... having been breathed out

I knew how easily it could happen, the past at hand, like the helpless cognitive slip of an optical illusion. The tone of a day linked to some particular item: my mother's chiffon scarf, the humidity of a cut pumpkin. Certain patterns of shade. Even the flash of sunlight on the hood of a white car could cause a momentary ripple in me, allowing a slim space of return. I'd seen old Yardley slickers—the makeup now just a waxy crumble—sell for almost one hundred dollars on the Internet. So grown women could smell it again, that chemical, flowery fug. That's how badly people wanted it—to know that their lives had happened, that the person they once had been still existed inside of them.

More and more LGBT people seem to be operating on a similar wavelength [to that of the author, a trans lesbian who prefers to live in a small "red state" city rather than a large coastal one]. I asked Gary J. Gates, the most widely cited demographer of the American LGBT community, what evidence he has seen of queer demographic shifts away from coastal big cities over the last decade.

He pointed me to his recent Williams Institute analysis of U.S. Census and Gallup polling data, which compared the concentration of same-sex couples in American cities in 1990 to the percentage of their LGBT population from 2012 to 2014. (It's an imperfect comparison, but given how hard it is to gather data on a small population like the LGBT community, it's one of the best available.) And the results are striking: Salt Lake City leapt up thirty-two spots in the overall rankings between 1990 and the 2012-2014 time period. Louisville, Kentucky, rose thirty slots over the same period. Norfolk, Virginia, and New Orleans, Louisiana both jumped more than twenty places. Meanwhile San Francisco remained static, Los Angeles fell two slots, and New York had a staggering eleven-place slump.

Gates believes that this discrepancy speaks to the social change happening in many red-state cities. As he wrote in the analysis: "Substantial increases in LGBT visibility in more socially conservative places like Salt Lake City, Louisville, and Norfolk likely mean that these areas are not as different from cities like San Francisco, Austin, and Seattle (all with long histories of fostering social climates where LGBT people felt more comfortable) in their acceptance of the LGBT community today than they were twenty years ago."

Indeed, an "important explanatory factor" for that data, as Gates acknowledged in the analysis, is the increased "willingness" [I, breathedout, would argue "ability"] of LGBT people in conservative areas to come out of the closet. In other words, although the analysis probably indicates some degree of population shift, [there is also an element of simply revealing that... ] LGBT people have been building beautiful lives away from the coasts for years. [...] But because the media overwhelmingly focus on the tragic things that happen to queer people in red states, that kind of community building often goes unnoticed by people on the coasts. As Jack Halberstam wrote in In a Queer Time and Place, "Too often minority history hinges on representative examples provided by the lives of extraordinary individuals"—among them LGBT people who have been murdered in conservative parts of America.

"[In] relation to the complicated matrix of rural queer lives, we tend to rely on the story of a Brandon Teena or a Matthew Shepard rather than finding out about the queer people who live quietly, if not comfortably, in isolated areas or small towns all across North America," Halberstam wrote.

I was at a loss for words. On the one hand, the idea was definitely attractive. Myron sometimes enjoyed the company of four or five men at the same time but he did not believe in mixing the sexes. I of course do. [...] Although I am not a Lesbian, I do share the normal human response to whatever is attractive physically in either sex.

St Peter met her at the gate,
And took her by the fin
Said He: some sins we all must rue
But you did clubs one winter through,
And that is hell enough for you—
Come in.

• Chapter 6, "'It Will be Quite an Object Lesson': R. v Phillips and the Ku Klux Klan in Oakville, Ontario, 1930" concerns a night-time Klan raid on the home of a black (or First Nations—his racial background was a subject of debate) man and his white fiancee. I posted at length about this chapter, which is probably the most relevant for my purposes: I'm specifically interested in attitudes toward white/Black intermarriage in eastern Canada in the early 20th century, and this had some really useful material, including specifically differing points of view from within the Black community of Ontario as various Oakville groups reacted to the fallout from the raid. 1930 is of course a little late for my purposes, and global politics had shifted substantially in the last 15-20 years, but it's still fascinating stuff. The contrast Backhouse draws between the Canadian government's (lack of) response to the rise of the Klan, and their (one might say draconian) reaction to the rise of the Communist Party of Canada, was also tangentially useful for me since a couple of my secondary characters are radical lefties (though anarchists of the IWW variety rather than Communists).



• Chapter 7, "'Bitterly Disappointed' at the Spread of 'Colour-Bar Tactics': Viola Desmond's Challenge to Racial Segregation, Nova Scotia, 1946" is one I'm halfway through and definitely want to finish, despite it being quite late for my purposes. Desmond was denied access to the more desirable ground-floor seats in a movie theatre in one of the steel-production factory towns that actually feature in my novel. As is obvious from the title, Desmond went on to challenge the discriminatory treatment she received, although I'm not far enough along in the chapter to report on details of what happened or what legal strategies were available to her. More to come!



• Chapter 5, "'Mesalliances' and the 'Menace to White Women's Virtue': Yee Clun's Opposition to the White Women's Labour Law, Saskatchewan, 1924" is a chapter I want to go back to, despite its being pretty far off my specific research goals. I posted about the so-called White Women's Labour Law here, and in addition to the fascinating history of the Chinese Canadian community's opposition to the law, there are a bunch of other, tangentially intriguing points too (e.g. the formation of 'Chinatowns' on the Canadian prairies; the double standards surrounding both immigration of Chinese women and intermarriage between white women and Chinese men; legal difficulties in defining "whiteness" in law, etc.).

Unable to echo this [political slogan], Gael is reminded of being a kid at mass, before she took the first step out the church door by telling Jarleth she didn't believe that Mary was a virgin; when she'd stopped saying the parts of the catechism she didn't believe in. Each week, she'd say less and less only uttering the parts that were demonstrably true until there was nothing left for her to say. For the kingdom, the power and the glory are yours, now and forever? No. That's moronic. It wasn't that she gave two shits about honesty—Jesus, if ever such a generous lover had lived, wouldn't be so petty as to monitor lipsyncing during his hymns; it was that she knew that this small movement of the lips, disconnected from the brain, going going going along with things, was a gateway drug. Not to heaven, but to fools' paradise. So her closed lips were a renunciation until she was ready to tell her mother she would never go again. "If you're staying here, you can help me organize this sheet music into sections," Sive had said, as if her daughter had confessed to something so trivial as wanting to skip swimming lessons. That was when she knew that logsitics had nothing to do with Sive's "duties" on Sundays.

It's our right to be virgins as often as we like, Gael told the girls surrounding her like petals round a pollen packet.

"Just imagine it, she said. "Louise, Fatima. Dierdre Concannon." She pronounced their names like accusations. She snuck the tip of her index finger into each of their mouths and made their cheeks go: pop. pop. pop. "I did mine already with this finger," she said. The girls flinched and wiped their taste buds on their pinafores. "Blood dotted the bathroom tiles but it wasn't a lot and it wasn't as sore as like... piercing your own ears without ice," she concluded ominously. "And now I don't have to obsess over it like all these morons. You should all do it tonight. We'll talk tomorrow and I'll know if you've done it or not."

Tiny hairs on their ears trembled at her inaudible breath like Juliet's. Gravely, she confessed: "Some of you will need capsules all your life. All the way to your wedding night because of being Muslim or really really Christian. Wipe your snot, Miriam. It's a fact of life. It's also helping people. Boys will think they're taking something fro you, when the capsule cracks. But you'll know better," she said. "You'll know there was nothing to take."

Gael was eleven. It was her last term of primary school. Perhaps that was why the proposition backfired. The girls were getting ready to fly off to some other wealthy, witheringly beautiful leader. But Gael wasn't disturbed by this. She no longer needed a posse. It would be tidier if they fell away than having to break them off.

"Really really Christian like your brother?" Deirdre replied. "Isn't he an altar boy?"

Gael rolled her eyes so dramatically it gave her a back-of-socket headache. "He hasn't got a hymen, Deirdre, so he's obviously irrelevant."

Deirdre and Louise's mirth was exacerbated by the fact that Miriam's tears had now formed a terra-cotta paste with the foundation she'd tried on at the bus-stop pharmacy earlier. How much would the virgin pills cost, Becca wanted to know. What would Gael price them at?

"What-ever," Gael said. "What does that matter? Pocket money is what. Everyone'll want them. Hundreds if not millions of people, Rebecca. So choose." She challenged their noncommittal natures, looking from girl to concave girl. "Well, are you or aren't you? In?"

donut_donut

In her thirtieth cahier, shortly after separating from Caroline Besterman in 1968, Pat had written: “To live alone, to feel occasional depression. Much of the difficulty is from not having another person around for whom one puts on a slight show—dressing nicely, presenting a pleasant expression. The trick, the sometimes difficult trick is to maintain one’s morale without the other person, the mirror.”

In Switzerland [in the 1980s], Pat had found a supportive publisher and world representative in Daniel Keel and Diogenes, a German-speaking public eager for her work, and not one person, really, for whom she could perform her “self.”