MORE THAN JUST WORDS
I was sipping a delicious Trappist beer at my neighbourhood bar when two young couples pulled up at a table next to me. A newly married gay couple was being grilled by a soon-to-be-married lesbian couple about the trials and tribulations of seeking a non-hetero marriage today in a urban setting within Ontario, Canada. Their story was more than mildly disturbing. (No doubt in part because their daily struggles are, for the most part, off my radar. I do apologize for my ignorance and assuming that most people and businesses are not overtly homophobic...)
Earlier in the day I’d listened to a podcast about “The Green Book”. This was a kind of underground yellow pages compiled by and for African Americans – back in the days of government-enforced segregation and oppression, when white supremacists travelled the highways, back-roads, and Main streets of America, uninhibited, hunting down people of colour (...way back in the dark ages: the latter half of the twentieth century.) The Green Book allowed people to navigate this hostile world by directing them to friendly towns and businesses and away from the most racist ones. By all accounts it really was an essential survival tool for minorities travelling outside their own community during segregation. Such was the tragic state of things for generations of folks, fellow citizens made to feel not only as an inferior and unwanted underclass but that there was also no way out, as the real transgression was that they were, somehow, born into the wrong skin.
These two insights of the day left me feeling that, despite this being Canada, where same-sex marriage has been politically and legally accepted for more than a decade, it appears our LGBTQ friends and family are still having an experience far too reminiscent to that of folks during America’s Jim Crow-era. (Yes, I appreciate the important differences; however, I assure you, the similarities are real, abundant, and highly ridiculous.) Institutions and businesses, even in the urban centers of Hamilton, Mississauga, and Toronto, it would appear, are still widely and disturbingly heteronormative, despite our acclaimed enlightenment. (It’s actually hard to imagine a business model, in twenty-first century Canada, that would actively limit profits while exposing the business and its owners to charges of homophobia, public ridicule, and boycotting. And yet...)
The couple at the table next to me ran through all the elements of their wedding; every part of which involved conflict imposed upon them (my reading of events) by some short-sighted, narrow-minded business. From their gift registry to ordering flowers; from buying suits to arranging a venue; from the impossibility of finding (or receiving) a queer-friendly wedding card to the difficulty finding someone able to officiate their wedding (someone that wasn’t very obviously uncomfortable or unsure of what language to use.) Every part of their wedding seemed to be a struggle – and, several times, nothing short of an embarrassing ordeal. They even described walking out of several businesses, unable or unwilling to continue their attempted transaction with an inflexible, unreasonable operator. What seemed to bother them the most was not even the big, overt conversational stuff (experiences they seemed to shrug off as normal and everyday.) What was worse was the faceless and unrelenting tsunami of default emails, messages, advertisements, promotional extras, and deals for the bride, bridesmaids, and her bridal party. This, to them, felt like the pointless and hurtful institutional assumption that they, gay men, don’t (and thereby shouldn’t) exist. He wasn’t laughing when he said “Which one of us is the fucking bride!”
What was perhaps most upsetting for me was realizing that the women across from them had set up this meeting, and were fiendishly asking questions and taking notes, anticipating their own gauntlet gong-show and hoping to minimizes their own pain and embarrassment, and everyone else’s too. It made me feel just the same as when I was listening to the “Green Book” podcast. Like: this is how we treat people?!
Sitting there with all of this I was reminded of all the rainbow stickers that are so common in Vancouver, those signifiers of queer-friendly businesses, and how they’re so very absent, in my experience, here in Ontario. (Which doesn’t mean the situation is ideal there, or even good, but that such recognition and visibility, it would seem, is a valuable public statement and commitment.) Their story made me understand the expansive gulf between legalizing same-sex marriage and actually supporting it. That, for LGBTQ Canadians, not unlike African Americans, there’s a big difference between winning equal rights on paper and experiencing something resembling legal or social equality. For the rest of us – in the same way that there’s a huge difference between saying you’re “not racist” and meaningfully, functionally, combating racism – there’s a big difference between saying you’re “not homophobic” and actually opposing homophobia. And I think there’s only one way to bridge the gulf between these two states: that is for people to stop saying one and start doing the other.
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