I was twenty-one in 1992, living in Toronto with my first boyfriend. We’d spent our last two years in high school dating in secret, so by early ’92, I was relieved to be out, proud, connected. The public streets were still hostile. Dangerous. Bedrooms were dangerous. Sex was dangerous. That...
Meaghan Loraas [mks_dropcap style=”square” size=”35″ bg_color=”#505556″ txt_color=”#ffffff”]B[/mks_dropcap]rian is irritated that the television isn’t working. I tell him not to do it but he’s sixteen and he does what he wants. He grabs my broom. He...
All of the essays in Brazen Femme do just that–help ‘good girls’ reach down and grab hold of our wild selves, throw out what we have been taught in favour of what we innately know. That to be femme is to be a survivor, an unbending battle ax. And it helps ‘bad girls’...
H for Heteronormativity Charles Demers When I was about twenty years old, my brother around seventeen, our dad took us out for what was meant to be a nice family dinner at one of Vancouver’s tackiest sushi restaurants. Fairly close to a university, the place’s tagline was “Miso Horny” (Get it? Just...
“First I found myself daughter, then granddaughter, and eventually, femme. Anna Camilleri’s I Am a Red Dress: Incantations on a Grandmother, a Mother and a Daughter is a poetic meditation on identity, empowerment, personal history, sexuality and abuse. Part mythic storytelling, part personal...
after Frank O’Hara Adam Meisner I’m leaving New York, again. Under swept trusses & skirting Harlem at the early hours of Columbia’s Sunday young. The drive piddles over the Washington & under another flag– the progeny of powdered wigs held higher ten years after I watched a...
