By Theodosia Henney It was the final semester of college. I was sitting with one of my advisors in her office, and we were reviewing my most recent batch of poems and flash-prose; two of them were about having sex with a woman. Yes, they were big, queer, gay-ass poems imbued with desire and...
By Fazeela Jiwa | Guest Post from a Straight Ally My Indo-African Muslim childhood in Canada was one of dissonance. It meant being invited to share samosas with my class on “multicultural days,” but feeling embarrassed of my non-sandwich curry lunches on every other day. The teacher’s enthusiasm...
By Leah Horlick When I opened the email to learn that I had been selected to attend the 2012 Lambda Literary Retreat for Emerging LGBT writers, I may have shrieked. I grew up in a small town in the northeastern part of Saskatchewan. I’m a young woman and came out as a femme lesbian when I was...
by Geer Austin When I agreed to lead a creative writing workshop for homeless LGBT youth, I had been leading workshops for about ten years. The earliest ones had taken place in the apartment in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn where I lived with my domestic partner. Those groups consisted of...
I was recently following the cyber trail from UVic Pride’s website to various sites describing the rights and responsibilities for someone of a “majority” group entering a “minority space.” Some of the advice included a responsibility to listen to, not to argue...
In a writing workshop yesterday, my peers had a bad reaction to one writer’s use of the word “hooker.” This term is derogatory, they said. So it was jarring, hard to read. But sometimes a narrator or a character can say things that are derogatory, but in a way that is true to...
by Michael Walter Can the internet free us from Canada’s history of censorship? The Canadian government hasn’t always been the biggest protector of free speech. Sure, things have improved a lot in recent years; we’ve gradually seen the growth of an open public space where queer literature has made...
