‘One of the best ways to fight bigotry is with queer and trans joy’
Authors Tom Ryan and Rhea Rollmann compare notes on queer histories and futures in this feature from ABT 98 fall 2023.
Tom Ryan is an award winning author, screenwriter and producer. His YA mystery Keep This To Yourself was the winner of the 2020 ITW Thriller Award for Best YA Thriller, the 2020 Arthur Ellis Award for Best YA Crime Book, and the 2021 Ann Connor Brimer Award. He is the editor of Are We Friends Now, a dynamic and exhilarating collection of writing from LGBTQ+ youth and allies from around P.E.I..
Rhea Rollmann is an award-winning journalist, writer and radio producer/podcaster based in St. John’s, N.L.. She’s a founding editor of TheIndependent.ca, and a contributing editor with PopMatters.com. Her book, A Queer History of Newfoundland, reveals the queer rights movement in the province as one of great pride and joy; one of hardship and struggle; and ultimately, one of triumph.
TR: The anthology I edited, Are We Friends Now, involved me working with young LGBTQIA+ Prince Edward Islanders, who are open with their stories and identities in a way that was unheard of when I was in high school back in the 90s. By contrast, A Queer History of Newfoundland required you to do some serious detective work to dig up personal narratives and historical documents that were often hidden or buried by necessity. How did you approach this project, knowing that a lot of the stories and material you were looking for had taken place underground and behind closed doors?
RR: The idea for the book came in part from me spending a lot of time digging through archival records as a journalist, and realizing what a rich queer history existed in the province, but was little known about because no one had pulled it all together in a comprehensive way. I soon realized it was impossible to make coherent sense of the archival records without speaking to people who had lived through the times and events chronicled there. So I began looking for the people mentioned in the archives, and reaching out to them for interviews. I did close to 150 interviews for the book, and that’s where things got really interesting.
What inspired them to share their stories was both the realization of how much has changed – socially and politically – in such a relatively short time, but also how precarious some of the improvements our society has made really are. Much of the bigoted rhetoric we hear today from far right politicians in the U.S., or even homegrown bigots like Premier Higgs in New Brunswick, is recycled directly from mid-twentieth century hate propaganda.
You worked with youth who grew up in the wake of all the social and political change that is chronicled in my own book. How did you connect and work with these youth, and how do you think they understood the significance of a collection like Are We Friends Now?
TR: To be totally honest, I’m not sure that the significance of the project was front of mind for any of these young writers. I think partly that has to do with the fact that the organizers and I focused our energy on giving them space to be creative. But another piece of the equation is just how much more comfortable young people have become with discussing matters of sexual and gender identity in recent years, even in a small province like P.E.I.
I’ve been writing young adult fiction for and about queer teens for over ten years, and in that time I’ve seen a remarkable shift in high schools and youth groups across Canada and the U.S. Young people in both countries are increasingly willing to share their true identities with the world.
Recently there’s been a widespread and alarming pushback against this progress. I don’t know anyone who writes positive queer representation for young readers – myself included – that hasn’t been called a groomer, or worse, over the past few years. It really worries me that the safer, more open world we’ve built for queer people of all ages is really under threat, and I hope that we’re able to find ways to maintain a sense of safety among young people who are trying to figure out who they are.
Were there any stories you uncovered during your research that really surprised you?
RR: I think if I had to single something out as particularly surprising, it would be the broader understandings that emerged of our history. There are certain stereotypes or tropes that have often been perpetuated about N.L., about the place being “conservative,” “Christian,” characterized by “traditional values” and other such vague signifiers that I think were deliberately deployed by the powers-that-be (churches, government officials) to downplay the presence of queerness and other non-hetero-patriarchal values and practices here.
Queerness was pervasive here. Same-sex activity was widely practiced in rural communities or same-sex spaces (the fishery, logging camps). People might not have talked openly about it and they might have denied they were “queer,” but it was widespread. There were young people in extremely rural communities identifying as trans before the term had even really entered the province. The recent census data collected by Statistics Canada reinforces this – N.L. turns out to be one of the most gender-diverse places in Canada. And perhaps it always was.
What drove some of the activists in the 1970s was their own anger at the double standard. This became particularly urgent of course when the AIDS crisis hit. It finally became necessary – as a matter of life or death – to acknowledge that all these people who purported to be straight and cis and monogamous were in fact having all kinds of complex sex and gender lives, and because of the prevailing stigmas and taboos they lacked the education to do so safely. HIV/AIDS had a horrific impact on the province and there has never really been an adequate reckoning of that impact.
The other thing I think that really surprised me was the wide variation in how communities responded to queerness. For some folks, they experienced support and positive reinforcement almost everywhere they turned. Yet someone else growing up in the same time period, in another community just a few kilometres up the shore, would experience absolutely horrific, traumatizing, violent homophobia.
Some of my interviewees emphasized this point as well: people’s reactions surprised them. Sometimes the most conservative-seeming people would be the ones to stand by them and defend them if they came under homophobic attack, even in the mid-20th century, while sometimes the most progressive and liberal-seeming people would turn and run. People are complex.
P.E.I. and Newfoundland are both characterized by island cultures and identities (without forgetting the important role and presence of Labrador in the N.L. case). Do P.E.I.’s island culture and demographic realities have an impact on how queerness develops and is experienced by queer youth and queer people of all ages in that province?
TR: Full disclosure, I’m not actually from P.E.I., so I can’t make too many generalizations about the gentle island specifically, but I am from Cape Breton, so I can speak to island culture more generally. People tend to know their neighbours and often have a sense of generational history that’s missing in much of the world. But for someone with a sexual or gender identity that doesn’t fit within the expected template, growing up in this kind of insular environment can be a lonely and painful experience. I think for a long time this resulted in specific variation on the traditional trend of Atlantic Canadian out-migration; queer and trans people leaving their home communities for bigger centres where they could find their own communities, often Halifax or Toronto or even farther afield.
I think we’re seeing a real shift in the ways LGBTQIA+ people are engaging with their small towns and rural communities in Atlantic Canada. Some of this shift is characterized by queer families moving to rural areas and becoming involved in local politics, opening businesses, and joining various groups and societies, but what excites me the most is the growing presence of Gay-Straight Alliances and LGBTQIA+ Youth Groups in schools and communities around Atlantic Canada. That’s not to diminish pushback and growing pains – attacks on Pride flags and protests against drag events are discouragingly common, for instance – but the fact that young queer people and allies are finding ways to band together and create community in their home communities as opposed to feeling forced to move elsewhere gives me hope. Despite everything, the kids are alright.
RR: I wholeheartedly agree. My own experience as a trans woman is that kids find it far easier to understand and engage with the gender and sexual diversity of today’s world than their parents. Here in N.L., we’ve often seen kids take the lead in standing up for their queer and trans classmates and teaching the adults in their lives how to operate in an accepting, tolerant and diverse world. There is a complicated irony in the political right trying to appropriate and weaponize kids’ safety as a way of sowing hate, while in fact kids are more comfortable taking the lead in this beautiful future than many adults who remain stuck in the narrow-minded bigotry and social paranoia in which they were raised.
One thing I really appreciated about your collection is the focus you placed on centring queer and trans joy. While we do need more proactive policies and protections to prevent right-wing hatred and violence from spreading, I also think that one of the best ways to fight bigotry is with queer and trans joy. I hope that is the overarching sentiment that emerges from the book — the beauty of these lives lived and the love that propelled activists in their fight to build a better world. That remains the source of queer strength and power. One of my interviewees – a gay Jewish Newfoundlander who drew important parallels between the fight against fascism 80 years ago and today – put it very succinctly: any effort to prevent people from existing or from loving is fundamentally rooted in evil, and must be resisted with constant vigilance and constant, courageous love.
A Queer History of Newfoundland is published by Engen Books; Are We Friends Now? is published by Acorn Press.
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