Cate Simpson

Queer people spend a lot of time thinking about labels. Picking one that fits, reclaiming offensive ones to alter their meaning, trying to avoid them entirely. Lately, I’ve started to worry about acquiring a label I never selected for myself: gay journalist.

I just finished an internship, and I’m returning to the freelancer’s constant search for work, so I’ve been looking back over my portfolio and wondering: when editors read through my clippings, do they see reviews, news pieces, and columns, or do they see reviews of gay books, gay news, and a column about queer politics? I didn’t set out to be a professional lesbian. I haven’t decided yet what sort of journalist I want to be when I grow up so I want to keep my options open, but I worry that the more queer-themed writing I do, the more the label starts to stick.

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Last week an 11 year-old from Massachusetts called Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover (right) hanged himself after enduring daily taunts at school, many of which were homophobic. This comes, as this press release from the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network reminds us, just over a year after the murder of 15 year-old Lawrence King, who was shot by another student because of his perceived sexual identity.

In an age where queer people are protected by various anti-discrimination laws all over North America, why are we still failing to extend these freedoms and protections to our youth? Among queer teens in the US and in Canada, suicide is the number one cause of death. We can do better.

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This column is brought to you today by my apartment hunt, which even though it’s being spearheaded by my girlfriend, is taking over all the other things I am supposed to be doing with my afternoon. It’s funny how being gay can complicate the most mundane of experiences — not just public bathrooms (that double-take) and dating, but completely banal things like moving house.

I have to wonder, for instance, about the "LGBTQ-positive space" checkbox on U of T’s apartment listings website (I’m not a student, but my girlfriend is). Ontario has laws about housing discrimination, so the landlords who don’t check that box aren’t actually allowed to refuse to rent to queer couples. But would we want to rent from them?

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Yesterday a friend in Edinburgh, where I lived until just over a year ago, sent me an invite to a Facebook group started as part of a campaign for marriage equality in Scotland.

I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty sick of talking about gay marriage. Especially now that I live in Canada, where it passed four years ago. I wish the rest of the world would cut the crap and stop holding out on us, so we can all get on with our lives. Gay and trans kids are still being beaten up in school, queers have less than equal access to healthcare, and Canadian same-sex couples might be able to get hitched but that doesn’t mean their families are always willing to stand at their sides at the ceremony.

The point is, we have other things we need to be talking about. There are other campaigns to start and wars to wage and — as Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore has often (and eloquently) pointed out — the campaign for gay marriage sets those fights back years in its zeal to make queer relationships seem as "normal" and hetero as possible.

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It occurred to me this week that if you’re reading this, whether you’re queer or not, chances are you have at least some interest in, you know, gay stuff. So, this column being but a tiny drop in the queer blogging ocean, I thought I’d round up some other sites that deserve a spot in your RSS feed-reading software of choice.

While we’re at it, I’ll also give a shout out to Snarfer, the program I use to aggregate my RSS feeds. It’s much more user-friendly than Google Reader; it downloads the whole webpage rather than just the text, which means you get the full visual experience of the site you’re reading; and it works offline.

We now return to your scheduled LGBT blog round-up. The biggest and most comprehensive is The Bilerico Project, a massive group blog with more than 50 contributors. It started out as a politics blog but it’s grown to include all kinds of queer-themed content including pop culture, music, and an advice column. The great thing about Bilerico’s size is that it manages to cover a tremendous amount of ground; their bloggers have something to say about most of the major (and many of the smaller) LGBT-related happenings in the US. The content can be slightly overwhelming in its volume, but the site’s layout makes it easy enough to pick through for posts you want to read.

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If you’re looking for some unconventional reading material this week, this list of the Canada Border Service Agency’s Prohibited Titles from October to December of last year is a fairly interesting browse.

The list is linked from a recent article in Xtra last week about gay porn studio Lucas Entertainment’s battles with CBSA over their line of fetish films (titles include "Piss!" and "Farts!" — I’ll leave the details to your imagination).

Censorship is full of grey areas that make it hard to come down on one side or the other of the debate, and it’s particularly complex from a queer perspective, because it hasn’t historically been in our interests to advocate censorship (Little Sister’s bookstore in Vancouver had a much harder time of things than Lucas Entertainment; their troubles with the CBSA span more than two decades), but there are queer groups out there advocating for the censorship of homophobic speech.

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“Sometimes men like women, and sometimes men like men. And then there are bisexuals but some say they’re just kidding themselves.”

A line from one of Phoebe’s famously quirky songs in Friends, this actually doesn’t strike far from the mark in terms of how bisexuality is viewed both inside and outside of queer communities.

People like to joke that bisexuals have the best of both worlds. In actual fact, the reverse is often true. They face the same prejudices in their same-sex relationships (along with their own particular set of challenges, because they have to deal with folks who don’t understand why they can’t just ignore their "gay" side). At the same time, they do without widespread support from other queer people, who scorn bisexuals for their easy access to heterosexual privilege (or, to put it another way: bisexuals get to turn out for Gay Pride and then go and date someone they can hold hands with in public without being stared at).

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Showtime’s lesbian serial drama The L Word returns this week for its sixth and final season. Set in L.A., the series follows a group of women through their hook-ups and break-ups, generally providing a rough sketch of what being a lesbian is like if you’re wealthy and live in Los Angeles. The show hasn’t garnered much mainstream press attention, but it has become a staple for queer female viewers.

Nearly every lesbian I know hates The L Word. We complain that the plot twists are out of control. We complain about the publicity photos showing the cast members stark naked. We complain that we have absolutely nothing in common with the lives of these rich, tanned, ultra-femme figures who also just happen to be gay (with the token bisexual included for good measure). We complain that Jenny is insane and irritating, and that if we have to hear one more word of her awful new-age writing we are going to stop watching. But we don’t.

What is it about The L Word that is so compelling? Maybe it has something to do with the dearth of other lesbian characters on television. There have been valiant attempts in the five years since The L Word premiered to introduce some queer characters to our TV screens, which would be more encouraging if these characters weren’t so prone to freak accidents and sudden changes of heart that see them packed up and shipped off the air without warning

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Pope Benedict made some waves last month with his Christmas address for saying, amongst other things, that homosexuality and transsexuality were liable to cause the "self-destruction" of the human race. It hasn’t so far, but perhaps he means sometime in the future we’ll reach a sort of trans critical mass and one Friday night at 2am, an especially loud Church Street drag queen will tip us over into the gender apocalypse.

The Pope also briefly compared the "protection" of humanity from homosexuality to the protection of the rainforest. Aside from being a curiously outdated approach to the climate change concerns of the present decade (when was the last time anybody said "rainforest"? Do we even have any rainforests left?) I think there may be in this the seeds of how the Catholic Church and the homos can finally live together. It’s called "queer offsetting."

As with the (somewhat dubious) practice of carbon offsetting, in which you arrange for some trees to be planted to make up for the damage to the environment by your carbon-belching SUV, queer offsetting would require queers to plant an appropriate number of trees every time their homosexuality impacts the world around them. So, for instance, an overly camp Christmas pantomime might warrant two or three, and when Pride Week brings all of downtown to a standstill someone better be out there planting a forest.

Or maybe the Catholic Church should stop hiding behind rhetoric about the end of days, admit that "tolerance" is no substitute for acceptance, and turn its attention to something that matters.

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I am writing this on a crowded flight from my adopted home of Toronto to my former home of Edinburgh, where I am trying to ignore the brainwashing effect of Fred Claus on ten tiny screens in front of me.

Like countless others, I am heading home for Christmas. So far though, I’m having a hard time getting into the spirit of the holiday — mainly because, for our third Christmas in a row, my partner and I are going to be on inconveniently opposite sides of the Atlantic.

I’m not the only one complaining about Christmas this year. Friends who have been hit by the recession face Christmas shopping with dread; those who still have their jobs are too busy to shop. It’s got me thinking about the reasons queers have in particular for succumbing to bouts of Grinchiness as the time for turkey comas and bad television rolls around.

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