Queer – Page 12 – Nicolas Demers

A couple of belated book reviews

Hey, didn’t I resolve in January to read fiction and then to blog about it? Why yes I did.

Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City

I’d started Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City in April, shortly after finishing The Five Books of Moses Lapinsky, and eventually finished it on my vacation in June. And just like Five Books, as with the previous book, I had a hard time getting into it. The problem, I think, was that there wasn’t any plot, just a bunch of characters living their lives and interacting.

But it grew on me. The lack of an overall plot stopped bothering me, and I just let Maupin lead me by the hand into the lives of these oddballs—not as sideshow freaks, but as interesting people who made San Francisco the city he loved. And hey, I can definitely relate to Mary Ann, the innocent newcomer.

Mary Ann Singleton was twenty-five years old when she saw San Francisco for the first time.

She came to the city alone for an eight-day vacation. On the fifth night she drank three Irish coffees at the Buena Vista, realized that her Mood Ring was blue, and decided to phone her mother in Cleveland.

Hee. “Mood Ring.”

And another sign of the times: all the scenes of cruising (both hetero and otherwise) at Safeways and laundromats. I mean, granted, they didn’t have the internet back then, but did people really do that? Oh my god, maybe they still do that! Have I been blind to all the hooking up going on at the Safeway on Davie? Damn, I’ll have to pay more attention in the future.

William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land

I totally forgot about this book, until I dug it up again in Ottawa, and decided to bring it back with me.

A bit of history: way back when, I borrowed from a friend a complete compilation of HP Lovecraft’s stories, in three large volumes. The second (IIRC) contained a review by Lovecraft of about a dozen horror/fantasy novels of the era. One of them, The Night Land, sounded intriguing—a story of the far future, where the last remnants of humankind are huddled in a massive fortress and the rest of the Earth is filled with horrible monsters. Lovecraft appreciated the weird and creepy settings, but objected to the silly pseudo-Olde-Fashioned Writing style, and the schmaltzy love story that drove the plot.

Don’t ask me how I got my hands on an obscure horror novel published in 1912, but I did. And say what you will about Lovecraft (like, that he was a creepy misogynistic bigot), but when it came to fiction the guy knew his shit. Everything he said in his review was absolutely on the nose. In fact, rereading The Night Land the second time around was even more painful than I remembered:

And I stood me up, and did peer about for any dread matter; but all seemed proper, and I began to stamp my feet against the earth, as that I would drive it from me, and this I do say as a whimsy, and I swung mine arms, as often you shall do in the cold days; and so I was presently something warmed. And I dismantled my cloak, and wrapped it around me, and did feel that the Diskos [his weapon, like a circular vibro-blade] was safe to my hip.

Then did I sit me down, and did glow a little with relish, in that I should now eat four of the tablets; for, indeed, these were my proper due, by reason of my shiftless fasting ere I came so wotless to my slumbering.

Now imagine 500+ pages of that. And I’ve spared you the really nauseating parts after he rescues his lady-love and takes her back to the Pyramid. They alternate between being all lovey-dovey, and her being an arbitrarily silly bitch so the big strong protector male has to hit her a few times so she’ll behave. Yeah, I’d forgotten how stunningly sexist the book was, and “Well, it was written in 1912” isn’t much of an excuse. Hodgson deliberately went for old-fashioned, not just in the language but the story dynamics, creating something I’d describe as “medieval”. As much as I hate doing it on principle, I had to skim a lot of passages until I got to the next plot point or action scene.

Some bits were interesting, though. The description of the Evil Forces was indeed pretty cool, as was the narrator’s musing that most of this future Earth wasn’t so much evil as just alien; dangerous to humans, sure, but not actively hostile to them, and still not without beauty.

At one point the protagonist was wondering if Naani (the love interest) had had other lovers between the present day and this future (because they’ve both been reincarnated many times) and actually got jealous over the possibility. That was just so silly to me that I felt sure the whole novel was a subtle deconstruction of the reincarnation romance trope. However, everything else seemed to be played completely straight, so I don’t know.

Bottom line: meh. It was kind of interesting as a specimen of old-time literature, but it fails as a love story, and only somewhat succeeds as horror and adventure. Only hardcore fans would enjoy this.

Book Review: The Five Books of Moses Lapinsky

Wow, that took a while. So much for my New Year’s resolution to read a novel a month, eh?

I started on this book in late January, after skipping through three quarters of the Mortal Engines quartet. Then I was taking a class, which left me with very little time and energy for such frivolities. But the class ended, and on Easter weekend I decided to pick it up again. I was immediately hooked, and devoured it in a three-day binge of more-or-less nonstop reading.

Wow, that took a while. So much for my New Year’s resolution to read a novel a month, eh?

I met Karen X. Tulchinsky years ago; she was leading a writing workshop, one night a week for… I don’t remember how many weeks. This was before I started blogging, but I was interested in writing. And meeting guys who were also interested in writing. The workshop didn’t help in that area, but otherwise I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. Ms. Tulchinsky was a great teacher, very friendly and supportive.

Now that I think about it, I’ve gotten the same impression from her previous books—one short story collection and two novels, all dealing with the trials and joys of being a Jewish dyke. I’m rereading some of the stories in In Her Nature, and (to this non-Jewish non-dyke) the history, the culture, the Yiddish, they never seem forced or self-conscious. Just a simple This is who I am. This is who we are. Sure, it’s okay to laugh along.

This latest book is different, though. It’s “queer” only in the loosest sense—only a couple of characters, including the titular narrator, are gay—but it’s still there, part of the tapestry of human experience. Another difference is that it’s not set in the present day (except for the framing narration at the start of each section, most of the action takes place in the 30’s and 40’s), and thus deals much more heavily in presenting Canada as it was then, and Canadian Jews as they were then. We know all the dates and facts about the Depression, about World War II, D-Day, about antisemitism. But the magic lies in making all that history come to life, and Tulchinsky pulls it off, brilliantly mixing the personal dramas with the wide sweep of historical events.

Interesting technique to really grab the reader: Tulchinsky writes in present-tense narration. Nice choice; it felt so natural I took a hundred pages to even notice.

This being a historical novel, the details are made up but the story is true. Toronto youths wearing Swastika badges, fighting Jewish kids; the Christie Pits riot; the disastrous Battle of Dieppe; pogroms in Tsarist Russia. All these things happened. And though Sonny “The Charger” Lapinsky never actually existed, other Jewish boxers lived and fought during the Depression. Though Yacov Lapinsky never existed, the stories he told of his escape from Russia are deeply rooted in reality—a lot more than I realised then, probably. Because, as I said, I’ve been rereading In Her Nature and one of the short stories there (“Canadian Shmadian”) contains some parts of those tales; surely they come courtesy of Tulchinsky’s older relatives.

Most of the novel’s events are related in chronological order, starting on the day after the Christie Pits riot in August 1933. Throughout the book we’re told all the facts, how that day affected the Lapinsky family: Sonny’s anger, Izzy’s brain damage. But in the last chapters take us back to the riot, and even though I knew exactly how things would turn out, I still couldn’t stop reading. Now that’s impressive.

The Five Books of Moses Lapinsky is a masterpiece: engrossing, educational, full of human drama that’s still not without comedy. Tulchinsky has done a wonderful job of honouring her family by creating this ficionalised, though still true, tale.

Graphic Novel Review: Fun Home

I love Alison Bechdel’s Dykes To Watch Out For, and have from the day I came out and picked up my first GO-Info (strip # 140, “The Last Tango”, where Mo and Harriet have sex one last time before breaking up for good). Until it ended earlier this year, it was the first thing I read when picking up Xtra! West, and I could always count on it to make me laugh make me think, or both. I own all the collected books, including The Indelible Alison Bechdel.

Fun Home Cover
Well you should see my story-reading baby
You should hear the things that she says
She says “Hon, drop dead, I’d rather go to bed
With Gabriel García Márquez
Cuddle up with William S. Burroughs
Leave on the light for bell hooks
I’ve been flirtin’ with Pierre Burton
‘Cause he’s so smart in his books”

—Moxy Früvous, “My Baby Loves A Bunch Of Authors”

I love Alison Bechdel’s Dykes To Watch Out For, and have from the day I came out and picked up my first GO-Info (strip # 140, “The Last Tango”, where Mo and Harriet have sex one last time before breaking up for good). Until it ended earlier this year, it was the first thing I read when picking up Xtra! West, and I could always count on it to make me laugh, make me think, or both. I own all the collected books, including The Indelible Alison Bechdel.

But, there was one book of hers missing from my collection: a non-DTWOF book I didn’t even know existed until this summer, when I saw it as part of an exhibition on animation and comics at the Art Gallery. I read it all the way through in one sitting, absolutely captivated. It’s poignant, disturbing in parts, brutally honest, yet at the same time masterfully intellectual and literate. A couple of weeks ago I bought it as a Christmas present to myself, and I’ve been compulsively rereading it over and over again. I guess this post is a way to get it out of my head.

In brief, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic is the story of Bechdel’s growing up, and her complicated relationship with her father. A few weeks after coming out to her parents at age 19, she learned he was gay. A few months later he was dead, possibly having committed suicide. Fun Home is Bechdel’s attempt to work out the threads of his life, her own life, and how the two intersected.

But Fun Home is more than a memoir. It’s a story about stories: specifically, the books that Alison and her father both loved—and for the last couple of years of his life, the only way they related to each other. Fun Home is peppered with allusions and quotes from F. Scott Fitzgerald, Albert Camus, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, Colette and Greek mythology, among many others, but they never (well, hardly ever) feel forced. Without bogging things down in tedious literary analysis, they provide just enough insight to not only enrich the story but get me excited about reading the originals as well.

Alison (I feel a bit awkward referring to her by her first name, but what can you do?) found her taste for The Classics in grade 12, but before that, her relationship with her father was mostly distant, even hostile at times. Bruce Bechdel, it seems, was not an easy man to live with. A remote, authoritarian father and husband, prone to bouts of rage, he spent much of his spare time reading or restoring his family’s 19^th century home. He was obsessed with beauty, but it was a narrow, oppressive kind of beauty, shallow and fragile, with no room for other people’s needs or tastes. The home he recreated was an artfully arranged, jumbo-sized closet, as much a museum as a place to live.

Everything in Bruce Bechdel’s world had to be just so, and that included his only daughter Alison. They were polar opposites in many ways, butch girl and sissy man; him trying to dress her up into a perfect model of femininity, her resisting his efforts as best she could. His intent is ambiguous: it’s not clear if she was just another canvas on which to work his art, or if he was actually trying to quash her budding queerness.

“Is that what you want to look like?” There are so many things wrong with that question. Is looking butch a worse sin than queerness? Would it have been better for her to look pretty, marry and have affairs with high school students on the sly?

Closeted father aside, there’s a lot I can relate to in Alison’s story. Both my parents are teachers as well (retired now) and have never been very demonstrative either. Like Alison, I realised I was gay before I had sex. And again like her, I bought a truckload of books upon coming out—biographies, histories, politics, humour, psychology, anything really, I wasn’t too choosy back then.

And actually, that part was familiar. The Indelible Alison Bechdel reprinted her coming-out story; originally published in 1993, it focused on the immediate circumstances surrounding her revelation, making contact with the local gay community, and ending with her first time with another woman. But in the meantime bookish, intellectual Alison had plowed through many, many books in an attempt to find, and understand, her new community. The masturbation scene above was played for giggles in 1993 but turned into something more serious in 2006, almost transcendent, a necessary step in her journey. Only the “good for a wank” brought it down to earth a bit.

Okay, I promised myself I wouldn’t be doing any high-falutin’ literary analysis (“Marlow’s steamer? penis. The Congo? vagina” Hee) but there are a few details that jumped out at me. Consider the picture on her professor’s office wall. It so happens (thank you Wikipedia!) that “The Descent of Minerva to Ithaca” is one of a series of engravings John Flaxman did to illustrate the Odyssey. Guess which book was studied in this English class? That’s right: Joyce’s Ulysses.

There’s more, though. This meeting took place the exact same day Alison realised she was a lesbian. And in the 1993 version of her coming-out story, she compares her revelation to the birth of Athena. “You know the story. She springs, fully grown and in complete armor, from Zeus’s head.”

Was that picture really there in her professor’s office? I don’t think it matters much. In a few instances, Alison points out a stray detail and insists it was in fact real. This still leaves many unaccounted for, but that’s fine. In a memoir, factual accuracy may sometimes take a back seat. I’ll trust that the story is true enough, and move on.

So there you have it. Honestly, going through Fun Home again and again has left me exhausted, but in a good way. I grieve for a man who died before he ever had the chance to truly live, but celebrate the life of a woman who escaped his labyrinth and created something truly beautiful. And maybe, one of these days, I’ll feel brave enough to tackle Proust.

Laugh At Me

The Queer Film Festival is in full swing. Last night I they showed The Coast is Queer, a showcase of shorts by local filmmakers that’s become an annual tradition. There was so much excellent material this year that it’s hard to pick a favourite, but I’d have to go with David C. Jones’ Laugh At Me. Which, good news, has been on YouTube for a while

Honourable mentions go to Hirsute (I’m a sucker for a good time-travel mind-screw), the sexily, dykily hilarious Jane Blonde, and the deliciously creepy Bathroom Mirror.

Arthur C. Clarke: 1917–2008

Well, damn.

I guess part of me thought he’d live forever, or at least long enough to see all the marvels he imagined or predicted. Hell, he saw geostationary satellites and global telecommunications become reality, why not space elevators or Martian colonies or deep-space travel as well?

Well, damn.

As a young nerd I read a number of his books: Dolphin Island was first, I think, way back in high school English class, though I haven’t picked it up since. There were also some of the classics, like 2001, Childhood’s End, The Sands of Mars, Rendezvous With Rama (never got into the sequels), The Fountains of Paradise. I loved them all, but my favourite was and still is The Songs of Distant Earth. Almost every page is gold, from the arrival of the Magellans to Thalassa to Moses Kaldor’s discussion of God (a theme Clarke picks up every now and then in his fiction), the conflicts, the heartbreaks, the dramas big and small, as well as the scorps’ evolution to semi-sentience. Like much of his work before and since, Songs shows us a very optimistic future. It’s a future where humanity has grown up, and mostly left aggression and bigotry behind; where we can find peace without sacrificing progress, and without losing our essential nature. A future where race, religion, gender and sexuality are just not that big a deal, and the boundaries of love and family are wider and more flexible.

Lieutenant Horton was an amusing companion, but Loren was glad to get rid of him as soon as the electrofusion currents had welded his broken bones. As Loren discovered in somewhat wearisome detail, the young engineer had fallen in with a gang of hairy hunks whose second main interest in life appeared to be riding microjet surfboards up vertical waves. Horton had found, the hard way, that it was even more dangerous than it looked.

“I’m quite surprised,” Loren had interjected at one point in a rather seamy narrative. “I’d have sworn you were ninety percent hetero.”

“Ninety-two, according to my profile,” Horton said cheerfully. “But I like to check my calibration from time to time.”

The lieutenant was only half joking. Somewhere he had heard that hundred percenters were so rare that they were classed as pathological.

Heh. Yes, it’s completely gratuitous, but Clarke pulls it off, and I can’t tell you what that kind of writing meant to my still-closeted teen self. I like to think it eventually helped me come out to myself, or at least made the way smoother by defusing any internalised homophobia I may have had.

More recently I bought his Collected Stories, a massive sampling of his short stories from 1937 to 1997. Though it’s hard to pick a favourite amongst all these gems, I’m very fond of the “White Hart” stories. Written in the 40’s and 50’s, these take place in the (probably partly real) London pub “White Hart,” a hangout of writers and engineering geeks. These loosely connected tales of university life and improbable inventions, full of dry, low-key British humour, remind me of P.G. Wodehouse’s stories—though with nutty professors and eccentric inventors instead of useless upper-class twits.

I also have to give a special nod to The Wire Continuum, the last one in the collection. Co-written with Stephen Baxter (another fave author of mine), this is a sequel to the very first story in the book, entitled Travel by Wire! A cute but unremarkable story of matter transmission through power lines is re-explored sixty years later as these two stupendously smart and talented minds play at finding applications to this technology. We’re treated to surgical teleportation, faster-than-light communication, instantaneous extrasolar travel and finally, the direct linking of minds leading to an evolutionary quantum leap for humankind. Some of these ideas are further fleshed out in The Light of Other Days, another Baxter/Clarke collaboration.

Finally, there’s an essay of his I reread regularly: “Arthur C. Clarke’s ‘Credo'”, appearing in the September/October 2001 issue of Skeptical Inquirer (one of several specials they did on science and religion). I found it a bit rambling and unfocussed, which I guess is understandable when you’re trying to talk about God and what others have said about God. But the grand vision, gentle humour and warm optimism are pure Clarke.

I began this essay by saying that men have debated the problems of existence for thousands of years—and that is precisely why I am skeptical about most of the answers. One of the great lessons of modern science is that millennia are only moments. It is not likely that ultimate questions will be settled in such short periods of time, or that we will really know much about the universe while we are still crawling around in the playpen of the Solar System.

He concludes by quoting form his earlier book Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible. I get chills every time I read this passage.

Our galaxy is now in the brief springtime of its life—a springtime made glorious by such brilliant blue-white stars as Vega and Sirius, and, on a more humble scale, our own Sun. Not until all these have flamed through their incandescent youth, in a few fleeting billions of years, will the real history of the universe begin.

It will be a history illuminated only by the reds and infrareds of dully glowing stars that would be almost invisible to our eyes; yet the somber hues of that all-but-eternal universe may be full of color and beauty to whatever strange beings have adapted to it. They will know that before them lie, not the millions of years in which we measure eras of geology, nor the billions of years which span the past lives of the stars, but years to be counted literally in trillions.

They will have time enough, in those endless aeons, to attempt all things, and to gather all knowledge. They will be like gods, because no gods imagined by our minds have ever possessed the powers they will command. But for all that, they may envy us, basking in the bright afterglow of Creation; for we knew the universe when it was young.

They loved the t-shirts, but the fridge magnets were a hard sell

It was the August long weekend so you know what that means? The Vancouver Pride parade. The sun was shining, the rainbow balloons were floating, the leather queens were buff and be-harnessed. The idea this year was to have a moving game: a few players would bump the ball around while two held up the net, and a few more would run around giving out free junk to the crowds. We were supposed to (a) watch out for the overhead wires, and (b) not do any hard hits, because the ball would go into the crowd and someone might get hurt. Which happened many times anyways, though nobody was ever hurt. Besides, the crowd loved the spikes and hard hits. Hey, you gotta give the people what they want.

I played for a while, then switched off to hand out goodies. And, hah, part of me flashed back to those days of yore when little hypershy me had to sell chocolate bars for the scouts. Let’s face it: everybody wanted the t-shirts, but the fridge magnets? Not so much. I had to be a bit more assertive and in-your-face to move those suckers. Plus, we ran out of t-shirts early on while we still had stacks of the magnets at the end. Which reminds me, I should have gotten one for myself. Oh, but we also had some bitchin’ press-on tattoos with the VGVA logo and Web site; I put a couple on myself, and they made me feel all tough and butch.

Yeah, it was an awesome day. But afterwards I was exhausted, sweaty and disgusting. They’d asked us to wear league t-shirts, but maybe I should have thought twice about wearing this year’s colour. Because dark purple and blazing sun don’t really mix.

Wings Of A Wild Goose

Chrystos is a Native American lesbian poet. I went to one of her readings shortly after I moved to Vancouver. Iâ€™d never heard of her before, and was deeply moved by her work. It speaks of the harsh realities of life, poverty and racism and sexism and love and activism and spirituality, and how all these things interact. At the time I wanted so much to write like she did, fierce and unapologetic and flowing straight from the heart. The following is from her first collection of poetry, Not Vanishing.

Wings Of A Wild Goose

A hen, one who could have brought more geese, a female, a wild one
dead     Shot by an excited ignorant young blond boy, his first
His mother threw the wings in the garbage     I rinsed them
brought them home, hung them spread wide on my studio wall
A reminder of so much, saving what I canâ€™t bear to be wasted
Wings
I dream of wings which carry me far above human bitterness
human walls     A goose who will have no more tiny pale fluttering
goslings to bring alive     to shelter     to feed     to watch fly
off on new wings     different winds
He has a lawn this boy     A pretty face which was recently paid
thousands of dollars to be in a television commercial     I clean
their house every Wednesday morning
2 dogs which no one brushes     flying hair everywhere
A black rabbit who is almost always out of
water     usually in a filthy cage     Iâ€™ve cleaned the cage
out of sympathy a few times although it is not part of what
are called my duties     I check the water as soon as I arrive
This rabbit & those dogs are the boyâ€™s pets     He is very lazy
He watches television constantly leaving the sofa in the den
littered with food wrappers, soda cans, empty cereal bowls
If Iâ€™m still there when he comes home, he is rude to me     If he
has his friends with him, he makes fun of me behind my back
I muse on how he will always think of the woods
as an exciting place to kill     This family of three lives
on a five acre farm     They raise no crops     not even their own
vegetables or animals for slaughter     His father is a neurosurgeon
who longs to be a poet     His mother frantically searches
for christian enlightenment     Iâ€™m sad for her     though I donâ€™t like
her     because I know she wonâ€™t find any     The boy does nothing
around the house to help without being paid     Iâ€™m 38 & still
havenâ€™t saved the amount of money he has in a passbook found
in the pillows of the couch under gum wrappers     That dead goose
This boy will probably never understand that it is not right
to take without giving     He doesnâ€™t know how to give     His mother
who cleaned & cooked the goose says she doesnâ€™t really like
to do it but canâ€™t understand why she should feel any different
about the goose than a chicken or hamburger from the supermarket
I bite my tongue & nod     I could explain to her that meat raised
for slaughter is very different than meat taken from the woods
where so few wild beings survive     That her ancestors are
responsible for the emptiness of this land     That lawns feed no
one     that fallow land lined with fences is sinful     That hungry
people need the food they could be growing     That spirituality
is not separate from food or wildness or respect or giving
But she already doesnâ€™t like me     because she suspects me
of reading her husbandâ€™s poetry books when no one is around
& sheâ€™s right     I do     I need the 32 dollars a week tolerating
them provides me     I wait for the wings on my wall to speak to me
guide my hungers     teach me winds I canâ€™t reach     I keep
these wings because walls are so hard     wildness so rare     because
ignorance must be remembered     because I am female     because I fly
only in my dreams     because I too
will have no young to let go

Accidental Community

Iâ€™ve just returned from the first meeting of the Accidental Community project. There was a photo slideshow by local artist John Kozachenko, a very brief overview of the history of gay menâ€™s communities in the West End, Q & A and interactive discussion, and a look at future directions for the project. Fascinating stuff. I learned that the man after whom Davie Street was namedâ€”Alexander Edmund Batson Davie, 8^th Premier of B.C.â€”was rumoured to be gay, though he had a wife and children. But apparently he hung out with gay people who, upon his death, started a social club in his honour and renamed the street after him. The articles I could find online donâ€™t elaborate on just what kind of social club this was.

I was invited to this meeting by one of the project members, whoâ€™d contacted me a couple of months ago via my queer history project, looking for leads for his research (unrelated to mine, but it never hurts to ask). Unfortunately, I couldnâ€™t really help him, since I havenâ€™t kept in touch with the one person I interviewed and all my other sources are publicly available. Still, Iâ€™m enormously flattered that my little project got his attention in the first place.

In addition to some cool history, another thing I got out of this meeting was how disconnected I am to the West End, living way the hell out in the suburbs. True, there are advantagesâ€”itâ€™s much cheaper to live out here, and I do have some (non-gay) friends nearbyâ€”but maybe Iâ€™m missing out on more than I realise. Years ago I voluntarily severed almost all ties with queer communities; Iâ€™ve since eased some of the way back in, and only recently have I realised what a mistake that self-imposed exile was. Where to go from here, though? Thatâ€™s what Iâ€™ll have to figure out.

The Day I Kept Volleying To Myself While Wearing a Feather Boa

…while accompanied by a woman dressed like a volleyball and a man wearing an itty-bitty speedo, with volleyballs painted on his ass cheeks.

Yes kids, it was Pride Day, and I walked with the VGVA posse. Since most of them were in Montreal for the Gay Games, it was a pretty small production this year, just a small truck with rainbow balloons and streams and music… nothing too special. We handed out little rubber bracelets with the VGVA Website on them, sprayed people with water, and I practiced my setting for the enjoyment of the people. Well, and also my own enjoyment.

Incidentally, a feather boa isn’t the best accessory to play volleyball in, especially when it’s, like, a hundred degrees. I was surprised at how warm those things are, at least around the neck. Gads, I don’t know how drag queens do it, I really don’t, with the dresses and the wigs and the accessories. How did they even keep their makeup in place, in yesterday’s heat? Laura (the human volleyball) had a bit of mascara on, and by the end of the parade it was running all over the place. But I had lots of fun. It was a nice change to be in the parade instead of watching it. On the one hand, I could only check out the floats just in front and behind us. On the other, I got to dance and play in front of all the people crowded along Denman and Pacific. Though I wasn’t exactly the centre of attention (see above, re: speedo, volleyball ass cheeks) it was a powerful experience to a formerly very shy, now not-quite-so-shy, guy such as myself.

Dancers, Drag Queens and Devout Nerds

Taking a brief break from Web development, with the coding and the styling and the restructuring, to write a quick entry. (A month between entries is not good. At least I’ve got a good excuse this time.)

So anyway, last Saturday I went to Davie Days, a street festival sort of thing where the businesses (queer and otherwise) along Davie Street all have booths displaying their stuff; there were a couple of beer gardens, a guy making balloon hats for the kiddies (of all ages) and a couple of stages for entertainment. A friend of mine was in a show in front of Celebrities, as a backup dancer for a drag queen lipsyncher by the name of Mina Mercury. Great show, preceded by another great show by a belly dancer troupe. Did I take pictures? Why, yes I did.

Continuing from last entry’s tradition, here’s another hilarious link: Jesus of the Week. And ohmigawd, did I ever flash back to my long-ago Catechism classes when I saw this one. Mind you, I had to look up the exact passage, but I remember so clearly reading those illustrated booklets with all the feel-good parables from the New Testament: the Good Samaritan, the house built on sand. Lots of others. I loved reading them. Well, partly because I loved reading, period. But I liked the stories too, and I effortlessly memorised them, to recite back in Sunday School. Damn, but I was a devout little nerd back then.

Well, enough lollygagging down memory lane. I’ve still got a site to upgrade.