Photo Courtesy Studio ZX

The graffiti-covered Van Horne skatepark on the edge of Montreal’s Mile End is usually dotted with boys in beanies and sneakers, launching themselves into the rink with the cracking sound of skateboard wheels hitting concrete. But, every Thursday night for a brief stint during the summer of 2021, they were replaced with a different crowd: femme, queer, and trans people, speeding by on skateboards or rollerskates as their friends cheered them on.

As the sky darkened, more people arrived. They came dressed to impress and eager to be with others who understood queer joy. When Vicky B. Ouellette, a trans woman and community activist, looked down into the skatepark the first time she attended “Tran Horne Take-Over,” she couldn’t hold back tears. “I’d never seen something quite like [it]. It was so precious and so exclusively queer, and it was really important.”

“There’s a lack of understanding that we create these spaces out of necessity, not out of entertainment,” Ouellette explains as she recalls the weekly event, which was intended to unite femme, queer, and trans people during Montreal’s COVID-19 lockdown. However, with each passing week, Ouellette noticed a shift: slowly, more straight, cisgender people who seemed like observers rather than participants started to attend, recording videos and taking photos. By August, the event was shut down. She believes that the police discovered it as a result of these people broadcasting the event online.

Despite knowing that the events broke the city’s stringent rules against gathering at the time, Ouellette also knows they were deeply necessary. She cites this saga as an example of how there is a widespread absence of awareness around the importance of nightlife for queer Montrealers. For many, coming together with their community is more than just a hangout; it’s seeing their self-made family.

Ouellette is the founder of Studio ZX and the president of MTL 24/24’s advisory council, two organizations driving nightlife activism for marginalized communities. To her and many others, the act of nighttime entertainment and gathering is sacred. If an event or venue is expressly queer-friendly, it becomes a haven for people to let loose without the fear of being misgendered, harassed, or othered. However, as city officials place greater scrutiny on the nightlife sector, the underground scenes that the community has built may be pushed further to the fringes.

In April 2024, Montreal’s Commission on Economic and Urban Development and Housing presented its final nightlife policy recommendations in a public assembly meeting. It was a step toward the city’s intention to spend $2.1 million to create a 24-hour nightlife zone, likely in the Latin Quarter, as well as “nocturnal vitality zoning” throughout the city. The details of the latter are still vague, with a sense that this zoning would permit alcohol sales after 3 a.m. (the city’s current cutoff). These developments may pad the city’s bottom line, but the policy lacks clear details on how it will include or protect the main drivers of Montreal’s local nightlife scenes and its most vulnerable populations: queer and racialized artists, patrons, and workers.

For those who are not within these minority groups, it can be difficult to understand the constant feeling of unease and danger in nightlife. When asked if she feels unwelcome in nightlife spaces that are not expressly queer-friendly, Ouellette was quick to answer: “Absolutely. It’s just so easy to be objectified, or fetishized, or harassed, or screamed at, or [looked at] cross-eyed. Stuff like that is so common.”

Maintaining physical safety is also a factor. For racialized people and those who are both queer and racialized, some of the peril in nightlife is not overtly violent, but stems from a sense of otherness in some of the city’s scenes. “Being hit on by cishet men not knowing that I’m trans is a situation that is extremely uncomfortable, and can be dangerous,” Amai Doucet, Studio ZX’s media relations and communities manager, explains.

For too many people, discomfort, and sometimes violence, is the status quo in nightlife. Canada’s Survey of Safety in Public and Private Spaces found that sexual minorities are nearly three times more likely to experience violent victimization and more than twice as likely to experience inappropriate sexual behaviours than heterosexual people. Studies have also shown that racialized women who report violence are often taken less seriously than white women, leaving them at further risk.

The document outlining the city’s most recent recommendations for the nightlife policy includes a section titled Safety & Security, which emphasizes a need to increase funding for NGOs that work to decrease night-based sexual violence and collaboration between these groups, the city, and Quebec’s Ministry of Labour, Employment and Social Solidarity. Although these recommendations are a starting point, they are so general that it is difficult to glean any concrete plans.

Queer and racialized groups, and the threat of danger they face, are mentioned in the published recommendations, but the details are scant. One recommendation is to “support the creation and maintenance of inclusive nighttime community spaces for marginalized communities, such as LGBTQ2+ people, racialized communities, and people with disabilities.” Although marginalized communities and safety issues are both mentioned broadly, the document does not link the two. (This Magazine contacted several city officials who were part of the policy’s creation for comment, but none were willing to speak about the policy directly.)

As Montreal prepares to invest millions into nightlife, there is no better time for the city to improve its relationship with some of its more important players. Montreal cannot continue to undervalue the voices of marginalized groups as it enacts policies that directly affect these communities.

Last year, FANTOM, a non-profit that serves as a voice for queer and racialized people in Montreal nightlife, conducted a survey to assess its community’s needs. By far, the top concerns were safety and security, with 61 percent of queer and 58 percent of racialized surveyees mentioning it in their responses. FANTOM’s co-founder, Oliver Philbin-Briscoe, was pleasantly surprised to see that the new recommendations mentioned safety for marginalized groups at all—it’s the first time the city has done so in writing, as far as he remembers.

FANTOM envisions several projects that may help address queer and racialized people’s safety concerns, like an app to search for, review, and share venue information and the creation of more local, community-owned and operated event spaces. Still, many activists have more expansive ideas that require significant funding, resources, and collaboration with local officials.

For example, Philbin-Briscoe says it’s important to expand public transit hours to match the proposed 24-hour zones, ensuring that after-hours patrons and workers would have affordable and reliable methods to return home safely. This idea is proposed in the document, but Philbin-Briscoe is reluctant to celebrate it as a win before further steps are taken. Ouellette suggests a more qualitative path forward: a widespread education campaign illustrating the realities of marginalized communities.

Another key solution that activists emphasize is well-trained security personnel. Doucet believes that good security must hold a deep understanding of the needs of marginalized communities and be sensitive to the existing tensions between these groups and law enforcement. Several of FANTOM’s survey respondents felt that overly aggressive and poorly trained security are a central problem for marginalized communities in the underground and after-hours nightlife scene. Doucet suggests mandatory training that focuses on harm reduction and de-escalation rather than the use of violence.

Ouellette says that she believes the city’s lack of consideration for marginalized communities is not ill-intentioned, but rather, stems from a lack of knowledge and resources. However, Doucet thinks there is a relatively simple way to address this problem: to put more marginalized people in decision-making roles. “This would make sure we don’t get to a point where we’re asked our opinion after 95 percent of the work is done and most of it can’t even be changed,” she says.

Doucet suggests a council of queer and racialized people that can advocate for themselves in the city’s policymaking, in nightlife and beyond. Sometimes, she says, policymakers may not consider what Black and Brown folks, women, and queer people need because they don’t know their life experiences. That’s why Montreal needs these groups to be involved in making decisions about this city’s future.

Queer and racialized nightlife activists are cautiously optimistic, but wary of what is to come. To ensure that their hope is not misplaced, marginalized people’s concerns, solutions, and voices must be a central and meaningful part of Montreal’s nightlife policy.

Illustration by Olivia Thomson

In 2021, Aaron Beaumont decided it was time to create more queer connections in New Brunswick. While doing their undergrad at St. Thomas University in Fredericton, Beaumont’s work in fat studies led them to learn more about fat activism online. After realizing that most groups were based in the U.S., and the few Canadian groups that existed were decidedly not in New Brunswick, Beaumont took matters into their own hands.

They created QT Fatties, a mostly online, and sometimes in person, community for queer and trans fat folks living in New Brunswick. Four years later, it has transformed into a space Beaumont had been dreaming of: one where trans fat folks across the province can connect.

QT Fatties uses Discord to plan both virtual and physical events geared towards other fat, trans queers. They’ve hosted clothing swaps and art markets, and have had online monthly meetups. They’ve also run mutual aid fundraisers for people in need of gender-affirming care.

Sam Walsh, who does administrative work for the group, explains that their Discord channel is where most of the community gets together. “There’ll be messages in the Discord sometimes like, ‘I want to do this. Anyone available to meet up and we can just hang out?’ Which I think is really awesome. It’s changed from being all on Aaron organizing, to being a little bit more community based.”

Beaumont founded the group in the hopes that more queers could find and help each other navigate being fat and queer in a largely rural province. “There was no activism happening in the province, more specifically, [around] accessibility. By that I mean clothing, gender affirming items, access to healthcare. All of the things that are already hard to access in this province—but you add body size and fatness on and that makes it more challenging,” they explain. “So, I wanted to make some of those things free and supportive and more accessible for folks.”

Walsh also says it was important to have a group based in the Maritimes, since a lot of resources are based on the West Coast. “Having something that’s local, where you’re able to connect with people that are in the Maritimes is really nice because some of the experiences that we’re dealing with are a bit different. Particularly when it comes to the medical system or accessing gender-affirming care.”

Some of these needs, Beaumont explains, stem from much of New Brunswick being not only rural, but also conservative, and generally lower income, especially compared to other provinces. Because of that, they make sure QT Fatties events take place in the province’s three major cities as well as virtually to remain accessible to all who need it.

“Fat activism is really grounded in disability justice. When we think about accessibility, online platforms, chats, whatever it may be, is what’s most accessible to a lot of disabled folks. I’m disabled myself and sometimes, in-person events are just not possible for me. [Online meetings] help in terms of rurality, but also disability accessibility,” Beaumont says.

The feedback QT Fatties has received from those it serves has been positive—but not everyone understands why it needs to exist. Beaumont says that simply means there’s more work to be done.

“There has been general questioning around like, ‘Why do we need a group specifically for fat people?’ Also, people being uncomfortable with the word ‘fat.’ I don’t think that has been a barrier to our events, but that has been things that come up online. Even though we’ve been doing this for four years people are still uncomfortable with just the idea of using the word fat.”

Still, members and organizers of QT Fatties feel grateful for its existence, especially in a politically tense time where we need activism and community more than ever.

Driving back and forth along Wellesley Street in Toronto, Iris looks for a sign that she belongs. It’s late at night and raining, and she’s been blown off by a date. The woman she met on the dating website Plenty of Fish lives in Niagara Falls, and Iris rented a car for the weekend to see her, flowers and gifts she bought in the back seat. It’s the first time Iris is heading to Toronto’s LGBTQ Village—and she can’t find it.

It is 2008, and Iris has been in Canada for only a few months, on a visa from Saudi Arabia, here to learn English. (Her name has been changed to protect her identity.) Her female teacher is openly gay, but Iris doesn’t feel comfortable being out herself among the students in her class, many of whom are also from the Middle East and not accepting of LGBTQ people. When Iris asks her teacher where she can meet women, she directs her to Church and Wellesley.

Living in a homestay as part of the program, Iris asks her host how to get to the intersection, unaware she was asking about the Village and that it might be a problem. The woman, a Canadian, asks why she would want to go there. (Afterwards, Iris says, she felt the host treated her differently, being “nasty” and accusing her of sneaking around.)

That weekend, she had been looking forward to getting out of the house, but when her date cancelled, she didn’t know where else to go. After asking strangers for directions, Iris eventually finds the Village. Her teacher had written, “Go to the bar,” on a piece of paper, and when she comes across a group of women she asks in broken English where she can find The Bar. They laugh and ask her what she is looking for, then tell her to go across the street where there is a place for gay women; they are going there later.

Iris sits alone at a table in the Japanese restaurant where she thought they had pointed to, after a while asking the waiter, “Are there any women here?” He smiles, but shakes his head. She gives up and decides she will drive to a hotel. But stepping outside, she notices a long line snaking around a restaurant. “What is this?” she asks. They tell her it is a lesbian bar. “This is the place I am looking for.”

Iris is one of likely thousands of LGBTQ newcomers in Canada who are searching for home, community, and their own image of settlement. Each of these journeys is made for a different reason, but barriers to accessing supports and services are commonplace and go beyond the existing challenges a refugee faces. Many are fleeing situations of violence and persecution because of their sexual orientation and gender identity and perceive Canada as a safe haven, a place where they can be themselves.

For newcomers, being open about their sexual orientation and gender identity can be difficult. “It’s been ingrained in them since birth, this shame and fear of being who they really are,” says Habibi Feliciano-Perez, who coordinates LGBTQ newcomer settlement services at The 519 community centre in the Village.

“That continues throughout their life in Canada as well.” Feliciano-Perez works with LGBTQ refugees at every level of their settlement processes, and has seen the difficulties they face in their first years of settlement, from finding a community to navigating institutions. “What I’ve noticed is there’s difficulty socializing with people and trying to find friends because of language barriers and cultural barriers, and they’re still in kind of a culture shock,” he says.

In 2017, the Canadian government welcomed about 7,500 refugees, with an additional 16,000 from private sponsorship groups. In 2019 the Canadian government plans to admit 9,300 refugees, with a further 19,000 via private sponsorships. By contrast, in 2017, the number of asylum claimants climbed to 50,000—up from 23,000 in 2016. It is difficult to know how many of these refugee claimants identify as LGBTQ, since not every person will disclose that information upon arrival, and what the government does know is not publicly available.

Recent data obtained by Sean Rehaag, an Osgoode Hall Law School professor, shows that 13 percent, or 2,371, of the 18,221 asylum decisions made between 2013 and 2015 were based on sexual orientation. While various organizations, particularly in urban centres across the country, do their best to aid LGBTQ refugees, they say the numbers keep growing—and don’t show any signs of slowing.

For a demographic who can be especially vulnerable in their resettlement—they’re often referred to as “minorities within the minority”—there’s a dire need for social care and access to programs as they navigate life in Canada. But the resources they need, in the abundance that they need them, often don’t exist.

AT FIRST, IRIS WAS SHY WHEN SHE STARTED frequenting Slack’s, the Village’s now-defunct trademark lesbian bar. She didn’t drink alcohol and was not used to so many openly gay women in one place. “It freaked me out. I told myself to stand near the door so I would have the option to leave.”

But she soon found it felt like a second home. The bar opened around mid-afternoon, where it was a casual hangout for women, before the crowds would gather at night for comedy shows, dancing, and dirty bingo. The venue closed down in 2013, but Iris remembers sitting and talking with other women after her language classes and watching television shows like The L Word, a drama that portrays the lives of a group of lesbian women. She would walk down Church Street and women would call out to her by name. The people she met there still remain some of her closest friends.

I met Iris at a round-table event about LGBTQ refugees and access to housing last February. She spoke animatedly to a group of people about her first months in Toronto, illustrating her initial cultural ignorance to LGBTQ communities in Canada. Once, she told the room, she approached a woman on the subway because she was wearing a plaid shirt and had short hair.

“I was told that’s what lesbians look like!”

Today Iris is open about her experiences, and she talks about them with a smile and light-heartedness that belies the isolation and uncertainty she felt at the time. When we later met for a coffee, she told me the less humorous side of her settlement story. In the 10 years since she arrived, she has struggled to feel comfortable in Canada, finding herself pinned between two identities—being Middle Eastern and being gay—and her future dependent on a settlement system and society she believes is not set up to receive her.

Iris came to Canada knowing she might never leave. In Saudi Arabia she had advocated for women’s rights, and when she felt it was no longer safe, decided to leave the country temporarily. While choosing where to go, she Googled the top 10 countries with the best human rights records, and Canada came up on top. After living in Toronto for four months, she heard that her name was on a list of persons to be arrested and decided to make a refugee claim to the Canadian government to stay.

Saudi Arabia is one of 13 countries in the world where homosexuality may be punishable by death, and although Iris had been in relationships before in her country, she also knew there was no future for her there.

The different types of refugees in Canada can be loosely gathered into three categories: Government-sponsored refugees are hand-picked from camps and waiting lists in their home countries, and are invited into Canada with the promise of financial, housing, and other settlement support for up to one year. Private sponsorship works similarly, through which eligible groups or organizations are usually connected with a person on a list and raise money to fund their travel and first year of settlement. Refugee claimants, on the other hand, arrive in Canada without warning or invitation, and once on Canadian soil make their claim to a border officer. More often than not they arrive without knowing anybody and are faced with a government and system that is reluctantly required to aid them.

This last group of refugees is extremely vulnerable. Once their asylum claim is made, they are given a date for their hearing, where the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada will determine whether they will be given refugee status. Canada is a signatory to the UN’s Geneva Convention, which means it must allow any person the chance to prove their need for protection and sanctuary; they also have the right to housing, education, and employment until they can make their case.

To be considered for refugee status, the individual must have a well-founded fear of persecution in their home country and be unable to go back. It is a rigorous process, one they must spend their initial months preparing for, and with such a backlog of applicants hearing dates may extend up to two years or longer. (As of July 2018, the average wait for a hearing is 20 months, four months more than the year before.)

During this period of limbo refugees are “claimants.” They are eligible to apply for a work or study permit, receive social assistance and basic medical care, and sometimes legal help (six of Canada’s 10 provinces provide legal aid free of charge). Otherwise, they are on their own.

When Iris went to the border services office to make her claim, she could hear the officer talking to another about her case, saying he was surprised she was asking for asylum coming from such a wealthy country; she must be in real trouble. It was a small but significant invasion of privacy. She was told to wait for a hearing date, which wouldn’t come for another two years. By that time she had experienced another side of Canada’s friendly image.

Refugee claimants have access to English-as-a-second- language (ESL) classes, and Iris soon found herself in one of these classrooms. Like her other English classes, the students around her were other refugees, many from other Middle Eastern countries. She hid that she was a lesbian, but she was still exposed to homophobia.

A classmate once told her he thought all gay people were sick, and that if he could, he would gather them all together and burn them alive. On another occasion, when the teacher found out she was a lesbian, she moved Iris to a different seat so she wouldn’t be sitting next to another woman.

Iris went to five different ESL locations before deciding to quit altogether. “I could not stand it. I did not feel safe,” she says. She decided she would rather pay for private classes than risk sitting in a classroom with other newcomers. She took language courses at both George Brown College and Humber College, where she hoped there would be more education around LGBTQ people.

Still, Iris didn’t always feel accepted. The courses were in the evening and students were allowed to bring their children. One day the teacher warned the class they might not want to bring in their kids for next week’s lesson because she would discussing “inappropriate” material. “I thought she was going to show us sex or something,” says Iris. It was about LGBTQ communities.

ON A WARM NIGHT IN OCTOBER 2017, CARLOS arrived at a bus stop in Barbados, where a group had already been waiting. He was alone. The group first called out to him, then surrounded him. They said people like him needed killing, and if they caught him by himself they would show him who was a real man. He had recently started hormone treatment and wearing more masculine clothing. Carlos, whose last name has been withheld to protect his identity, knew he was male at five years old, but it wasn’t until puberty when he realized he wasn’t allowed to be.

“Barbados is a very hyper-masculine place,” says Carlos. “They are very threatened by anything that looks like an infringement on their masculinity.” As he slowly began his transition, binding
his chest and paying a doctor under the table for hormone treatment, he experienced a great deal of transphobia and verbal abuse.

After the incident at the bus stop, he realized his life was in danger; within two weeks he quit his job and sold all of his belongings. He told his mom he was deciding between the Netherlands, Spain, or Canada. His mother suggested the latter, a place Carlos had been before.

Arriving on a visitor visa and making an asylum claim, Carlos’s experience was much different. “I expected a red carpet, everyone dancing around with unicorns and fluffy bunnies, rainbows everywhere! Because that’s the kind of picture Canada puts out there,” he says. Instead, he says, it felt empty: “I was alone and knew nobody and had nothing.”

After clearing the border and making his initial claim, an officer asked if Carlos had anywhere to go. Carlos had been in contact with The 519, who had told him they would help him find a safe place to stay upon arrival, but they weren’t picking up. “The guy looked at me dead in the eye and said, ‘Look, I do not want to detain you. That’s not a place for you to be in.’”

Carlos was given a number for the Canadian Red Cross, who are often the first contact for refugees landing on Canadian soil. To find him a shelter, they asked if he was a man or a woman. He told them he is a man, a trans man. And they said, “So what does this mean?”

The Red Cross First Contact program does not have a specific policy on how to communicate with LGBTQ persons. A representative of the organization expressed in an email that their goal is to be the first point of contact for refugees when they arrive at the airport, where they try connect them to information and resources, regardless of gender identity or sexual orientation.

Carlos was taken to a refugee shelter in downtown Toronto, but when he got there nobody knew what to do with him. He was told they could not put him in the women’s shelter, but he wouldn’t be safe staying with men, either. “I think the hardest thing for me was being told that Canada was going to protect people like me, and the first person I had a conversation with blatantly said there is no safe space for me here,” he says. Carlos would remain there until his hearing.

In refugee hearings, a board member listens to the claimant’s explanation of their need for Canada’s protection. Refugees who are LGBTQ face unique challenges when preparing their cases. When the basis of claim is their sexual orientation or gender identity, individuals are expected to prove they are in fact queer or trans, and must describe in detail why this puts their lives in jeopardy. This can be extremely difficult, especially for those who haven’t come out yet, or have been living in fear of violence or rejection if they were open about their identities.

In effect, the purpose of the hearing is its danger; individuals are re-traumatized over the same circumstances that would buy them protection. The more open and specific they are about their experiences back home—especially when describing stories of violence or social exclusion—the better their chances of convincing the board they deserve asylum.

“In the best situation it’s more delicate; in the worst situation it feels more invasive,” says Elizabeth Wozniak, an immigration lawyer in Halifax.

Nova Scotia is one of the provinces that doesn’t provide legal aid to refugee claimants, and Wozniak sometimes works pro bono. “We definitely have to prepare the person for the kinds of questions they will get asked and sometimes it can be a bit harsh, but you have to get them ready for it. You don’t want them to be blindsided at the hearing when in the hearing the judge asks them why don’t they have a Grindr account.”

After the hearing, which can extend from two hours to multiple days, refugees will either be granted a positive decision, meaning they become a “protected person” and can apply for permanent residency (usually granted), or they must wait for a written decision—“which usually means ‘no,’” says Wozniak. The current rate of acceptance hovers around 65 to 70 percent, the highest since 2012.

Carlos says he was lucky: His hearing took place after only a year. After successfully convincing the board and being granted refugee status, his energy turned to finding a new place to live. He was receiving $733 a month from social assistance—$390 of which was meant for housing.

This amount varies throughout Canada, but not by much, and is not adjusted according to the region. A single refugee claimant in British Columbia will receive $710 in a comparable market—even in Vancouver, one of the country’s most expensive cities to live in. In Quebec where prices are much cheaper, claimants would receive $633 a month; in Manitoba it is $820.

For Carlos, searching for a home in Toronto, where rental prices averaged almost $2,000 for a one-bedroom last year, the task felt insurmountable. Carlos wanted to be open with landlords about his gender identity—he didn’t want there to be any surprises if they saw needles lying around. He looked at multiple places across the city, but nobody was calling him back.

He eventually found a room in an apartment with three cisgender men. It was way above what he could afford to pay, but it was close to the refugee shelter, whose staff had become the closest thing to family he had in Canada.

In the house Carlos kept to himself. His roommates didn’t know he was trans, and he lived in constant fear of them finding out. Two of them were from Jamaica, a country with a culture that is notoriously anti-LGBTQ, and he wasn’t sure how they would react. They all shared a bathroom, and he would change in there, or dart to his room before they saw him in a towel.

“The public has a general understanding of LGBTQ communities, but transphobia and homophobia are still very prevalent,” says Darae Lee, acting senior manager of settlement and integration programs at the Vancouver-based charity Mosaic. “So when we put those two identities together it is even more difficult to find safe, welcoming housing.”

Lee names affordable housing as one of the most pressing issues for LGBTQ claimants in Vancouver, something that can also affect mental health and community participation. Few shelters in the city are LGBTQ friendly, and what is available is overrun; Lee says most people in Mosaic’s I Belong program, which serves LGBTQ newcomers, rely on social media and word of mouth for safe places to stay.

“They are really lucky if they have a friend who can share their room, but in most cases that’s very rare,” says Lee. “They just don’t have the connections.”

In these cases, refugee claimants are forced to hop from shelter to shelter—there is no maximum but stays rarely exceed 10 days. In extreme situations, newcomers are forced to sleep in abandoned storefronts and on park benches. Canadian cities only host a handful of shelters that specifically serve refugees or LGBTQ communities; none are designed to shelter both. In most cases those seeking asylum are placed wherever there is space—which in itself is a big feat, as emergency shelters in Canada’s major cities continue to burst at the seams.

The last national shelter study found Canada’s shelters were operating at over 90 percent capacity—Toronto is currently at 96 percent with their handful of refugee-specific shelters running wait lists. In June 2018 it was estimated that more than 40 percent of those in the city’s shelters were refugees, propelling the City to house the increasing number of refugee claimants in motels and temporary shelters erected in parking lots—makeshift buildings that are little more than glorified tents.

Even when there is space, these can be rough environments, where newcomers live in close proximity with those experiencing substance abuse and mental health issues. For a refugee who is LGBTQ the first few weeks can be dangerous and upsetting, and securing a roof over their head can make a world of difference on the path to settlement.

BY THE TIME I SAT DOWN WITH ZULFIKAR FAHD from Indonesia, he had been in Canada for just eight months but had already secured a job and apartment, started a blog, and had plans that weekend to drive to Oakville, a suburb of Toronto, to buy a dog, a cockapoo. He planned to name her Phoebe, after the character in his favourite show, Friends.

Fahd took a different approach to settlement. Three weeks earlier he posted an ad to Toronto’s Bunz Home Zone, a popular Facebook group where members upload posts offering or looking for vacant rooms and spaces for rent. In his post was a photo of himself, a picture of a cockapoo, and a paragraph of his story coming to Canada as a gay Indonesian refugee.

It is not illegal to be gay in his home country, but police and neighbours often punish queer men and women with public whippings. Last year in Indonesia, while he had another man over at his apartment late one night, there was a knock at his door, which turned out to be multiple neighbours and a police officer there to kick him out of his home.

Fahd moved but experienced other instances where he felt unsafe, eventually quitting his communications job and making his way to Canada, a place he heard was welcoming. He says he hasn’t experienced any of the roadblocks to settlement other gay refugee claimants may have, and much of that has to do with his proficient English and the money he brought with him.

He was able to avoid the shelters and had a few friends in the city who let him stay in their homes until he could find his own place. He also studied law in Indonesia, so he didn’t require legal assistance. His only qualm, he says, is that he has to wait for his hearing—it’s been pushed back indefinitely for reasons unknown, but he wants to start his life, and is confident Canada will accept him.

By the time he wrote his Facebook post, he didn’t consider his refugee status as a negative thing. “When you want a better life and when you work hard, I don’t think that’s something you have to be ashamed of,” he says. “That’s more like a superpower.”

UPSTAIRS IN THE TWO-BEDROOM APARTMENT IN Toronto where he now lives, Carlos is lounging in basketball shorts, playing FIFA ‘16 on his Playstation 4. Soon after arriving Carlos met another trans refugee at the Metropolitan Community Church while he was volunteering. Desperate to get out of his housing situation, Carlos jumped at the opportunity when a friend told him there was a vacant space in the building. He invited his new friend into the lease and today they are best friends.

Around the time of Carlos’s “Manniversary”—the six-month mark since he started taking the right dose of testosterone (in Barbados he was just using what he could get)—Carlos started
the process to a full transition. First on his list: top surgery. He has also been seeing his girlfriend for a few months, and they recently went camping together. Sitting on his couch beside a
window, I ask him if he feels more at home now. “I always felt at home,” he says, “I’m starting now to not feel as displaced.”

Iris, meanwhile, met her partner online, and two years ago they decided to have a child, her partner giving birth to a baby girl. The couple has since separated; Iris is now fighting for
shared custody of their child. To be close to her daughter she moved out of Toronto to the suburb of Mississauga, a place she says doesn’t have much of an LGBTQ community.

But she’s finding life easier, and she says she’s become more comfortable in her own skin. The Village has remained her safe place, but outside of the city she uses Facebook groups for gay and
bisexual women to stay connected. She has friends across the world, and she was recently speaking to a woman who lives in Miami, Florida.

As her English improved she also began volunteering at the Metropolitan Community Church. That eventually led to a job at another organization, where she works with other refugee
claimants and newcomers, drawing from her own experiences to help with the settlement process.

“People will come here with this idea that they can be themselves, so when they come here it is like this picture is breaking in pieces,” she says. “When they come here they don’t have family. They try to build family but it is so hard. They have been lonely in their countries but now they’re truly alone and lonely.”

It’s 1:30 a.m., and I’m in my family’s living room giggling and staring at my laptop screen. I’ve been online for 10 hours in a chatroom with a rotating cast of friends. We have members from every time zone, scattered across the globe; the Australians are just coming online while some of the Americans are logging off. Some have work tomorrow, most have school like me. But the current topic is more important: The newest episode of Doctor Who featured a lizard lady and her lesbian lover, and it’s a big deal.

This is how I spent most of my nights from age 14 to 18. Years online allowed me to build up a network of queer friends across the globe when I was sorely lacking any in real life.

I grew up with my sexuality a secret. I always knew that I liked girls, but people around me kept reminding me why I shouldn’t tell anyone. When I was four, a friend told me it was yucky to kiss girls. I told my best friend I might like girls and boys when I was 11; when she told a bunch of my peers at a sleepover I wasn’t invited to, they decided that it was disgusting. At 13 a teacher told me gay marriage was a sin. My French Catholic school upbringing instilled in me the idea of guilt, so I felt ashamed when I looked for queer content. Over time I learned to keep my sexuality, my feelings to myself.

My mom hooked up our household with an internet connection in 2006, shortly after the sleepover incident. I found my comfort zone online. It started slow, Googling terms and immediately clearing my search history in fear. Forums became my go-to for stories of people’s lived experiences. I’d stay up late using the web browser on my handheld video game console to read as much as I could. Hiding under my blanket with the lights out, I’d go through pages of LGBTQ support forums. I found out other people liked girls too, and that it was normal to have crushes on my friends.

Queer mentorship is complicated: In my everyday life I didn’t have anyone to talk to or look up to. But online, there were thousands of people who could offer support. My parents were initially uncomfortable with the amount of time I was spending online; they didn’t understand why I was staying up late and constantly on my phone. One night, I had my mom come into my room and meet my chatroom pals. They introduced themselves and made small talk, and from then on there was a new understanding. She would tell me to say hi to people I was messaging, and even bought a card to mail to one friend with whom she shared a birthday. She saw how important these people were to me, that I had found a lifeline in friends who supported each other. The internet can seem like a cold and untrusting place; but for youth, like me, struggling with identity, online connections are invaluable.

By 2013 the internet helped me understand the nuances of my different identities, and I came out as both queer and non-binary. For me being non-binary means being completely outside of the gender binary of male and female. I try to avoid gendering products, ideas, or behaviours. I prefer to be confusing rather than categorized. I like to imagine my gender like a void—endless and vacant.

I also started making online LGBTQ friends. Mazz, for instance, was only a few months older than me but knew much more about queerness. After my first LGBTQ dance held in a neighbouring town’s high school, Mazz encouraged me to message the cute girl I’d met and danced with. I made a Tumblr blog when I was 15 and slowly began following other blogs run by queer kids. Some analyzed queer representation in media; others were an online record of their owners’ existence as LGBTQ people. This online, intangible world became a haven: It was proof others like me existed.

My online support system bolstered me to talk openly about my identities in real life. Later in 2013, I came out with a Facebook post that friends, family, and classmates could read. A few hours later I got a message from my mom asking what non-binary meant and what she should know. That was that: No awkward conversation, no crying, no shouting. The internet helped me streamline my coming-out process: It gave me the power to plan my words and share my identities with a chosen audience, and it gave my mother time to understand and research. The next time we met in person, she used my preferred pronouns—and it’s been that way ever since.

Coming out online gives the process a form of permanence: It’s always in my web history and I can re-share it without having to stress. This year when I moved and made new friends, I posted on my Instagram story for Trans Day of Visibility to remind everyone and let new friends know that my pronouns are they/them/their. The internet also provides filters: I can easily remove those who don’t approve of my identities from my life without a scary and potentially dangerous in-person interaction.

These days I’m vocal about being non-binary and queer, and I’ve built a community offline. Online, I’ve kept in touch with my chatroom friends. I might not need them as much as I did, but we still send each other links about our favourite shows and encourage one another.

The internet has revolutionized how queer youth can learn about themselves. Queer knowledge and mentorship is more accessible than ever before. More kids will be able to educate themselves, find communities, and even change the world along the way.

Photo courtesy Rahim Thawer.

Growing up in an Ismaili Muslim community in Toronto, there was no explicit acceptance of queer folks, says Thawer. “I simply did not know where to look to find other people like myself.”

At the age of 23, Thawer finally found his people at Salaam Canada, a social network and support group for those who identify as both Muslim and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer. The volunteer-run organization based in Toronto, which opened briefly in the 1990s but closed after two years due to violent responses and threats from other parts of Canada and the United States, reopened in 2000. Salaam now offers monthly gatherings and refugee support. It also hosts an annual Peace Iftar during Ramadan, and hosts meetings about human rights and social justice issues within the LGBTQ and Muslim communities.

Today, Salaam Canada is associated with over 20 organizations across Canada and others worldwide, including NAZ Male Health Organization in Pakistan and The Inner Circle in South Africa.

The traditional schools of Islamic law (and many other religions) consider non-heterosexual acts a sin. Many have been forced into arranged marriages, been shunned by loved ones, or forced out of their native countries in fear of being killed.

For Thawer, maintaining his faith while embracing his sexual and gender identity was a process of anticipating loss of community and friends, and then coping with that loss. “My identity formation centered on a belief that my queerness was a deficiency I should correct and compensate for,” says Thawer, who’s now part of the core organizing team of Salaam Canada. “I’ve overcome the weight of these experiences by surrounding myself with affirming people.”

As Thawer points out, offering the space and support to help reconcile one’s identity is a rare but critical service. “We then get to think about what could Islam mean for me if I was queer and trans? Does it have a place in my life? Do I want it to be a spiritual thing in my life or do I want to reclaim it as a cultural part of who I am?”

Then Ismail joins a writing class at the University of Toronto where he meets Fatima, a girl the age his daughter would have been, who also belongs to his Indian Muslim community. When Fatima’s parents kick her out because they learn she’s queer, Ismail’s near-empty house presents a convenient (if not entirely comfortable) solution. Meanwhile, Celia, a recent widow, moves into the house across the street. Celia, battling her grief and her Portuguese community’s strict rituals of widowhood, finds herself drawn to Ismail. Ismail, who mostly shuns (and is shunned by) his neighbours in Little Portugal, finds he’s less fractured in Celia’s company. As Ismail’s relationship with the two women deepens, his demiexistence gradually fills with ripe, rewarding chaos.

With a quiet, inward-looking analysis of Ismail’s life, Farzana Doctor‘s Six Metres of Pavement asks how mourning can make way for grief when it’s cemented in by guilt, and if memories can be defanged. Simmering in the background is a remarkable portrait of immigrant Toronto. As an Indian in a Portuguese neighbourhood, Ismail is a double immigrant, and the narrative marks the myriad ways Ismail experiences the city as insider-yet-chronic outsider. With this second novel, Doctor confirms her adeptness at burrowing deep beneath the surface of things—and her gift for relating her findings with humour and grace.

The Dirt Chronicles is a delicate alloy of Burroughs and Gallant, walking an uncompromising line where the homeless, the junkies, the punks, and the dispossessed are one and all pushing against a threat sometimes left to vague societal pressures but otherwise embodied in the interweaving stories’ antagonist. The King, a sadist vice cop with a thing for rockabilly bent on breaking the dignities and backs of our heroes, is the Toronto underworld’s answer to Dr. Satan.

Her characters carry chips on their shoulders and monkeys on their backs, from the whipped and broken crackhead Darcy to the fragile, indomitable Ferret to the tragically incarcerated Eddie.

When they’re bent or broken, Dunnion narrates enough pain to pass sympathetic jolts to her reader. A visceral and violent book that could have set out to shock is instead touching. The dance between her characters’ strengths and weaknesses is compelling, readable, and tempers the handful of potshots she takes at the world of the well-fed and gainfully employed.

After Patrick Furey, a heartbroken and bullied gay student, hangs himself in his bedroom, there is no minute of silence, no special assembly. Instead, his school’s closeted principal forbids staff to share any information, fearing a teen suicide would damage the school’s reputation and possibly spawn copycats. Furey’s death may happen in the first few pages of Suzette Mayr’s fourth novel, Monoceros, but it echoes from cover to cover. His empty desk forces students and staff to contemplate the finality of his death, and the fact that they hardly knew the troubled student at all.

Suzette Mayr skilfully crafts each chapter from the perspective of one member of her colourful, but flawed, cast of characters. Furey’s secret boyfriend, Ginger, suppresses his grief to keep their relationship hidden, especially from his jealous girlfriend, Petra, who had scrawled “u r a fag” on Furey’s locker before he died. There is also Faraday, Furey’s unicorn-obsessed classmate, who wishes she had done something nice for Furey before he died, like written him a note saying “Hi” or donated her virginity to him.

In a tragedy laced with humour, Mayr engages readers with her meticulous attention to detail, providing vivid descriptions of not only her characters, but also the heavy emotions—grief, confusion, aching—churning inside them. Monoceros may spark a visceral reaction in some readers, especially as the unnerving words “faggot” and “homo” roll off characters’ tongues with teenage ease. But mostly, it is a thought-provoking tale of a boy who chooses to take “charge of his own ending” and the interconnected web of lost souls he leaves behind.

The contributors’ list features Canadian and American voices such as Vancouver filmmaker-author Amber Dawn, feministing.com’s Miriam Zoila Pérez, and Toronto literary darling Zoe Whittall.

The bright spots are many, but the most affecting essays are the ones that veer into the personal: a sexworker femme’s memories of her butch lover; gay club culture in the post-Stonewall riots era; attending a relative’s stag rather than the doe; wondering if breast reductions or testosterone injections make you less butch than trans and butches with babies.

Other entries are little more than Livejournalling, diary declarations about the Self, or laced with academic speak. Swinging from one end of the narrative spectrum to the other can feel confusing, but the message as a whole is that butch and femme are not two identities, but the work of many individuals who have created themselves in their own images.

Persistence isn’t just about gender performance. It weaves thoughtful threads about class, race, disability, pop culture, and media into an oft-parodied and stereotyped modern queer culture. It’s a worthy collection that brings nuance back to notions of dykes, femmes, butches, and lesbians all.

“Total Eclipse” (2005) by Will Munro. Photo by Sean Weaver, courtesy Paul Petro Contemporary Art.

It is impossible to speak of Will Munro. It is easy to talk about Will Munro(s).

Will Munro, the artist/activist/social wizard/impresario and all around wunderkind, passed away one lovely, clear-as-a-bell summer morning in 2010. He was 36.

In that too-short time, Will produced an enormous amount of highly influential, DIY-infused art, reinvigorated the Toronto, and by extension the Canadian, and some argue international queer club scenes—and I support that argument, having seen Will’s influence up close in countless cities far and wide. He empowered an entire generation of artists, who felt the ossified Canadian art scene was not for them, to simply make/display/distribute their art on their own terms.

You’ll note I’m using the “/” rather a lot—I have no choice. Will was so many things, Will made so many things.

I generally distrust the concept of “legacy,” but not in the case of Will Munro. His simplest and most inspired conceit was that queers of all stripes (homo-normative, hetero-normative, just plain fucking crazy, what have you) have far more in common than not, and can share a big sandbox with joy. And we did. For a decade, Will ran the legendary Vazaleen parties— mad, dressed-to-thrill events that spawned many, many subsequent cultural products and collaborations. And that’s putting it mildly.

The parties and the underlying concept—shared space for a diverse population—were both quickly copied, largely because a generation of queers had grown up under the segregationist, essentialist politics of the ’80s–’90s (dykes only go to dyke spaces, fags only go to fag spaces…oh, it was all so tiresome, so numbing), politics that no longer made sense, no longer reflected the day-today reality of the third wave of queer liberation. Suddenly, we all had a meeting place, and we used it.

Now it’s time for a more rigorous examination of Will’s beautiful, sexy art. Will’s social contribution is well-documented (and I’m doing it again), but his highly original art practice, one fuelled by punk-rock aesthetics, righteous rage, and delicious impertinence, rough homemade fashion, sex-worker rights, and queer youth advocacy, club and DJ culture, anti-corporatism, and, less remarked on, his long fascination with, and promotion of, queer cultural history (an interest that made him, again, unique in his generation) has been, to date, not as well-considered.

I sense a sudden boom in Munro studies coming. Retrospectives and monographs galore. More gifts from a relentless giver. It’s the least we can do.

But this is not the place for academic pursuits. Let other people get post-grad degrees off Will’s back.

Right here, right now, I just want to say thank you. I miss you, Will.