Category: Queer Life

Someone asked me the other day if Paul was my gay boyfriend. I said no, because the label makes me think of a swishy, bitchy fag who would criticize my clothes and make catty comments about my dyke friends. Paul so far has shown little interest in my fashion choices and is far less catty than I am.

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This year I loved Folk Fest more than ever, because the welcoming of people with disabilities really sank in. It blew my mind and warmed my heart as much as the queer vibe. More…

Last week I expanded my horizons to Second Life, though my avatar is still floating like a dork at the entryway. All I’ve managed to do is make her thighs and stomach heftier than the starter model. More…

When I was in high school, I would rather have died than announce to the class that I was a lesbian. Not that it would even have occurred to me to label myself in the first place, to imagine that my intense lust for girls could be a public identity, and not just my secret problem. More…

I’m not sure why, but lately I have been obsessing over finding a snappy label for the particular subculture of dykes that I joined when I came out. If I’d been born in another era, I could have been a monocle-wearing mannish lesbian in 1920s Paris, or a high femme with a hard-living butch lover in 1950s America. Or even a radical lesbian separatist clearing land for a commune in the 1970s. But instead, I came out in 1993 in Vancouver. Nothing against the time or the place or the people–it’s just that I find it hard to describe my particular scene in a few potent words.

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Last December my generous, queer-positive Dad offered to take my girlfriend and me on a tropical holiday for spring break. Of course we said yes–we’d had a crappy, rainy fall and we couldn’t afford to pay for a trip like that ourselves. More…

I’ve always suspected that the Vagina Monologues would piss me off. But when a local women’s centre put on the Monologues as a fundraiser, I decided I should go and see if my suspicions were justified. Sure enough, supporting a good cause turned out to be pretty much the only enjoyable aspect of my theatre experience…. Vulva refers to the external genitalia-the labia, the clitoris, the vaginal introitus, and to things like the fourchette, fossa and frenulum, which I confess I didn’t even know about before researching this column. So you’d think Ensler might have used that v-word instead. More…

Jokes and the Unconscious dazzled me from the very first page. This brilliant graphic novel by performance poet Daphne Gottlieb and artist Diane DiMassa blazes through death and sex with compassion, honesty and a perfectly sick sense of humour. Oh, and did I mention it’s hot, too?More…

I can’t believe Notes on a Scandal is up for four Academy Awards. Can I just say that I totally hated it?

For those of you who haven’t seen it, Barbara (Judi Dench) is a bitter, frumpy woman obsessed with lovely young Sheba (Cate Blanchett). When Barbara finds out that Sheba is having sex with a teenage boy, she offers herself up as a confidante in hopes of getting closer to Sheba. But her manipulation escalates into blackmail, as Barbara becomes desperate to have Sheba as her “friend.”
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On New Year’s Day I ended up at an impromptu brunch where we had a discussion that was like a distillation of conversations I’ve been having throughout 2006, meaning a mix of despairing and philosophical.
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