Read a F*cking Canadian Book, Eh: Diane Obomsawin’s “On Loving Women”

It’s maybe not the best idea to start a review by giving away the ending of the book, but I’m gonna break that rule because I think you’ll be more likely to read Canadian writer Diane Obomsawin’s graphic novel, On Loving Women, if I tell you that it ends with a threesome in which one of the women loses her virginity and blurts out, “Women rock!” Agreed?

This very short book (I think I read it in an hour) is a collection of stories from Obomsawin’s friends on… you guessed it… loving women. At the On Loving Women book launch at Drawn and Quarterly in Montreal, Obomsawin explained that she would take her friends out, sometimes get them a bit drunk, and then talk about their experiences of coming out, first crushes, loves, and heartbreaks. She then drew her friends with female bodies but animal heads. The graphic novel has no shortage of female-bodied queer girls with the heads of horses, ducks, birds, pigs, rats, and bunny-like creatures, which makes On Loving Women feel kinda like a sexy lesbian version of Arthur. Obomsawin explained that drawing her friends with animal heads made the whole process of telling their stories feel less vulnerable.

Her ability to condense complex sad moments into deceptively simple, seemingly unrelated blocks of text means that all of her stories feel fast and alive: “Later, we broke up on a trip. There were three of us. She left with the other girl. I was in a state of shock. I travelled to Northern Greece.” There’re no long descriptions of messy emotions, regrets, tears, anxieties. Sadness is acknowledged in short sentence, and then it’s onwards to Greece! to a threesome! to acid!

“At twenty, all in the same day, I quit university, dropped acid… and fell in love with a woman.”

As someone who has a tendency to overthink everything, when I first started reading I found myself wanting to know more about the characters so I would have more to…well…think about. But once I stopped thinking and was able to fall into Obomsawin’s style, I ended up finding the simplicity of On Loving Women surprisingly refreshing.

via media.npr.org

Diane Obomsawin was born in Montreal in the late ’50s but then lived in France until her twenties. She studied graphic design before moving back to Canada in the 80s where she got into comics, painting, and animation. Before On Loving Women, she published another graphic novel with Drawn and Quarterly: Kaspar, about the life of Kaspar Hauser, a German teen who claimed he grew up in total isolation in a cold, dark cell and was later stabbed to death. Obomsawin has also written a book about her childhood called Here and There.

Despite its simple narrative and illustrations of ridiculous animal-headed women, On Loving Women still manages to convey complex emotional truths and heartwarming (or heartbreaking) situations. Love. Rejection. Sex. Longing. It’s all there; and the stories span different decades, so you get to see rat-women and genderqueer pig-people in 60s and 70s fashions. How many books can you say that about? So if you’re in the mood for pig-eared coming-out stories and illustrations of naked, horse-faced lesbian lovers lounging on vintage sofas drinking wine, order a copy of On Loving Women through Drawn and Quarterly!

“My Prairie Home” Proves You Can Go Home Again: A Review of Rae Spoon & Chelsea McMullan’s Documentary

If you haven’t already seen My Prairie Home, the musical-documentary on Rae Spoon directed by the oh-so-talented Chelsea McMullan and produced by the National Film Board (NFB), you need to drop everything and go see it right now. The film follows the Canadian singer-songwriter as they tour Alberta on a greyhound bus. Set to the music of Spoon’s new album of the same name, My Prairie Home is an exploration of the complicated intersections between gender, sexuality, music, and Alberta. The film also draws on Spoon’s first novel, First Spring Grass Fire, which we’ve also reviewed.

via raespoon.bandcamp.com

From its very first scene showing an upside down landscape – a vividly blue prairie sky underneath a a sliver of land at the top of the screen – I knew that My Prairie Home was going to be amazing because any movie set in Alberta that starts with a shot of the sky is getting it right. And we all know I have a lot of feelings about the sky.

Alberta is as much of a character in this documentary as is Spoon, and in addition to the sky, there are beautiful, take-your-breath-away shots of the Rocky Mountains, Drumheller, and the Athabasca Glacier. There are many slower shots of both the natural and urban landscapes: an oil pump moves against another bright, blue sky; Spoon stares out of a window for a long time at passing farmland; the camera slowly zooms in on the indifferent expressions of the patrons in a Calgary truck-stop where Spoon has just performed. The slow pace makes sense. Alberta is a province with sprawling cities separated by great distances. We’re used to waiting – for winter to end, for the bus, for the final destination during a long drive. It makes sense that so much of the film is shot from the perspective of Spoon looking out a greyhound bus window. Living in Alberta, you end up spending a lot of time in vehicles. And like Spoon, when I was a kid I spent a lot of time daydreaming while sitting in my parents’ van staring out the window on long road trips to Drumheller or the mountains. In such a vast province with such a low population density, there’s bound to be a lot of silence, which McMullan also poetically captures.

At one point, Spoon sings surrounded by dinosaur skeletons at the Royal Tyrell Museum, where I used to go with my family every summer when I was a kid. It was surreal seeing the background to my childhood summer vacations on an actual movie screen; and I have to thank McMullan and Rae Spoon for bringing Alberta’s beauty to an international audience.

via straight.com

Chelsea McMullan and Rae Spoon met when the latter composed some of the music for McMullen’s first NFB short, Deadman. They became friends and McMullen, who was fascinated by Spoon’s talent and story, felt that the singer deserved more attention. In The Globe and Mail, she said:

“I was kind of sick and tired of seeing so many white dudes with beards who were not nearly as talented as Rae being far more successful. I truly felt like more people just needed to hear [Spoon] sing.”

McMullen got her wish. My Prairie Home recently had its US debut at Sundance, where it was this year’s only Canadian feature. “I was worried that no one would see it, and it would get buried somewhere deep underground, ” MucMullan said. “I was hopeful that maybe it would get a sort of cult following. But I never thought that it would go to Sundance.”

My Prairie Home is more than pretty skies and poetic wheat fields. It’s also about growing up different in a difficult environment and what it means to survive. Spoon speaks with a vulnerable courage about what it’s like to live in a religious household with a mentally ill father. In one of the film’s songs, “I Will Be a Wall,” they sing about being a child in an abusive home, afraid (“Hide the children. Hide the children. A storm is coming”) but also determined to survive (“There are beautiful places that we can hide/ Between the notes and the rhymes/ I sang for my sister on the darkest nights/and I sang for my brothers too.”)

Spoon also speaks about their gender: “When you don’t fit into the gender system people tell you you shouldn’t exist, and you DON’T exist. Well I’m here to tell ya, I exist.” Cut to a scene in a Greyhound bus station with Spoon coming out of a women’s washroom. It’s a powerful juxtaposition – Spoon is happy and confident in their gender identity, but they know when and where to show this confidence. An Alberta bus station isn’t the most queer friendly place. Nor, we learn, was their high school. In probably one of the most adorable scenes, Spoon recreates prom with their actual high school girlfriend, but the two also talk about the homophobia they had to deal with.

As much as it’s a film on Alberta, queerness, and music, My Prairie Home is also, not surprisingly, about the concept of home. Alberta is full of contradictions, and like the upside down landscape in the film’s opening, it doesn’t always make sense. It’s a musical documentary about leaving the place you grew up, a place that’s difficult to love but is a part of you nonetheless. It feels like a love letter to music and to Alberta; but like any interesting love poem or story, it’s not all roses and violets. There are the sad, the difficult, and the painful parts too, but ultimately, My Prairie Home does what good art often does: it teaches us how to survive and find home, wherever that may be.

You can listen to the My Prairie Home album on CBC radio, and it’s also available on iTunes. The film can be rented or downloaded on the NFB website and on iTunes.

A Prairie Homo Does New York: Moving at the Speed of New York

A couple of days ago I stepped off the train and a middle-aged man walked right into me. I think he was middle-aged, but to be honest, I’m not sure. I only had time to see a hint of greying hair and what looked like a frown before he had pushed right past me and onto the train. There was no apology, no eye contact, no acknowledgement of what had just happened. In fact, if I hadn’t been holding a hot coffee cup that had been pushed against my chest when he walked into me, I might not have even realized what had happened. Instead, I quickly checked my dress to make sure it was coffee-free (it was) before continuing, quite unfazed, on my morning commute. This was completely out of character for me. Usually when someone bumps into me I automatically say “sorry!” like a walking, talking Canadian stereotype – apologizing for something that isn’t even my fault. But the more time I spend in New York, the less I do things like say sorry and the less I care if I bump into someone or someone bumps into me. There’s just no time for sorrys and cares!

via http://ak.picdn.net

In New York, you don’t wait for the light to change before you cross the street. It would be rude to stand still at the curb and wait because you’d stop all the other people behind you from moving. And if New York could be described in one word, I think the word most suitable for this city would be movement. As soon as it looks like your chances of getting hit by the oncoming traffic are relatively low, you hurry across the street. Waiting for the light to change doesn’t even increase your chances of staying alive. I’ve seen far too many cars, trucks and even tour buses drive straight through red lights like it doesn’t even matter – like a red light has no place telling a NEW YORK vehicle it has to stop. Stopping is something you just don’t do in New York.

A few months ago, I watched a great documentary, The Business of Being Born, with my mom. We learned that New York has an unreasonably high number of scheduled c-sections. Back in Edmonton, I wondered why. Did it have something to do with the ridiculous, for-profit American health-care system? Well, maybe, but extremely high numbers of scheduled c-sections are a New York problem, not a general American one. Now that I’m in New York, it makes perfect sense. If you don’t have time to wait for a light to change or to say sorry to someone you accidentally bump into, how in the world do you have enough time to push a human being out of your vagina?

Some may call this need for speed insanity, others call it energy. I’m not sure how I feel because… feelings? Who has time for feelings? My feelings come in spurts and jumps here in New York. They play hopscotch, jumping from heart to brain to back again. There are endless possibilities in this city and an exhilarating sense of momentum seems to be in the air, wafting around with the car exhaust and the garbage fumes, available to anyone. Another substance readily available to everyone is coffee. New York probably has more coffee than it has taxi cabs. It makes sense because coffee is needed to fuel this momentum, this speed, this energy, this insanity – whatever you want to call it. Since I arrived, I’ve been drinking way more coffee than I usually do, just to keep up with New York.

I walked across the Williamsburg Bridge a few days ago. I’m used to thinking of bridges as peaceful places, but peace isn’t the first word to come to mind when crossing a New York bridge. Walking on the Williamsburg Bridge felt like being suspended right in the middle of a clash between natural and man-made worlds. I could smell the water which made me think of family vacations, summer and relaxation; yet the roar of the cars and the trains surrounding me contradicted all that. On the horizon stood New York: tall, impressive, overwhelming. I felt small and insignificant, which I am compared to a roaring train, a huge river and skyscrapers. Yet, I also felt powerful and accomplished for being able to walk through all the noise. My legs burned because I had been walking quickly for a long time. My face was sweaty because you’re always sweaty in New York. And, to add to all the contradictions at play on that bridge, I felt more at peace than I had in days walking across the Williamsburg bridge surrounded by all that noise. I wondered if maybe happiness is the perfect mix of noise, sweat and contradictions. But I didn’t have time to wonder for long. I had to keep on walking, keep on moving. This is New York, after all.

Top Ten Things In New York that Don’t Exist in the Canadian Prairies

One of the cardinal rules of traveling is that you’re not supposed to compare the place you’re in to the one you’ve just come from; so by writing this compare and contrast list (did you have to make those in school too?) I feel quite rebellious… granted, in the nerdiest way possible. The thing is, it’s too much fun not to compare. These are things you see in New York that you will never see in Edmonton.

1. Rats

In Alberta rats are illegal. We have something called the Rat Patrol which means our border is patrolled to keep the province a rat-free zone. I’m 100% serious. Read about it for yourself.

2. Subway performers

I remember the first time I saw Rent and there was that scene in which everyone boards a train and then sings and does cartwheels and flips, effectively transforming the subway into a dance hall. Musicals aren’t known for legitimately showcasing real life and I’ve never turned an argument into a “Take Me or Leave Me” dance routine; but when it comes to performing on the subway, Rent was right. Groups of mostly black guys routinely board the trains with boomboxes to perform gravity-defying feats of awesomeness.

Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times

3. A four-lane street full of yellow taxis

My first week in New York, whenever I was with another person walking through Manhattan, I felt the need to point and go, “Look, a taxi!” like a 2-year-old who has just learned the word “taxi.” I had never seen that many taxis in my entire life and every time I tried to hail one, I would burst out laughing because I felt like a bad actor trying to be a person in New York trying to get a taxi.

via picedia

4. An actually functional transit system

The train runs 24 hours. You can take it anywhere. Enough said. Edmonton, take note.

5. Crowds

If you’re thinking to yourself, “But there are crowds in Canadian prairie cities,” just stop right now. Yes, there are crowds. There are crowds everywhere. But you don’t know crowds until you’re waiting to cross the street in Manhattan at rush hour, unable to move while the guy to your right recites bible verses under his breath and the dude to your left keeps “accidentally” brushing your butt with his arm. Meanwhile, all the cars are honking, there’s a police siren blaring from somewhere and an arm emerges from the crowd with some sort of flyer asking you to buy something. Is that a baby you hear crying? No, it’s you. How can you not cry when there are so many fucking people? There was a time I wanted kids, but there’s nothing like Midtown to put the rust on the hands of my biological clock. Why would anybody want to bring yet MORE humans into the world? Aren’t there enough already, crawling everywhere like ants, filling every available crevice and surface, making loud human noises, blowing noses, sweating, eating, farting, nail-picking, finding eachother attractive, and then multiplying?

Once I told my roommate, “So I just want to walk along the river for like an hour and not see anybody. Where should I go.”

His reply: “Nowhere in New York.”

6. People sitting on the steps of brownstones

Think Sesame Street.

7. Groups of 100+ queer women

Think paradise.

8 . Garbage cans that look like this:

Think olfactory insulting.

9. The best fucking band you’ve ever heard, smack dab in the middle of a train station

copyright Malaika Aleba

Check out Drumadics! And like them on Facebook!

10. Publishing jobs

When you google “Edmonton + publishing + jobs” you don’t get much, but New York is entirely different. There are pages and pages of job descriptions with employers actually asking for applicants with English degrees. Take that all you blank faced, cynical, so-uh-whaddya-gonna-do-with-that naysayers! There are places in the world where English majors are taken seriously and even requested on job postings.

Important Prairie Homo News: Rae Spoon Announces “My Prairie Home” Tour Dates

Canadian indie-pop musician Rae Spoon’s upcoming LP is a shout-out to prairie homos and everyone who likes good music and storytelling. Spoon explains that their LP, titled “My Prairie Home,” will explore themes of “death, coming out as queer during high school, and surviving abuse.” The 19 track personal song cycle, which comes out August 19th through Saved By Radio, will be the soundtrack to Spoon’s “My Prairie Home,” a soon-to-be released documentary directed by Chelsea McMullan about growing up queer in Alberta (shout-out to my province!)

via raespoon.com

We’re big fans of Spoon here at Autostraddle. We crushed pretty hard on “First Spring Grass Fire,” downright fell in love when Spoon donned a grandpa sweater and sang “Insensitive” with Vivek Shraya in a most perfect Canadian prairie homo moment, and couldn’t believe the marriage of awesomeness that occurred when Rae Spoon paired up with Ivan E. Coyote for the Gender Failure show (which you can watch online! Wow! Does life get any better?)

So of course we feel obligated to make sure you know that Rae Spoon recently announced “My Prairie Home” tour dates! Get out your day planners, your iPhones, your Google calendars! Spoon is coming to a Canadian city near you! Or, if it’s not near you, well, then that’s a good excuse to come to Canada.

Tour dates:

9/18 Toronto, ON – The Gladstone
9/19 Ottawa, ON – Black Sheep Inn
9/20 Peterborough, ON – The Spill
9/21 Sudbury, ON – TBA
9/22 Montreal, QC – La Sala Rossa
9/27 Fredericton, NB – Gallery Connexion
9/28 Halifax, NS – The Company House
10/10 Calgary, AB – Festival Hall
10/11 Lethbridge, AB – The Acoustic Owl
10/12-13 Edmonton, AB – Up+Downtown Festival
10/19 Victoria, BC – The Copper Owl
10/23 Vancouver, BC – TBA
11/23 Winnipeg, MB – The Windsor

For more information, or if you just want to hang out on an amazing website, check out Rae Spoon dot com.

A Prairie Homo Does New York: Wooooh, Dyke March!

Hello, my dear Autostraddlers. How are you? I hope you’re drinking lots of water and sitting under lots of trees or even maybe just standing underneath tall people who have afros because, my lovely homoqueers, it’s hot! You know how during the hottest part of a summer’s day you can sometimes see heat waves rising from the sidewalk, making everything blurry? Well that’s what’s been happening to my brain. Not only does summer in New York make my skin feel like it’s melting off my bones, but I swear my brain cells are evaporating, rising in blurry squiggle waves of heat from my skull and into my hair, which, if it weren’t for all the inexpensive black hair products I’ve found in Brooklyn, would resemble a frizzy nest perfectly suitable for one of New York’s many rodents.

But let’s not think about that right now, okay? Despite the heat, many exciting things have transpired recently, and I’m not just talking about sweat. I don’t know if you know this already, but I’m pretty gay and pretty Canadian, eh; so how lucky am I that this past week there has been not one, but two events to mark my favourite identities? Unfortunately, the Canadian Consulate in New York chose to celebrate Canada Day on the same day as the Dyke March, and dykes will always win over nationalism, so I joined the dykes! And the queers! And we marched! Or, as a fellow Autostraddler put it, we did a kind of homo shuffle because when you have that many queers in one place at one time, it’s hard to move as quickly as the city wants you to.

There were all sorts of sights at the Dyke March, like boobs, and a cute baby in a jumper that said “queer spawn” and drag queens dressed as nuns who sang about clits! Adding to the entertainment, there was a solitary religious protestor who stood on the sidelines holding a sign that read “Christ died for our sin.” I always thought seeing religious protestors so close to me would make me feel scared or angry, but in reality, it was just really, really funny. I mean, there we were with our rainbows, our boobs, our queerspawn, our clit-worshiping nuns, our bravery, our laughter, our signs proclaiming the need to stand with trans* people and people of colour, our purple Dyke March pins which read “dyke” or “fisting,” our sandals, our sneakers, our heels, our wheelchairs, and some random guy felt the need to talk about sin? What sin? His sin for being against making the world a better place by marching for diversity, pride, equality, and fun? It was all a little funny. He looked like a circus side-show, especially with the person beside him happily holding a sign that accurately let everyone know that “this guy needs a hobby.”

via Peliconaut

I like getting the chance to be gay without having to think too much about it.

Once upon a time, many years ago on a cold winter’s night (no, I’m serious. Remember I’m from the Canadian prairies!) I felt like the only little queerling in the world as I chopped my hair into a lesbian haircut and listened to the soundtrack to Rent, not knowing that one day I would pay actual rent in New York and march (I mean shuffle) amongst hundreds of queers through the streets of Manhattan, not even one bit worried about my long hair not making me look “gay enough.” When you’re surrounded by so many queers celebrating queer, you feel normal by default and happy because everyone around you is happy. You don’t feel the need to change how you look as some sort of signal, and having a conversation on where to get sandwiches and water is just as, if not more important than discussions on identity and queerness and coming out. Constantly having to explain and defend your sexuality and/or gender identity is heavy and exhausting. I like getting the chance to be gay without having to think too much about it. That’s why the spaces created in the Dyke March, Pride, and A-Camp are so wonderful and important.

Our very own Gabrielle is the cutest marshall ever!
via @stef_schwartz

I’m still a little sad I missed the Canada Day celebrations at the embassy though. I’ll have to have a belated Canada Day party in the coming weeks. Who’s in?

Canadian Children’s Book Explains How Babies are Made in a Gender-Neutral Way!

Hey guys, I’m going to share something a little embarrassing with you, but I’ve been writing here for a while now, so I feel okay telling you this. When I was a kid, I pieced together bits of information from my parents and from Sunday school to form a very religious and imaginative idea of how babies were made. These are the steps I thought it took to create a new life:

1. Man and woman get married
2. Man and woman kneel down together and pray to God for a baby
3. God considers them and their merits and decides if He will grant their wish.
4. The woman stands outside under the sky (where God lives, obviously) and God reaches his hands out from the clouds and places a baby in her stomach.

Hey, um, so that’s not how babies are made. Surprise! You don’t need a man and a woman! They don’t need to be married! And God doesn’t have to reach down into a woman’s stomach from the Heavens! Canadian author Cory Silverberg’s new book, What Makes a Baby would have cleared this up for me, had it existed when I was a mini-Malaika.

Silverberg was inspired to write the book for a trans* friend who was having trouble explaining to his four-year-old son how their family came to be. What’s great about this book is it can speak to anyone. It focuses on the science behind conception, not the genders or relationships of the humans doing the conceiving, so anyone can use What Makes a Baby to explain their unique situation. Silverberg says he hopes his book can be used by “grandparents raising kids, single parents, gay, lesbian and transgender couples, for example.”

Editor and illustrator Fiona Smith’s drawings are perfect.

“Most of the books that exist tell one story. They tell a story that everyone has a mom or a dad and your mom has eggs and your dad has sperm. The books differ in how much detail – some say they make love or they get together, or others go into specifics. The problem with that is we all don’t have two parents. We all don’t have this nuclear family and it doesn’t reflect so many of us. When you read (these books), you’re always having to edit, you’re always having to make changes.”
-Cory Silverberg

The story of how Silverberg made the book is almost as beautiful as the book itself. Thinking he would have to self-publish, he launched a Kickstarter project page, aiming to raise $9,500 in 30 days, which would be enough to publish 1,000 copies. Instead, by the end of the month he had not only raised over $65,000 and garnered a lot of publicity and support, but he also had the book picked up by Seven Stories Press.

Silverberg explains that there are many families who, because they don’t fall into the heteronormative family model, lack resources that help them talk about their family to their children. But children are beautiful, amazing little creatures no matter how they were made or what their families look like:

“I wanted a book that would celebrate this,” he says. “Parents want to tell their children a story about how they were born that is beautiful.”

Lucky for us, Silverberg doesn’t plan on stopping with this one book. His next will be for older children and explain sperm donation, egg donation, surrogacy and more untraditional forms of baby-making. There’s also a 60-page readers’ guide to help parents navigate some of the terms and concepts in the book.

While you’re eagerly awaiting your copy, check out Silverberg’s adorable publicity video:

A Prairie Homo Does New York: Homeward Trouble

Last week I met with my roommates in this underground bar somewhere in Manhattan. If I were an actual New Yorker, or someone who had lived here for more than three weeks, I would be able to remember the street name or at least the address of this bar. I wish I could be like every single New York (or New York based) writer I’ve read and throw around place names like I’ve forgotten that not everybody knows New York is the centre of the fucking universe. I haven’t been here long enough to forget though, and New York is not the centre of the universe, but I’m happy I’m here.

However, I have no trouble remembering the decoration. There was a old pink love-seat — the kind you’d imagine Barbie would lounge on if Barbie were a British aristocrat in the 19th century. The lights were dim and the drinks were so expensive I only had water. I sat on a long wooden raised bench with my two roommates and listened as one of the evening’s performers, a Scottish musician, sang of home and moving West to America; and of course I teared up a bit. I’m from “The West,” not the general West the singer was evoking but the Canadian West: Alberta; oil and cowboys and the tar sands and the river valley and the biggest mall in the universe and love and contradictions and winter and temperature in celsius and family and home.

A friend once said that I’m kinda like a turtle; not that I’m a shrivelled up, green-hued specimen of a girl, but that I can carry my home with me wherever I go. But I think that’s too simple to be true. Carrying this one home with you everywhere you go sounds pretty tiring, doesn’t it? To me that sounds heavy, back-breaking. It’s easier to feel at home in various places if you destabilize the notion of home like I destabilized gender and sexuality in women’s studies classes. What is home? If Judith Butler wrote a book and called it Homeward Trouble would she say that the concept of home and the rituals associated with it were performative and exist to give us a false sense of security and comfort? Is home masculine? Is home feminine? Is home in the body or is it outside of it? Is home my iPhone because I take it everywhere with me? Is home the internet because that’s where I can live with my friends and family all at once, wherever I go? The thing is, if you’re not too attached to one definition of what home is or what it’s supposed to be, it can be anything, which allows you to feel at home anywhere.

New York isn’t familiar enough to be home yet. Like I said, I still haven’t gotten all the neighbourhoods down; but that night last week as I sat in the Manhattan bar listening to the Scottish singer sing about Scotland while I thought about Alberta, I realized this could be home. Maybe. I feel comfortable enough with being uncomfortable in a new place that this place doesn’t always feel so new anymore. I think in Alberta, and in Canada as a whole, and maybe in other places of the world too, there’s this sense that New York is the Cool Kid in the global schoolyard. Until recently, I’ve had this grudge against New York because I’ve never been part of the Cool Kid Group. When I first arrived, I admit part of me was thinking, “Hey New York, just cause you wear these cool designer bridges across your rivers and you’ve got some graffiti on your interesting architecture, doesn’t mean I have to like you, okay?” But I do like New York in spite of myself. I’m realizing it’s not New York’s fault it’s so cool. It’s not a city that puts on airs. New York is actually just an authentically pretty cool place, and that doesn’t mean other cities aren’t as interesting. They’re just different. Just like it’s important for me, right now, to have different definitions of what home means, I want to have a multiple ideas of all the various aspects that make a city what it is so I’m not always comparing one city to another (one home to another) but measuring each place on its own unique qualities. That’s easier said than done though. After all, it’s human nature to compare one thing to another, and I’d be really boring if I didn’t have any opinions based on things I’ve seen and places I’ve been before.

There will always be tension between the notion of home being the place I was born and grew up in and the place I’m currently living in. I’ll always feel a desire to both compare a city to another and to let it stand on its own foundations. Maybe it doesn’t make sense. Maybe it does? Maybe I’m not making sense. I’m a weirdo-wanderer, but as I sat in that underground bar with Barbie’s divan and the long wooden bench, the dim lights, and the Scottish singer setting the idea of home to a guitar and a microphone, I felt okay with myself, okay with all the tensions, and okay with New York. I felt at home in Manhattan, at home in my thoughts of Alberta, and at home in that bar with my glass of water and my roommates.

New Study Shows Discrimination Makes it Harder to Move In With Your Girlfriend

feature image via shutterstock

Today in depressing news, finally getting a place with your amazing girlfriend might require more anti-anxiety meds and deep breathing exercises than you originally thought. Moving is stressful for everyone, but a new study shows it could lead to even more late night teeth grinding episodes among queers. According to the first ever American national housing study, same-sex couples have a harder time than straight ones when it comes to finding a place to rent.

via Queerty

The research backing this up is pretty hard to argue with. The study, “An Estimate of Housing Discrimination Against Same-Sex Couples,” focused on 7,000 housing inquiries in 50 metropolitan areas and took place from June to October of 2011. The researchers responded to online housing ads using two emails: one from a purportedly straight couple and the other from a same-sex one. Race, age, or other factors didn’t come into play because the only distinguishing feature of the emails was the sexual orientation of the couple. Not surprisingly, the fake same-sex couples received fewer answers to their inquiries than the straight ones. Gay men were less likely to get a response than lesbian couples, but there wasn’t that much of a difference between the responses to the two: only 0.3%, to be exact. While straight couples were favoured over lesbian couples 15.6% of the time, emails from seemingly straight couples were preferred over those by supposedly gay men 15.9% of the time.

Pretty horrible, right? It’s discouraging to think that discrimination against queer people isn’t prohibited by the federal Fair Housing Act, but at least there are protections in certain states, and that should help, right? While there are such protections, the Study of No Good News found that incidents of adverse treatment of gay and lesbian couples in the rental market was actually higher in these states! This doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense, and the researchers wondered if this was because states with the protections were more likely to be discriminatory in the first place. But a Queerty article questioned this reasoning because it would mean California is more discriminatory than Alabama. It’s more likely there’s a serious lack of enforcement of anti-discrimination laws; and until that changes, their existence isn’t really doing anything to protect gay couples.

The other surprising finding was that there was no correlation between the response statistics and the size of the metropolitan area. So you and your girlfriend are more likely than your best friend and her boyfriend to face housing discrimination whether or not you’re living in a big city or just an average-sized one. There were no studies done in rural areas, however, and it would be interesting to see what the findings in non-metropolitan areas would be.

In the meantime, you can just hope your landlord isn’t a homophobic asshole and take solace in the fact that you and your girl/boifriend are getting a place together! Yay! It will just be 15.6% more difficult than it should be!

A Prairie Homo Does New York: Oh, The Places You’ll Go

A few weeks ago, I moved from Gabby’s apartment in the Bronx to Brooklyn: home of Robyn, the Canadian from How I Met Your Mother; and the spoiled, white, hipster girls in Girls. I met my super friendly roommates-to-be in a cute cafe full of young people wearing vintage dresses and multiple piercings. At first we just discussed the normal, everyday topics: likes, dislikes, chore expectations, jobs, interests. But later, as we walked up the street to the brownstone where I’ll spend the next three months, the personal turned more political as my roommates-to-be brought up gentrification, the neighbourhood’s violent history (“it was like a warzone in the 70s and 80s”) and the lingering tensions that still exist between the white and Jamaican populations.

“Hipster culture exists alongside Jamaican culture,” one of my roommates explained. “You’ll see a church with a name like End of Days Tabernacle right next to a vegetarian cafe.” We passed a group of young black men gathered around a boombox blasting dance music, and I remembered the bearded white guys wearing plaid I’d seen cycle past me on my way to the cafe. How many worlds can you fit per square mile?

Yes, there is unavoidable multiculturalism right out the door, but for some, that’s more than enough. “I never really go East,” my landlord said when my roommates and I had him over for dinner one night. He’s an older man with round glasses and a Brooklyn accent like the kind I’m used to hearing in movies and sitcoms. We were talking about the neighbourhood and how much it had changed in the past few years. When he bought the place, he was one of the only white people around, he said. But that’s really changing, except things a few blocks to the East of the apartment are still the same, and he doesn’t go there because, why would he? What’s there for him, he asked?

“But isn’t it a part of your neighbourhood? Wouldn’t you want to just walk there because it’s… 5 minutes from you… just to see what it’s like?” As someone who continuously walks everywhere and needs to see everything, I found my landlord hard to understand. Just this weekend I walked 15 minutes to the East of my apartment for no other reason than to sightsee. It wasn’t much different from where I am now, except there were no white people, no fancy cheese shops, and fewer cute cafes. But there were a lot of dollar stores, laundromats, and DVD stores. Lining the streets were beautiful brownstones that weren’t just brown but pink, and yellow, and white. Big trees. Old, important looking brick buildings that had been converted into fast food joints. I couldn’t understand why my landlord wouldn’t go.

East of my apartment

What I’ve noticed so far is that many New Yorkers try to make this big, diverse city as small as possible. West-Brooklynites stay in West Brooklyn. The white people at the South end of Prospect Park don’t venture to the North part where there are more people of colour. Middle-aged Wall Street bankers don’t go take butchering classes and hang out with the hipsters in Williamsburg. Of course, there are many exceptions to this; but it seems to me that even though New York is multicultural, some parts of the city are more sectional plate than melting pot.

Then there’s my neighbourhood, where the different cultures don’t melt into each other, but remain side-by side, tolerating one another. I could go to an End of Days Church, and then go next door to get a kale smoothie from a guy who’ll probably have a beard, a bike, and an awesome collection of alternative music. Unlike my landlord, it’s important not to set up invisible fences that keep us where we’re comfortable. There are so many amazing things and people to see in all directions and in all five boroughs.

Will The Canadian Supreme Court De-Criminalize Sex Work?

It’s not every day that a group of current and former sex workers sue the government of Canada, but that’s exactly what’s happening with Bedford v. The Government of Canada, which is now being discussed in the Supreme Court. Amy Lebovitch, Terri-Jean Bedford and Valerie Scott first challenged three laws that criminalize various aspects of sex work in an Ontario court back in 2007. In Canada, the buying and selling of sexual services itself isn’t illegal, but Bedford, Scott, and Lebovitch argued that the laws criminalizing the activities surrounding sex make it very difficult to legally and safely participate in sex work, and that these laws violate their rights to security of the person as outlined in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The Ontario court agreed and tried to erase all three laws, but not before the government of Canada basically said, “Hey! Hey! Not so fast, Ontario. We’re pretty committed to the criminalization of these activities surrounding sex work.” The federal government appealed the verdict and it was brought to the Supreme Court, where the case was heard yesterday. This past week, sex workers have voiced their support for Bedford, with marches being held in big cities across the country.

via http://www.cbc.ca

So what are these three laws that the Bedford case, if successful, could erase?

1. The law prohibiting public communication: This law prevents sex workers from publicly, openly (and therefore more safely) discussing how much they charge and negotiating things like consent and boundaries. According to the advocates supporting Bedford, “this law unfairly forces sex workers to choose between their liberty from imprisonment and charges, and the safety/security of their person from violence.” Unable to openly engage in necessary communication, sex workers have been driven out of safer, public areas, and also have to often work alone rather than in pairs or groups so as to “stay under the radar.” Because this law accounts for approximately 95 percent of prostitution charges, sex workers are forced to spend their energy on avoiding getting caught instead of openly communicating about important things like boundaries, money, and safety, and Bedford argues that this makes them more susceptible to abuse and exploitation.

2. The “bawdy house” law: Previously used to condemn gay male bathhouses, the “bawdy house” or brothel-restriction law prevents sex workers from using a specific location (either indoors or outdoors) for their work. Advocates for decriminalization stress that this law “attacks the ability of sex workers to have a safe and secure work location, where they are in control of the space, can limit the possible dangers, and employ safety protocols.” The law also puts sex workers’ housing at risk. Landlords, if they know what the location is being used for, have to evict the workers or face penalties themselves. Like the law prohibiting public communication, the “bawdy house” law isolates sex workers by creating legal incentives to work alone. If they work in a brothel or other communal work location, they are vulnerable to attacks from clients, who can call police about the whereabouts of the space once they’ve left.

3. The law preventing “living off the avails of prostitution:” This law is supposed to prevent exploitative and forced labor, but de-criminalization advocates argue that there are already laws dealing with extortion, forced labor, and rape; and that this additional one is paternalistic and treats sex-workers-by-choice as though they are unable to take care of themselves. Additionally, it puts their relationships with everyone from bodyguards to accountants at risk.

Bedford argues that together, the three laws work to hide and shame sex workers, which is detrimental to their health and safety:

“Sex workers’ rights advocates say all three of these laws serve to drive sex work more underground, where the exploitation of sex workers is more easy and likely to occur. They also feel that the laws put sex workers at risk of predatory violence because predators know that sex workers are less likely to report to the police, and that it is less likely sex workers will be believed or that they will have the violence against them taken seriously.”

The Bedford case isn’t just causing conflict between different Canadian court systems, but within feminist spheres. You only need to google Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon to see that feminism’s relationship to sex-work has not been one of rose petals and love notes. Anti-prostitution feminists argue that all sex-work is inherently exploitative of women, especially poor women and women of color, and must be abolished. The pro-legalization community doesn’t deny that reality, but they do not agree that criminalization is the best way to make work and life safer and easier for poor women and women of color who are involved in sex work nor is it helpful when combatting sex trafficking. In Canada, the Women’s Coalition for the Abolition of Prostitution is, as you can tell from their name, for the abolition of prostitution as a whole, and not just its de-criminalization. The Coalition represents multiple women’s groups that fight to protect women from violence, abuse, and exploitation. It has been around for decades and represents The Native Women’s Association of Canada, the Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies, The Canadian Association of Sexual Assault Centres, Vancouver Rape Relief Society, and the French groups Action ontarienne contre la violence faite aux femmes (Ontario Action Against Violence Against Women), Concertation des luttes contre l’exploitation sexuelle (Coalition Against Sexual Exploitation), and Regroupement québécois des centres d’aide et de lutte contre les agressions à caractère sexuel (Quebec Group Against Sexual Aggressions).

According to the Coalition and the many groups it represents, prostitution itself is a danger to women that must be abolished:

“Prostitution itself is harmful to women. Women in prostitution in all locations endure verbal abuse and humiliation, loss of their children to adoption or state care, physical pain from repeated intercourse, mental trauma, health problems and homelessness.”

Though it is against all forms of sex work, the Coalition is in favour of certain parts of the Bedford case, mainly the idea of decriminalizing (mostly female) sex-workers while punishing (mostly males) involved in paying for or profiting from sex work. Legally, the Women’s Coalition recognizes that criminalizing public communication surrounding sex work is unconstitutional and unsafe for sex workers, but it wants to keep the provisions that criminalize living on the profits of prostitution and running a “bawdy house” to remain. What the Coalition wants pretty much already exists in Sweden where buyers of sexual services, and not the sex workers themselves, are criminalized. Decriminalization advocates argue that this is not the model to follow because it “serves to lessen the ability to clearly communicate around consent and boundaries or to screen clients. And it takes away income opportunities for those making their livelihood from sex work, forcing them to work longer hours and lower their standards for safety and satisfaction.”

It can’t be ignored that sex work in Canada is extremely racialized. A study of sex workers in Vancouver found that 50% of those interviewed were First Nations, which is not at all representative of overall population demographics. Furthermore, the same study reported that ninety-five percent of sex-workers interviewed said they wanted to leave prostitution. The Coalition stresses that, as shown by studies such as this one, sex work oppresses low-income women and First Nations’ women, and therefore should be abolished. Of course, those who support decriminalizing sex work aren’t advocating for the oppression of low income and/or First Nations’ women who have been forced into their line of work by their circumstances. They argue that, in light of the fact that the majority of sex workers want to leave sex work, it would be easier for someone to leave sex-work and find another job if they did’t have a criminal record, and that even those sex workers who want to leave may not be able to do so immediately, and up until that day comes their safety should be paramount. Furthermore, decriminalizing sex work could make it easier for oppressed women to report rape, assault, kidnapping and other crimes committed against them while working — these crimes (which are already illegal, regardless of context) often go unreported because reporting them puts the woman at risk of arrest as well.

In “Sex Work: a feminist legal perspective,” lawyer Leslie Robertson discusses the case to de-criminalize sex-work and her relationship with sex-worker-led advocacy groups such as POWER (Prostitutes of Ottawa Work Educate and Resist) and Maggie’s: The Toronto Sex Workers Action Project. Just like the Women’s Coalition for the Abolition of Prostitution, POWER and Maggie’s recognize that sex-work disproportionately affects First Nations and low-income women who already face economic and racism-related disadvantages. But unlike the Coalition, sex-worker-led groups such as Maggie’s and POWER want it to be legal to work in a brothel and profit from prostitution:

“POWER and Maggie’s told the Court that this model does not actually make their work safer. When clients are criminalized, workers will still have difficulty screening customers, clearly communicating about their transactions, and working with others or indoors. Criminalizing the clients perpetuates the stigmatization and keeps this labour underground and unsafe.”

Instead of following Sweden’s model, many decriminalization activists look to New Zealand, where there has been full decriminalization since 2003. A 2008 study of the effect of this decriminalization found that while sex workers still faced the threat of violence, abuse, and exploitation, in the five years between the decriminalization and the study, there was improvement in working conditions, though it wasn’t universal. To make environments safer, the government is moving towards written employment contracts for sex workers in brothels and says it will continue to recognize that decriminalizing sex work “has empowered [all kinds of] sex workers by removing the taint of criminality from their occupation, and part of that empowerment is to take control of their employment relationships.”

The Supreme Court of Canada will make a decision on whether or not to criminalize sex work in the coming months, but the debates around this kind of work are likely to go on for much longer. It’s a unique opportunity for a public conversation about a topic that’s usually avoided, and hopefully to improve women’s safety and wellbeing in the long run.

A Prairie Homo Does New York: Ten Things I Hate About Mice

Hey, you know what? New York is more than taxi cabs, street food, and crowds. There’re also mice, rats, and cockroaches! Lots of them! How exciting, right? My roommate told me something really interesting the other day. He said that if all the walls of New York homes and buildings suddenly disappeared, maybe you’d still be able to see the outline of the city made up of rats, mice, and cockroaches! It’s like they’re the backbone of New York. Someone should draw that! Wow! I’m learning so many new things here in New York and I’m having lots of new experiences too, like ones with mice. Hey, so you know how there are those people who are really, really, really afraid of mice (like really)? I’m one of them! But how great is it that traveling is forcing me to confront my fears? Really great! I’m sure I’m growing as a person and all that (yay!) but in the meantime I still really hate mice.

via shutterstock.com

Ten Things I Hate About Mice

1. When you tell people you’re afraid of mice, they respond with their most horrifying mouse/rat/cockroach story. How much sense does that make? None, whatsoever.

2. A friend told me: “I know this girl in Brooklyn who was in bed sleeping when she woke up to this continuous tapping on her arm and assumed it was the girl lying beside her. When it didn’t stop, she finally decided to get up and investigate. Turns out one of the ceiling tiles had come lose. The mice in her ceiling were dropping on her one by one…” I’m sorry, but what, what, WHAT?

3. “I hear mice in my ceiling,” I told my roommate. After saying he’d speak to the landlord, he left my bedroom with a “Goodnight, sleep tight, don’t let the mice bite.” The next day he said, “At least we don’t have roaches. The apartment next to us had a cockroach infestation. The place was just crawling with them.”

“But they never got into this place, right? Why not?”

He told me his previous roommates were pagan nurses who set up a spiritual barrier against the roaches. I laughed.

“No, I’m serious.” He looked serious.

I stopped laughing.

“Pagan nurses or pagans who were also, like, regular nurses?”

“Pagans who worked in a hospital as nurses.”

“I see.”

The basement of our building is full of neon paintings of vaginas, left behind by the tenant who lived here before the pagan nurses. I hope it’s okay that I’m not a painter of vaginas or a caster of anti-roach spells.

4. “I heard mice in my walls,” I told a friend of the family who was visiting New York and taking me out for dinner.

“Oh,” she said. “Let me tell you. I knew a woman who had mice in her garage. Spent the weekend sweeping up the poop. By Monday she had what she thought was the flu, and a few days later she was dead. Hantavirus,”

“Oh my God!”

“No, don’t worry. It’s only carried by field mice. The urban ones are fine. Really, don’t worry. If New York mice had it, everyone in the city would be dead. Hahahaha.”

It’s really not funny.

5. I wrote half of my previous Autostraddle piece to the sound of mice squeaking in my walls. Usually, I prefer to write to music, to the melody of birds chirping, rainbows forming, children laughing, but this is New York so I’m trying to be open to new cultural experiences. I hope you appreciate that.

via shutterstock.com

6. What if the mice have rat friends?

7. They’re not part of the queer community. Seriously. If they were, they’d stop reproducing and there’d be no more mice. Why do mice have to be so straight?

8. They’re big enough that you can hear them but small enough that they can sneak up on you.

9. Their beady eyes.

10. Their tails sticking out from underneath the stove…and hey, you guys, remember when I said I was more of a dog person? Well, guess what? I’ve changed! Cats, cats, cats! Soft, purring, cuddly, lean, mean, mice-killing machines! Someone get me a cat, please and thank you!

via shutterstock.com

Australia Conducts Largest Ever Study on Gay Parents, Finds Kids Are In Fact Alright

In this week’s edition of shockingly obvious news that is, unfortunately, still not obvious to a lot of people (see: traditional-marriage enthusiasts and anti-gay bigots) the children raised by same-sex families are… wait for it… totally okay! In fact, they’re more than okay! They’re healthy, open-minded and thriving with Mommy and Mama or Mom and Lesbian Dad, Mom and Mom, or whatever else they call their loving, same-sex parents. Melbourne University recently conducted the largest study ever on children in same-sex families and found that these kids are not only doing well, but in some ways, they’re doing better than the children of straight parents.

via http://www.shutterstock.com

Melbourne’s researchers collected data from over 500 children, and 315 lesbian, gay, and bisexual parents, to monitor key indicators of health. What the Australian Study of Child Health found is that there’s no difference between the children in same-sex-parented families and those with heterosexual parents when it comes to issues of self-esteem, emotional behaviour, and the amount of quality time spent with their parents. However, when it came to overall health and the strength of the relationship they had with their parents, kids raised by gay parents scored higher than the national average..

What a surprise, right? Wrong. This study may be the largest, but it’s by no means the first of its kind. Way back in 2009, professor Stephen Scott, director of research at The National Academy of Parenting Practitioners explained that the data they’d collected showed that children raised by two moms went on “to do better in life.” And a year later, the 24-year-long USA National Longitudinal Study released its findings that zero percent of families with lesbian parents reported incidents of physical and sexual abuse. Granted, the sample size was small, but zero is still a good percentage when it comes to abuse!

Kate Coghlan (left) and Susan Rennie with their children Hannah, 8, Anouk, 5, (top) and Xavier, 6. Photo: Joe Armao via: The Age

It’s not the first study to show that children aren’t going to be traumatized by the simple fact of having same-sex parents, either. A few months ago the very reputable American Academy of Pediatrics released a paper that draws on 30 years of research to conclude, among other things, that “many studies have demonstrated that children’s well-being is affected much more by their relationships with their parents, their parents’ sense of competence and security, and the presence of social and economic support for the family than by the gender or the sexual orientation of their parents.” Exactly. If traditional marriage supporters were really so concerned about the well-being of children, they’d focus instead on things like how poverty and race and class affect children’s access to health insurance, good education, and nutrition; but nope, they’d prefer to preach the danger and dissolution of America caused by Heather’s Two Mommies.

via Strong Families

The Australian Study of Child Health and ones like it are important because although their findings can seem obvious to us, there can never be enough scientific studies and reports released when in many states second-parent adoption is still illegal and there are even states like Florida that completely ban same-sex partners from adopting. Just last week in Louisiana, a bill passed which ensures that all gay and unmarried couples will not be able to use surrogacy when starting a family. Studies concerning the fitness of same-sex parents and life outcomes for their children have become major talking points in the courts; during the Prop 8 trial, questions about whether children really needed “a mother and a father” abounded. Whether or not it’s true, conservatives love to argue that none of the research supporting gay families as healthy families is viable, so it’s hugely important that this study was so large; it makes its results much harder to argue with. The more viable research we have on our side, the harder it is for homophobes to claim that they’re just doing what they think is best; when experts have debunked that theory, they’re left with admitting that they’re acting out of bigotry. With all the pressure put on lawmakers by traditional marriage supporters and homophobes, it’s important that reputable organizations continue to conduct well-researched and scientific studies that show, for however long is necessary, that in same-sex families, the kids are alright.

A Prairie Homo Does New York: Gratitude

Right now I’m sitting in the living room on the top floor of my Brooklyn flat on an old velvet couch underneath strings of lightbulbs hanging from the ceiling. At my publishing internship, I get to read manuscripts and meet famous people. There’s some sort of concert happening down the street from me: the beat of the bass, the occasional lyric, and the smell of pot are all carried by the breeze through the window to this beautiful room where I get to write for Autostraddle, the “the world’s most popular independently-owned lesbian website.”

Brooklyn kinda looks like Sesame Street
via http://www.kidlantis.com

Whoa, go me! Is this even real? Not too long before I applied to be an intern, I was reading a lot of articles that said the publishing industry was becoming increasingly geared towards rich white kids because publishing internships are unpaid and in expensive cities. I think I might have cried when I read that. Were all the people who had told me I was wasting my time getting an English degree right? Was I stupid for not taking advantage of all of Alberta’s “opportunities” in the oil industry? Why didn’t I just get a grip on reality and accept the big bucks to work for a company involved in activities like cutting down the boreal forest and polluting the river systems? Or I could just give up and stop doing this writing thing.

Fuck that.

I got a second job at a liquor store. I applied for the unpaid internship in the expensive city. I was repeatedly harassed at the liquor store by drunken men who smelled like how I imagine the patriarchy would smell if it had a scent. “Hey honey, you’re so beautiful. What races are you mixed with?” “I bet you’re just hired to stand here and look pretty.” I got a third job and quit the liquor store; and about the same time I found out I had been accepted as an intern (yay!!) I realized I was hardly going to be getting any hours at Job #3 so I cried some more and stressed out about making no money for three months while living in New York City of all places! I thought back to everything I had read about the inaccessibility of publishing internships. Why should publishing internships just be for rich? And people who already live in big, expensive cities or have family there they can stay with? And people who aren’t me?

Fuck that too.

Here’s what I did: a fundraiser. At first the thought of asking people to give money to me, and not, you know, starving children in the third-world, or amazing non-profits, made my stomach feel gassy, my palms sticky, my brain itchy, you get it — I was neck-deep in uncomfortableness; but not head-deep, so I was still able to drink lots of wine to calm me down while I planned a silent auction fundraiser.

Women are socialized to take care of other people before themselves, to not want too much, to apologize profusely even when they’ve done nothing wrong. Women of colour are taught that the world doesn’t exist for us, but if we’re lucky we can get a starring role as the exotic so-and-so alongside Mr. White Patriarchy. Queer women and queer women of colour are constantly left out of queer spaces and feminist spaces until we start to question our own legitimacy. Going after what you want is even hard for the straight, white men out there, so it’s no wonder I felt a little shy, a little uncertain, a little insecure when it came to organizing a fundraiser for my internship. Who was I to even want these things that I wanted? Who was I to ask for them? The thought of doing a fundraiser made me feel vulnerable, like suddenly I couldn’t hide behind jobs I hated and pretend to want the same things other people did. I was open, naked: This is me. This is what I want. I need your help.

via http://capabeaufort.org

But here’s the thing: No one laughed at me or told me I was wrong to do a fundraiser. Instead, people were inspired and eager to help me out. I had many discussions with others and explained that they too were fed up with a class, economic, and education system catered to well-off people in big cities. Good for me for taking the initiative to tackle those obstacles, they said. The more people who helped me, and the less uncomfortable I felt. It was hard to be nervous when I was surrounded by so much love and support from everyone — my family, my friends, businesses, and random strangers I called up to ask for donations. Autostraddle’s very own Gabrielle Rivera even offered to let me crash on her couch for my first couple of weeks in New York while I waited to move into my Brooklyn sublet. It’s hard to feel much fear and anxiety when you’re bursting to your ear-tops with gratitude. Who am I to do this was replaced with Who am I not to? There are people rooting for me! Who am I to let them down?

We live in a culture of fear and anxiety, and nowhere is this more apparent than in a city like New York, full of crowds, cars, noise, racial tensions, religious tensions. This is why it’s all the more important to feel gratitude for all the wonderful people who help you in this noisy, confusing life. Say thank you. I mean, you don’t have to constantly say it all the time to everybody who’s nice to you. There’s no need to turn up the Canadian to an annoyingly polite pitch, but think it, to yourself. Thank you, thank you, thank you. I grew up Catholic and there’s a lot of fucked up shit that comes with that but I think one of the benefits is this ingrained belief in remembering to give thanks, for your food, for your life, for your opportunities, for the people in the world who step up and help you.

I promise I’m not writing this while sitting on a patchouli-lotus leaf smoking flower-sparkle-fairy dust and cleansing my aura with sunlight filtered through a tie-dyed t-shirt decorated with representations of the goddess’s vagina. Though if I were I hope you wouldn’t judge me. What I’m trying to say is we live in a culture that, cynical towards positivity, encourages us to be anxious, fearful and stressed. There is no lack of fake positivity and insincere gratitude. Women, especially women of colour, are often encouraged to convince others of our (ultimately insincere gratitude) to make white people feel comfortable, to make the patriarchy comfortable, to make everyone feel comfortable except ourselves. If we don’t we’re told we’re angry and have no sense of humour. What I want to feel and for others to be able to feel is more real gratitude. Real gratitude makes you feel like your body isn’t big enough because there’s not enough room between your cells and your blood vessels to contain it all. Real gratitude makes your heart electric and your brain cells bounce around singing Kool and The Gang’s “Celebration” like at some cheesy, junior high dance party. This kind of gratitude, this real gratitude, is radical, necessary, and often undervalued.

As I sit in my Brooklyn living room listening to the music and smelling the pot, thinking about what an awesome day I’ve had at my internship, I think it’s important to remember to do all of the impossible things. The systems that are in place to oppress us maintain that we should be capable of doing everything on our own, without help, even though classism, racism, cissexim, homophobia and more make that almost impossible. But we don’t always have to do it on our own, even when we’re told that’s the only way. For every person who de-legitimizes you, there are so, so many more who will affirm you.

Team Pick: Toi Scott’s Piece Teaches Us How to Queer Food Justice

Malaika’s Team Pick:

One of the things I’ve learned and that people have told me about New York is that there are fewer healthy eating options in areas where people of colour are the primary demographic. Neighbourhoods with lower median incomes are high on the Burger Kings but not so much on the Whole Foods. That’s why when I read Toi Scott’s “Queering Food Justice” in Decolonizing Yoga, I found myself nodding yes, yes, yes to everything, and I’m so excited for all of you to now read this great piece and tell me what you think. Or maybe you don’t want to tell me because you’re one of Autostraddle’s many readers who don’t comment? That’s fine too! The important thing is that you talk…with your mom, with your friends, and with your OKCupid date about issues of food accessibility, security, and justice. Instead of judging people on whether or not they eat meat and have organic kale with every meal, we should be asking ourselves who has access to healthy food and why.

via http://www.decolonizingyoga.com/queering-food-justice/

Scott begins the piece like this:

If you’re a person of color with a low income it’s important for you to know that conversations about your ability to access foods, yes, conversations about your very well-being are happening behind your back.

It also goes on to explain how intersectionality and food, well, intersect:

Where we sit at the intersections of race, gender, class and sexuality makes us highly vulnerable and subject to the policing of our food and economic system. Our lack of resources, especially TIME, allows for outsiders (and sometimes even well-meaning allies) to come in and make decisions FOR us – maybe even AS us – based on their assumptions and their own personal beliefs about what will make our community better.

There are also ideas for what you can do to radicalize your food consumption. However, as Scott points out, it’s important to remember that there is no uniform definition of what constitutes radical. Instead, it depends on an infinite number of things, like your economic situation, your race, your home environment, etc. So if being radical for you is as simple as buying more bananas because they’re the cheapest fruit you can afford, go you! Don’t let anybody make you feel like you’re not doing enough. And if being radical means throwing a queer potluck, have fun and maybe ask out the girl next to the homemade veggie chilli, because she’s probably me.

Once you’re finished reading about queering food justice, you should check out the rest of the site! Decolonizing Yoga (Where Spirituality Meets Social Justice) is a great online resource that highlights the voices of “queer people, people of color, disability activists and more in relationship to yoga and countering oppression in general.” It was started by transgender writer and activist, Be Scofield, and there’s even a Facebook page you could check out after you’re finished reading Toi Scott’s piece and crushing on the website in general.

A Prairie Homo Does New York: Race and the Subway

Autostraddle’s resident prairie homo is in New York for the summer! Welcome to A Prairie Homo Does New York, a new weekly column detailing her (hopefully) exciting adventures.

“Good evening ladies and gentlemen! My name is Damien and I’ll be your candy man tonight!” It’s Thursday evening and I’m on the 2 train in the Bronx. It’s surprisingly crowded for 8 p.m., but nothing compared the subway in Manhattan at 5. If I wanted to, I could probably manage a (small) jumping jack without slapping any commuters in the face, but I don’t want to put on a show. That’s Damien’s job.

“Candy!” he announces in a voice that could carry across a packed stadium, a voice that commands attention, but he’s hardly even given a glance. “I got chocolate bars! Snickers! M&Ms! You want Kit-Kat? Gummy bears!” he lists off the candy like an auction announcer. I don’t know how anyone can talk that quickly while also walking down the aisle of a semi-crowded train rattling a brown cardboard box of candy. “Chocolate bars! Snickers! M&Ms! Kit-Kats! Gummy bears!”

People check their phones, stare out the window at the darkening skyline, and hush their children, but they don’t buy any candy. Undeterred when we reach the next stop, Damien adjusts his baseball cap and hops off the train and onto the one behind us.

via wikimedia

Before I came here, hearing the words New York pushed the “on” button on a kind of slide projector in my brain and all of these images, mostly accumulated from nearly a quarter century of TV, would speed through me one after the next like cars of an express train: Oscar the Grouch in a garbage can would be in car one; then there’d be the gang from Friends at Central Perk; Big Bird; people sitting on the steps of their brownstones having conversations with each other and maybe with Big Bird; Carrie from Sex and the City running through the rain hailing a taxi in heels and some extravagant outfit I’ll never be able to afford and wouldn’t want to wear anyway; some diner scene from Seinfeld; the girls from Girls being girls in hipster-chique fancy clothes. Minus Oscar the Grouch whose ethnicity is unknown, and Big Bird whose ethnicity is bird, most of the characters in my New York slideshow were white.

Of course, I knew New York was a multicultural city, but the slideshow in my head was projected from the television set, and according to the TV, the main course in New York is white, to be served with the occasional exotic side dish (yummy!) of person of colour as temporary love-interest or person of colour as wise-cracking janitor! And so, when I arrived in New York, the slide show in my brain didn’t match up with reality. At all.

My first morning in New York, I get on the Bronx 2 train headed to Manhattan. Everyone on the train is black. And looking around I realize I’ve never before been on a train or in any environment, besides a country dance club I went to for a friend’s birthday when I was 19 (everyone was white) in which everyone was all black or all white. In Edmonton, wherever I go, there’s a mixture of ethnicities; whereas New York has histories and politics etched deep into the subway lines it could take me a lifetime to study; so I start by studying the woman seated across from me. She’s wearing a crucifix and holds a prayer book in one hand, her phone in the other:

“Now girl, what you eating? You always eating. You love your belly!” And later: “Everyone’s telling me to be thankful, but I’m not thankful, I’m grateful. This new job…I still got no coverage, so I’m grateful, but not thankful. There’s a difference.”

The Bronx is so beautiful. That’s what struck me most when I arrived, tired and overwhelmed, my hair blown-up by the humidity like a poodle ready for a snooty dog show: green! trees! There are blocks that look like they come straight out of the Sesame Street Mega Blocks set I had as a kid: colourful, painted brownstones side by side. You pass the most majestic-looking buildings full of sweeping vaults and intricate designs carved into cement, buildings that make you think of European opera houses. And next to them, tall grey or brown apartments, then brownstones, storefronts that could be out of the Wild West, a tunnel, train tracks, graffiti. Recently, a friend who’s traveling wrote me and explained that when she’s in a new place, sometimes the buildings don’t look real. When you find yourself dropped in unfamiliar surroundings, it’s hard enough to believe that you’re actually here, wherever here may be, let alone that other people are here and have been their whole lives. But seeing graffiti can help bring the sleepy-eyed, jet-lagged traveler back to reality. Walls always seem more real when covered with imperfect but beautiful and colourful messages. Graffiti says, “Real people were here. Real people wrote this.”

via http://levysuniqueny.com

As the we get closer to Manhattan, the woman with the crucifix necklace, the prayer book, and no health coverage leaves the train, and more and more white people board. Soon the train will reach Wall Street station and there’ll be white men in suits holding briefcases. They’ll stare at their iPhones in a way that makes you think they are doing Very Important Business even if they’re just updating their statuses to “Train’s crowded and I think I wrinkled my suit,” and they probably don’t have to worry about things like health coverage.

I get off at 34th Street Station, go up some stairs, (or was it down some stairs?), push my way through crowds of people trying to find my exit and instead end up in some sort of underground cafeteria. It smells like junk food but also like mould and sweaty bodies. In the glow of the fluorescent McDonald’s M, an old grey-coloured man in an Oliver Twist cap sings Whitney Houston’s I Will Always Love You into a microphone shaped like an ice cream cone. It’s just so strange I don’t even know what to do. “Holy shit! New York! Shit, New York’s weird,” I tell myself as I look around for the 34th Street exit to the beat of “And aaayyyyyyeeayyyyy will aaalllways love youououuuuuuuu!” mixed with the rattle of trains, which, I’ve noticed, have an uncomfortable way of always sounding like they’re two seconds away from breaking or exploding.

It’s not just the train. The whole world is also a potential disaster waiting to happen, I’m later informed by an an old man with skin like a crinkly paper bag, a Santa Claus beard, a red baseball cap, and a booming voice he’s decided to use to preach to the Bronx-bound commuters.

“It’s not the government. It’s the Illuminati.” He stands in the middle of the train and takes the time to try to make eye contact with every single passenger. “Put down your iphones, put down your ipods.” Some people giggle. One or two even nod thoughtfully, and there are those who don’t even seem to be aware he exists. “The government’s not gonna protect you. It’s about community. We gotta be here for each other.” I’m unable to keep my eyes off him as he sways back and forth to the rhythm of both the train and his words. You could clap in time to the cadence of his speech, but instead I hold my bag against my knees, turn off my iPhone, listen and watch New York.

Read a F*cking Canadian Book, Eh: Zoe Whittall’s “Holding Still For As Long As Possible”

If you’re anything like me, Holding Still For As Long As Possible by queer Canadian (and hot!) writer Zoe Whittall will keep you sitting still for as long as possible while you read on to find out what happens next. I spent most of last night sitting still for as long as possible in bed as I read the intertwined first-person narratives from Whittall’s rotating 20-something-year-old cast of characters in modern-day Toronto. There’s Josh, a paramedic in a flailing relationship with Amy. Amy doesn’t understand how her once fireworks and magic and omg-you’re-my-soulmate relationship with Josh, whom she met when he was crashing on a mutual friend’s couch while recovering from top surgery, suddenly seems boring. But Amy also has a crush on Roxanne, an all-around cool queer lady with tattoos and lots of past lady-hookups she’s turned into friends. Roxanne lives with Billy (or Hillary), a former Canadian pop-teen sensation who now works a boring, unsatisfactory job and has frequent panic attacks and all-around anxiety about everything. Billy just broke up with Maria and they still can’t quite let go of each other, but Billy recently developed a crush on…Josh. Yup. We’re now back to Josh. The crush-connection circle is complete. Still with me?

The characters’ sexualities fluctuate as often as the novel’s narrative voice. Each chapter is told from a different person’s perspective. Holding Still For As Long As Possible seems to take place in a kind of post-identity politics utopia where everyone just goes about being attracted to whomever they’re attracted to. The characters don’t fit into boxes because there are no boxes. The book is post-box; post-gay. It’s all very queer.

Zoe Whittall via zoewhittall.blogspot.com

The main conflicts in Holding Still For As Long As Possible don’t have to do with sexuality. Instead, they occur not only in the characters’ complicated relationships with each other, but also in their relationships with themselves. Josh doesn’t seem to think that much about being trans*. He has injured and dying people to attend to on an hour-by-hour basis, and his descriptions of his job give a glimpse into a career I hadn’t ever really given much thought to besides, “If there’s an emergency, you call 9-1-1 and the ambulance comes and you hope everything turns out okay.” But what about the paramedics in the ambulance? How do they turn out okay when they see what they see day in and day out. Josh deals with dying patients, people who have shot themselves in the head or over-dosed in front of their small children, and then he goes and drinks some coffee, makes bad jokes with the other paramedics and comes home to his stale relationship. Yet, he’s afraid of the raccoons who raid his garbage in the middle of the night. Fear, like relationships and sexuality, also can’t be put into a box.

Zoe Whittall has a way of describing things in ways others don’t. It’s like you’re in a whole new book-land where things are done so differently than you’re used to and all you can do is sit back, take it in, be amazed and maybe learn something. When she has anxiety attacks, Billy is described as feeling on fire, like her skin and then her entire self is about to burst into flames, and like a fire, the anxiety keeps getting worse and worse, devouring everything in its path…everything, being Billy. Fame, even the Canadian version of fame, probably had a lot to do with it:

So I’ve been famous, the kind of famous where girls in grocery stores said to me, You made me believe in myslef/leave my abusive boyfriend/forgive myself for the abortion. Sick kids wrote me letters. There were Seventeen magazine articles. Minor endorsement deals. And what did I feel? More scared to die than ever. Before I’d been scared to die, but also, really excited to live and make my dreams come true. My dreams came true. Then I became scared that this was the height of feeling: watching from the stage while crowds sang songs about my silly little feelings. You were not anything they wanted to be, but they believed you were. They believed being you would make such a difference in their lives. Their belief anchored them. Pacified them…Fame makes the whole world seem ridiculous.

People like having other people on whom to anchor their hopes in times of fear and uncertainty. And in the book, like in real life, there is a lot of fear. Josh and Amy remember hearing about 9/11 and feeling like their illusion of safety had been shattered. Josh makes sure to wash his hands compulsively because of SARS. Amy washes with her ever-growing collection of soaps, hoping she’ll be able to cross the widening rift between her and Josh with a bridge made from strawberry, cinnamon and vanilla scents. She has other idiosyncracies as well:

Like when I sit down to pee, I have to count down or I can’t go. I don’t know when I started doing this, but now, even if I’ve had seven beers or a quart of lemonade, I say 5-4-3-2-1! before I can relax enough to let it happen. I don’t know why. I think it’s kind of funny…The other thing is that when I’m having sex I have to think about something totally mundane to get off. Sometimes I’ll repeat a word to myself, like yellow yellow yellow yellow or hand grenade hand grenade motorcycle pop-tart! Anything completely nonsensical and without sexual connotation.

Will Josh and Amy learn how to know one another again like when they first met? Will Billy be able to find calm? What’s the deal with Roxy? And if she were real, would she judge me for not being as cool as she is and for sometimes listening to Britney Spears while eating McDonald’s french fries? Will all these wonderfully complicated characters learn to unravel their complications and fears? Probably not. But will they braid them together and be a community and learn from each other and describe their weird pee-routintes as they do so? Don’t you hope so?

If you like reading about Canadian queers who are afraid, hilarious and weird – just like you – and who get-off to pop-tarts – probably unlike you (or maybe like you? I don’t know. You do you!) then you should probably get ready to sit still for as long as possible while being completely enthralled by Holding Still For As Long As Possible.

A Prairie Homo Companion: Wanderlust and Lessons Learned

A Prairie Homo Companion is a regular column that celebrates the Canadian prairies, canola fields and big skies, and the paradoxes of being a fine-ass lady prairie homo.

Header by Rory Midhani

This is the last A Prairie Homo Companion that I’ll be writing from Edmonton for a while. This prairie lady will be off to New York for a summer publishing internship. I’m excited, terrified, jumpy, stressed, completely in awe, full of anticipation, thankful, and all of the other feelings. I could probably write out a feeling I’m feeling for every letter of the alphabet, but that would be boring. Instead, I’ll look back on some of the things travelling has taught me.

I wasn’t one of those kids whose parents took them on exciting trips all over the world. For the first twenty years of my life, travelling meant getting in the family car and driving the four hours from the prairies to the Rocky Mountains. I loved it, but as soon as I was able to work, save up money, and apply for scholarships to go on foreign exchanges, I couldn’t wait to see, well, everything! In the past three years, I’ve lived in no less than three cities in three different countries. It has been a bit of a whirlwind, and I like to think all of this travelling has taught me a few things, or else what would be the point? So here’s a list of 10 things I’ve learned as a prairie homo in the great wide world:

via shutterstock

1. There are a lot of people in the world. A lot.

2. Most of these people are like you in a lot of ways. If they disagree, it’s probably because they’re scared — of you, of difference, of new ideas and cultures.

3. You don’t know anything. I don’t mean that literally. You’ve probably learned (or slept through lessons) on algebra, handwriting, and books. Maybe you’ve learned how to make your grandmother’s chicken pot pie. Good for you. You’re so great. You’re so smart. You’re so knowledgeable.

Got it?

Now forget it. Sometimes your cultural framework and the experiences you’ve accumulated through your years of living aren’t enough to help you to understand a new culture, and everything will seem weird and scary. You’ll feel like you’re two years old and just learning about things like speaking English and tying your shoes, except there won’t be a mother or a kindergarten teacher to give you a gold star (no pun intended) when you finally figure out how the metro system works or how to properly socialize with people in a new environment.

4. Don’t judge the new country and the new people just yet. Right now you’re in the initial stage of Not Knowing Anything. Instead of judging, listen. Open your eyes,  your ears. Open your nose to new smells and your door to new friends who might enter bearing gifts of pizza and beer and port, and then everyone will make out and by the end of it you’ll feel fully integrated into the new culture: a sense of community created through kissing. Or does that just happen to me and my friends?

5. You get to know your travelling companion very, very well. Do they stress-pick their nose while waiting for the train from Lille to Paris? Are they gay? Do they not pack enough underwear and wear the same pair twice in a row by flipping said underwear inside out? Are they ridiculously awesome and fun to be around all day every day? Are you gonna be bffs? Do they share your taste in museums? You guys, there’s a special, magical kind of intimacy reserved for travel partners. If you’re not sure whether or not you’re compatible with someone, the quickest way to find out is through travelling with them.

via shutterstock

6. You learn a lot about yourself. Not to get all Eat, Pray, Love on you (although I’m proud to say I do think Elizabeth Gilbert is an insightful and funny writer and has amazing blonde curls to boot), but I think travelling is one of the best ways to learn about who you are. I mean, when you’re away from your friends, your family, your dog, and most of your clothes, all you have left is you! And if you’re like me and many of the people I’ve spoken to, you’ll realize just how fucking awesome you are because hey, you can live in a foreign country on your own and survive! You can handle that confusing foreign paperwork with instructions written in a language you don’t use everyday! You can figure out that subway map, find that grocery store, and fucking feed yourself! And people besides your friends back home do in fact like you and wanna hang out with you because although you may be as weird as you think you are, everybody else is too. All over the world. The world is packed full of weirdos. You’re not the only one. It’s wonderful.

7. People are nice. Before I left for Europe everybody (okay, mostly my mom’s friends) cautioned me about people who would try to rob me, kidnap me, etc., and I nodded and took notes. Our whole lives we’re taught not to talk to strangers, not to trust unfamiliar people and places. The newspapers, the Facebooks, and the televisions are bursting with stories of bad guys and all the horrible things they do in the world. Though it’s true of course that life is not fucking fair, and horrible things do happen, what I’ve learned from travelling is that, contrary to the six o’clock news, most people are, in fact, really nice.

Throughout my travels, people I’ve just met have let me stay in their houses, cooked for me, and shown me around. The good thing about being queer is in most places, other queer people welcome you with open arms and don’t hesitate to introduce you to their city’s queer scene. It can feel like the Here/Queer column comes to life and takes the form of an awesome new friend. Whenever I read too many depressing news stories, or just read too much about Canada’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper and feel like crying, I think back to all the wonderful, friendly people I’ve met throughout my travels and my faith in humanity is restored.

via shutterstock

8. You can’t control things. I’ll admit, change freaks me out. I spend far too much time planning everything I can. I’m that girl who writes everything on her iphone calendar and journals all of her feelings so I can analyze them, figure myself out, and thus hopefully magically predict my future! Unfortunately, life doesn’t allow for this, and at no time is this more apparent than while travelling. I had a moment sitting in my dorm room while on exchange in France, when I realized I had no idea how I’d spend the next few months following the end of term. Would I go back to Canada? Travel? Which countries would I go to? Would I find a job? Would I have enough money to survive without a job? Where would I live? Who would my friends be? Would I be sleep with that girl in that other country again? Would I ever see her again? I couldn’t come up with any answers, and I felt alone, out of control, and 100% freaked out.

Life is unpredictable, it’s true, but life while travelling puts unpredictable in capital letters, each letter highlighted and surrounded by sparkles. Travelling is real life on fast-forward and, like a fast amusement park ride, left me feeling dizzy and nauseous. I was forced to learn to be okay with the question marks, the uncertainties, the dizzyingly high speed of life, and I found that often, things turned out much better than I could have made them if I were, in fact, the puppet master of my own life. And that was magical.

9. There are a million and one ways to live a life. I come from a moderately-sized city and thought I’d witnessed quite a bit of variety and multiple viewpoints, but when I travelled I learned how much more there was. I learned that in other places, art and writing are valued way more than they are in Edmonton. It’s not art and writing aren’t celebrated at all in Edmonton, because they are, but in Oxford there are literally bookshelves in the bars and libraries under the sidewalks. I visited the former homes of writers like Virginia Woolf and Shakespeare and thought “Wow! These geniuses did normal-people things like live in houses and eat in kitchens and stuff!”

Feeling so close to the history of art and literature made me feel supported and inspired. No, I was not a weirdo for being so passionate about writing and taking English Literature in University. I wasn’t stupid for not taking something more “practical” like engineering. I felt loved, supported, and lifted up by all the millions and millions of humans throughout history who’ve written stuff, and painted stuff, and composed stuff, and acted stuff. Sometimes being an artsy-fartsy gay kid in the prairies can feel lonely, but it’s hard to be lonely when you’re surrounded by more art history than you could’ve ever imagined while cramming for an Art History 101 final.

via shutterstock

10. Life is beautiful. You’re so lucky to see everything you’ve seen. Be grateful.

A Prairie Homo Companion: To Be More Like A Dog

A Prairie Homo Companion is a regular column that celebrates the Canadian prairies, canola fields and big skies, and the paradoxes of being a fine-ass lady prairie homo.

Header by Rory Midhani

Early last week I was sitting and crying not necessarily because I was sad, but because I had so much work to do and I didn’t know how I was going to get it all done. All of my feelings of being overwhelmed needed somewhere to go and so I sat and I cried, softly, thinking no one would hear. I was wrong though. My dog heard me, and she came running up to me as I sat on my bed, her tail wagging excitedly, a chew-toy in her mouth. She jumped up — paws on my knees, pushing the chew-toy in my face as if to say, “Don’t cry. Play! How could you feel overwhelmed when there’re so many fun things to do in the world? So much to chew.”

COPYRIGHT MALAIKA ALEBA

This is a post about dogs, because this prairie homo wouldn’t be who she is today if it weren’t for dogs. It’s a well-known fact that cat-lover is synonymous for lesbian. I mean, pussy and cat can mean the same thing and queers girls love both; but I think there’s enough on the internet about the strange and wonderful connection between lady homos, boi homos, bi homos, and their feline obsessions. Remember that time I wrote about lady-loving-lady writers and the dogs who’ve inspired them? Well, I’m not finished with writing about dogs for the internet. I don’t think I ever will be. Virginia Woolf said that no woman can ever write enough. I wholeheartedly agree, and would like to add on that a woman can never write enough about her dog. I’m sure Woof would agree with me as well — after all, she did write a whole novel from a dog’s perspective.

PRAIRIE HOMO DOG
COPYRIGHT MALAIKA ALEBA

Dogs are very important to a prairie homo. Sometimes it can be hard to find other lady-loving-prairie-ladies who share your taste in books, are fantastic cooks, enjoy political debates, are addicted to CBC, are adventurous and edgy but not so adventurous and edgy it scares you, will teach you how to cross-country ski, speak a language other than the one you do so you can learn new words, are full of serenity to counteract your anxiety, are able to connect with you on all the levels, enjoy your quirky sense of humour, and are willing to dance badly with you in the kitchen (I have certain requirements, you know). Or maybe all of those perfect-for-you women are out there, but you want to stay inside because it’s cold, or it’s too hot and staying in to read Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal while eating ice cream and then French bread soaked in olive oil while drinking wine is your activity of choice because while you know you can drink that wine just as well as any alcoholic vineyard owner, flirting with women in crowded spaces (or even one-on-one) is not an activity on which you’d write an advice column. Your dog doesn’t care that you’re an anti-social drunk bookworm. She just tries to get in on the French bread and olive oil situation, and even when you tell her, “No! My food!” she stares at you with adoring eyes as if staying at home to eat and read is the best activity and you’re the best human for partaking in it.

I once had a very environmentally conscious roommate who insisted on keeping the heat turned incredibly low even in the middle of the winter. I spent a lot of time typing, then pausing to rub my hands together, or typing while wearing gloves, and my bed had about 7 blankets under which I shivered. My roommate suggested putting a water bottle in the bed, like they did back in the day before they used heat made from oil obtained by digging up the boreal forest, poisoning the rivers, and mutating the fish. “Y-y-yesss?” I agreed, and a water bottle did help, but you know what is even better? A woman obviously, but let’s not forget dogs! I admit, I am one of those people who lets her dog sleep in her bed, and if you think that’s gross or something, we’re probably not going to get along. The thing is, there have been many-a-night when my dog’s body heat is responsible for keeping me warm and asleep, as opposed to shivering and awake.

COPYRIGHT MALAIKA ALEBA

It’s finally warm now. I don’t need my dog as a heater, but last week, as I sat and cried, and she pushed her chew-toy into my face, I came to an important realization: I need to channel my inner dog. Sometimes it’s not enough to love dogs; it helps to kinda be like them too. Now, I’m not going to start saying hello by sniffing butts and pulling dead squirrels out from the ravine with my teeth, but I can appreciate the fact that however overwhelmed I may be feeling, there are still games of chew toy tug-of-war to be had. There are so many ways to play; so many fun things to do. When my dog gets mad, she’ll express herself in a healthy way by barking, but then she’ll let it go and either sleep or run in a circle and chase her tail. Nothing miserable is worth holding onto in her world because it only takes away from all the fun times to be had. Life is good. Now if you’ll excuse me I’m going to continue reading Why Be Happy When You Could be Normal? while my dog snores at my feet.

A Prairie Homo Companion: Weather Watch Gender Presentation Fashion Crisis

A Prairie Homo Companion is a regular column that celebrates the Canadian prairies, canola fields and big skies, and the paradoxes of being a fine-ass lady prairie homo.

Header by Rory Midhani

Right now I’m sitting at my desk, and this is what I’m wearing: wool socks, orange shorts with pink squares on them, a grey hoodie with black zigzags. I don’t know if you guys imagined me as this super-cool, fashionable person because I write for Autostraddle and Autostraddle is always in style, well, I have news for you:I’m not. I mean, usually I am (I hope) or at least I try, but lately, especially when I’m at home, alone, writing, I’ve just given up. But sometimes even when I’m straddling along on the street (pun intended) my outfits don’t make sense. Take, for instance, last Thursday. At first (in the morning), I wore the following: winter boots, jeans, winter coat, hoodie, t-shirt. But in the prairies, the three hours between 9 am and noon is apparently enough time for winter to skip right past spring and on to summer because come lunchtime, I wished I had worn sneakers as I was forced to trudge along outside in my heavy, hot winter boots, carrying my hoodie and coat in the sudden surprise summer. The week before there had been a surprise winter storm: one day it was your average spring, with blue skies and puddles and birds and the like. The next day the wind was howling so loudly I could hear it in the shower (seriously) and there was snow everywhere. Yesterday there was a rainstorm. Or was it the day before? Right now in Saskatchewan there are reports of heavy snow, fires, and flooding — all in one province. I just can’t handle this anymore. I don’t know how to think, or feel, or dress, which is why I’m here, in my orange shorts that look like they’re covered with pink 80s bangles and my not-at-all matching grey hoodie.

I like to think my gender identity changes with the seasons. In the winter I can channel my great Canadian butch, or great Canadian bad-girl-bank-robber butch, if it’s -30 degrees and I happen to be wearing my balaclava. To keep warm, I wear flannel, hoodies, and jeans baggy enough to fit long-johns underneath. I limit my makeup because when you come inside after being outside in the cold, mascara and eyeliner have a habit of smudging and blurring as the ice crystals that have formed on your eyelashes defrost.

via Meanwhile in Canada

Summer though, is all about sexy two-pieces, flowy t-shirts that make me feel like I’m a hippie in the 70s, earrings (I don’t have to worry about the metal getting cold and freezing my ears), pretty skirts, and things with flowers on them because summer is pretty with flowers and makes me feel pretty and flowery. In summer, I can femme it up, go to queer spaces, and have people look at me like I don’t belong. “Oh please,” I want to say. “Just wait till winter.” My gender presentation is weather-based.

That’s why I’m really confused right now — the constantly changing weather is not only affecting my mood (read: moody), but I also have no idea how to dress, how to be a young, hot, fashionable queer. Every morning I wake up and have no idea what to wear. Do I wear my winter boots? Am I going to need them because it’s cold, or am I going to need them because currently it’s warm, but later it will snow and rain at the same time, then get cold, then the ground will freeze and I’ll need my winter boots with their good grip so I don’t slip on the ice and break various parts of my body? Do I dare wear just a t-shirt under my coat, or is that taking too much of a risk? I mean, what if there’s a surprise snow storm and I’m caught with just a t-shirt under my light coat? Have you watched that interview with Grimes in which she talks about how she got frostbite and then had to wait for 17 hours in Emergency? Shit could get dangerous.

So until the weather decides what it is, I too, will remain confused about my identity and will try to make peace with being this not-quite-butch, not-quite-femme unfashionable prairie homo writer creature in weirdly coloured summer shorts paired with wool socks and a hoodie. But hey, if the weather’s going to procrastinate on an actual spring that moves towards summer, then I think I’m justified in procrastinating my sense of fashion.