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Protestors rally against rbc’s fossil fuel funding in hamilton, ‘girls nite out’ brings all the laughs to the burlington performing arts centre.

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All-funny, all-female comedy is coming to the Burlington Performing Arts Centre next month. Comedian Elvira Kurt is going to be leading ‘Girls Nite Out’ , which sees a cast of Canadian Comedy Award winners, Second City alum and CBC comedy darlings perform stand-up, improv and a talk show that includes the audience, and will leave everyone laughing out loud.

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From left: k.d. lang, Kent Monkman, Tegan & Sara, Beverly Glenn-Copeland, Peaches, Elliot Page, Dionne Brand, Xavier Dolan and Jackie Shane (Illustrations by Jonathan Busch)

June of 1969 was a revolutionary moment for queer rights. 50 years later, we’re celebrating Canadian artists who have shaped our country’s rich LGBTQ history.

1969 is often regarded as the beginning of the modern LGBTQ rights movement — but not because it was the month Canada relaxed its laws around homosexuality. If anything, charges escalated in the years that followed that alleged “decriminalization.” Still, it marked a shift, and the movement started picking up significant steam — substantially influenced in this country by our American siblings rioting at the Stonewall Inn that same month. By October of 1969, Canada saw its first gay student organization (the University of Toronto Homophile Association), and by the end of 1970 early “gay liberation” groups began appearing (the Community Homophile Association of Toronto, the Front de libération homosexuel in Montreal, the Gay Alliance Toward Equality in Vancouver and Gays of Ottawa). But it wasn’t just student and activist groups rising up to make Canada a safer place for LGBTQ folks — it was also our artists.

In honour of that pivotal year, CBC Arts is celebrating 69 of the many, many LGBTQ artists who changed this country for the better — before, during and after 1969. And we’re calling them Super Queeroes, because that’s what they are. Collectively, they have given hope, courage and visibility to LGBTQ folks in this country, long before we got the respect we deserve from the state.

Adrian Stimson

Active post: 20.

• Allyson Mitchell & Deirdre Logue

Ann-Marie MacDonald

Attila richard lukacs.

• Beverly Glenn-Copeland

Billy Newton-Davis

Bruce labruce.

• Candy Palmater

Carole Pope

Christopher house.

• Craig Russell
• Daniel MacIvor
• Dionne Brand
• Elliot Page
• Elvira Kurt

Faith Nolan

• General Idea
• Ivan Coyote

Jackie Shane

Jeremy dutcher, joe average, john greyson, jordan tannahill, kent monkman, kiss & tell, lorraine segato.

• Lucas Silveira

Mado Lamotte

Makeda silvera.

• Marie-Claire Blais

Michel Marc Bouchard

Michel tremblay, michelle ross, midi onodera, mirha-soleil ross, nalo hopkinson, nicole brossard, owen pallett, patricia rozema.

• Richard Fung

Rufus Wainwright

Scott thompson, shawna dempsey & lorri millan, shyam selvadurai, sky gilbert.

• Stephen Andrews

Syrus Marcus Ware

Tegan and sara.

• The Body Politic
• The Hidden Cameras
• Thom Fitzgerald

Timothy Findley

Tomson highway.

• Trish Salah

Vivek Shraya

• Wayson Choy

William Hutt

• Witch Prophet
• Xavier Dolan

Just as the word queer has been reclaimed as a celebration of who we are, it’s time for the LGBTQ community to reclaim our place in Canadian history. Super Queeroes does that through an extravaganza of words, pictures and videos — all created by or featuring LGBTQ Canadian artists, including a few on their way to Super Queero status themselves — to do justice to a league of folks who in many cases don’t get the credit they deserve.

So what exactly makes a Super Queero, and how did we choose just 69 of them? The first part of that question has a relatively easy answer: a Super Queero, in this context at least, is an unapologetically queer Canadian artist who has loudly and proudly used their work to lift LGBTQ communities. However, since there are clearly and considerably more than 69 people who fit that description, the second part of that question is...tremendously difficult to answer. After all, lists of any kind are subjective. We consulted with dozens of LGBTQ people in communities across Canada, ultimately coming up with a list of around 400 Super Queeroes that was painstakingly pared down to 69 through a lot of conversations and a lot of disagreements. Ultimately, we’re proud of where we’ve landed. And we hope you’ll share the project — along with the name of one of your own Super Queeroes.

– Peter Knegt

active post: 12

Active post: 43, active post: 19, active post: 21, active post: 45, active post: 17, active post: 48, active post: 51, active post: 49, active post: 61, active post: 3, active post: 27, active post: 33, active post: 5, active post: 14, active post: 28, active post: 11, active post: 57, active post: 16, active post: 31, active post: 6, active post: 1, active post: 68, active post: 34, active post: 44, active post: 42, active post: 25, active post: 2, active post: 59, active post: 35, active post: 41, active post: 62, active post: 23, active post: 32, active post: 54, active post: 38, active post: 4, active post: 69, active post: 46, active post: 53, active post: 60, active post: 30, active post: 55, active post: 63, active post: 13, active post: 10, active post: 9, active post: 29, active post: 15, active post: 65, active post: 67, active post: 40, active post: 26, active post: 66, active post: 24, active post: 8, active post: 7, active post: 64, active post: 58, active post: 50, active post: 37, active post: 39, active post: 18, active post: 22, active post: 36, active post: 52, active post: 56, active post: 47, so much more than ‘the only lesbian in canada’.

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

Lynne Fernie, filmmaker and film festival programmer:

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

Playfully and radically queering the Canadian landscape

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

Allysin Chaynes on Craig Russell

A worldwide superstar decades before rupaul.

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

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

Pushing Québécois theatre’s boundaries since the 1960s

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

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

By rinaldo walcott.

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

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

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

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

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

Rinaldo Walcott is a professor at the University of Toronto.

A queer R&B legend rediscovered

“This is the closest to Jesus Christ some of you will ever get,” proclaimed Jackie Shane on a live recording from 1963. Born in Nashville, the trailblazing R&B singer joined forces with Frank Motley in the early ’60s and moved with his band to Toronto, where Jackie, who was trans, soon established herself as a musical force and a beacon of queer visibility. Shane had a commanding stage presence and routinely donned flamboyant getups and elaborate makeup, never seeking to conform — even in an era when homosexuality was illegal in Canada. Her 1962 single “Any Other Way” became a top 10 hit in Toronto, its lyrics rife with double entendres like “Tell her that I’m happy, tell her that I’m gay, tell her I wouldn’t have it any other way.” But in 1971, Shane vanished from the public eye, and from much of music history — until a 2010 CBC radio doc by Elaine Banks tracked the singer down, bringing her music to a new generation. Her legacy was explored in the 2014 short film Whatever Happened to Jackie Shane? , and in 2016, a larger-than-life mural of the singer was emblazoned on Yonge Street in 2016. Shane died in early 2019 at 78, but not before a two-disc project culled from her old recordings earned Shane a Grammy nod for best historical album. “I have never felt that I had to change or do anything that wasn't natural to me,” she told Banks earlier this year on q . “I will never, ever be some kind of wishy-washy creature that pretends or lets others guide me. I guide my life. It is mine. No matter what anyone says, I'm going to be Jackie.”

Peter Knegt on The Body Politic

“If I could thank all of the people involved in producing The Body Politic — all those writers, many of whom are no longer with us — I’d thank them not just for paving the way for myself to have fundamental rights and freedoms as a queer person, but also my own writing has been inspired by what they did. I know that there’s no equivalent to The Body Politic in 2019 but I really try in my own work to at least maintain that spirit of bringing Canadians together to understand what their fellow LGBTQ people are doing. So thank you, Body Politic.”

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

These lesbian sisters are no con

In 2017, to commemorate the 10th anniversary of their revered 2007 album The Con , Tegan and Sara Quin compiled an eclectic roster of artists to perform covers of each song from the original. The Con X: Covers doubled as a way to raise funds and awareness for the Tegan and Sara Foundation , which “fights for economic justice, health and representation for LGBTQ girls and women.” Tegan and Sara have harboured that same inclusive spirit ever since their formation in late-’90s Calgary. The identical twins have both openly identified as queer from the moment they first introduced their heart-on-sleeve indie rock to audiences. They’ve since grown to sell over a million albums, releasing The Lego Movie theme song “Everything Is AWESOME!!!” — a cheekily brainless pop parody — even while they were crossing over into full-fledged pop territory themselves. “Our first goal is always, always music,” Tegan Quin explained in a 2012 interview . “But we’ve found clever ways right from the very beginning to ensure that we were infusing our political and social beliefs into our music.” The duo designate a charity for each tour, and with 2016’s “Boyfriend,” the pair accomplished something truly AWESOME!!! by expertly crafting a radio earworm out of lyrics about a queer love triangle.

Vivek Shraya , musician and author:

Tegan and Sara have been unabashedly queer from the beginning of their career, inspiring countless other artists — including myself — and fans to embrace who they are, especially in a time with fewer role models. Furthermore, they have always generously used their platform to support the advancement of LGBTQ rights and the betterment of LGBTQ lives. Tegan and Sara are national treasures.

A multi-talented, non-binary Prairie wind

As the non-binary child of Pentecostal parents, Rae Spoon faced their fair share of hurdles growing up in the Prairies — experiences which helped form the basis of their wildly empathetic musical career. Originating as a country singer, Spoon first broke ground with their 2008 album Superioryouareinferior , which featured tracks that traversed the Canadian landscape to address colonialism and personal trauma, casting the Great Lakes as an allegory for perseverance. Spoon has toured the country numerous times since and returned to their troubled upbringing with First Spring Grass Fire , a book about growing up in Alberta, and subsequently in the 2013 Chelsea McMullan–directed documentary My Prairie Home . Routinely incorporating Canadian geography, autobiography and pressing topics like climate change and modern politics into their lyrics, Spoon has pivoted from their country roots to become a multi-talented indie-pop musician who wears their disinterest in squeezing into the strict confines of the gender binary on their sleeve.

An everlasting iconoclast: How Peaches came to destroy our past

By kevin hegge.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In her own words:

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

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

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

Singing the stories of Black Halifax

To simply refer to Faith Nolan as a musician would be to minimize her impact. A fixture of Canada’s folk music landscape, Nolan is a committed social activist, community builder and cultural historian. She spent the earliest years of her life living in Africville, a former Black community in Halifax (and now a National Historic Site), and has since sought to preserve the systematically unsung history of Afro-Canadians, even naming her 1986 debut album Africville . Through her music, Nolan has also given voice to feminist struggles and advocated for workers’ and children’s rights. She has also notably fought to raise awareness of the disproportionate number of Black and Indigenous women who are imprisoned in Canada. Nolan proudly identifies as a lesbian woman, and her activist efforts were spotlighted in Dionne Brand ’s 1993 National Film Board documentary Long Time Comin’ .

His notes on camp confront colonial violence

Adrian Stimson attended three residential schools growing up. Now, as an internationally renowned interdisciplinary artist, he often incorporates physical remnants of actual residential schools into his artwork. A two-spirit member of the Siksika (Blackfoot) Nation in southern Alberta, Stimson produces work that examines Indigenous identity and cultural erasure . He uses the slaughter of the bison as a route to exploring his people’s history, and fashioned his shapeshifting alter-ego, Buffalo Boy (a play on Buffalo Bill), as a satirical commentary on colonialism and the historical persecution of two-spirit peoples. Melancholic and camp, Stimson’s exhibitions and performances wield humour and homoeroticism as tools for coping with the colonial violence that his practice is ultimately always confronting.

The Chinese-Canadian Andy Warhol

Paul Wong’s phone is both his paintbrush and his canvas. The seminal Canadian multimedia artist has been producing art for screens of all shapes and sizes since the mid-1970s. He cut his teeth in the art world as a member of avant-garde collective the Mainstreeters, which grew out of Vancouver’s Main Street neighbourhood. Wong is known for merging queer and Chinese-Canadian cultural perspectives in his work, and was once dubbed the “Chinese-Canadian Warhol.” Among the more notable pieces he’s produced are a series of anti-racism TV PSAs entitled Refugee Class of 2000 and the 1996 documentary Blending Milk and Water: Sex in the New World that plays off the genre of the AIDS educational video by asking a diverse cast of people to offer their candid views on sex. In 1984, he drew controversy with his project Confused: Sexual Views , a video installation that featured 27 people talking about sexuality for nine hours. In recent years, Wong has embraced new technologies as the foremost tools for artistic creation. “This is my studio,” he said of his phone in a CBC Arts Art Minute . “I proudly and loudly say [my phone] is where I do most of my work.”

Ben Lewis on Elliot Page

A brave, strong voice for queer actors.

“I think the real turning point for me in which he became a real inspiration for me was after his coming out speech at the HRC Time to Thrive conference in 2014. He was so raw and vulnerable and honest about his personal struggles with self-love and self-acceptance and I think it was really powerful proof that you can have it all in the eyes of the world, but if you can’t be openly and honestly who you are, there’s no way to really enjoy that success.

I just want to thank Elliot Page for all the hard work that he’s done and the bravery he’s shown in helping change the film and TV industry for queer actors like me.”

Ben Lewis is an actor, writer and director born and raised in Toronto, best known for his role on the CW show Arrow and his award-winning short films Zero Recognition and Apart From Everything.

Turning queer desire and heartbreak into song

Upon watching his baby boy being breastfed, Loudon Wainwright III penned the tongue-in-cheek track “Rufus is a Tit Man” — which assumed an ironic new meaning when that boy grew up to be gay. The Montreal-raised son of folk singers Kate McGarrigle and Wainwright III came out of the closet when he was a teenager, confirming a parental suspicion that was piqued by his commitment to singing along with Blondie on the radio as a child. Wainwright has been equally forthcoming about his homosexuality from the outset of his musical career, infusing his lyrics with drama, explicit queer desire and heartache. Following the release of his debut album, Wainwright moved into New York City’s Chelsea Hotel to write his sophomore effort, where he spiralled into a period plagued by drug addiction. After getting treatment, Wainwright expressed the belief that he was especially susceptible to addiction as a gay man: “Years of sexual insecurity, the low-grade discrimination you suffer, the need to belong — speed takes care of all that in one second,” he told the New York Times . The one-time libertine (he formerly subscribed to the “Wildean school of homosexuality”) eventually settled down and started composing operas — a fitting second act for a peformer who’s built his career on songs of yearning and thwarted desire.

Get the General Idea : This holy trinity of queer men inspired a generation of artists

By barr gilmore.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A soulful gay presence in Canadian music

Billy Newton-Davis knows from divas. His debut gig, back in 1973, was as a backing vocalist to Gloria Gaynor, and in 1989 he released “Can’t Live with You, Can’t Live Without You,” a duet with Céline Dion (herself an unlikely queer icon ). But that doesn’t mean he’s not a formidable presence in the Canadian music industry himself. The versatile R&B, jazz and gospel singer received Junos for best R&B/soul recording for his first two albums Love Is a Contact Sport (1986) and Spellbound (1989), and more recently took home a trophy for dance recording of the year for his foray into house music with the Deadmau5 collab “All U Ever Want.” For decades, Newton-Davis has been forthright about his identity as a gay man. It was during a powerful 2000 TV interview with Sylvia Sweeney that he first opened up about being HIV-positive , and the singer continues to lend his voice as an activist for HIV/AIDS awareness and the ongoing fight for equality.

Thriving as a trans woman in today’s world

On her 35th birthday, multidisciplinary artist Vivek Shraya published a Facebook post where she announced that she would now be identifying using female pronouns. It had been years since she’d felt the drive to express herself through songwriting, but to accompany the announcement she recorded “Girl It’s Your Time,” a single about self-acceptance in which she sings: “All those years I wore myself hard, all those years I kept you barred, I’m never going to hide you.” Shraya, the Alberta-raised child of Indian immigrants, was in her 20s when she first learned about transness. “I remember wishing that I had been presented with the option when I was younger,” she recounts . “It felt like a ship that had sailed.” Since transitioning, her work has courageously explored feminism, sisterhood, identity and surviving as a trans woman in today’s world. In 2017, Shraya collaborated with the Queer Songbook Orchestra on the EP Part-Time Woman , and in 2018 she published I’m Afraid of Men , a non-fiction account of all the havoc toxic masculinity and misogyny has wreaked upon both Shraya and the world at large. A director on the board of the Tegan and Sara Foundation, this year she made lemonade from the anonymous hate mail that she's been receiving since 2017 by transforming it into a comic book entitled Death Threat .

From feminist liberation to Oprah’s Book Club

Born on a West German air force base, Ann-Marie MacDonald trained at Montreal’s National Theatre School of Canada before moving to Toronto to explore its experimental theatre scene. At the same time, she got caught up in post-Stonewall queer and feminist liberation struggles, and landed a number of stage and screen roles — including Mary in the iconic Patricia Rozema film I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing . But MacDonald is perhaps most recognized for her successful writing career, including a series of acclaimed plays and her 1996 novel Fall on Your Knees , which follows a Cape Breton family over the course of several generations and was selected for Oprah's Book Club in 2002. Her most recent work, 2014’s Adult Onset , focuses on a middle-aged writer who has assumed the bulk of the child-rearing duties in a same-sex marriage, all while navigating the pain caused by her parents’ refusal to accept her sexuality. “I came of age in a world that thought it was absurd of same-sex people to marry one another,” MacDonald says . “It was like that until I was 40. So getting married and having children is the most surprising thing that has happened to me.”

Leila Marshy, author:

Ever since Fall On Your Knees , Ann-Marie MacDonald has been my lodestar idea of a writer: brilliant, sweeping, determined, undaunted. Our biographies are similar but we’d never met when last year — boldly and out of the blue — I asked if she would blurb my novel; then, bolder still, if she would host my launch. Reader, she said yes to both. This unexpected gesture is testament to her generosity and her commitment to giving back and paying it forward. She's also just really, really cool.

Chanty Marostica on Elvira Kurt

Storming comedy stages in a straight man’s world.

“Elvira existing just meant that I could too. And her being such a big name and swooping in in her neat outfits and me introducing her and me being so scared just meant that one day I could have that. I could be as big as her and have a family in show business and exist. So thank you for being my mentor and for being such a dear friend to me. And also thanks for supporting all of the kids. You’re a big deal, and you don’t have to but you always make sure that everybody's okay, and it’s really good to have you as a mama bear in the community.”

Chanty Marostica is a three-time Canadian Comedy Award winner, Juno nominee and Canada’s “Top Comic” 2018 and is the first out trans person to do all of those things.

A provocative canvas for exploring the male body

A member of the Young Romantics movement alongside a small group of his peers at the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design (now the Emily Carr University of Art and Design), Attila Richard Lukacs quickly left home after graduating to spend decades variously calling Berlin, New York and Hawaii home. Lukacs’s diverse body of work is representative of this itinerant spirit. His often blatantly homoerotic paintings marry classical configurations of the male body with contemporary renditions of deviant masculinity, depicting everything from military cadets to skinheads . Using pornographic magazines and his love of nature as reference points, Lukacs’s irreverent and thought-provoking canvases have been widely exhibited across Canada and abroad, drawing attention for their interrogation of the violent beauty of the male form captured through the gaze of a gay man.

‘Love has no rules’: In writing as in life, Wayson Choy gently refused to conform

By shaun brodie.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The royal highness of Montreal drag

If you find yourself in Montreal but can’t catch one of Mado Lamotte’s uproarious live performances, you can always head on over to Grévin Montréal to lay eyes upon a garish, hot-pink wax statue of the iconic drag queen. A product of the mind of Luc Provost, Mado Lamotte is a staple of Montreal nightlife and Quebec’s most famous drag queen. Provost gave birth to the character after dropping out of theatre school and beginning to experiment with drag personas as the host of a variety of bingo nights. He has said that he was influenced by the work of Michel Tremblay and the women he remembers from his childhood in Montreal’s Rosemont–La Petite-Patrie neighbourhood when creating Mado, whose look has evolved over the years from cigarette girl to Royal Highness . Conceived at the tail end of a fraught period in the city for queer people, when police regularly raided Montreal’s Gay Village, Mado amassed so much of a following that she decided to open a club in her name — Cabaret Mado — in 2002.

Jean-François Guevremont, director of programming and human resources at Fierté Montréal:

Mado has always been a unique and flawless character. She has paved the way for so many clown queens, allowing them to be themselves and to live their most colourful dreams. Smart, bitchy but sensitive, she is undeniably a forced to be reckoned with. Long live the queen!

Going boldly where few trans men have gone before

It is important to Syrus Marcus Ware that activists feel loved . As an engaged member of Toronto’s activist community himself — he’s a core member of Black Lives Matter Toronto — Ware decided to pay tribute to community mobilizers with the Activist Portrait Series. The project saw Ware paint portraits of activists on a massive scale typically reserved for dignitaries or the wealthy. In fact, a tendency to approach his subjects in large-scale is characteristic of much of Ware’s body of work. A trans man who splits his time as a visual artist, activist and scholar, Ware works with paint, installation and performance to confront oppressive systems. Beyond the Activist Portrait Series, Ware has commonly rendered trans activists, political heroes and people with disabilities in a larger-than-life fashion. His practice extends over large spans of time, too: since 2014, he has been the curator of the That’s So Gay exhibition at the Gladstone Hotel. Ware is also a father who works in youth advocacy and contributed the chapter “Going Boldly Where Few Men Have Gone Before: One Trans Man’s Experience of a Fertility Clinic and Insemination” to the book Who’s Your Daddy?: And Other Writings on Queer Parenting .

Keisha Williams, actress:

Syrus Marcus Ware works tirelessly to create spaces for Black, Indigenous and Racialized Queer and Trans people that celebrate our resilience and help shape and craft a revolutionary and beautiful future. He never stops bringing the world innovative ideas for how we can disrupt and change the systems that often oppress us.

A true Ingénue: On k.d. lang 's unwavering commitment to being her authentic self

By michael yerxa.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Canadian theatre's buddy in bad times

If there’s one thing Sky Gilbert isn’t afraid of, it’s going against the grain. In 1979, he co-founded Buddies in Bad Times Theatre , Canada’s preeminent theatre company devoted to staging plays written by and for queer people. Gilbert served as Buddies’ first artistic director, holding the role until he passed the torch in 1997. While more than 40 of his plays have been produced, Gilbert has also authored multiple collections of essays and poetry, and a handful of novels, including Sad Old Faggot , a work of autobiographical fiction. Gilbert also contributes opinion pieces — which often draw fiery backlash. A frequent critic of his own LGBTQ community, Gilbert proclaimed in a 2009 article that “gay is everywhere and, paradoxically, gay is also over” in response to the mainstream commercialization and sanitization of queer identity; in another article he described himself as “so hated by the gay community.” Gilbert performs in drag under the name Jane, and teaches in the school of theatre at the University of Guelph. In 2014, a laneway behind Buddies was dubbed “Sky Gilbert Lane.”

Not giving a Schitt about viewer expectations

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

Salvatore Antonio, Schitt’s Creek writer:

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

Confronting sexuality with his camera for four decades

Evergon has always made art as an affront to the conventions of dominant culture. Born in Niagara Falls, Ont., he rejected his birth name — Albert Jay Lunt — from the outset of his photographic career and rechristened himself with a slew of aliases, including Celluloso Evergonni, Egon Brut, Eve R. Gonzales and, most recognizably, Evergon. Known as one of the country’s most eccentric and frequently exhibited photographers, Evergon has, for 40-some years, audaciously probed marginalized queer sexuality, the construct of gender and the nude body. He has employed everything from non-silver printing to Polaroid photography to digital imaging to achieve his singular effect, imbuing his prints with a baroque sensibility through elaborate staging and the intense use of light and colour. Revitalizing and confrontational, Evergon’s work offers a queer take on the sort of photographic subjects society is accustomed to seeing.

Casey Mecija on Richard Fung

Re:orienting perceptions of queer asian identity.

“Richard Fung has made it possible for queer Asian artists like myself to be brave and fearless and public with the work that we produce. He’s done all of this work with a sense of humour, a generosity, a kindness and a sharp intelligence with the hopes of creating a more equitable world not just for LGBTQ people but for everyone. And for this I am grateful. Richard Fung — you are my shero, my hero, my artistic everything, so thank you for everything.”

Casey Mecija is an accomplished multidisciplinary artist primarily working in the fields of music and film.

A writer of desire, of flesh, of the body

After publishing her first collection of poetry, Aube à la saison , in 1965, Montreal writer Nicole Brossard spent decades carving out a place for herself in the pantheon of Canadian poetry by penning a formidable body of work that unabashedly echoes her declaration that “loving a woman is always political.” Brossard took an active role in the feminist movement in the mid-’70s, and that grounding has informed all the non-poetry work she has undertaken in the literary realm, from co-founding feminist newspaper Les Têtes de pioche to taking part in the publication of an anthology of Quebec women’s literature. The two-time recipient of the Governor General’s Literary Award for poetry in French is known for — among many other things — her 1987 novel Le Désert mauve , which will soon receive an opera adaptation, and her poem “Smooth Horizon of the Verb Love,” which is an ode to Montreal lesbian bar Chez Madame Arthur.

Marie-Ève Blais , author:

It’s hard to imagine writing by women, by lesbians, by homosexuals, without thinking about what Nicole Brossard’s writing conveys: the strength and the pride in complexity, in the margins — and beyond that, the literary quality that expresses what is, in my opinion, literature’s great strength: expressing desire. A writer of desire, of flesh, of the body, of translation, she is without a doubt one of the greatest writers of our time.

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

By heath v. salazar.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ensuring the stories of queer women of colour are heard

“These women have never been heard,” Makeda Silvera writes in Silenced , a monumental work of oral history woven from the accounts of Caribbean domestic workers in Canada. Throughout her career as a writer, editor and political activist, Silvera has laboured to make sure the stories of women — particularly queer women of colour — get told. In 1985, she co-founded Sister Vision, a pioneering Canadian indie press devoted to publishing writing by women of colour, and in 1991, she published Piece of My Heart: A Lesbian of Colour Anthology — the first anthology of its kind to be published in North America. Silvera has also painted vivid, multilayered portraits of the immigrant experience (she immigrated to Canada from Jamaica at 12 years old) and the African and Caribbean slave diaspora in her rousing works of fiction, which include the short story collection Her Head a Village and novel The Heart Does Not Bend .

Shawn Hitchins on Daniel MacIvor

Breaking down the stage door for lgbtq voices.

“What I would say to Daniel is thank you. Thank you for creating a space and clearing the land — which is what a lot of these artists did in the ’80s and ’90s and early 2000s. I mean, there was no subgenre of LGBT. They walked into these spaces and they said, ‘I’m here.’ We have to keep pushing forward. We have to take the space that they’ve created for us and not waste it.”

Best known for sparking the global wave of Ginger Pride by marching hundreds of redheads through the streets of Edinburgh, Shawn Hitchins is an award-winning entertainer and author.

Committing himself to art in the face of HIV

Standing 5-foot-8, finishing with a C average in school and having a run-of-the-mill appearance led this pop artist to decide the moniker “Joe Average” sufficiently represented who he was, which happened to be, well, average. But the magnitude of his contributions to Canadian art and queer activism have proven he is anything but. When he was 27 years old, doctors told Average that he was HIV-positive and may only have months to live. Receiving this news filled him with the conviction to live without inhibitions and unflinchingly pursue his dream of becoming an artist. The oeuvre he has crafted since — a kaleidoscopic collection of cartoonish people, animals and elements of nature — has touched viewers worldwide for its tenderhearted portrayal of the harmony of all living things on earth. Average is also a well-known advocate for HIV/AIDS awareness and LGBTQ rights, and frequently donates his artwork to charitable causes. In 2002, Vancouver’s mayor proclaimed Nov. 3 “Joe Average Day,” and his contributions were recently recognized by the Royal Canadian Mint, which commissioned the artist to design a 2019 loonie to commemorate the progress achieved by the queer community — and point to the work still to be done.

These lesbian film narratives go straight for the heart

Léa Pool’s fiction and documentary films are characterized by their nuanced investigations of exile and identity. The Switzerland-born daughter of a Polish Holocaust survivor, Pool relocated to Canada at age 25 to study in Montreal, where she went on to produce a number of films with the National Film Board that conveyed the female experience with authenticity. In Pool’s narratives, sexual identities and emotional conditions are in states of flux — from Genie Award-winning films like Anne Trister (about a grieving student who develops an attraction to an old friend) and Straight for the Heart (which follows the end of a of bisexual polyamorous relationship ends) to her sequence within the omnibus film Montreal Stories (starring Anne Dorval as a young lesbian woman in an ambulance, recalling her life). Treading the fine line between homoerotic and homosocial female relationships, Pool's characters have added remarkable depth to the Canadian film canon.

The queer prince of Toronto: How the genius and magic of Will Munro will live on forever

By sarah liss.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A pioneering voice in Indigenous theatre

In his writer’s bio, Tomson Highway jokes that “at one point in his life, his trophy case collapsed from the terrible weight and killed three people.” It isn’t far outside the realm of possibility — Highway is among Canada’s most decorated playwrights, and his impact as a queer Indigenous writer is immeasurable. At age six, Highway was taken from his parents and placed in a residential school, and after graduating from university, he got involved in social work within Indigenous communities until he turned 30 — at which point he started to write. Highway took the country by storm with 1986’s The Rez Sisters , which blended a realist view of day-to-day life on a First Nations reserve with elements of camp and Indigenous spirituality — and even boldly included a character grieving the loss of her female lover. Highway worked closely with his brother René, a dancer and choreographer who was also openly gay, before René passed away from AIDS-related causes in 1990; Highway’s 1998 novel, Kiss of the Fur Queen , is a fictionalized account of their childhood experiences in a residential school, and the René-inspired character Gabriel is gay — a portrayal that Margaret Atwood praised as “pioneering.” After René’s death, Highway told Maclean’s that his job was to be “twice as joyful...because I promised to be joyful for both of us.” For years, he served as the artistic director of Toronto’s Native Earth Performing Arts, the country’s oldest professional Indigenous theatre company, and now splits his time between Ontario’s Sudbury area and Gatineau, Que., with his partner of 30-plus years.

Probing what it means to be queer in Quebec and beyond

From nearly the very start of his career as a playwright in 1981, Michel Marc Bouchard’s dramatic work has probed ideas about what it means to be a queer individual both within Québécois society and the world at large. Born in small-town Quebec, Bouchard went on to study theatre at the University of Ottawa, and secured his place in the national theatre pantheon with Les Feluettes , a coming-of-age romance between two young men presented through a play within a play that recalls a past atrocity. (It was later turned into an award-winning film adaptation, Lilies , directed by John Greyson .) A number of Bouchard’s other works have received movie renditions, including Les Muses orphelines and Tom at the Farm , the latter of which Xavier Dolan brought to the big screen in 2013. His 2012 play Christine, la reine-garçon , about the 17th-century Swedish queen who became an unlikely icon for defying gender norms, is currently being turned into an opera co-commissioned by the Opéra de Montréal and the Canadian Opera Company in Toronto. Composer Julien Bilodeau has theorized that Christine resonates so widely because it explores the “foundation of modern society...free spirit, gender equality, and scientific knowledge.”

Gwen Benaway on Trish Salah

Making trans women’s lives visible through deep lyrical joy.

“Go and pick up a copy of Wanting in Arabic , Trish’s first collection of poetry, and immediately you’ll be struck by the beauty and the deep lyrical joy of Trish’s poetry. She makes trans women’s lives visible, but more than that, she makes incredibly gorgeous art.

To Trish I would say thank you for your outstanding contributions to trans poetry and trans literature and scholarship in Canada. You’ve made it possible for me and many other trans women to exist, to feel that our voices matter, that we could speak and create art. You’ve helped us have a bridge between the trans women who came before us and the trans women who are coming after us.”

Gwen Benaway is the award-winning author of three collections of poetry.

Finding a home in the Asian diaspora

25 years ago, a debut novel arrived to an outpouring of praise for being one of the most stirring depictions of the tensions leading up to the 1983 riots in Colombo, Sri Lanka ever written. That novel was Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy , which evoked elements of the author’s upbringing as a closeted youth coming to terms with his sexuality against that volatile backdrop (Deepa Mehta is set to direct the film adaptation). Just as in the novel, Selvadurai’s family immigrated to Canada, where he attended university and dabbled in TV writing before publishing a number of widely read novels and short story collections that powerfully draw on his Sri Lankan heritage and his experiences as a gay man. In a 2003 essay entitled “Coming Out” that appeared in a 2003 issue of Time magazine focused on Asian diaspora, Selvadurai explored these intertwined themes. “In this country that I still considered my home,” he wrote, “I could never be at home.”

She rose up to become the soundtrack of the queer movement

In 1982, Lorraine Segato and Billy Bryans received a phone call that would change everything. The Toronto International Film Festival was looking for musicians, but neither of the bands the pair played in together (Mama Quilla 11 and V) were available — so they decided to assemble a new group. Their one-off band, featuring Segato as vocalist, performed to a rapturous reception, and soon they were offered a recording contract, leading to the formation of influential new world music group The Parachute Club. They rose to fame with their equality anthem “Rise Up,” a song that became the de facto soundtrack to queer social causes and political movements at the time. Segato — an out lesbian — served as the group’s lead vocalist and songwriter until the band broke up, and has since gone on to release three solo albums and record a dance remix of “Rise Up” for WorldPride 2014. In addition to her musical endeavours, Segato is a dedicated activist and played pivotal roles in the creation of the documentaries Queen Street West: The Rebel Zone and Lowdown Tracks .

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

“An older gentleman once asked me, after a show, whether all my plays were ‘gay-themed,’” recounts Jordan Tannahill , the prolific, sui generis Canadian theatre-maker. Tannahill’s knee-jerk response was to try to dispel the perception that all his work was inherently gay, but in hindsight, he wishes he’d responded: “‘Yes. Even the plays about straight people.’ Because my queer politic suffuses everything I write.” The Ottawa-born artist moved to Toronto at 18 to mount a relentless streak of plays that discarded convention by incorporating amateur actors, on-site staging, live-streaming, myth and reality, Tannahill’s suburban upbringing, and queer love and politics. In 2012, Tannahill and his then-partner William Ellis gave an old barbershop in Toronto’s Kensington Market a makeover to turn it into Videofag , a now-legendary multidisciplinary arts hub where they lived and held readings, screenings, exhibitions and parties until 2016. Tannahill has also collaborated with choreographers Christopher House and Akram Khan on staged pieces at the intersection of dance and theatre; penned the autofiction novel Liminal ; and produced a virtual reality experience, Draw Me Close , a recreation of his childhood living room drawn by artist Teva Harrison. In 2018, Tannahill became the youngest two-time winner of the Governor General’s Award for Drama for his pair of plays Botticelli in the Fire and Sunday in Sodom .

Christopher House , choreographer and artistic director of Toronto Dance Theatre

Jordan Tannahill is a force of nature: a radical queer amalgam of artist, polymath, activist, sensualist and kind-hearted, wayward angel. Whether writing, directing, co-creating Videofag or challenging the hateful policies of the Sultan of Brunei through an intervention at Claridge’s in London, he brings the same calm ability to cut to the essence of what is necessary. And he’s just scratched the surface of his extraordinary potential!

The pioneering, unabashedly queer feminism of artist duo Allyson Mitchell and Deirdre Logue

By adrienne crossman.

Who are Allyson Mitchell and Deirdre Logue?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zero patience for convention

You can’t unfasten John Greyson’s films from his political convictions. The Toronto-based filmmaker first made a name for himself in the 1990s with a string of eclectic works that were influenced by topical issues in the queer community, including homophobic violence, police mistreatment of the queer population and the HIV/AIDS epidemic. In 1991, Greyson produced the musical short The Making of Monsters , partly based on the murder of Kenneth Zeller, a Toronto schoolteacher who was beaten to death by five students. Shortly after, he directed a CBC docudrama entitled After the Bath about a sensationalized news story that London, Ont. law enforcers used to justify a witch hunt of local cruising venues. Greyson’s breakthrough work, Zero Patience , melodically calls the urban legend of Patient Zero into question by way of an original musical book and score. His 1996 film Lilies , an adaptation of a play by Michel Marc Bouchard , tells a multilayered love story between two young men — and won the 1996 Genie Award for best picture. In 2013, Greyson was arrested in Cairo after filming a protest and imprisoned for 50 days, leading to a campaign that pressured the Egyptian government to release him. A figure who is as radical in his activism as he is in his media production, Greyson has also helmed a number of video essays, a murder mystery web series and Fig Trees , a “documentary opera” chronicling the struggles of two AIDS activists.

Stephen Jackman-Torkoff on Beverly Glenn-Copeland

A kind soul enters an extraordinary second act.

“I feel like he’s the Queero we all need because he reminds us that we can do something. And we have a lot of compassion in our generation and if we activate that we can make a lot of change.

Thank you Glenn for all the music you’ve created, all the space that you’ve created for people. Thank you for never stopping making music. I’m glad it’s been a long road with this. And thank you for being one of the kindest, most compassionate people I know.”

Stephen Jackman-Torkoff is a performer, playwright and wandering poet who has acted in productions across Canada and is the resident poet with the Queer Songbook Orchestra.

Her “tiny movies” empower the disenfranchised

While cinephiles mourn the demise of the big-screen experience in favour of living room viewing on Netflix, Midi Onodera is a proud pioneer in the field of “tiny movies”: films shot on small, mobile cameras, with the intent of being viewed on small, mobile screens. Informed by her background in experimental cinema, Onodera is a filmmaker and video artist whose work fuses a number of formats — from the old-school mediums of Hi8 and 16mm, to low-fi iPhone apps and mass-produced toy cameras — in order to point a personal lens at the world, letting the viewer see it through the eyes of a Japanese-Canadian, lesbian woman and feminist. Onodera has explained that “mobile videos have the potential to expand storytelling conventions and can empower disenfranchised voices,” and her penetrating micro-shorts — including 2006–2007’s A Movie A Day “vidoodle” series — use this short-form, small-screen format to explore individual and transnational identity. Through her art, she’s been on the cutting edge of exploring what has now become an everyday practice: pointing our phone cameras at ourselves and uploading constantly to social media. Onodera has also helmed video essays on her creative methodology and directed the award-winning 1995 feature Skin Deep .

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

By oliver skinner.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oliver Skinner is a writer and filmmaker living in Ontario.

An enduring hardcore shock to polite Canadian sensibilities

Bruce LaBruce is not for the faint of heart. The cult filmmaker originally set out to be a film theorist or critic, and first amassed a following through the publication of “queercore” zine J.D.s alongside Toronto punk fixture G.B. Jones . As an active member of the local punk scene, LaBruce first got involved with experimental filmmaking when he started shooting Super 8 movies that documented his circle’s subversive lifestyles and radical takes on sexuality. 1991’s No Skin Off My Ass , which chronicles a punk hairdresser who falls for a young skinhead, was LaBruce’s first film to make waves on the indie circuit. It also featured graphic sex and radical politics — two elements that, along with brutal violence, would come to define the transgressive body of work that he has moulded since, including Super 8½ , Otto; or, Up with Dead People and The Misandrists . LaBruce has said the substantial use of violence and anti-establishment ideology that permeates his work are likely the product of being called a sissy so many times growing up. Forget respectability politics and rainbow Doritos — LaBruce has never worried about being “safe” enough to fit in.

The crotch grab heard around the world

Unmistakable for her jet-black fringe and provocative lyrics that boldly brought songs of lesbian desire to the ears of Canadians in the ’80s, Carole Pope first rose to fame as the vocalist of Toronto-based rock group Rough Trade. Although the band’s 1980 single “High School Confidential” explicitly referenced same-sex feelings and featured controversial lyrics like “It makes me cream my jeans when she comes my way,” Canadian audiences embraced Pope. The new wave legend was showered with Junos , winning the award for most promising female vocalist of the year in ’81 and best female vocalist of the year in ’83 and ’84 (and, of course, spicing up the broadcast with some onstage antics during the ’82 awards). As a solo artist, Pope has long been a fixture in Canada’s queer community: she re-recorded Rough Trade’s infamous track for use in the first season of Queer as Folk ; she titled her 2015 EP Music for Lesbians ; and in her 2001 memoir, Anti Diva , she gave fans unadulterated access into her personal history, which included an account of her early-’80s romance with Dusty Springfield. Pope is an undeniable envelope-pusher who broke barriers for queer representation in the Canadian music industry.

The gay godfather of Southern Ontario gothic

For being such a highly regarded author of novels, plays and short stories (not to mention a number of scripts for television and radio), Timothy Findley did his best to stay out of the spotlight, eventually moving to split his time between Stratford, Ont., and the south of France in order to work on his writing in peace. The author was similarly discreet when it came to talking about his sexuality — he rarely alluded to it while giving interviews — yet he peppered his writing with homoerotic undertones, complex depictions of masculinity and the occasional affair between same-sex characters. Before turning to writing, Findley had built a successful career as an actor, sharing the stage with Alec Guinness and William Hutt at the Stratford Festival. In 1962, he met the man who would become his lifelong romantic partner and collaborator: William Whitehead, an acclaimed documentary writer for the CBC who would type up and review many of Findley’s manuscripts. Findley went on to become one of the most esteemed members of Canada’s writing community and was remembered by Governor General Adrienne Clarkson as “a most extraordinary person” and “an atmosphere” when he passed away in 2002.

Natasha Negovanlis on Candy Palmater

The kickass queer indigenous comic that standup stages needed.

“I love that she proves that there’s no one way to be a queer woman. I love that she explores all aspects of her identity and shares all of them and encourages people to think about their isms as well and how the things that make us different are also our super powers in a way.

Candy, I just want to thank you for kicking ass and taking names. Despite all of the adversities you’ve faced in your life, you are an incredibly strong and inspiring woman and I appreciate all of the work that you do so much — and that you do it with a sense of humour.”

Natasha Negovanlis is an award-winning actor, writer and producer best known for playing Carmilla Karnstein in the web series and feature film Carmilla.

Acting allowed this Stratford legend to embrace his identity

In a theatrical career that spanned more than 50 years, William Hutt was the longtime face of the Stratford Festival who climbed its stage to play almost every Shakespearean hero written. But in his private life, he did something even more heroic: he was openly bisexual. Although Hutt kept his personal relationships more concealed from the public, his director Richard Nielsen put it pointedly: “As a young man, he was openly gay at a time when being openly gay was a very dangerous identity.” Before working in the theatre, Hutt served as a medic in World War II, where he would intermittently take leave to travel to London and catch theatrical productions. Upon returning to Canada, the aspiring actor enrolled in the University of Toronto’s Trinity College and joined a student theatre troupe. While he once used a family dinner to confess “I’m another Oscar Wilde!,” Hutt struggled to accept his sexuality for some time — until he performed as an androgynous Pandarus in a Stratford Festival production of Troilus and Cressida , a role that, according to his biographer , helped liberate him from some of his anxiety. For Hutt, acting wasn’t just his craft — it allowed him to accept who he truly was.

A genderqueer force of nature

A highly prolific artist and social activist since the early 1990s, Mirha-Soleil Ross is a force of nature. Raised in Montreal, she moved to Toronto and co-founded the pivotal queer zine Gendertrash From Hell with her partner Xanthra Phillippa Mackay. New issues of Gendertrash were published between 1993 and 1995, compiling original art, poetry, fiction and resource lists, all with the aim of giving “a voice to gender queers, who’ve been discouraged from speaking out and communicating with each other.” Ross went on to helm Counting Past 2, the world’s first trans art festival, and developed a number of performance art pieces that sought to educate audiences about the realities of sex work and debunk stereotypes about trans identity. A staunch animal rights activist, Ross used her post as grand marshal of the 2001 Toronto Pride to lead a squadron of queer animal rights activists into the parade. She has also persistently spearheaded community programs — such as The 519’s Meal Trans program and a trans sex worker outreach program — to fight for better conditions for trans individuals and sex workers in Toronto.

Finding room for hope in the humour, light and lyricism of Marie-Claire Blais

By stéphanie verge.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A bright fire of queerness burning through Canadian music

For those who watched him come up under the name Final Fantasy in the Torontopia scene of the mid-aughts — a violin, a loop pedal, clever songs riffing on Dungeons & Dragons — Owen Pallett’s rise feels both improbable and inevitable. A Polaris and a Grammy later (for 2006’s He Poos Clouds and Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs , respectively), Pallett finds himself providing string and orchestral arrangements for the likes of Frank Ocean and Taylor Swift, penning viral musicological analyses of Katy Perry and composing movie scores and operas. And while queerness has always permeated his musical output, his sexual identity assumed a more prominent position with his 2014 release In Conflict . “There’s a lot of people out there who cannot hear the words that a homosexual Canadian is singing and think that it has any bearing on their own lives,” he said after the album’s release . “When I look at my fellow indie musicians, the ones who are queer and who sell the most tickets and get the biggest guarantees, they are all closeted, with the exception of Tegan and Sara .” But Pallett, undeterred, knows how important this sort of openness is — and he’s not waiting for the rest of the world to catch up.

Kim Katrin Milan on Witch Prophet

The visionary, inclusive hip hop of ayo leilani.

“Hip hop spaces are often really homophobic and really transphobic...But when I go to an 88 Days show or when I’m listening to their work or listening to Leilani’s work, I don’t have to work to reconcile my identity, and know that the culture that’s being created from this space is only supporting our community and is not doing anything to harm it.

I want to thank you, Leilani, for the work that you’ve done in Toronto — the spaces that you have made for us to vibe in and to get to know each other. Thank you for being such a creative visionary and for pushing even without the support that I know you need.”

Kim Katrin Milan is an award-winning human rights educator, writer and content producer.

The original troublemaker of Toronto queercore punk

G.B. Jones was a product of Toronto’s queer punk scene of the 1980s and ’90s — or, rather, Toronto’s queer punk scene was a product of G.B. Jones. The multidisciplinary artist helped launch the city’s queercore movement alongside filmmaker Bruce LaBruce , and together the partners-in-crime produced a number of no-budget films that have since gained cult status, as well as the era-defining fanzine J.D.s (which stood for “juvenile delinquents”). In addition to appearing as a frequent face in LaBruce’s early work — although her face is so often masked by her signature sunglasses — Jones’s filmography includes The Troublemakers , The Yo-Yo Gang (a 30-minute exploitation flick about girl gangs) and The Lollipop Generation , which reportedly took 13 years to complete (take that, Boyhood ). She was also a central figure in the post-punk band Fifth Column, who are perhaps best known for their controversial single “All Women Are Bitches.” Her visual work, some of which channels Tom of Finland-style erotic tropes to form lesbian fantasy images of bikers and cops, has been exhibited internationally and was compiled into a 1996 limited-edition book entitled, naturally, G.B. Jones .

How Thom Fitzgerald ’s cinematic garden led me beyond the emotional hellscape of the teenage closet

By peter knegt.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The renegade trio pushing the boundaries of art

When the exhibition Drawing the Line — a provocative photo series portraying acts of lesbian sexuality, from kissing to bondage — opened in 1989 Vancouver, it didn’t cause a stir for merely subverting the male-dominated gaze of traditional photography. The series was also groundbreaking because it invited attendees to inscribe their reactions to the images on the gallery walls, incorporating an interactive dimension that forced the viewers to examine their sexual biases and desires. This was by the brilliant, renegade design of Vancouver’s Kiss & Tell collective: a trio of artists — Persimmon Blackbridge, Lizard Jones and Susan Stewart — who spent the ’90s unleashing a number of envelope-pushing multimedia pieces upon the Canadian public. Kiss & Tell perpetually put lesbian sexual politics at the foreground and used live performance to transcend the limits of verbal expression.

A queer, feminist, Afrofuturist vision of the world

Her mother was a library technician, her father was a writer and she’s been a voracious reader since the mere age of three — so should it come as any surprise that Nalo Hopkinson grew up to pursue a literary career? The celebrated speculative fiction author was born in Jamaica, grew up in Guyana and Trinidad, and moved to Toronto at 16, which resulted in a fusion of her new and former homes weaving their way into her creative output. Hopkinson often draws on Afro-Caribbean culture and folklore, synthesizing these influences with feminist, futurist and sci-fi elements — her debut novel, Brown Girl in the Ring , takes place in a dystopic Toronto ravaged by economic collapse. Hopkinson’s queer identity has materialized in both explicit and implicit forms in her fiction: her story “Fisherman” centres on a trans fisherman who was assigned female at birth, and “Something to Hitch Meat To” chronicles the employees of a company who produce pornography for straight men, even though few of them are straight themselves. Last year on Bi Visibility Day, Hopkinson tweeted: “Didn’t know I was queer till my 30s...Society makes sexuality so fraught, non-normalized sexuality even more so. So it makes sense that some of us don’t ‘just know’ our own sexualities right away.”

The inimitable lion of the contemporary dance world

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

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

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

Heath V. Salazar on Lucas Silveira

The first openly trans man in history to sign a major label record deal.

“Lucas, I would say, thank you so much. I would not be able to be where I am without the work that you’ve done. And so I’m really thankful for your bravery, and I’m thankful for your generosity and your wonderful laugh. You bring humour to everything and I think that that is such a gift and such a testament to your strength. So, thank you.”

A fearless force in lesbian filmmaking

When she was just 28 years old, Patricia Rozema burst onto the Canadian film scene with her accomplished debut feature I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing . The low-budget comedy, following a daydream-prone temp worker who develops a crush on an art gallery owner (whose ex-lover is played by fellow Super Queero Ann-Marie MacDonald ), screened at the 1987 Cannes Film Festival to rave reviews and the Prix de la jeunesse award. Mermaids performed exceptionally well at the box office (at least for a female-led Canadian arthouse flick) and landed a spot on TIFF’s list of top 10 Canadian films of all time in 1993. Rozema went on to helm a number of Canadian indies, including the sapphic love story When Night is Falling , before directing Mansfield Park , Kit Kittredge: An American Girl and a range of television work. The filmmaker — who was raised in Sarnia by strict Dutch Calvinist parents who limited her access to TV and movies — was initially wary about coming out publicly and being labelled “that lesbian filmmaker.” But as the industry has finally made inroads toward the mainstream inclusion of LGBTQ voices, Rozema’s decision to be a pioneering queer filmmaker has paid off. Her career in Canadian cinema is having a renaissance, and her most recent efforts — Into the Forest (starring Ellen Page ) and Mouthpiece — are fearlessly feminist and as powerful as anything she’s ever produced.

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

By owen pallett.

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

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

What is important, to me, about The Hidden Cameras — aside from Joel’s unique songwriting voice, and the quality of music that he and his collaborators created and continue to create — was that the project, from 2001 to 2004, felt like an invitation-toward-participation more than a band. There were shows where there were upwards of 40 musicians onstage, of any sexuality and gender. Although the early songs focused on distilling a specifically gay male experience, the journey felt shared with people of any gender and/or sexuality; it felt liberating and inclusive. Although the thesis of the band, and its membership, may have changed over the years, the impact of that initial spark of inclusivity continued to be felt by many of its participants, continuing to inform the practice of so many of us nearly two decades later.

Owen Pallett is an award-winning composer, violinist, keyboardist and vocalist (and was himself profiled for Super Queeroes ).

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

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

Andrew Johnston, comedian:

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

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

By bojana stancic.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Winnipeg duo laughing in the face of Canadiana

Winnipeg-based duo Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan first entered the public eye with "We’re Talking Vulva," an educational music video about female genitalia. Everything the performance artists touch is saturated with this irreverent approach to convention, as they insert queer and gender politics into popular spaces typically absent of them. (Dempsey and Millan were, at one point, a couple, but decided to remain partners in art even after breaking up.) In 1997, they masterminded the One Gay City project, which featured bus shelter ads that parodied Winnipeg’s former civic slogan “One Great City.” The ads were never installed because the agency in control of the shelters objected to them, leaving the artists to recreate the project as a series of postcards instead (the dispute was the subject of a human rights challenge that ended in settlement). You might also recognize the artists from Lesbian National Parks and Services , an ongoing performance piece that sees the pair don forest ranger outfits to queer the Canadiana cliché of national parks tourism. The pair’s work has routinely incited uproar and faced censorship, but they have never shied away from performing a shameless, comical queer reality into existence.

The caped crusader of the Indigenous renaissance

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

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

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

A true drag queen supreme for 45 years and counting

Michelle Ross has been a reigning queen on Toronto’s Church Street and beyond for a sublime 45 years. Glamorously brandishing the self-appointed title of “professional diva,” Ross first climbed onto the stage to deliver a fiery performance of Dionne Warwick’s “Anyone Who Had a Heart” in 1974. A Warwick track may have been her opening number, but more than anyone else, Michelle Ross is a supreme authority on her namesake, Diana Ross. Ross (Michelle, that is) has been known to cap off her show-stopping acts by removing her wig as a clever way of calling attention to the fine line between identity and performance. For Ross, conceptions of male and female are no more than tropes: “Both sides are equally part of the glamour,” she says . “I see them as stories that are ready for a makeover.” Even though the Jamaican-born drag queen has brought her exalted energy to stages all over the globe, her home is still Church Street, where she continues to perform weekly.

Tynomi Banks, drag queen and Canada's a Drag star :

I remember the first time I saw Michelle Ross. I must have been 22, just entering the gay scene, figuring out, “How do I fit in this new world?” Then one evening I was out with some friends at a drag show and this beautiful being/creature walked out onto the stage. The way she commanded everyone's attention was effortless and magical. The impact this woman has had on my life has been so inspiring, and it has given me ambition and push to reach my goals and create new ones constantly. Her love and support of the community goes beyond. She is the mother of all mothers, and I'll always cherish our friendship.

Canada has had way more than 69 Super Queeroes. Here are a few we missed.

Produced by: Peter Knegt and Mercedes Grundy | Writing and editing: Oliver Skinner, Peter Knegt, Reiko Milley and Eleanor Knowles | Design: Mercedes Grundy and Jeff Hume | Website: Jeff Hume | Video: Lucius Dechausay, Mercedes Grundy and Kiah Welsh | Illustrations: Jonathan Busch | Graphics: Allison Cake | Special thanks: Christopher DiRaddo, Michael Erickson, James Fowler, Trevor Green, Rachel Iwaasa, Thomas LeBlanc, Zachari Logan, Renata Mohamed, Kathleen Mullen, Matthew-Robin Nye, Sean O'Neill, Tanya Schuh, Michael Venus, Johnnie Walker, Tranna Wintour

224 Picton Main St, Picton, ON K0K 2T0

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Girls Nite Out

Comedy Country wraps up our 8th season of laughs in style at The Regent Theatre with a special night of laughs for the ladies!

Girls Nite Out is an all female, all funny stand-up and improv comedy ensemble featuring CBC darlings, Canadian Comedy Award Winners and Second City including: Jennine Profeta, Elvira Kurt, Diana Frances and Karen Parker . Gather your gal pals for a sizzling night of stand-up and improvised comedy fit for the feistiest furnished by some of Canada’s top women in comedy!

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Praise for Girls Nite Out

“Funny, smart and energetic. This show as everything I like in my comedy.” – Norm Foster, playwright

“Girls Nite Out has become a staple in our Theatre Collingwood annual playbill. Our audiences love them so much! A great group of ladies that provide fantastic entertainment and are a joy to work with!” – Erica Angus, Theatre Collingwood

“Our audiences leave feeling that they have laughed a lot and experienced something truly special.” – Sarah Quick, Globus Theatre

Elvira Kurt

An icon of Canadian comedy, Elvira’s globe-trotting stand-up career spans The Second City, Just for Laughs, Baroness von Sketch and The Tonight Show, as well as her own specials for Comedy Central, The Comedy Network, Showtime, HBO, CTV and CBC, in addition to hosting popcultured with Elvira Kurt and Spin Off. The Canadian Screen Award winning writer’s credits include Canada’s Drag Race, Masterchef Canada, Iron Chef Canada and the Great Canadian Baking Show.

@ELtotheVEE

Jennine Profeta

Actor, improviser, and writer Jennine Profeta performed across the globe as part of The Second City’s National Touring Company and Second City Theatricals. She’s written for the Gemini and Genie Awards, CBC Radio, Chatelaine, Today’s Parent and Best Health and was a principal player in Howie Mandel’s “Howie Do It” for NBC.

@jennineprofeta

www.jennineprofeta.com

Diana Frances

Originally from Vancouver, this award-winning improviser and comedy writer now calls Toronto home. Credits include Corner Gas: The Animated Series (Comedy Network,) Still Standing (CBC) and The Beaverton (Comedy Network). Diana has been nominated for 8 Canadian Comedy Awards for ‘Best Female Improviser’, and has entertained Canadian troops in Bosnia, Egypt, Israel and Afghanistan.

@dianafrancesvan

www.dianafrances.ca

Karen Parker

3-time Canadian Comedy Award winner and Dora-nominated Karen is an alumnae of the Second City Toronto as a performer and director. She has performed with theatre companies across Canada, and her film and television credits include: People of Earth, Baroness Von Sketch, Hemlock Grove, Beauty & The Beast, The Firm, Saving Hope, Being Erica, The Jon Dore Show and Instant Star.

@thekarenparker1

www.karenlouiseparker.com

Prince Edward County’s own comedy duos Short Attention Spa (Lenny Epstein and Gavin North) and Silver + Gold (Julianne and Paul Snepsts) join forces to bring you a knee-slapping, satirical look back at The County’s top news stories of 2022. It’s the return of The County Roundup.

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Elvira Kurt

This trail-blazing queer icon has all the credits: talk show host – popcultured with Elvira Kurt , game show host -Spin Off, sold out standup shows and comedy special tapings worldwide. She’s guest starred: Baroness Von Sketch Show (and wrote for), DeGrassi: The Next Generation , Miss Persona. Elvira also writes, produces and directs talent: Netflix’s Drink Masters , Canada’s Drag Race and The Great Canadian Baking Show . Awards include Canadian Screen, Canadian Comedy, SF Film Festival, Toronto Fringe Festival Awards AND the Jury Choice Award at the Cannes Short Film Showcase! for Reel Women Seen which she wrote. Clearly, Elvira’s no slouch.

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40 at 40: Stand-up Elvira Kurt on making LGBTQ+ history and staying honest

April 19, 2021 Glenn Sumi and  Daryl Jung

• Copy current article link

Over the last 40 years, dozens of stand-up comics have graced the cover of NOW. But only a few have made history. That’s what Elvira Kurt did the year before she was on our December 29, 1994 cover.

With her appearance on the CBC talk show Friday Night! With Ralph Benmergui in 1993, she became the first out queer performer on national TV – a few months before Lea DeLaria did the same thing on the higher profile Arsenio Hall Show south of the border.

In Daryl Jung’s cover story, Kurt discusses that Benmurgui appearance, calling it “a horror…. the most bizarre experience I’ve ever had.” She recalls feeling a wall of shock from the audience. The truly bizarre thing? Today – albeit 27 years later – Kurt doesn’t remember much about the experience.

“It sounds like this poor lamb being led to the slaughter,” she says, laughing. “I kind of remember what I wore, and I think I took a prop with me on set. But I don’t remember anything else.”

In true Kurt fashion, she brought the fact of her missing memory up in her therapy session, which she completed right before talking to me.

“One of the things I have been exploring in therapy is the way I shut things down and don’t want to think about them – I put them away,” she explains.

“It’s probably a survival tactic. Do you remember the end of the first Raiders Of The Lost Ark movie? The whole film has been about getting this object, and the very last scene is of the object being put into a giant warehouse filled with hundreds of crates. That’s where I imagine my trauma is. And it’s not in a big box; it’s probably the size of a ring box.”

What’s telling about reading that 1994 story is how psychologically insightful Kurt was about her artistic process – and this was years before she had begun therapy. Working on the Yuk Yuk’s circuit, she kept her queer material off the stage, she says, because she was keeping it from herself. Her breakthrough came when she was honest; and she was given the chance to do that in alternative clubs like the Rivoli and the Queen’s Bedroom.

“I was pretty insightful for someone with no self-awareness,” she says. “Dropping all my defences made me realize I even had them. So that was pretty huge. I wasn’t being fulfilled doing comedy while wearing this armour. It was very liberating to lose it. It’s something I still try to do, to peel the layers further and find out how much more truthful I can be.”

Even back then, a few years into her stand-up career, she was getting laughs from the acidic, judgemental observations of her Hungarian immigrant parents. They’ve been grouchy constants in her act, and Kurt’s impressions of them – especially her mother, Irene – still ring true.

Her parents are still alive but live apart – she recently took them to get their COVID-19 vaccinations separately. Did they ever become proud of her achievements, which include a couple of TV shows, like Pop-Cultured and SpinOff, as well as three decades of doing comedy both here and internationally? (Kurt just got nominated for two Canadian Screen Awards, for her writing on Canada’s Drag Race and The Great Canadian Baking Show.)

“I outlasted their desire to criticize me,” she says. “I don’t think they expected my career to go on this long. And now they’re just” – she gives me a bit of the accent, as if she’s just tasted something bitter – “Ugh… at least you gave us grandkids.” Her busiest time as a stand-up was when she was based in L.A. – the cover story alludes to her contemplating making the move.

“There was a period of six to seven years when I spent a lot of time criss-crossing the U.S. doing shows,” she says. “I moved to L.A. to be in L.A., but I was finding it hard to be there and it was easier to run away and be on the road constantly working. It was lucrative and I could easily fool myself into thinking, ‘Well, at least I’m doing stand-up.’ But it wasn’t getting me where I wanted to be, the reason I was in L.A.”

After gaining so much attention and momentum in Canada, she didn’t anticipate having to start from the bottom in the L.A. scene. It was impossible to get into the major rooms, and in the smaller rooms that were just starting out there were people who weren’t very good acting as gatekeepers.

“I was full of hubris and ego and found it very difficult,” she says. “I didn’t have a support system – I didn’t even think of having one. Every once in a while, I’d run into another Canadian comic, and the one thing about L.A. that was true then – I’m not sure if it is now – is you didn’t want to hear anyone’s tale of woe. You didn’t want the stink of that to get on you. So I kept myself isolated. I made it harder on myself.”

As if to make up for the lack of any support early on in her own career, she’s always been incredibly generous with new and emerging comics.

“It didn’t occur to me that I might get any help from others – nor, with my youthful arrogance, did I think I needed any help either,” she says, ruefully. “I would have pushed it away or put the Kurt family world view on it, which was contemptuous and suspicious.

“But now, I’m a full two generations older than many younger comics, and I feel like it’s my job to help support them,” she says. “I’ve lived through this experience. I’m not as plugged in as the current comics, but I’m not afraid to make connections and share any information I have. I like to remind people that they’re awesome, because that’s always good to hear. And I have no problem sharing what I know. Why would I want to sit on that information?”

She also realizes that these days, talented comics don’t even need to work within the system.

“I don’t think everyone’s figured that out yet,” she says. “You don’t need to go through the CBC or do Just for Laughs. You think it’s prestigious, but you don’t need it. They need you. We’re all Jay-Z. They need us more than we need them. 

“One of the great things about having a 15-year-old kid is not only do I have the deep bench of my queer knowledge that extends back to the golden age of Hollywood, but I also have what she is constantly discovering online,” says Kurt. “She’s shown me stuff on TikTok before it goes viral, and these guys are so talented, so good. I don’t know how viable it is in the long term, but to be able to take a kernel of pop culture and repurpose it, and get millions of views and likes, there’s a real talent there.”

Not that Kurt is coming soon to TikTok. These days, besides writing on acclaimed TV shows – she loves the Drag Race writing because it’s often in-the-moment reactions to the queens’ outfits, ad-libbed and spoken into judges earpieces – and doing virtual comedy, she’s constructing a show that’s unlike anything she’s done before. She likens it more to theatre than comedy.

“In this pursuit of deeper honestly, I’ve been wondering how I can change the form of stand-up,” she says. “How can I use the space I perform in in a different way? I like performing without a handheld microphone when I can. I love the freedom to be able to move about a space and try to be creative in a more natural way. I feel like it’s a natural progression of where I’m going with my work. I’m not afraid to be daring. I can trust that I’m going to make something good, because after all this time I know that I’m good. I didn’t know that before. It’s liberated me.”

And then she pauses, perhaps sensing a Kurt family view punchline to deflate all that confident optimism.

“Just before the pandemic I was going to embark on this new daring frontier of theatre work. Instead what I’ve done is learn how to sit still in a chair for my Zoom comedy shows.”

Below, find Daryl Jung’s cover story on Elvira Kurt, republished from NOW’s December 29, 1994 issue .

Lesbian laugh queen shoots for across-the-board appeal

By Daryl Jung

Toronto comic Elvira Kurt wants to make it by being upfront and operating on her own terms.

On stage she picks apart the minutiae of daily living – and, of course, relationships – with the vulnerability of a child and the loving eye of a woman in control. In doing so, she’s hilarious. In her short career, she’s amassed more fans than she’s even aware of.

Indeed, her set at the Town Hall Theatre in New York City last June – as part of the OUTrageous Comedy 94 show with Sandra Bernhard – caused Comedy Central honchos to vigorously pursue her for their Out There II show, shot at Caroline’s Comedy Club. It was her U.S. network television debut.

She’s also turned heads at Montreal’s Just For Laughs fest, opened for Scott Thompson’s Champagne Soul show at the Improv in Washington, DC, and written for the Gemini, Juno and Hockey awards on CBC-TV. Her appearance on the Comics! series features a gay spoof on I Love Lucy, called I Love Ethel, with Thompson as Ethel.

She came of age with parents who immigrated to Canada from Hungary and had an unenlightened upbringing that made career choices as difficult as sexual ones. Comedy caught her attention as a high-schooler via Yuk Yuk’s and, like so many others, she took her first shot at it on amateur night. Her selection of professions – and, ultimately, lesbian lovers – was not what her folks had in mind.

“The reason I tell the stories I do is because my parents’ disappointment is so obvious,” says the engaging Kurt, plugging her New Year’s Eve First Night gig at BCE Place. “Faced with that attitude so constantly, I have to make jokes about it. I go home and the three of us have this pain competition, and I lose – every time. That’s very funny to me.

“When you’re the child of immigrants, you don’t know much. They don’t try to get access to any of the cultural icons of the new community or society they’re in. The constant struggling – the scrapping – that I do now makes me feel alive in ways a world like that never could.

Women’s humour

“In the back of my mind I always thought I could make people laugh, but I still don’t know why. I do know that my sense of humour comes from the women on television I most admired. Gilda Radner was my big hero.”

Kurt says she never did fit in. She graduated with a bachelor of science degree in psychology and criminology from the U of T – her parents wanted her to be a doctor. But when she flunked chemistry – “What’s a girl to do?”

With her degree she could have been a personnel manager or worked in a prison. She ended up instructing Boots drugstore clerks on computers. Kurt thought she should probably expand her horizons.

“I was in such denial about my sexuality at the time that I couldn’t relate to what anyone at work was talking about,” she says. “I wasn’t into registering my glasswear, or whatever they do. There was just nothing that appealed to me about nine to five.

“I didn’t come into comedy with any kind of consciousness of it. I was such a misfit that I just stumbled into it. Now when I realize how versatile I am, I understand that not having a specific focus made me a jack-of-all-trades. I mastered how to do comedy in the most horrific situations. When you can do that, it’s easy to adapt to whatever may come along.”

Adapting to being gay and a comic was confusing at best. On the Yuk Yuk’s circuit, always having a secret made it difficult for her to connect or actually become good friends with the guys. It also didn’t help her act.

“I kept the gay material off the stage because I was keeping it from myself,” she says. “Since I never said I was gay, I thought I was quite successful at hiding it. That’s the most amazing thing about denial. Here I was, with my hand in the cookie jar, saying ‘No, it’s not!’ I figured as long as I was not saying it, people must not believe it.”

She took a job at Second City in London, a different experience from the stand-up scene, one not so imbued with the desperation of individual competitiveness. It was a more nurturing environment, more of a family situation. There, she met someone “important.”

From that point on, when talking about relationships, Kurt didn’t want to change pronouns anymore. If it mattered so much that she’d be fired because of it, she figured the job wasn’t worth having – a first step in leaving her denial behind. She came clean and didn’t lose the job, learning instead the valuable improv ropes that helped her soften edges sharpened at Yuk Yuk’s.

And then things started happening. She discovered alternative bookings, taking the stage at places like the Living Well Cafe, the Rivoli and the Queen’s Bedroom, armed with a book full of notes and a fierce commitment to creating on the spot.

She became the queen of the gay scene, effortlessly charming a good share of straight folks along the way. She broadened her base and stockpiled material, using her dual comedy background to the max. Having made certain people like her for the right reasons, the challenge of taking the act back to Yuk Yuk’s, just to see where it would go, beckoned her. The experience was a revelation.

Antagonistic package

“I saw what I had almost become,” Kurt states flatly. “I was turning into a very slick, antagonistic package, always waiting for someone to start up on me about being a woman or about not being funny. The gigs at the Queen’s Bedroom taught me that I didn’t want to do that kind of comedy anymore.”

It was in the Bedroom – not the oft misogynist boy’s club that is Yuk Yuk’s – where everything fell into place.

“It occurred to me that those audiences don’t want to attack you,” enthuses Kurt. “They just want to enjoy you, which is very different from the comedy clubs. I knew what I wanted to get away from, but I couldn’t do black if I didn’t understand what white was. I just didn’t need to be this aggressive person. I was embarrassed in a way. I’d been so hard on them.

“Then my style just started to change. In that deconstruction of my style, I began to talk about things I wouldn’t have been able to within that style – just who I am, without pretending.”

Her first high-profile coming out was a disaster. The producers of Friday Night! With Ralph Benmergui were flogging the titillation factor and told Kurt not to hold back. The result was two minutes of general, banal observations and then “Here’s the gay stuff.”

She was getting attention, but the audience never recovered.

“It was a horror,” she says. “It was the most bizarre experience I’ve ever had. For a person who relies so heavily on her connection with the audience, to feel a wall of shock come up so instantly like that was almost devastating.

“But it was an experience, and I’m glad I had it. Attention? Yeah. But to what end? It was my first taste of representing something that people didn’t understand. I became the ‘dyke on TV.’ I wasn’t thrilled with that at all.”

What Kurt realized was that her forte was “word groups with laughs at the end,” and that she’d like to be thought of as a comic who is gay, not a gay comic. Her sexuality is only a fraction of the complete comedy package.

“I don’t think my gay stuff is my best stuff,” she says. “It’s the honest stuff. I’ve gotten to the point where I’m not afraid to let all the experiences I’ve had inform my act. This is how I got here.”

And now Kurt is haunting L.A., where it’s been pointed out by the powers that be that she might choose to stay closeted in her act. Not a chance.

“When you’re telling the truth, you uncover the darkness,” she explains. “It’s under everything. I can’t talk about my parents or my sexuality and have it be any different from the way it really is, which is very difficult and painful.

“I try to put myself in as many positions as possible – warts and all. I don’t know any other way to go. It’s the way I’ve dealt with everything in my career. It feels like I’m going through a snowstorm. Everybody else is saying, ‘There’s a blizzard! Why don’t we stay here and think about how we’re going to get through it?’

“And I’m like, ‘We’re already in the blizzard. Let’s just keep going!'”

Check back every Monday for a new  40 at 40 cover story  marking NOW’s 40th anniversary year.

@glennsumi | @nowtoronto

Glenn Sumi talks to Elvira Kurt and Nour Hadidi about the rocky transition to Zoom performances in the latest episode of the NOW What podcast, available on  Apple Podcasts  or  Spotify  or playable directly below:

NOW What is a twice-weekly podcast that explores the ways Torontonians are coping with life in the time of coronavirus. New episodes are available Tuesdays and Fridays.

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Elvira Kurt

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Season 2 E 2 • 06/05/1999

S1 • E1 Comedy Central Presents Wanda Sykes

S1 • e2 comedy central presents marc maron, s1 • e3 comedy central presents reggie mcfadden, s1 • e4 comedy central presents lewis black, s1 • e5 comedy central presents greg fitzsimmons, s1 • e6 comedy central presents mitch hedberg, s1 • e7 comedy central presents sue murphy, s1 • e8 comedy central presents kevin brennan, s2 • e1 comedy central presents kevin nealon, s2 • e2 comedy central presents elvira kurt, s2 • e3 comedy central presents margaret smith, s2 • e4 comedy central presents mark curry, s2 • e5 comedy central presents greg proops, s2 • e6 comedy central presents hugh fink, s2 • e7 comedy central presents kevin meaney, s2 • e8 comedy central presents dave attell, s2 • e9 comedy central presents mario cantone, s2 • e10 comedy central presents todd barry, s2 • e11 comedy central presents jack coen, s2 • e12 comedy central presents patton oswalt, "south park: snow day" trailer south park, make the most of a day off with "south park: snow day" south park s26, "star trek: very short treks" has lightyears of laughs star trek: very short treks s1, fires and full moons breed a new terror on wolf pack, this game of m.a.s.h. is a real monster in cursed friends cursed friends.

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What to do when your own number appears to ring your home phone

I f you are like me and refuse to give up your home landline, you're probably no stranger to... well, strange calls. Landlines are more prone to spam calls than cellphones, which offer better call-blocking options . 

If you're used to getting the occasional spam call on your landline, you likely already have a system in place to handle it. Perhaps you just hang up the call as soon as you see a number you don't recognize (or, maybe you recognize it at this point because they call so much!). Or, maybe you even pick up the line and give them a piece of your mind. However, is this the right thing to do?

And what happens when your landline rings and the caller ID lists your number? Strange, right? This is what happened to one of our CyberGuy Report subscribers, who reached out to ask us about it. Crazy as it sounds, this person said the scammer got a hold of their home phone number and used it to call the same number they were spoofing. This is obviously a bit more of a cause for concern than ordinary scammers.

Now, if the scammer you're seeing on your caller ID seems like they are calling from your own landline phone number, you'll want to do the steps above in addition to the three steps below:

1) Alert your phone provider: If your number has been spoofed, you should inform your phone company as soon as possible. Depending on the situation, they may be able to guide you on the best way to proceed.

2) Get your personal information offline: There are several ways that phone spoofers can hijack your phone number, but it's most likely because they can easily find personal information online. There are several tools you can use to find where your personal information is lurking online and get it offline, away from scammers who want to steal your information and exploit that information, whether to commit identity theft or something else.

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While no service promises to remove all your data from the internet, having a removal service is great if you want to constantly monitor and automate the process of removing your information from hundreds of sites continuously over a longer period of time. Check out my top picks for data removal services here.

3) Change your number: If all else fails and your phone company is not really able to help, a good idea is to change your home phone number altogether. While you may not want to do this, it may be the only solution, especially if the scammer continues to call you on your same number and if friends and family are getting those calls as well.

HOW TO STOP PHONE NUMBER SPOOFING AND PROTECT YOURSELF FROM SCAMMERS

Now, let’s shift our focus to why it’s best not to engage with scammers who call you, regardless of whether they’re using your own phone number or another one. Here are a few reasons why: 

1) Safety : Engaging with unknown callers can potentially expose you to scams or other forms of fraud.

2) Privacy : Even if you’re giving them a hard time, they might still be gathering information about you in the meantime. And, now, with AI voice scams, these scammers can clone your voice to use for other types of scams.

3) Encouragement : Responding to these calls, even negatively, can signal to the caller that your number is active, which might lead to more calls.

END OF ANNOYING ROBOCALLS? FTC CRACKS DOWN ON DECEPTIVE PRACTICES

Of course, nobody wants to continue to get scam calls. So, there are a few recommended steps you can take instead:

1) Let the answering machine answer or go to voicemail. This allows you to screen calls without directly engaging with potential scammers. You can avoid direct interaction with them and listen to the message at your convenience to determine if it’s legitimate.

2) Block the numbers : If you notice certain numbers repeatedly calling, you can block them. Take a look at our best landing call-blocking devices. These are especially helpful in blocking robocalls but can also help block individual scammers.

• Use Star Codes: Many landline phones allow you to block calls by using star codes. For example, you can dial *60 to block specific numbers.
• Call-Blocking Devices : Devices can be attached to your landline to block unwanted calls. These devices can come preloaded with known spam numbers and allow you to add numbers manually. Check out my favorite call-blocking devices for landlines by clicking here .
• Service Provider Features: Contact your landline service provider to inquire about any call-blocking features they offer. Some providers have services that can help manage unwanted calls.

3) Report the calls : If you’re in the U.S., you can report unwanted calls to the Federal Trade Commission .

4) Add yourself to the no-call list: Consider adding your phone number to the National Do Not Call Registry , which can help stop some of the scam and telemarketing calls you're getting.

Remember, while these methods can significantly reduce unwanted calls, it may not be possible to block all spam calls completely. Always exercise caution and avoid sharing personal information over the phone with unknown callers. My rule of thumb involves asking yourself one simple question: "Did I ask for this call?" If the answer is no, then hang up.

HOW TO AVOID BEING DUPED BY ROBOCALLS NOW AND FOREVER

Getting spam calls on your landline is no fun, and even more so when those calls are coming from your own number. Remember, it’s important to protect your personal information and privacy and always to be cautious when dealing with unknown callers. Using the techniques above can help ensure you're not only using best practices when dealing with scammers but also protecting yourself in the long run from future ones.

How do you think phone companies should address scam calls and caller ID spoofing? Let us know by writing us at Cyberguy.com/Contact

For more of my tech tips & security alerts, subscribe to my free CyberGuy Report Newsletter by heading to Cyberguy.com/Newsletter

Ask Kurt a question or let us know what stories you'd like us to cover .

Answers to the most-asked CyberGuy questions:

• What is the best way to protect your Mac, Windows, iPhone and Android devices from getting hacked?
• What is the best way to stay private, secure, and anonymous while browsing the web?
• How can I get rid of robocalls with apps and data removal services?

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Original article source: What to do when your own number appears to ring your home phone

Points and Payouts: Stephan Jaeger wins $1.64 million, 500 FedExCup points in Houston

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Stephan Jaeger is the Scottie Scheffler slayer.

As it often does, it boiled down to the penultimate stroke of the Texas Children’s Houston Open. With a conversion from just outside five feet, Scheffler would have forced a playoff, but the putt veered left. That left Jaeger as the champion, thus ending Scheffler’s winning streak at two.

It’s Jaeger’s first PGA TOUR victory in 135 career starts. He’s in his fifth season as a member. Despite that and some wobble upon arrival to Memorial Park Golf Course, the 34-year-old was +5000 to win pre-tournament at BetMGM. That was tied for 12th-shortest in the field of 144.

Recapping the detail of what you already knew in general, Scheffler was a heavy favorite at just +275 , but he settles as one of five runners-up. More on the rest in a moment.

Dating back to Scheffler’s victory at the WM Phoenix Open in February 2023, he’s prevailed four times on the PGA TOUR. So, while he’s most definitely the world’s top talent right now, contrary to understandable belief he doesn’t win every time he pegs it, but Jaeger is just the third to break through in a field with Scheffler in it in the interim.

Jaeger easily was the shortest of the three on BetMGM’s board. Kurt Kitayama was +20000 when he won the 2023 Arnold Palmer Invitational presented by Mastercard, while then-amateur Nick Dunlap was +40000 to prevail at The American Express two months ago.

With an 8-under 62 in his second round in Houston, defending champion Tony Finau matched the course record that he already had shared with Scheffler. Finau backpedaled with a third-round 72 before recovering for a Sunday 66. He’d land among the quintet at T2. At +2200 , he was fifth-shortest to win.

Last week’s defending champion of the Valspar Championship, Taylor Moore, also shared second place in Houston. He was +5500 pre-tournament. The other two T2s will remain non-winners on the PGA TOUR for at least another week – Thomas Detry ( +6600 ) and Alejandro Tosti ( +30000 ).

In both his previous two starts, Wyndham Clark was victimized by Scheffler and placed second. At +1200 to win, Clark was second-shortest at Memorial Park and finished T31.

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Rob Bolton is a Golfbet columnist for the PGA TOUR. The Chicagoland native has been playing fantasy golf since 1994, so he was just waiting for the Internet to catch up with him. Follow Rob Bolton on Twitter .