David was at his sister’s cottage once, and his stepmom asked if she could take a photo. His dad brought David and his sister in close, and David made some comment like, “I thought you taught us to never touch each other.” And his dad was like, “Oh yeah, sorry about that.” He acknowledged it, and apologized for not expressing physical affection when David was a kid.
For David’s master’s in social work, he had to write a paper about the intergenerational emotional patterns in his family, which required asking his parents questions. David’s dad was very open to sharing information, and he also apologized for going away for a large portion of David’s grade twelve year. That year, it was just David and his mom, and they fought all the time.
There were other out kids at David’s high school. At least, there were after his mom outed them. In grade eleven, he started hanging out with two gay kids in grade twelve, and he started seeing one of them. They were sort of out to their friends, but not super out. One day, David was supposed to go home, but instead, he hung out with the kids from grade twelve. David’s mom found out where the boy lived, went to his house, and told his parents that he was gay. David still doesn’t know why, to this day. The boy immediately wanted nothing to do with David.
David’s high school principal didn’t like him because David handed out a survey about gay attitudes and experiences for his grade twelve sociology class. He handed it out to his friends, some of whom were out in high school and some of whom came out later, but also to other, random students. Someone reported him, and he got called into the principal’s office. His sociology teacher didn’t stand up for him. His principal yelled at him and said the survey was inappropriate. The principal stood up and walked around his desk so that he was standing over David, his cheeks quivering he was so angry. After, one of his classmates who was an intern at a TV studio got David on a local show to talk about high school homophobia. David badmouthed his principal on TV. It was funny. David was almost prevented from attending prom. Not because he had a gay date, but because he wasn’t dressed appropriately. They did eventually let him in. It may have been a power play.
When David was coming of age in Fredericton, the city still felt very homophobic. It was twenty years ago, so that’s part of it, but also, New Brunswick tended to have more traditional, Christian values than other places. For the entirety of high school, David was looking forward to leaving. In every teen soap he watched, his favourite season was the one where they went to university. He was really excited to do it himself.
David ended up going to the University of Guelph. It wasn’t an easy transition, though. He lived in residence for his first two months and then moved out and got his own apartment. His room in residence was nice, with big bay windows, but it felt like he’d moved in with his high school football team. He needed to get out. He’d signed up for psychology as his major when he applied to university, and it worked out—he liked studying it and was drawn to learning more about himself. The people he met felt like his people, but he was still pretty much just living in his head.
It took until David graduated from university and moved to Toronto for him to really feel comfortable being himself. He felt pretty closed off in Guelph, even though he had queer friends and dated people there. He found a big queer community in Toronto, where everyone was really weird and not like a lot of other queer people he’d met before. He felt a lot of kinship with them. Eventually, he felt more comfortable opening up. It was age, partially, and doing work on himself. He figured out how to be more open.
When David got to Toronto, he lived a carefree life for the first few years. He was a bartender until he was twenty-six or so, partying all the time. David abused alcohol in those years, but then he started dealing with the emotions he’d been avoiding, and moved from bartending back into the structure of school. The consequences of drinking started to outweigh the benefits, and he stopped drinking excessively. He only drinks a bit now and no longer has a problematic relationship with alcohol. There’s an intensity to sobriety that can feel like being on drugs. When David stopped drinking excessively, he felt more anxious at first, and then he felt sharper than he’d been in a long time.
He thinks that part of that time of excess in his twenties might be attributable to the fact that queer millennials didn’t really get a youth—the freedom to explore that exists for some in their teenage years and early twenties is often devoted to repression, or a focus on escape and survival—so they have had to live it later, once they found their communities. It may also be that being queer is like rewriting a script: when you break one of the main rules, you just aren’t as willing to follow other kinds of rules, and you’re not as willing to follow traditional life paths.
john
JOHN WAS BORN IN 1991. They’re non-binary. They grew up on a pretty big farm, in northwestern Ontario, near Lake of the Woods, with an older brother and a younger brother. It was a very pretty part of Ontario, near the Canadian Shield—so, nice and rocky. Where John grew up, there was sometimes a grocery store. It would change hands every couple of years. There was a church, and there was a school. There were maybe 100 kids in kindergarten through grade eight in the entire school. John’s year was relatively large, and it was six people. Their older brother was one of two people in his grade. Many of the people in the area were farmers. John’s family raised beef cattle. Growing up meant mostly being stuck on the farm or in school, and occasionally seeing other people.
John’s family home was about 2,000 square feet. It had plywood floors that never ended up getting any flooring on top of them. It was a built-for-efficiency house that wasn’t very fancy. A bungalow with a crawl space for a basement. The walls were extra thick, because when John’s dad built the house he was like, “I need to have as much insulation in this house as possible.”
They went to the Canadian school that was just about a kilometre from their farm for kindergarten through grade six, and then they crossed the US border and went to a school in Baudette, Minnesota, for seventh through twelfth grade. Their mom drove them across the border every day to school.
John had to leave home to go to university. Their parents were really pro-education. There wasn’t anywhere to go in the area, apart from maybe a community college in Fort Frances an hour and a half away. John’s dad really wanted someone to take over the farm, so there was that pressure, but John knew they wouldn’t be suited to it. If John wasn’t going to take over the farm, there was nothing really for them in their hometown.
John really didn’t have much of a concept of queerness until they went to university. They knew gay people existed, but they didn’t know anyone who was out. Everything they heard about being gay growing up was pejorative, insults. They didn’t have a sense of there being any community.
John’s mom is pretty open-minded, and their dad just doesn’t care about that sort of thing, for the most part. John is not exactly out with their parents, but their mom follows their Twitter account, so she sees John tweeting about queer themes and topics, and being non-binary. It’s probably something they should have a conversation about at some point. But John is not very good at having these kinds of conversations.
As John started learning more about trans people, they remember being really fascinated but not really knowing why. They were maybe a junior in university when they learned being trans was a thing. They didn’t learn that being non-binary was a possibility until after they graduated. It wasn’t something they encountered until they came across A. Light Zachary, a writer who had they/them pronouns in their Twitter bio, and they were like, “What does that mean?” John learned more and thought, Oh, wow, that’s me.
John gave themselves permission to identify as non-binary a couple years ago, when they were living in Jersey City, New Jersey,