Welcome to my column, my queer wonderland, my fruit basket, my fairy world, or (borrowing from Tony Kushner) my gay fantasia on national themes. Here we will be exploring not only what it means to be an LGBTQ student at Camosun, but also what it means to be queer in the world at the moment. I will be your host—a queer and genderfluid student who’s undergone gender-affirming surgery—and I can’t wait to explore this topic together.
I’ve definitely had a lot on my mind lately, and I’m not alone. Victoria is a great place to be queer (to use an umbrella term), but locally, nationally, and globally there are a lot of high-stakes questions left to answer. While a lot of this is scary, I’m not interested in just focusing on the things we have to be afraid of. I also want to spend time on what is working, and what it is we’re fighting for. What does queer happiness look like? What exactly is it that we want to have understood? How do we handle the labels we’ve made to navigate these spaces, and when are those labels no longer helpful? What does it mean to be a queer community?
I can think of 100 more questions I’m curious about. I can’t stop thinking about them, and I’m always talking about them. This is why I decided to do a column on the topic: because there’s just so much to explore here.
Something else I would like to include regularly is suggestions on where else to hear queer voices. “Queer” is a massive label; I can’t possibly represent every perspective and I don’t want to try. I regularly go out of my way to find books and movies and music and comics written by people with a different history from me, and I find my world is always richer for it.
Here in my first column, I’d like to share a particular favourite of mine: A History of My Brief Body by Billy-Ray Belcourt.
This memoir shares Belcourt’s experiences at the intersection of being gay and Indigenous. Written in often funny and often heartbreaking poetic prose, the book is a powerful collection of vignettes from Belcourt’s life. If you read with a highlighter, keep it at the ready for this one.
I’m so excited to explore these topics together.