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the original internet portal for gay, lesbian, 2-spirited,
transgendered, transsexual and questioning youth and
adults living in Norfolk County, Ontario, Canada

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John Harnick has been flaunting the rainbow flag in Norfolk County since 1996 and is one of the army of 'un-sung heroes' in Canada's gay, lesbian and trans communities who have lived our lives openly and honestly as the women and men that we really are!

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trans communities — both national and international

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The unfinished project of gay activism
[XTRA, June 30, 2011]

In the lead-up to Pride season across Canada, we look at the fights gays and lesbians are still fighting. The targets range from the courts to the media, from elementary schools to the world of professional sport. We've come a long way, but this list illlustrates that the work isn't over.

1    Creating a society free of violence

Reported gaybashings continued to rise in 2009, the most recent year for which statistics are available. And, compared to racially motivated or religiously motivated crimes, gaybashings were more likely to turn violent and result in injuries, according to Statistics Canada. ...

3    Ending bullying in schools

More than one in five queer high school students reported being physically harassed by classmates, according to Egale Canada's climate survey. The solutions - education, zero-tolerance policies, proactive principals and teachers, dedicated queer-issues staffers - must be fought school board by school board across the country.

4    Promoting gay-straight alliances in all schools

When the Halton Catholic District School Board banned gay-straight alliances in late 2010, it touched off a media firestorm and revealed disturbing details about school boards' official policies on gay issues in Canada's publicly funded Catholic schools. ...

19    Looking after seniors and aging gay and trans people

Canada's first generation of out, proud activist gays is gradually retiring. At some point, many will need long-term care facilities - facilities that are often run by religious groups and are notoriously prudish. The work of transforming these spaces from phobic to welcoming has just begun.

[Note: We won the war but the battles continue to rage. There's still much work to be done.]

[Continued here]

The Faces Missing from 'The Gay Rights Movement'
[Huffington Post, January 25, 2012]

I am a gay, multiracial male who grew up in Tennessee. When I was little I felt like an outsider, like many gay folks, but my "outsider" position was not just because I was gay; it was much more complicated. I was one of the only people of color in my school, and I was the most effeminate little boy there, as well, which pegged me immediately as a "faggot." I also was pudgy, not very athletic, and liked video games too much, but those are all minor aspects of why I didn't fit in. Needless to say, no one around me was like me, the puggy, effeminate, brown boy living in the South -- and that was lonely.

As I grew up and got to high school, a few gay kids did start coming out, and I did make some gay friends, but these kids, due to being in a white suburb, were all white. So my race and my gayness then began to work together, making me feel different, making me feel hopeless, making me unable to consider that it could get better. When I watched some of my favorite gay-friendly TV shows, like Will & Grace, I would see gay folks having fun, being gay, and enjoying life in a city, most of the time. This gave me my first insight into what being gay was, and my first suspicion that gay was not like me -- it was wealthy, it was white, and it didn't bother to have people who looked like me for me to look up to, or even begin to understand what my experience was like as a gay person of color. ...

So as I watched the YouTube Video "The Gay Rights Movement," which has recently gone viral, I got progressively sadder as the video played through footage of what the gay community seems to consider milestones. Lots of familiar faces rolled by, and happy emotions did rise inside me, but I still felt hints of sadness, a sadness that was familiar, that wasn't new, and I knew exactly what it was: I, and a lot of other people within the gay community, were not there. It's not like we weren't ever there; there have been tons of queer folks of color who have done amazing things in America.

For instance, the video shows Martin Luther King Jr., but not his advisor and one of the main powers behind him, Bayard Rustin, a gay black man. The video shows Ellen Degeneres over and over talking about suicides, but not another famous lesbian who is black, Wanda Sykes. It shows coverage of the suicides of gay male youths, but not the countless suicides of transgender people, which happen yearly and go quite unnoticed, just like the faces of trans people in the video.

[Continued here]

• Nathan Manske: Black LGBTQ Stories: Are Black Gay Men Just Special Guests in a White Gay World? [Huffington Post, February 6, 2012]

Stephen Winter is from Chicago, Ill. When I asked Stephen to share a story about being a black gay man, he needed to spend a good amount of time mulling over his answer:

        It was a journey within myself that I went through this week, when I was trying to figure out, as someone who is perceived as gay and perceived as black... without pissing myself off, because I don't want to be the black guy. On a regular week, I'm Stephen Winter, art guy, film person. This week, I was Stephen-Winter-does-not-want-to-be-a-black-gay-guy first. Still, one that has relations with men and dudes, still wants to proudly operate under a society where cops think I'm black, but [I] did not want to respond in a way that would help perpetuate what I think is a status quo that we really need to move beyond.

Stephen's father was from Hungary, a Jew-turned-Catholic who fled the country to escape the Nazis. His mother was from Jamaica. Both of them went to Chicago in the '40s, where they met.

        What they did say to me, very clearly, was, "Your mother is considered black, and your father is considered white. But we're not. I'm Jamaican, I'm Czechoslovakian. You're our child. You're American, and you are wonderful. And so you shall be."

[Note: I've been under attack for decades for actively supporting the full, welcoming inclusion of Blacks, Asians, South Asians, Latinos and Native Americans in the wider GLT communities.]

Reclaiming Our Homostory

"Operation Soap was a raid by the Metropolitan Toronto Police against four gay bathhouses in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, which took place on February 5, 1981. More than three hundred men were arrested, the largest mass arrest in Canada since the 1970 October crisis, before the record was broken during the 2006 Stanley Cup Playoffs in Edmonton, Alberta.

The event marked a major turning point in the history of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered community in Canada. The raids and their aftermath are today widely considered to be the Canadian equivalent of the 1969 Stonewall riots in New York City. Mass protests and rallies were held denouncing the incident. These evolved into Toronto's current Gay Pride Week, which is now one of the world's largest gay pride festivals and celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2005." [Wikipedia]

[Continued here]

Hate Watch, Canada

"Historian Daniel Goldhagen, discussing antisemitic hate groups, argues that we should view verbal violence as 'an assault in its own right, having been intended to produce profound damage — emotional, psychological, and social-to the dignity and honor of the Jews. The wounds that people suffer by... such vituperation... can be as bad as... [a] beating.' " [Wikipedia]

[Continued here]

the Family Circus

"We fight a lot, you know, but that's family. We may be dysfunctional but we're still family." [Star Jones]

[Continued here]

Drive-by homophobia & transphobia as it happens

"Homophobia is like racism and anti-Semitism and other forms of bigotry in that it seeks to dehumanize a large group of people, to deny their humanity, their dignity and personhood." [Coretta Scott King]

[Continued here]

our Health Matters

"At the University of Western Ontario, more than 2,000 freshmen and their frosh leaders crowded around an outdoor stage on Wednesday evening for the One Love Rally — a show focused on mental wellness, diversity and sexual health." [Globe & Mail]

[Continued here]

Shocking behaviour of healthcare professionals

"Over the decades, many health-care professionals have spoken out against electroshock.

But for the first time an organization of professionals has been formed to expose what they call a harmful treatment, stating that 'mainstream psychiatry has flagrantly and persistently misrepresented both this procedure and the vast body of research surrounding it.' " [John Bonnar]

[Continued here]

Stalag 69

"Then the loudspeakers broadcast some noisy classical music while the SS stripped him naked and shoved a tin pail over his head. Next they sicced their ferocious German Shephards on him; the guard dogs first bit into his groin and thighs, then devoured him right in front of us. His shrieks of pain were distorted and amplified by the pail in which his head was trapped." [Pierre Seel]

[Continued here]

Gay Pride Parades Through The Years

Toronto to host World Pride 2014 [CBC, October 19, 2009]

"It doesn't matter what you do in the bedroom as long as you don't do it in the street and frighten the horses." [Daphne Fielding]

[Continued here]

Bread and Circuses

"Colin Firth summed up a strange Hollywood agony concisely this week, as he was nominated for an Oscar for his role as a gay college professor in A Single Man. 'If you're known as a straight guy, playing a gay role, you get rewarded for that,' he said. 'If you're a gay man and you want to play a straight role, you don't get cast - and if a gay man wants to play a gay role now, you don't get cast.' " [The Sunday Times]

[Continued here]

Our Reel History

"When Vito Russo published the first edition of The Celluloid Closet in 1981, there was little question that it was a groundbreaking book. Today it is still one of the most informative and provocative books written about gay people and popular culture. By examining the images of homosexuality and gender variance in Hollywood films from the 1920s to the present, Russo traced a history not only of how gay men and lesbians had been erased or demonized in movies but in all of American culture as well." [Michael Bronski]

[Continued here]

Theater in the round

"Jaques:
All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages."
[William Shakespeare]

[Continued here]

gay Docs, no not that kind of doc

"When it comes to gay cinema, however, do we talk about films made by openly gay filmmakers? Do we include films that portray same-sex relationships? Do these films have to somehow advance the LGBT cause or contribute to the agenda of gay activists?" [Emrah Güler]

[Continued here]

Rob Duckworth ... unvarnished

"First, and foremost, Rob wasn't just gay; Rob was queer — "pink triangle" queer, fighting queer; and he wore this badge with utter dignity mixed with hauteur." [John A. Harnick]

[Continued here]

Creative Commons

"Whitman's sexuality is often discussed alongside his poetry. Though biographers continue to debate his sexuality, he is usually described as either homosexual or bisexual in his feelings and attractions. However, there is disagreement among biographers as to whether Whitman had actual sexual experiences with men. Whitman was concerned with politics throughout his life. He supported the Wilmot Proviso and opposed the extension of slavery generally. His poetry presented an egalitarian view of the races, and at one point he called for the abolition of slavery, but later he saw the abolitionist movement as a threat to democracy." [Wikipedia]

[Continued here]

realpolitik

"The 'thought police' that populate so much of gay culture and media are often every bit as intolerant as the zealots of the radical right." [Chris Thomas]

[Continued here]

A Penny for Your Thoughts

My own very personal reflections on a life pretty much well-lived

[Continued here]

Postcards from the edge ... of town

A series of vignettes first published in April of 1997

[Continued here]

Surviving and thriving...

"The ultimate success of all forms of oppression is our self-oppression. Self-oppression is achieved when the gay person has adopted and internalised straight people's definition of what is good and bad." [London Gay Liberation Front Manifesto]

[Continued here]

...or not

"The suicide of an 18-year-old Rutgers University student following an unimaginable invasion of his privacy has launched an overdue examination of casual — and possibly criminal — disregard for others' personal space." [Kathleen Parker, Washington Post]

[Continued here]

Hunk du Jour

" 'Gay athletes are very apprehensive about coming out of the closet during their careers,' a gay equality activist in Delhi told the Times of India. 'But Mitcham did that at the height of his career and has certainly faced problems because of that. But his performance has taken him beyond all of it.' " [SameSame]

[Continued here]

the good, the bad and the ugly

"As a young gay man of 21 and a victim of religious and social homophobia as a result of her comments I am now fearful for my personal safety and for that of those like me." [Steven Colhoun, a gay Christian, commenting on the homo-hating outbursts of Irish DUP MP and MLA Iris Robinson]

[Continued here]