DAYNA DANGER is a queer, Two-Spirit, Métis/Saulteaux/Polish visual artist based in Montreal. Danger’s medium shifts to capture her ideas, whether that means hand-beading leather fetish masks or photographing naked subjects holding animal antlers. Always striking and highly erotic, the artist’s work addresses power and intimacy, explores the line between objectification and empowerment, and creates space for underrepresented bodies to fill. Danger creates with femme, butch, trans, and gender non-conforming folks in mind.

Toronto-based writer and performer CATHERINE HERNANDEZ stunned readers last year with her debut novel Scarborough, an extraordinary portrait of intersecting lives in the community in Toronto’s east end. A self-described “Filipina Femme, Navajo wife, and radical mama,” Hernandez is also the author of multiple plays and M is for Moustache: A Pride ABC Book, a gorgeous celebration of diverse lives, chosen families, and queer histories for children. On top of literary brilliance, Hernandez is the director of b current performing arts.

New Brunswick’s PARTNER is one of the most exciting bands in Canada— and they’re making the lesbian garage rock of your dreams. Fronted by best friends Josée Caron and Lucy Niles, Partner is loud, intimate, and unapologetic. Tracks like “The ‘Ellen’ Page” and “We’re Gay (But Not for Each Other)” have earned them a cult following and made Partner the most beloved lesbian Canadian group since Tegan and Sara.

BILLY-RAY BELCOURT’s debut poetry collection This Wound is a World, released late last year, established the queer Cree poet as an essential voice in the literary landscape. Writer Gwen Benaway called the work “the best of the Queer NYC poets meeting the best of Indigenous poetry.” Belcourt’s words are a revelation, challenging—among many things—gender roles, racism, and the colonialism of queer spaces, all the while crafting visions for possibilities of decolonial love.

VIVEK SHRAYA is a force to be reckoned with. In the past year alone, she released her musical debut Part-time Woman in collaboration with the Queer Songbook Orchestra (an album by a brown trans girl about being a brown trans girl) and Angry, an EP she made as one half of the duo Too Attached (a musical project with her sibling Shamik Bilgi). No matter the medium, the writer/musician/publisher/educator’s work is striking, honest, and unapologetic. Shraya’s next book, I’m Afraid of Men, will reflect on toxic masculinity, homophobia, and transphobia, and will hit shelves fall 2018.

CRIS DERKSEN is a Two-Spirit Cree cellist and composer originally from Northern Alberta. Now based in Toronto, Derksen has received critical acclaim for their albums, including the most recent, Orchestral Powwow—a powerful blend of electronic cello and powwow music. Derksen’s masterful creations as a composer accompany performances by artists like Tanya Tagaq, Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory, and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. Derksen will premiere new work at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity this summer.

For a peek into the worlds of urban queer youth, look no further than the work of Montreal-based writer CASON SHARPE. Our Lady of Perpetual Realness & Other Stories, Sharpe’s chapbook of short stories published by Metatron Press, follows six gay men of colour as they come of age in Toronto and Montreal. Sharpe’s characters navigate gender norms, racism, sexuality, conflicting identities, and capitalism. The author also co-hosts the intimate and binge-worthy experimental podcast Two Hungry Children with best-friend and artist Kalale Dalton-Lutale.

SULTANA BAMBINO is a creator whose work celebrates and uplifts queer lives and talent. As an artist, Bambino is known for her pastel-palette drawings depicting the universes of “supernatural queers” in her community, including the cover art for Kai Cheng Thom’s brilliant novel Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl’s Confabulous Memoir. Bambino also co-founded Slut Island, a feminist-queer summer music festival in Montreal for underrepresented performers and audiences. Through words, performance, textiles, photography, video installation, and more, femme supreme

KAMA LA MACKEREL explores resilience, resistance, and healing for marginalized communities. Among her many projects as an arts facilitator and educator, she hosts Gender B(l)ender, Montreal’s only queer open mic, and is the artistic coordinator of the Our Bodies, Our Stories, an arts mentorship program for queer and trans youth of colour in Montreal.

CORRECTION (06/11/2018): A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that Catherine Hernandez was still a part of Sulong Theatre. This regrets the error.

Photo by Pascha Marrow

Asking Kama La Mackerel what her art practice consists of is not an easy question to answer, but one she reacts to with a smile and a warm, inviting laugh. From poet to photographer, curator to performance artist, the simple response, she says, is that she has never restricted herself. “It’s about letting my body and my heart speak and create what it wants to create,” she says.

Regardless of the medium, she says her relationship to her art is closely tied to her relationship to her femininity. “As someone who was assigned male at birth and had to reclaim my femininity through the years and repress my femininity when I was a child, I had to repress that artistic and creative side of me. It allowed me to find myself and who I am.”

In 2013, La Mackerel added founder to her roster, with the creation of her queer open stage mic project, Gender B(l)ender. The collective came out of a personal need: La Mackerel says she found it difficult to find a stage she felt comfortable sharing her art on when she moved to Montreal in 2011. “There are so many open mics in Montreal, but open mics are not [always] safe for queer and trans people,” she says. Her goal was to create an experimental environment where “anybody from the LGBTQ community could come in and perform whatever they wanted”—whether someone wants to try drag for the first time, do a poetry reading, or try their hand at comedy. La Mackerel says about 50 percent of current performers are people of colour, while 9 out of 10 are women or femmes and trans. “They are the people who need it the most,” she says. Now, each monthly event reaches capacity, and she has to cap the number of performances; otherwise, “it could go on forever.”

Both Gender B(l)ender’s audience and performers are diverse, coming from a range of backgrounds and lived experiences. “What I really love about it is that it’s an intergenerational space,” La Mackerel says. “My favourite moments are when trans women come who are in their sixties, and I’m like, ‘You’re my elders! I can’t believe you’re here!’ I get really excited when that happens.”

La Mackerel grew up in Mauritius, a plantation island off the Indian Ocean that was a British colony until 1968, which has led to intergenerational and colonial violence on her family. “I don’t think I understood this when I was younger, but colonial violence expresses itself in so many ways. I don’t think you can talk about race separately from gender,” she says.

That’s why La Mackerel designed the Gender B(l)ender stage as a place for performers to discuss identity through art. “It’s about the conversations, and creating that space where we can find each other,” she says. “Some people go on stage for the first time in their lives, and that’s something I don’t take for granted; that people are so willing to share their ownness. The audience really wants to hold that space and allow that vulnerability to grieve and exist.”

And La Mackerel is no stranger to being vulnerable in her own work, regularly grappling with the idea of her own healing, with subject matter spanning gender, race, sexuality, and anti-colonial resistance.

Besides preparing for Gender B(l)ender’s return after its short hiatus over the summer, La Mackerel is keeping busy with two ongoing projects: From Thick Skin to Femme Armour, a multimedia, multi-dimensional research project about femme of colour resistance across history, and Breaking the Promise of Tropical Emptiness, a postcard photography project about Mauritian transwomanhood. She is also starting an eight-month artist residency in the Faculty of Education at McGill University.

“There’s the art, and the final performances, but really, my art is about the process. The process is where I grow, where I learn, where I heal,” she says. “Those are my stories, that’s my lived experience, and I know other people connect to that story.”