, in this ownership system? Are they being fostered? Are they being published? Are they being paid?

JOHN DEGAN: Well, there is absolutely no question that writers make less today than they did in that golden age that Elaine described in the seventies. The Writers Union has done an income survey of our members in the larger sector and we found that there has been an income drop of about 27 per cent over the last 20 years. Now the factors causing that drop are complicated. I'm sure a lot of what's been described here has a lot to do with it. But there are global factors as well. There's a wonderful independent sector of publishers in Canada and probably today more than ever, a new Canadian writer has a good chance to be published in Canada. Where it goes after that point is what we're concerned with. Can they make a living from this? And more and more writers in Canada can't make a living.

MF: And Glenn, what about the way the government—the bureaucrats that Elaine speaks about—what about the way they make decisions around Canadian companies being sold to foreign interests?

GLENN ROLLANS: The process she described is absolutely true. There's a black box. The standard is supposed to be net benefit for Canadians. But we don't actually know what goes on behind closed doors and we don't know what the standard is for net benefit. The transactions should happen in the light of day because the policy is there to protect ownership in Canada for Canadians. And that's for good reasons. Canadians make different decisions about our cultural industries than non-Canadians do. When we look at it, what we see is that independent publishers in Canada publish about 80 per cent plus of new Canadian writers and we know that our publishers tend to stay around. We tend to work with authors, develop them and bring that product to Canadian readers, help the writer develop their craft and their livelihood. I don't disagree with anything that John said about the stress on that livelihood and I think that the concentration in the industry has been a big part of that.

MF: John, tell us more about what it is like for writers in Canada today to get published and where the new M&S as part of Bertelsmann fits into that.

JOHN DEGAN: Well, I think, I mean we're talking about Canada but this is really a global issue there. You know there have been lots of changes in the industry. Certainly digital has a lot to do with the changes. There is a blockbuster culture out there. There's a sort of a one and done culture that sees it being increasingly risky for a young writer to break into the industry. If they break into the industry and they don't make it big right away, they have a better chance of disappearing now than they did in the past certainly. I agree with Glenn that there are wonderful publishers out there who are still involved in the development side of writers, but they're few and far between. And we need more of that. And what we really need is diversity. That's what we look for. We look for great diversity within the business side of the sector. We want the bigs. We want the mediums. We want the smalls. We want them all but we want them to be playing on a level playing field. And I think when we allow cultural policy to erode—I'm not saying that that's what happened here—but I think there's sort of general agreement that there is that there's an erosion at the federal level of cultural policy. And they're busy looking at that and what they can do about that. When we allow things like that to erode, I think it just damages that playing field that I'm talking about.

MF: Glenn, where is the door in for first time writers and new diverse writers?

GLENN ROLLANS: Well, we've got about 115 members in Canada. That's really the independent English speaking sector in Canada. And it's not a wide open door. There is a gatekeeper process that's there in book publishing because book publishers are part of a creative team and they're investing their own resources in developing books. But it's 115 companies versus a very tiny top of the pyramid for that international owned industry at this point. The process that we've seen, I mean we're talking about McClelland & Stewart today but we've also seen Amazon enter the Canadian market as a retailer. We’ve seen the Apple iBook store enter. We saw Kobo divested—the originally Canadian-owned e-book retailer divested to Rakuten of Japan. We've seen John Coutts eventually become an Ingram company. John Coutts was a library distibution service, so the people making decisions about what gets bought for libraries are now in the US. Distican was bought by Simon & Schuster, another big distributor. Simon & Schuster set up a publishing program in education. Nelson was cleared for acquisition by Cengage out of the US. Penguin and Random House merged. We heard about Harlequin. It’s just a long litany of decisions that honour the policy in reverse, in secret as we've described and we think it's a huge issue for our publishers. It's a huge issue that we should have access to purchase the assets of these companies when they're up for sale. It's a huge issue that if they're not purchased by Canadians that the Canadian government take its responsibility to otherwise keep those assets in Canada and we haven't seen it. In fact, we haven't seen it exercised in the positive. Up to this point, we've seen it exercised in secret and always to the benefit of the foreign-owned company.

MF: Well and partly on that note Glenn, what would you say to people who believe perhaps more and more that Canadian publishers shouldn't have any special support or subsidies, that you need to adapt to the market, sink or swim. What would you say to all that?

GLENN ROLLANS: Well, for starters I think that we're just through an era where books were declared dead and have been declared back to life again. Books have an incredible role among the media that we have the national Canadian owned media and they're prestigious. They punch above their weight and I think the fact we're talking about this transaction today points out where they sit in developing Canadian identity. The Canadian industry, at this stage I think one of the biggest things we have going for us is resilience. We've been up against incredible pressure. We sit on the border of the largest cultural exporter in the world. Very large, very heavily capitalized companies are our direct competitors. We publish in English and so US publishing and international publishing in English is dominant. It’s probably 90 per cent of the actual book market in Canada. Without direct subsidy, it's very tough to compete with that. And it's really part of the Canadian project to decide whether we will be active in this medium or not. Hopefully government money works as an incentive to grow, to do a better job next year for your authors, for your readers, for your employees and your company. I think that's the right structure and I think that support for development and for specifically literary publishing has been really important to Canadians and it's part of us having an international position as a literate nation, a literary nation and a knowledge-based economy that has possibilities in the future.

MF: Both of you, thank you very much.

GLENN ROLLANS: Thank you, Mike.

JOHN DEGAN: Thanks a lot.

GLENN ROLLANS: Thanks, John.

JOHN DEGAN: Yep.

MF: John Degan, novelist and poet and executive director of the Writers Union of Canada. He was in Toronto. And Glenn Rollans, president of the Association of Canadian Publishers. He was in Edmonton. Did you tune in late to that conversation and does it really interest you? If that's the case, you can download our CBC Radio app where items like that are things you can put in a playlist and listen to again or for a first time at your leisure. It's absolutely free. The CBC News is next. Then growing up gay in an immigrant family in Canada can be tough. One Montreal filmmaker captures the complicated feelings involved in coming out to conservative religious parents. The film's called Abu. We'll talk about it in the next half hour. This is The Current.

'I felt like a sinner': Film ABU tackles taboo of 'coming out' for LGBT South Asians

Guests: Arshad Khan, Rishi Agarwal

MF: Hello. I'm Mike Finnerty and you're listening to the summer edition of The Current.

[Music: Theme]

MF: For LGBTQ people, coming out to their families looms large in the process of accepting their own sexual identity. This can be particularly difficult for those brought up in a family that openly rejects homosexuality or doesn't discuss it at all. And that's the subject of a new documentary we're hearing about next. And a warning: some of the language we're about to hear may be offensive to some.

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[Music]

I imagine coming out would cleanse the guilt. It didn't. It just highlighted internal schisms and tacked a few more hyphens to my identity. Now I was the brown Pakistani, Muslim, KFC eating, cinema junkie, faggot.

MF: Strong language. But that's how filmmaker Arshad Khan describes himself in the film, reclaiming a childhood taught as part of his identity. His journey to be accepted by his parents after he came out as a gay man is the subject of his new film, Abu. Abu is the Urdu word for father. And it was the death of his father that triggered him to explore their personal family story. The film uses home movies going back decades and old Bollywood films to establish a nostalgic look at Arshad Khan's childhood in Islamabad as part of a well-to-do family.

[Music: Bollywood]

MF: Things changed when he emigrates to Canada and his family settles in Mississauga, Ontario the film Abu gets its Canadian release this weekend at the Fantasia film festival in Montreal and to tell us more about it, we're joined by Arshad Khan from our Montreal studio. Arshad, hello.

ARSHAD KHAN: Hi.

MF: There's so much to talk to you about, but I wanted to start by going back to your childhood and there's a point in the film where you say “I was the glamorous child number five.” What was it like to be the glamorous child number five?

ARSHAD KHAN: Well, I grew up in Islamabad, Pakistan and it's a very beautiful city at the foot of the Himalayas. And it was a magical, magical place because I had three sisters and they were beautiful and we lived in a big house with a massive yard that my mother nurtured. And it was wonderful growing up in that environment for me, but I was still child number five and I had a younger brother who was way cuter and way smarter. [chuckles] And I had this sibling rivalry with him. He was three years younger.

MF: There was lots of singing and dancing and family outings.

ARSHAD KHAN: Yes. It was such a different place growing up in the eighties because we had just had a overthrow of a democratically elected leader Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Pakistani democracy. And it was replaced by Zia-ul-Haq, who was a military dictator. And so what happens in such a situation is that the effects of the dictatorship didn't seep into the society just yet. It was still a burgeoning society with the big middle class, a huge promise for the future and the Afghan war hadn't taken its effect on Pakistan at that point. So it was a very, very promising time and there was all this investment in US money coming in to the country. And it was for me growing up as a kid, a very beautiful open society. There was absolutely no kind of threat or security risk. And I remember my sisters and I would take long walks at night and never ever felt threatened in this city of Islamabad.

MF: And what were your parents like at that time because they’re quite different later on in the film. I suppose everybody changes as they age, but what were your parents like back then?

ARSHAD KHAN: Well, my father was quite busy. He was a businessman always trying to venture into new businesses, but he was a ex-military man so he had a lot of business with the military. He was in the indenting business so he took contracts and he was kind of a middleman bringing military stuff from overseas and so on. And my mother, she was a homemaker and she was raising six kids and she was doing a marvelous job and she loved her garden. She was a horticulturalist. And everyone was interested in music and art and very lively debate. And I remember my sisters. My father really encouraged my sisters’ education and all of our education, but particularly my sisters’ and one of my sisters wanted to be a physician. And I never realized at that time, but that was kind of a radical thing in our family to do, to encourage your daughters not to just grow up and get married but to actually educate yourself.

MF: And you had all this home film footage too, which is such a big part of your documentary. How did you come to realize that you were gay?

ARSHAD KHAN: So I'll address your first point first. My father loved technology and we were the first family in Islamabad in 1981 that we knew of to get a VHS movie camera because on one of his trips to Europe, he brought that for us. And my father, we happened to be a most well-documented family and I didn’t even realize it until I started doing this research. And in Pakistan, as I discuss in my documentary, being gay is tantamount to being a pedophile or a rapist. It’s like the worst of the worst. So I never acknowledged it in Pakistan and I never thought about it. As an identity, it's a common culture of complex sexual identity. So I even think that it's not really easy to address it because there's a lot of gray area in sexuality in Pakistan and there's a lot of do it but don't talk about it kind of culture. And there's also no acknowledgement of queer identity as a legitimate identity. Only recently in Pakistan did they recognize the third gender officially and that's transgender. Transgender is the third gender that they recognize, but queer relationships are still very much taboo.

MF: You did have a relationship with another teenager. No, in your teenage years?

ARSHAD KHAN: Oh yes. Sorry. I thought you were talking about open identity but yes, absolutely. You know, the fact is that nobody wants to stick out and be different. And I didn't either. And growing up, you always think you're going to fall in love with a girl. I always was so in love with my sister and thought I'll have a beautiful wedding and I’ll have all the normal things that people have. And you know you grow up in Pakistan thinking one of the most important days of your life is going to be your wedding day. And so that's how I used to think also. And I fell in love with a boy very unexpectedly and that really threw a wrench in those plans and I didn't realize at that time how much it would affect me later in my life. But it really had a very long lasting impression.

MF: Well, it felt certainly in the film that it was reciprocal, the love.

ARSHAD KHAN: Yes, it was absolutely. It was reciprocal. And then it was over. It was devastating.

MF: Why did it end?

ARSHAD KHAN: It ended because you know the parents found out and that's the only reason it ended and I really want people to watch my movie and find out exactly why it ended. [laughs] But basically when you are in love with someone and you're always with them and you always want to talk about them and people start suspecting things, but in the eighties nobody suspected anything because I didn't even know the word “gay” actually. And then his mother discovered love letters and realized that there was something really wrong and forbade him from seeing me ever again.

MF: So did that mean at that point that there was a real, a genuine discussion about homosexuality?

ARSHAD KHAN: No discussion. There was no discussion. There was no talking about it. I couldn't even tell any friend that I was in love with someone. People ask me what happened? You were the best friend of this so-and-so person and now you guys don't even talk to each other. And I couldn't say anything. You know? It was so hard. It was like I can't explain it to people today, especially to queer people today because we don't have those stigmas here necessarily in Canada or in the West. But it's very, very debilitating if you’re living in a place like Pakistan or India or South Asia or Middle East. And today we are living in even worse and most dangerous times where there are concentration camps in Chechnya, public floggings in Indonesia and beheadings and people being thrown off buildings in the Middle East. So consequences are even greater for such love crimes.

MF: And you were left your heartbreak.

ARSHAD KHAN: Yes. I was very young. I was only 14, 15, you see. So already when you're a young person, you're not recognized human being or a full person. And on top of that, I was a young person who was heartbroken. So it was very, very tough, that situation.

MF: Your family wasn't that religious when you were a child, were they?

ARSHAD KHAN: Religion wasn't a big deal at all in our family or otherwise. We identified as Muslim and so on. But you see the thing is when you're growing up in Pakistan or any other country, you don't realize the privilege you have and you don't realize anything about the other. It is only when you come to Canada or when you travel or when you're faced with discrimination yourself that you realize oh my god, I was doing this to other people. You don't realize your privilege until it is taken away from you. And that is why Canada has been such an important country for me and for my family because only here did we realize what difference is, what privilege is and what it means to be all of a sudden the other.

MF: Can you describe some of the changes that occurred for you and for the family as we get into the period where you have now emigrated. You're living in Mississauga and we arrive at September the 11^th and what follows that?

ARSHAD KHAN: September the 11th changed the lives of many, many people around the world. But especially in the Muslim community, there was a panic of faith. So as much as I do not want to conflate sexuality and issues of LGBT with religion, the fact of the matter is this panic of faith causes regression all over the world within Islamic societies because they felt under attack and they felt threatened. When communities and societies feel attacked, they go into themselves. They retract from any kind of progress and this is exactly what was happening globally. And this is why actually I became a filmmaker because I was like my identity was under threat. In no unclear terms, Muslims were being associated with terror and I found that to be so mischievous and so false and so unacceptable that I dropped out of my last year of architecture school, bought myself the cheapest camera money could buy in 2003 and started documenting a case about Canada's war on terror of these young men that were suspected of, falsely accused and suspected of terrorism. And I started making movies.

MF: And coming back to this film, the film of your family life—

ARSHAD KHAN: Abu.

MF: Abu, yeah. Your parents began to become more religious and in your film you narrate how your parents found out you were gay. Let's listen to that.

SOUNDCLIP

In the summers, I moved back home with my parents to save money. Of course around them, I was still in the closet.

[Music]

I was extra careful around the house. I told my brother Mani to be vigilant with my things. But he being who he is forgot my CD labeled “Gay Classics” in the family car. Of course my mother found it. I saw my parents sitting in the basement discussing something serious. I knew I was in trouble.

[Sound: Typing]

One day I was sitting at a computer when he came and sat right next to me. He said, “You are a gay.” He told me about his brother who had overcome drug addiction and likened me to his cousin who had killed a man. He then proclaimed, “You are our son and we love you. But see a psychiatrist about this condition.” I promised I would. Shortly after that, I moved out. I never lived with my parents again.

MF: Arshad, how did your relationship change from that moment with your parents?

ARSHAD KHAN: You see the fact is I never wanted to come out to them. I knew it would be too much trouble. So I just kept to myself. But my parents were nosy and they really needed to know. They wanted me to get married and find a nice girl. And so they just needed an excuse basically to confront me with this because they felt this is a Western sickness or a Western influence on me without realizing that really this isn't. And it was very difficult. But they didn't throw me out of the house. They weren't awful to me in that way. And you know I dealt with, I moved out because I didn't feel safe anymore because if you come out to your parents like that gentleman who we're going to have next did, it's different. The power is in your hands to reveal when you're ready. But if it's the other way like they kind of turned the tables on me and I just wasn't ready for it. So it was definitely very, very disconcerting.

MF: The gentleman you're referring to is Rishi Agarwal who's a gay Indo-Canadian man. He's from here in the Toronto area and he got quite a different response when he came out to his parents. He's been listening. He's seen your film. They screened it this week. Rishi, hello. Thanks for coming in.

RISHI AGARWAL: Hello.

MF: What was that like for you, that moment where it all became clear between you and your parents?

RISHI AGARWAL: So my parents always sort of maintained that they had no idea until I told them and kind of like what Arshad was saying that I consider myself very fortunate that I had the opportunity to sort of control the message and control the circumstances around it. I chose Canada Day weekend 2004 because it was a four-day weekend and so it just made it easier. I knew my parents didn't have any weddings to go to. They could sort of lock themselves up in the home and cry or do whatever they needed to do. So it allowed me to sort of control that circumstance. And we also had some family visiting from India and they had left. So what that allowed—basically they came back from the airport and I basically had brochures from support organizations called PFLAG. So I had their brochures. I knew what I was going to say. I have them sit down and then I explained it to them. And so I think because of that, I was able to make their experience a little bit easier than it otherwise would have been.

MF: How did they react?

RISHI AGARWAL: So at first, I think it was just shock. So my dad who's someone who talks like you can't get him to stop talking, kind of like me, and my dad just was super quiet. He turned into I think his like safe space. He's a mechanical engineer like Arshad’s father and he basically just went to logic. And okay, I need to ask you question one. Is this a phase? Oh. How many books have you read on the subject? How do you know? And so you know he had very specific questions that he needed to ask to like information gather. And my mom, she was just in total shock. She didn't know what to do. She just stared into one corner of our family room for like two hours straight. Didn't say a word, didn't move a muscle. Just stared into the corner of that room for two hours straight with not one word to say.

MF: That must have been hard for you.

RISHI AGARWAL: Oh my god, it was so hard because I felt like I have no idea. Like is my mom going to talk to me again? And then with my dad, it felt like a very sanitized conversation like it's like him versus me and there's just these questions kind of like an interview. And I didn't know where he stood. I’m like am I allowed to come home again? I had no idea and I had to flat out ask them you know, Dad, Mom, like is it okay for me to come into the house again? And my dad's response was, “Rishi, you are our son. We will always love you and this is always your house. Don't ever think otherwise.” And so it wasn't until that moment that I realized I wasn't going to lose my family and that's kind of when the bricks came off my shoulder.

MF: I mean it went even further than that with your parents. They are now supporters of you and in a big way.

RISHI AGARWAL: Yeah. I think it's interesting to see their journey. I think my dad is someone who's very, once he has it in his mind what's the right thing to do, he won't stop and he won't let anyone tell him otherwise, which is a really great skill to have. He went to the library with my mom. They got books and videos. They learned more. They went to PFLAG meetings to get more support. They went to the family doctor to get more. And then that really started their journey of joining the board of PFLAG, helping other parents, doing one on ones with all of their family friends to explain about me and give them brochures and pamphlets to help them educate themselves and just been more sort of you know working with the community. Then my mom wrote a book called Loving My Gay Child and then they sort of launched the PFLAG Peel Region chapter. So they've just been sort of trying to help other parents as much as they can because they see how much pain there still is there.

MF: Arshad, when you hear that and the way it was so different for Rishi’s parents, how do you react?

ARSHAD KHAN: The fact is that I'm inspired by Rishi’s parents and by Rishi’s story and I read that when it came out. It's fantastic. And really, these are important stories to tell and for people to amplify in the media because we do not hear enough of these stories and these stories should go globally. The fact is our parents are very complicated people. Mine are and so are Rishi’s, but they're very different people and you see, also Rishi and I have a generational gap as well. And at the time my parents came was a little bit different. And you see my parents did not react this way and I almost feel as if when your parents find out you're gay and they reject you and throw you out of the house, it can sometimes be easier because you’re forced to make your own new family and whatnot. And you get hurt and it's sad and it's awful, but you can move on. With my parents, it was kind of a passive aggressive attitude whereby every time I came home, I felt like a sinner. I felt like I was disappointing them and I had to live for years with this disappointment that just wouldn't go away. And on top of that, society all around them was changing. Instead of them being more accepted and being able to, for example, find decent jobs and be able to make Canadian friends and mix, they were being kind of shut out. And economically I felt because they came to Canada at a certain age and they've really faced the terrible wrath of being a being an immigrant. And even though they tried very hard to fit in, they just couldn't and their comfort zone was their own kind of community or their own religion and they felt their children slipping out of their hands. So they became even more conservative and they used this to fight off. They wanted to fight off this modernity that was taking their children away from them. And especially when my brother my older brother went and married a white woman from Newfoundland, that really triggered them and they felt all our children are going to go and marry outside of our religion and culture. You see, so all our parents are different and all are triggered by different things and all have complex influences. But the case I make in my film is that society, we have a lot of work to do as a Pakistani, Muslim, South Asian, Indian, what have you, those cultures and societies. But as a Canadian society, we have a lot of work to do as well because the new people that we bring in with the promise of a better future, they are struggling and they're misunderstood and the media isn't doing enough to help better the understanding between communities. And my parents definitely were a victim of this kind of segregation.

MF: Rishi, you told me off air that Arshad’s film had a big impact on you. How so?

RISHI AGARWAL: I think it brought up a lot of feelings that I hadn't thought about in decades. The film I think really does a great job of walking through Arshad’s experiences from beginning to end and I really like how it starts off with his parents. I felt that there was a lot of similarities between his parents and mine. So both our fathers were early adopters of technology. You know my dad was the first to have a VHS and all that stuff. They're both mechanical engineers. They both play a lot of importance on family and keeping tradition and culture. So I just, I felt like right away when I watched the film, I right away connected to Arshad and his family. And you know very close with my mom as Arshad was. So I definitely felt sort of like I was going through, I felt like I was living through his experiences as I was watching the movie.

MF: And some of his pain as well?

RISHI AGARWAL: And some of his pain. Though our sort of life story was a little bit different, I could feel his pain as he was going through the story and as I was watching, I just felt like oh, when is this going to get better? When is it going to get better?

MF: And it does go in some slightly unexpected directions. And of course we know from the beginning of your film that Arshad, that your dad passed away and we won't spoil the film because that is really in a sense the big payoff. It is quite a moment and listen, I want to thank you both very much for coming in and being so ready to talk about such personal things. Arshad, I wish you the best with your film and the big premiere that's coming up and I encourage people to go see it. Thank you both very much.

ARSHAD KHAN: Thank you so much for having me. And thank you, Rishi.

RISHI AGARWAL: Yes. Thank you to both. Thanks.

MF: And so we've been speaking to Arshad Khan whose new film is called Abu and it is about his personal journey of coming out to his family. Its Canadian premiere is at the Fantasia film festival in Montreal. That is on Sunday. The film will be screening at other festivals this fall. Rishi Agarwal is an Indo-Canadian gay man who’s been accepted by his family after he came out. They now head up a new chapter of PFLAG. You can search for Rishi's name. Find a lot of CBC information online about it. Watch some things about it. See his parents as well. Just have a search on your favorite search engine. That is the summer edition of The Current for today. Want to encourage you to tune in on Monday when Laura Lynch will be in this chair, but not here in Toronto. The Current will be live from Kamloops to cover the impact of the wildfires. My name is Mike Finnerty. It's been a real pleasure on the summer edition of The Current this year, as every summer. Enjoy your summer, Canada. We’ll speak to you soon.

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July 14, 2017 full episode transcript

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