Photo Courtesy of Kelsey Savage & John Woods, Real Talk

On paper, Alison Klein is a serious academic with a master’s in interdisciplinary studies focused on adult education and disability. Meet her at one of the Real Talk’s free public events (affectionately known as “pizza parties”), and she’ll be the first to greet you as a peer facilitator and make a joke—sometimes with anatomically correct models at the ready.

“I go, ‘Look, a present’, and then just walk away,” says Klein with a smile. “I have kind of a funny side.”

Founded and managed by sexual health educator John Woods, Real Talk is an initiative based in Metro Vancouver that supports people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD). Woods has worked in community living spaces, schools, and sexual health organizations since the early ’90s, both in Canada and in London, UK. He saw the urgent need for sex education tailored to the IDD community, and a slew of intersectional barriers rooted in eugenics. Now, in between pizza parties and Q&As, Real Talk works with the community living sector to support providers and those with cognitive disabilities.

“Step five is getting the public to acknowledge and affirm that folks with intellectual disabilities could be LGBTQ,” explains Kelsey Savage, Real Talk’s project developer. “Step zero is the general population believing that folks with intellectual disabilities have a sexuality at all.”

Since its founding in 2017, Real Talk has grown to include both certified sexual health educators and peer facilitators with lived experience, ensuring its initiatives are driven by community needs. While the disability rights rallying cry “nothing about us without us” has existed for decades, Real Talk remains one of the few accessible sex-positive resources that centre self-advocacy. It provides an extensive library of YouTube videos addressing common questions around sexuality and disability. Savage also oversees Connecting Queer Communities (CQC), a social group for 2SLGBTQIA+ folks with cognitive disabilities to connect across the Lower Mainland both in person and online. People often attend both Real Talk and CQC events, and several have joined Klein as peer facilitators themselves. As facilitators, honouring education and community could mean helping someone explain orgasms to their partner one day, and being with someone’s deepest traumas the next.

“It’s happened a number of times at our events, where people have discovered they’ve been taking birth control and it’s been called a vitamin, or they’ve had an IUD and they didn’t consent to it,” says Savage. “There’s already a lot in the room before you step into it.”

As Real Talk works across communities to expand its outreach, what’s needed to ensure the future of good sexual health education is clear: government-sponsored education and publicly funded accommodations and support so people with cognitive disabilities have an equitable pathway to become sexual health educators. “I want to ideally work myself out of a job,” teases Savage.

“Earlier, I was mostly around staff and disconnected from my community,” Klein says. “I hope Real Talk is a starting point, and that sex education can be taught in schools to kids from all different backgrounds, so they all have a frame of reference [for] each other.”

Photo by Lisa from Pexels via Pexels

It’s the late 2010s and I’m a teenager carefully watching my mom out of my peripheral. She’s paying attention to the TV and the animated man on the screen in a hilarious combination of suit, tie, and yellow beanie. He’s eating ice cream in a diner with a friend: a girl who’s made it very clear she likes him this whole season, only to be met with his awkward body language, stumbled excuses, and quick subject changes.

I’ve seen this one before, but my heart is in my throat when the companion asks Todd Chavez (Aaron Paul) if he’s gay.

Todd responds, “I’m not gay. I mean, I don’t think I am, but I don’t think I’m straight either. I don’t know what I am. I think I might be nothing.”

I click the next episode of BoJack without hesitation.

BoJack Horseman is a Netflix original animated tragicomedy set in a fictionalized version of Hollywood. Our cast includes a mix of humans, anthropomorphized animals, and celebrity cameos. As it aired from 2014 to 2020, BoJack went on to receive consistent critical acclaim and a dedicated audience who loved the balance between the wacky scenarios typical to adult animation and the honest portrayal of serious topics like substance abuse and depression.

When season four graces our screen, I finally hear the word that I’ve held close to my chest for years now spoken aloud: “asexual.” Todd Chavez, our wacky slacker sidekick, initially reacts with an aversion to the label.

But after some uncertainty and self-reflection, Todd embraces his identity in “Hooray! Todd Episode!” During a vulnerable moment, Todd comes out to BoJack: “I’m asexual. Not sexual.”

I share a look with my mother, the woman who’s known me all my life, who still knows me best, and hope that she understands.

*

Todd Chavez was one of only two asexual characters included in GLAAD’s 2017-2018 “Where We Are on TV” report, marking the first year the annual publication included asexuals in its data. While the publication notes that there was some asexual representation on television in previous years, “those characters were often relegated to one-off episodes, which did not allow for nuanced exploration.”

Seeking out asexual representation on TV was an often-disheartening exercise for a young asexual (commonly shortened to “ace”) like me. As a greater number of queer characters stepped into the spotlight, I searched desperately for the aces. When it came down to it, most of our “ace representatives” pre-2017 were only “ace-coded” characters, portraying some common signs of asexuality without ever encountering, exploring, or articulating the term. Asexuals would often recognize these signs or find the experiences of the characters relatable to their own asexual experiences, but we rarely heard our label spoken aloud.

Sometimes, it was enough to be the character left uncoupled by the end of the narrative—like Frozen’s Elsa—to be hailed as an “asexual icon” on internet forums. The ambiguity of the unlabelled asexual meant little repercussion for portraying common ace stereotypes like the logical and emotionless “robot” over and over again. Think The Big Bang Theory’s Sheldon Cooper who says he “find[s] the concept of coitus to be ridiculous and off-putting.” Sheldon is touch-averse and sex-repulsed, but never uses the term “asexual” to describe himself. The lack of articulated labels leaves it up to fans to draw their own conclusions and, in more cases than not, leaves the writers space to retcon any common ace markers to suit their narrative needs. When the word “asexual” was actually uttered, it was met with a “fix it” attitude like House M.D.’s episode “Better Half.” (House spends his 44-minute run-time trying to disprove the claims of a self-identifying asexual couple, unfortunately succeeding when it’s discovered the man has a pituitary tumor that lowered his libido and caused erectile dysfunction, and the woman admits she was faking for her husband.)

Todd Chavez’s ground-breaking journey on BoJack was an important milestone for those of us looking to see our sexuality portrayed with positivity and a complex, comprehensive multi-season storyline on screen. When I showed my mom BoJack, already knowing where Todd’s journey would lead, I was secretly building a foundation for my own coming out moment.

As Todd comes into his own understanding of his identity—an asexual who is interested in romance, but sex-averse—the show demonstrates the variance in ace experiences. A couple from his Asexual Alliance group explain the difference between aromantic asexuals—those not interested in sex or relationships—and aces who enjoy dating. Todd’s childhood friend Emily (Abbi Jacobson) informs us that some asexuals do have and enjoy sex. As Todd’s dating life progresses, we see the struggles that arise from dating while asexual, such as Todd dating Yolanda (Natalie Morales) because they’re both asexual, even though they have nothing else in common.

The thing I dreaded most about my own coming out moment was having to explain to my family what asexuality means. I didn’t want to field questions, discuss the nuances, and be delegitimized because I was just an inexperienced teenager. One of the benefits of representing marginalized identities on screen is that representation bridges gaps in understanding. Pink Triangle Press’s 2024 PTP Pink Paper, a research report on Canadian 2SLGBTQIA+ media representation, explains, “9 in 10 media professionals agree that on-screen representation increases understanding and drives acceptance of 2SLGBTQIA+ people in society at large.”

In its delicate handling of my identity, BoJack provided the crash course on asexuality that I dreamed of. My mom was an apt student who was enticed by the series’ rapid-fire shifts between tense dramatic moments and silly schemes. By the end of the series, she left with something meaningful: some basic knowledge about a type of sexuality she wasn’t previously familiar with. All that was left for me to do was to point at Todd and say, “Mom, that’s me.”

Yes, I came out to my mom using BoJack Horseman. Turns out TV is a useful tool.

*

Since BoJack, I’ve encountered more asexual characters in the media I love, though many of them aren’t as widely visible as the ones found on television. Most of my favourites come from books or indie content on the internet with a limited audience. On TV and popular streaming services, especially in Canada, there’s still a lot of work to be done.

In GLAAD’s most recent “Where We Are on TV” (2023-2024), they reported four asexual characters across streaming and cable: Sex Education’s O, Heartstopper’s Isaac, Heartbreak High’s Cash, and Big Mouth’s Elijah. At four characters, we see double the total from Todd’s ace-debut year—all of them found on Netflix, two carried over from the previous year—and still pitifully in the single-digits. The 2024 PTP Pink Paper report omitted data on asexuals as there was not sufficient ace representation in mainstream Canadian media.

A greater number of characters only have their asexuality confirmed by their creators rather than shown on screen. According to SpongeBob SquarePants creator, Stephen Hillenburg, in a 2005 People Magazine interview, he “never intended [SpongeBob] to be gay. I consider [him] to be almost asexual.” SpongeBob is asexual! Who knew? Many other creator-confirmed aces can be easily-missed by audiences, buried in interviews and old social media posts. The aces are out there—more of us than you’d think—but where are our storylines?

It’s tough work seeking out asexuals on screen. Alongside intersex and Two-Spirit, we’re still one of the most underrepresented queer identities on mainstream TV. Nearly a decade after he said “asexual,” Todd Chavez is still important to me, still my favourite character in western animation. He gave me the courage and the resources to express my pride and come out to my family by bravely embarking on his asexual journey. As the next generation tunes in to their favourite shows, I hope they find their Todd.

Gurza, a disability awareness consultant since 2012, has made it his mission to get Canadians to stop, think about, and discuss how people with disabilities are portrayed in society—including their sexuality and desires. Since the launch of his website, AndrewGurza.com, in January 2015, his message is slowly making its way to folks both in Canada and across the world.

People with disabilities face a number of challenges. One hurdle Gurza has faced is that society largely views disabled folks as undesirable or asexual beings. “Sex and disability make most people uncomfortable because they haven’t had the chance to see disabled people sexualized in a way that gives them agency over their bodies and their experiences,” he says. As a result, Gurza has spent considerable time over the past four years crafting his voice. He has worked tirelessly to reclaim words such as “disabled” and “crippled.” Through social media and his blog, he provides readers with insight on the real disabled experience. “It is never really seen as something normative and accepted at all,” he says.

In February 2015, Gurza launched Disability After Dark, a weekly podcast dedicated to disability and sex. He talks frankly about everything from sex and sexuality, desire, devotion, accessibility, sexual identity, and queer culture, and often invites guests on the show to share their experiences. In a recent episode, “Accessing Anal,” Gurza discusses the inaccessibility of anal sex to a person with disabilities, using himself as the example. Its open and honest format has paid off: The podcast has reached nearly 6,000 downloads since its inception.

Gurza also speaks across North America about disability, on topics ranging from body image issues to long-term care. “Being a disability awareness consultant, I want people aware of what the disabled experience—what my experience—as a queer disabled man feels like,” he says. “I want to bring everyone into my experiences and give them a seat at my table.”

It’s hard to deny that while Gurza’s voice is valuable for the disability community in general, it is extraordinarily valuable and necessary in the queer community. As a queer man, he’s aware of the “homonormative ideal,” which assumes that all queer people must conform to certain ideal beauty standards or fit certain stereotypes. From being flamboyant and feminine to having huge muscles and a beard, these ideals have plagued Gurza throughout his life, and he has been confronted with an incredible amount of ableism and discrimination from within the community. “I’d be lying if I said it didn’t hurt,” he says. “It burns each and every time.” From being asked blatant questions about his body (“Does your penis work?”), to being unable to access queer spaces both physically and emotionally, much of this has fueled Gurza’s work. “I use the tough parts [of my own life] to bolster my mission of shining a light on the reality of disability,” Gurza says.

Gurza has embraced his status as a kinky cripple who has worked overtime to dispel the myths that plague those who have disabilities. “What I am trying to do in my work is shine a light on what disability is really like for me,” he explains. “There are days when living as a disabled person isn’t awesome, and no matter how much positivity you use, nothing will change that.” He believes that by showing Canadians the emotional side of disability, they will have a better understanding of how disability affects folks in all aspects of their lives. Most recently, a parent who listened to Gurza’s podcast wrote in to say that because of him, they now had the words to talk to their disabled teenager about sex. “When I read that, I was bowled over. I mean, it doesn’t get much better than that,” he says.

This year, Gurza is challenging himself to something different: he’s in the midst of writing a book proposal based on his blogs and planning a lecture series based on his podcast series. “I want my voice to be among the many disabled people, to bring disability that much closer to the mainstream,” he says. Gurza may just be the voice to end the stigma and make you look at disability differently

If Maclean’s was looking for someone to explain Canada’s teenage girls to their parents, Sax was a strange choice. He does have a PhD in psychology from 1980, but he primarily interprets and popularizes research rather than doing peer-reviewed work himself. Unfortunately, his interpretations are pretty controversial.

A blog called Language Log has criticized Sax for over-interpreting and distorting research on gender differences. This stands out to me because I know Language Log to be home to particularly smart take-downs of bad statistics. The New York Times also published a fairly critical profile of Sax a couple years ago.

So I shouldn’t be surprised to find Sax up to his usual tricks in this Q&A. Take his claims about self injury:

…if you look at the literature, you see that more than one in five girls is cutting herself and/or burning herself with matches. […] In a very well-executed study published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal two years ago, a demographically representative sample of young people 14 to 21 years of age was surveyed in Victoria, and there was an overall prevalence of roughly 16 percent. Although in the abstract there’s no mention of sex differences, if you pull up the tables you see that only eight percent of boys but 24 percent of girls were cutting or burning themselves.

In fact, that’s not exactly what the paper found. (You can read it here.) Sixteen percent of young people and 24 percent of girls had, at some time, injured themselves. But the way this statistic is repeated presents two problems. First, Sax implies that all self injury in these papers is cutting or burning, when in fact the authors also measured some kinds of drug and alcohol use, and other behaviours. This is an understandable memory lapse. But second, and more importantly, Sax’s statistics are for youth who had ever hurt themselves. When we look at how many youth had injured themselves more than three times, prevalence falls to six percent. (The paper doesn’t provide a gender breakdown for that smaller group.)

The difficulty here is Sax’s verb tense. The fact that he says “one in five girls is” and then later “24 percent of girls were” suggests an ongoing, long-term problem. As unpleasant as it is to imagine, I think we can accept that a large number of teenagers try out self harm, and that this is quite different from someone who injures repeatedly, over a long period of time. It is the latter scenario that Sax goes on to describe in titillating detail:

The girls themselves tell you, “I cut myself because it’s real, it’s not fake.” It’s not a cry for help: most girls don’t want adults knowing they’re cutting, which is why they cut in places we won’t see, like high up on the inner thigh. And they don’t want to kill themselves. There’s research which is quite astonishing to many people: when girls cut themselves, they are getting a release of endogenous opiates—they’re actually getting high.

This is a small misinterpretation, but it is important. A surprising result has unusual power in this sort of piece—it stops readers short, overturns their assumptions, and encourages them to reassess the rest of the article’s claims. And it’s especially disappointing coming from a magazine that just last year published a comprehensive package on how well teenagers are doing:

In light of these facts, [Reginald] Bibby [sociology at the University of Lethbridge] expects strong resistance to his findings from the very teen crisis apparatus he partially credits with all the good news. “The experts act almost annoyed when you suggest kids are actually looking a little better,” he says. Some of that blowback stems from genuine difference of opinion. But a lot grows out of popular wisdom coming out of the United States.

Unfortunately, with this piece Maclean’s has uncritically repeated that misleading popular wisdom. And from a cover this sensationalist, I think we have a right to expect more.

In today’s Verbatim, we’ve got a transcript of my interview with Alisa Palmer, director of Cloud 9, currently playing in Toronto at the Panasonic Theatre. Cloud 9 is British playwright Caryl Churchill’s 1979 play that masks a scathing critique of English colonialist notions of sex, gender, and race beneath a fast-talking and often absurd family comedy.

I talked with Alisa Palmer, director of this latest remount, about what’s changed in the 30 years since Cloud 9 debuted—and what still has the power to shock.

Q&A

Graham F. Scott: Cloud 9 is 30 years old now. When it debuted it was very much of its time. So what appealed to you about it today?

Alisa Palmer: Well, as we were just chatting, I’m a student of the philosophy of history, but what the past holds for us is sometimes it’s easier to see what the truth of a story is when there’s an arm’s length on it. And I think when it debuted, a lot of the reputation of the play was how theatrically experimental it was, or how politically and sexually sensational it was. And so the shock value was part of its reputation. And now that 30 years have passed, the shock value has abated because we’re more explicit culturally about what goes on in people’s bedrooms. So that effect has kind of been diffused with time and I think it allows the heart of the story to come through more easily.

And that’s really what was interesting to me, is that essentially I find it’s kind of a family drama told in a very unusual way. And the core of the family story is how raising children and different values that travel through generations affect people when they become adults. And so, in the first act we see this kind of archetypal, satirical version of a family—a 1950’s family—and she sets in it colonial Africa as kind of a poetic license. And then the children in that act grow up and we see them in the second act in their proper time and place—in 1980’s London—and their choices for how they conduct their relationships and their personal lives seem to be informed intensely by how their raised as children, and the gender expectations and the emotional expectations, and repressions –all those things. And that to me is an essential story.

I think Northrop Frye, he talks about how there’s only really one story, and that’s, who am I? How do I become who I am? And it’s a story of identity. And you can go across all the great plays, you know “to be or not to be” and King Lear, how do I fulfill who I am in whatever age of life I’m living? And this goes back to Cloud 9 as well. How do I fulfill who I am? How do I become a full person without stepping on someone else’s toes while making authentic choices? So that’s what drew me to it. I thought, 30 years of time, now we can actually hear the story which is more about relationships and finding out who you are, fulfilling who you are. And the other wild stuff about the style or the content will take a back step. It’s the fun part of the play, but it’s not the heart of the matter.

Graham F. Scott: And yet, apparently it still does have the ability to shock because you said in the director’s notes in the program that you got e-mails objecting to this play even being staged. What were the objections you heard?

Alisa Palmer: There are people who are concerned about Anne of Green Gables. (Laughs)

Graham F. Scott: How so?

Alisa Palmer: This is so fascinating because we all know that actors are actors and they play different roles, but there’s also some part of us, or some part of the population, that really suspends disbelief. So when an actor takes on a role you identify with that role. So Megan Follows was in the play, and she’s done so many different films and TV shows and stage pieces, but she’s most famous for being Anne of Green Gables when she was a teenager, or a young child. So she has a fan base that was dedicated to her, and some of them can’t make the distinction between Megan Follows and Anne of Green Gables. There’s a lot of dismay about Megan Follows selling the reputation of Anne of Green Gables by playing a lesbian. (Laughs)

Graham F. Scott: That’s bizarre.

Alisa Palmer: It is bizarre, and I think that would be the main point, the most articulate outcry. The experience that I have often is, I look at a play and I think, well this speaks to me I feel right at home with this, and then I think, am I a freak because other people think it’s so wild? And I go back to my childhood to my parents’ faces and reactions to things I would do that I think are perfectly normal, whether it’s dating a woman and then dating a man and then dating a woman, and their jaws would drop and I would think, am I a freak? And I remember my mother saying, why do you behave this way? Why do you live this way? And I said, well because you’ve raised me to believe that people are equal. You’ve done such a good job at raising me. And she was stumped! (Laughs) She was stumped and she said, you should go into law. But theatre’s kind of like law. You make an argument and other people can make their decisions about it.

Graham F. Scott: This is the second Caryl Churchill play that you’ve directed inside a year with Top Girls for Soulpepper [correction: this production was actually 2007], so there’s also the Caryl Churchill festival that’s going on right now in Manitoba and then the Shaw Festival’s going to be remounting Serious Money this summer. It seems like there’s a Churchill moment happening right now. So why two plays for you, and then why do you think that Caryl Churchill is so on the radar right now?

Alisa Palmer: I actually have done four plays of hers, technically, although one was with the University of Toronto theatre program and I did a dream play. That was something that premiered an adaptation of the Strindberg play that Caryl did. And I did a workshop production of The Skriker, I think it was almost about nine years ago with the World Stage Festival, a Night with Theatre. And we did this in-house workshop production and Caryl Churchill came over and I worked with her on it. That play was brought to me by an actor, Claire Coulter, and it has an amazing part for a woman actor in it. And I had heard of Caryl Churchill a great deal, but I wasn’t familiar with her work because I didn’t study theatre in university. So if you don’t study theatre, you often don’t get to read a lot of the pioneering writers, because they’re usually part of the curriculum and they don’t get produced professionally. So The Skriker was brought to me and I started to read the play. I found her voice formidable and amazing, and she was still writing and she was, at the time, in her mid-60’s, and I thought, this is incredible.

So I worked on that play, and at the same time I started to realize that the time was right to do her masterpieces, which are Cloud 9 and Top Girls. They had been done in Canada 30 years before with ensembles, really significant actors who went on to have these great careers and they were always landmark productions. And I thought the time was right to do this so I started – and this was eight years ago – I started talking to people about producing either of those plays, and the response I got was, again, I must be crazy. People were saying, they’re dated pieces, they’re feminist pieces, they’re topical, the issues have all been dealt with; which cracked me up, because it’s like, how do you finish human rights? How have you finished them? It didn’t make any sense to me and I thought, there’s a gender bias going on, there’s something at work that is preventing this woman’s writing from being recognized the way Pinter’s plays are, Sam Shephard’s plays are, other people who are writing in the ‘60s and ‘70s and who’s work is not being considered “dated”. Or a special lobby interest group of people who want to do it, like women or something.

So it took me a long time to find creative partnerships and Soulpepper was one of the first people that picked up Top Girls and I was convinced that it would sell from working at Nightwood [Theatre] and from being able to have financial success with shows that are feminist. I know there’s an audience out there for people who want material that’s really savvy and sophisticated. I think a lot of times people underestimate the theatre audience and it’s got itself in some kind of ivory tower and it’s formidably frumpy on a bad day. And there’s a whole bunch of circumstances why that happens, and a lot of it has to do not with theatre practitioners, but with the general perception of media and culture and where it’s going, and that’s a whole other conversation. But in any case, when Soulpepper agreed to produce this I thought, that’s great. I was excited about that because it would draw attention to Caryl Churchill as a writer of classics and it would sort of authorize her work because Soulpepper’s known for doing classics. And it was one of the most successful productions that I’ve done and there was an audience for it, which was no accident in my eyes, and I encouraged them to consider doing Cloud 9. And as it turned out, the Mirvish’s were first off the mark to really go for it.

But I think that the production of Top Girls, my experience is that it took the curse off of a play that had been considered dated and experimental, all those misconceptions of this play about women. I think it took the curse off of it, and other people started realizing that you can do a play that is artistically and politically challenging. People actually like it and they’re interested and they’re game?. And at Soulpepper, Top Girls was the first production of a play by a woman that they had ever produced. After eight years or nine years, to have had eight seasons of work without a single play done by a woman, I mean you actually have to make an effort to do that. But they’ve changed their course now, and they have more shows by women. I think they have more shows in the season now than they’ve had in the last decade, so I guess they’re catching on to the rockin’ trend of women being functioning artists. (Laughs)

So I think the success of Top Girls took the curse off of Churchill and actually excited people about it. And there are tons of people who were always interested in her work but there’s nothing more reassuring than seeing audiences getting excited about it, and let people go forward with what they knew in their hearts anyway a lot of time.

Graham F. Scott: Now, in terms of the success of women in theatre, in terms of writing and directing, do you see improvement? I mean, you are yourself, kind of an example of someone who’s doing well, but are you the exception to the rule?

Alisa Palmer: I’m happy to say, you know I’ve had recent successes, like East of Berlin has been this phenomenal experience of touring for three years and being remounted three times, and it written by this woman writer. And I’ve made an effort to get work by women out there, and that’s what I did when I was running Nightwood, it’s like, get it into the mainstream. So there’s a lot of really good things that I’ve experienced myself and the changes at Shaw Festival with Jackie Maxwell being in charge and her inclusivity has just been sublime. And she’s sort of normalizing women as artists in that sphere of the festivals and that level.

But, all that being said, I moved here about 18 years ago, and I think in the ‘80s, when I was in university, my impression was that there were a lot more artistic directors who were women, and there was an acknowledged excitement about work that talked about women’s experiences. And I had one person say it was a fad. (Laughs) I can’t really say that I’m willing to say that, but every 50 years or so there seems to be this acknowledgement that women’s work has suffered from gender bias and sexism and it hasn’t had the same authority in the mainstream and culture that men’s work has, and people sort of say, yeah, that’s right, that’s true, there is sort of this old patriarchy, and let’s address it and make some changes.

And then there’s this reaction the other way, like a company like Soulpepper emerged 10 years ago and they were lauded by a lot of the media for doing work that hasn’t been done on Toronto stages. But that fact was that they were doing international work of a classical canon, which means there were no plays by women, there were no plays by artists of colour, and there were no Canadian plays. And so I thought it was interesting that 10 years ago, for the media to say, wow, we really needed this. When, in fact, it had only been 30 years before that that people like Paul Thompson were arguing for Canadian content. And the Canada Council was developed in the ‘50s to make it possible to do Canadian content and not colonial work, so for the media to say 10 years ago, well, we really need this colonial work again, as if it hasn’t been done. That seemed to be a revisionism. And sometimes it keeps happening with the media’s perception of art—like wow, we really need to do some of these plays that have been so neglected, like Shakespeare. (Laughs) So all of that is to say, without trying to denigrate the efforts of anybody who’s doing art, like Soulpepper’s, or anybody at all, it’s all legitimate. The wider the spectrum of art that gets done; the better. But it seems like in spite of my good experience as a woman artist, it’s not as rocking and developed for women artists as it was 20 to almost 30 years ago in the ‘80s and so on, so it’s been a downside. But now I think the nose is coming up again. We’re moving ahead and moving forward and people are realizing that it should be more integrated.

John Mathenke, a Nairobi sex worker, was diagnosed with HIV in early July. He has gone public with his story and started a health education organization to help other young gay sex workers avoid contracting the disease. Photo by Siena Anstis.

John Mathenke was once arrested for being gay but, after failing to pay the customary bribe, was forced to have sex with the policeman. He had an orgy with a priest who publicly excoriates homosexuality, along with five other Masaai boys. And his Arab trader clients curse him during the day, but come back looking for sex at night.

Such is the life of a homosexual prostitute in Nairobi, Kenya. “It’s better to be a thief than a gay in Kenya,” he says. Both are often punished by death, but being the latter means never revealing yourself to the public and remaining perpetually closeted. It means dealing with homophobes at day and pleasuring them at night.

Mathenke, a quiet-spoken young man, is forthright with his story. His gay identity has not been shamed or hidden by years of abuse. His ability to tell his intimate story to a stranger is testament to his bravery. He tells me that he wants to be openly gay – and to help those who want to do the same – in a country where all odds are stacked against him.

His forced silence is not only affecting Kenya’s gay population. According to the BBC, gay men in Africa have 10 times higher HIV rates because of homophobia. These gay men often have “cover wives” who are also eventually affected by HIV. It’s a vicious cycle in a country where the government has proved reluctant to address the mental and physical repercussions of homophobia.

In 2002, Mathenke left his poor community and followed other dream chasers to Nairobi. He paid a barber $30 to be trained as a haircutter. His perfect English eventually landed him a job selling textbooks in a lavish Westlands shopping center. This was the scene of his first same-sex experience. While, subconsciously, he knew it had always been a part of him—he says he used to wear long shirts when he was small and tied a rope around his waist to pretend it was a dress—he had never experienced sex with a man.

A Frenchman would come in, day after day, he says. He would open thick African history books and look at pictures of naked men. He bought many books; some that Mathenke would help him carry to the car. He never thought much of this flirtation, until the man took him out for dinner. Inebriated, they went back to the Frenchman’s home and had sex. The man took him home almost every night after that. In the same store, Mathenke encountered the priest with whom he had a five-person orgy.

At this time, Mathenke was discovering his sexual identity and decided to move to Mombasa, an area rumored to be less hostile to gay relationships. $700 in his pocket, he put himself up in a hotel. Eventually the money dried up and he was left desperate. He went to Mercury, a local bar, and was offered money for sex with an older European.

“When you’ve had sex with someone once, they don’t want you again,” explains Mathenke. Customers became few and far between and he continued to sleep on park benches, washing in the seawater in the morning. He also faced continued stigma: “Arab traders would insult us at day, and come looking for sex at night.” A lot of his clients were—and are—popular religious leaders who would curse homosexuals in public and find pleasure in paid homosexual company in private.

Mathenke eventually returned to Nairobi, where he settled in with a new boyfriend. He continued to see clients from the big hotels: the Hilton, the Serena, the Intercontinental. He had yet to use a condom.

Community outreach by Sex Workers Outreach Program (SWOP) in Nairobi eventually led him to his “second-home.” Provided with free health services and counseling, he tested positive for HIV/AIDS three weeks ago. So did his partner. Instead of bemoaning his future, Mathenke has launched himself into a new project. He is bringing together groups of young gay sex workers and helping them form an advocacy organization, Health Options for Young Men on HIV/AIDS. He is teaching these young men—some only 12 years old—about using condoms and lubricant when having sex with men.

Mathenke’s work is necessary. Many of the bars and hotels on the coast and in Nairobi are, by default, gay bars. The men frequenting these places pay off the police so that they’ll be left alone. But violent raids continue to happen. At the same time, homophobia ensures that these men are never reached by HIV/AIDS awareness. Changing public behavior is key to lowering the HIV rate and protecting all Kenyans, gay or otherwise.

While the government has long been reluctant to address the role of homophobia in increasing HIV/AIDS rates, there have been some positive changes over the years. Gloria Gakaki, a social worker at SWOP, highlights the brave role of Dr. Nicholas Maraguri, Head of the National AIDS and STD Control Programme (NASCOP), who is pushing the government to address HIV among Kenya’s hidden gay populations. Maraguri has also been meeting directly with male sex workers to get a more in-depth idea of what their problems are, and how government can help.

For further information on SWOP or to donate to Mathenke’s new organization, please contact Gloria Gakaki at Ggakii@csrtkenya.org.

Only her plastic surgeon knows for sure. Image courtesy: ABC/Bob D'Amico

Has a transsexual ruined your life lately? Because if you believe what you see on TV, trans people are lurking everywhere, just waiting to pounce on unassuming heterosexuals.

Trans characters on TV are like those early depictions of gay men, before they started cropping up as every woman’s best-friend-slash-fashion-adviser. It’s depressing to argue that the amount of fleshing-out required to outfit such characters from a pool of stereotypes actually represents progress, but even by this measure trans characters have a long way to go.

The majority of trans people on television are male-to-female (meaning they were born as male but identify as female), and the dramatic crux is nearly always The Big Reveal: the moment when we realize that a beautiful woman was — gasp — formerly a dude. Inherent in this storyline is always the implication of deception, the idea that a trans woman is just a very well disguised lie that is bound to be found out eventually.

Take for example Alex Meade in Ugly Betty, whom everyone presumes dead until he shows up during Fashion Week transformed into the blonde and beautiful Alexis Meade. She then allows her own brother to hit on her before dramatically revealing her true identity in front of a room full of people. Myth #1: trans people don’t want to quietly get on with their lives; they want the entire world to pay rapt attention to their exciting new gender.

My favourite over-the-top trans character though is Ava Moore from the second season of Nip/Tuck. The disappointing thing about this storyline is that a trans character on a show about plastic surgery could have been truly groundbreaking. We could have been allowed to witness her entire transition, made to understand what she was feeling and why sexual reassignment surgery was necessary to her own personal happiness. Instead, we get the same tired old stuff.

Ava, who works as a life coach, is retained by plastic surgeon Sean to help his 17 year-old son Matt. But Matt and Ava spend a little too much time one-on-one and start sleeping together. The age difference has everyone on edge, and when Matt and Ava decide to run away together, Sean’s partner Christian threatens to kill Ava if she doesn’t break it off with Matt. Then, just to make his point, he rapes her — discovering in so doing that her vaginal canal is suspiciously shallow. Christian flees the scene, telling Sean and his wife that “Ava’s a man.” Myth #2: even when nothing male remains of her, a transsexual woman is still, somehow, a man.

For reasons that are never explained, Christian and Sean set to work trying to track down the plastic surgeon who performed Ava’s sex reassignment. Maybe that’s just what you do when you discover a transsexual in your midst: you try to find out where s/he came from.

Ava’s plastic surgeon reveals that Ava had first met him as Avery, a gay man who had fallen in love with him. But, being straight, the doctor could not return Avery’s love. So he agreed to transform him into a woman. Myth #3: being gay and being transgender are basically the same thing. Also, gay guys will do anything to make straight guys love them.

I swear, up until this point Nip/Tuck is not as hokey as the above episode implies. But introduce a trans character into a TV show and suddenly the whole thing becomes a Shakespearian farce.

Throughout the episode where all of this drama unfolds, Ava is repeatedly referred to as a medical marvel — as the “hope diamond” of transsexuals — because (Myth #3) trans women don’t usually pass so flawlessly. At the end of the episode, Matt is accepted back into the loving arms of his family—- who choose not to tell him about Ava’s past for fear of his being “sexually ruined for the rest of his life.” Ava skips town. Her secret is out, so obviously she can never work in Miami again.

Even The L Word is pretty uncomfortable with its trans characters. The first was Ivan, a drag king who seems to primarily identify as male. Ivan starts spending time with Kit — a straight woman — which makes Kit’s sister Bette immediately uncomfortable. “She is in love with you and she wants to be your husband,” Bette tells her, correcting Kit’s use of male pronouns while simultaneously stressing her distaste for all this reckless gender-bending. Myth #4: a trans person who appears attracted to you always has sinister intentions.

Then there’s Max, a female-to-male transsexual who, once he starts taking male hormones, begins behaving like masculinity run amok: acting jealous when his girlfriend talks to other guys, becoming physically aggressive with her and throwing temper tantrums right, left and centre. In the final season, Max gets pregnant and is abandoned by his partner. Which brings us neatly to Myth #5: trans people don’t get happy endings.

Television, we can do better.

Cate Simpson is a freelance journalist and the web editor for Shameless magazine. She lives in Toronto.

No one has conducted an official poll on the matter, but I’m fairly confident that the first reaction of most sound-minded Canadians to this news is one of disgust, perhaps even outrage, at the existence of such blatant state-sanctioned gender injustice—especially in such relative proximity to our own progressively thinking northern hub. And, while this may be a stretch, I’ll bet the next response is a smug “only in America,” twinge of moral superiority. This is Canada, after all, hotbed of progressive politics and European socialism lite; there’s a reason why U.S. travelers abroad pretend to belong to our half of North America.

Unfortunately, the truth is less than cut-and-dry. Sure, we don’t charge rape victims for their disclosure, but when it comes to the nationwide epidemic of sexual violence against Native girls and women, we are willing to turn a cold shoulder. Which is worse?

According to studies conducted by Indian and Northern Affairs Canada in both 1996 and 2001, Native women with Status are five times more likely to die as a result of violence than any other Canadian woman. In addition, 75% of Native girls under the age of 18 have been sexually abused. Yet, the ongoing scourge of violence against Canadian women of Native descent remains a virtually silent struggle.

Despite the disproportionate incidence of violence against Native women in Canada, “[cases are] grossly underrepresented in our mainstream media,” says Robyn Bourgeois, a PhD candidate at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education who teaches a course on Gender and Violence at the University of Toronto.

Bourgeois cites the highly publicized disappearance and murder of Victoria “Tori” Stafford as a current example of the preferential treatment of non-Native violence by mainstream media outlets. Bourgeois explains that on the same day that Tori disappeared, Regina police renewed their efforts to locate Tara Lyn Poorman, a Native girl who had already been missing for four months. “In this case, neither the original disappearance, nor the renewed search efforts, garnered [much] media attention,” says Bourgeois.

Bourgeois points out that while dominant cases such as that of Vancouver’s missing women do bring such brutalities into the mainstream, coverage is skewed. In that particular case, the emphasis was placed on the women’s involvement with addictions and prostitution rather than their Aboriginality, failing to make connections to the larger national scope of violence against Native women. In less lurid cases such as that of Tara Lyn Poorman, a straight-A student and regular volunteer at a Regina drop-in centre, coverage is either grossly limited or entirely non-existent.

This poses the question: what exactly does violence against Native Canadian women have to do with Texas rape kits?

The act of charging the victims of rape—who are primarily women—to pay for their own rape kits implies that these individuals are somehow responsible for—and therefore deserving of—the violence perpetrated against them. Similarly, in opting to dismiss the epidemic of violence against Native women, we are quietly enabling the process. We say, through our silence, that these women deserve to be abducted and abused because they are implicitly less-than.

With regard to the Lone Star State’s rape kit record,  someone seriously ought to mess with Texas. But, we shouldn’t be let off the hook so easily either.

Does this suit make me look queer?

We’re less than a month away from Pride Week in Toronto, which kicks off with the Dyke March — also known as the Saturday when thousands of half-naked queer women take to the streets between Church and Yonge.

Lately, I’ve been wondering if this mass shedding of clothes isn’t really about celebrating our sexuality and glorying in the freedom of Pride, so much as a rebellion against the minefield that is lesbian fashion.

Contrary to popular belief, there is really no lesbian fashion aesthetic. There’s a “look,” but it’s hard to quantify and even harder to emulate if you’re a newcomer to the scene. It’s one of those you-know-it-when-you-see-it things. And it only applies to the shorthaired stereotype-adhering among us; if you’re high-femme, you’re on your own.

Queer women who come out in their 20s instead of in their teens seem to be hit hardest by the lesbian fashion crisis. I have more than one bisexual friend who — accustomed to dressing up to get the attention of men on a Friday night — is entirely at a loss when it comes to dressing for other women. And while it is widely accepted and known that there are gay and bi girly-girls, lesbians are notoriously suspicious of them. Go to a Church Street bar in makeup and a short skirt and if anybody talks to you at all, it’ll be to ask if you got lost on your way to the entertainment district.

Perfect gaydar, no matter what Stanford from Sex & The City would have us believe, is a myth. It depends on being attuned to the most subtle of clues queer people send each other, and even though most of us aren’t dangling colour-coded handkerchiefs from our back pockets anymore, clothes are a big part of those. People who just don’t identify with the latest in queer fashion markers struggle to identify themselves as queer without throwing out their entire wardrobes.

Things are not always so cut and dried even for the more obviously queer-looking among us. Where I come from, lesbians dress fairly uniformly in jeans and t-shirts and sneakers. We signal to one another through lack of effort. In Toronto, where everybody is better dressed — queers included — I spent a lot of time feeling scruffy and inappropriate before finally deciding not to care very much.

Part of the problem is that it’s tough just to find clothes that fit you when you’re boyish looking but shaped like a girl. Men’s clothes are tentlike on us, but women’s clothes are invariably too, well, woman-y. And those perfect-fitting men’s-suits-cut-for-women Shane wears on The L Word? Those don’t really exist.

All of this has me wondering about the stickers that are available all through Pride Week with every conceivable sexual orientation written on them. It’s as if, having shed our clothes and our coded messages about who we might sleep with, we are finally free to wear our identities on our sleeves.

Cate Simpson is a freelance journalist and the web editor for Shameless magazine. She lives in Toronto.

Yep, we know.

In the movies, the quiet boy starts dating the football star or the misfit girl starts dating the cheerleader, everyone at school finds out, somebody tells the parents, and after some drama the whole experience is over. Television tells us that you can’t have a satisfactory same-sex relationship until everyone is out of the closet — take Dana on The L Word, Kevin’s actor boyfriend Chad on Brothers & Sisters, or David from Six Feet Under as examples.

But what happens after you leave home, and have to come out to your college roommate? Or your first boss? Or your second boss? For most of us, the process of coming out lasts our entire lives, and every new situation offers an opportunity to jump back into the closet.

Now that being queer is less and less of an issue, you might imagine the pressure to come out has lessened. Instead, the reverse seems to be true. Fail to share your sexual identity with your co-workers or semi-obscure relatives and they assume either that you’re a tortured closet-case, or worse, that you’re keeping quiet because you think they’re going to be an asshole about it.

The pressure is even more acute for those in the public eye: getting photographed leaving the wrong bar or with the wrong person can spark years of speculation about celebrities’ sexual orientation. And nothing causes a media field day like a public declaration of homosexuality. R.E.M.’s frontman Michael Stipe has been openly bi since the ’80’s, but in a manner so casual that every few years some interviewer writes up his reference to a male partner as if it were breaking news.

Lately, I’ve been wondering why the relentless parade of self-revelation is necessary. Wouldn’t it be nice if we didn’t have to announce our gender preferences to everyone we meet, any more than anyone has to announce that they like slasher flicks, only date blonds, or don’t like ice cream?

The answer, I think, is that being gay is about more than who you sleep with. There is a whole culture and history and set of experiences associated with it, and identifying as queer means claiming that set of references. We don’t all go to the same nightclubs or listen to the same music, but we share an identity with some external significance.

I’ve been trying to imagine what queer identity without coming out would look like. Even if it meant total equality to the extent that we no longer had political interests in common, in a world where accidentally hitting on somebody straight was no more awkward than hitting on someone who just didn’t fancy you, the end of coming out would erase part of our history, culture and identity. Even if an identity is created out of oppression, eradicating that oppression doesn’t unmake that community.

I guess the best we can hope for is that, when there’s no longer anything to hide from, coming out becomes less dramatic, less revelatory, more like telling your friends and family that you’re going to become a lawyer or, gasp, a Conservative. Come to think of it, maybe that’s already more controversial than telling them you’re sleeping with the football star.

Cate Simpson is a freelance journalist and the web editor for Shameless magazine. She lives in Toronto.