The McGill Daily Vol. 112, Issue 8

The McGill Daily is located on unceded Kanien’kehá:ka

Published by The Daily Publications Society, a student society of McGill University.

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The McGill Daily is located on unceded Kanien’kehá:ka territory coordinating editor

Anna Zavelsky managing editor Olivia Shan news editors

Saylor Catlin Emma Bainbridge Zoe Lister Robert Muroni commentary + compendium! editors Will Barry Meena Thakur culture editor Yehia Anas Sabaa features editor Zach Cheung science + technology editor Vacant sports editor Vacant video editor Vacant photos editor Genevieve Quinn illustrations editor Vacant copy editor Catey Fifield design + production editor Hyeyoon Cho social media editor Frida Morales Mora radio editor Vacant cover design Olivia Shan contributors

Saylor Catlin, Awais Khaliq, Tamim Sujat, Nina Tavernier, Meena Thakur, Genevieve Quinn, Ellie Wand le délit

Gabrielle Genest rec@delitfrancais.com

Closing the Knowledge Gap in Queer Health

Queer individuals have unique medical needs. More than others, they may need to access hormone replacement therapy (HRT), facial feminization surgery (FFS), mental health services, and reproductive health services. Standard medical curricula inadequately train health care professionals to provide quality, inclusive, and gender-affirming care to queer and trans patients. LGBTQ+ individuals are less likely to have a regular health care provider, are more likely to delay or avoid seeking treatment, and are often reluctant to disclose their sexual orientation to health care professionals. For BIPOC queer and trans people, disparities in health outcomes are often more extreme due to the barriers to health care enforced by racism and transphobia. This is largely due to discrimination and mistreatment by providers. Queer and trans people are left to advocate for themselves, educate their doctors, or move away from mainstream systems of health care in order to reclaim agency over their bodies.

Medical schools fail to adequately teach the human and social aspect of health that is needed to interact with and treat a diverse group of individuals. Not having received formal training in inclusive and gender-affirming care, many health care professionals are incompetent when it comes to working with people who exist outside heteronormativity and the gender binary. Transphobia and homophobia can result from miseducation and gaps in knowledge. Health care professionals who lack training will often use cisnormative language, propose treatment plans that aren’t sexuality- or gender-affirming, and assume authority over bodies that they know little about.

In a 2011 survey of 150 medical schools across Canada and the US, nine reported zero hours of LGBTQ+ content taught during preclinical years, and 44 reported zero hours taught during clinical years. The schools that did have LGBTQ+ curricula reported a median of five teaching hours dedicated to this content, and respondents only rated the quality of the curricula as “fair” in 40 per cent of the schools. In a similar survey of LGBTQ+ content in UK medical schools, only five of 19 institutions were found to have “good” or “very good” content on LGBTQ+ topics.

LGBTQ+ health content in medical curricula is presented primarily in the context of HIV/AIDS, and it lacks coverage of many other queer health topics. According to a study published in the Canadian Journal of Emergency Medicine, the historical failure to train physicians on LGBTQ+ health has resulted in very few providers qualified to treat queer patients, let alone teach the content.

health.” Medical providers often lack knowledge about the experiences of women who have sex with women and the medical implications of this, including the possibility of STIs and other infections. In another instance of medical incompetence, an asexual individual in British Columbia reported that their doctor, misinterpreting their asexuality as low libido, refused to prescribe them medication for their depression because it might reduce libido.

In TheRemedy, an anthology of queer and trans experiences in the Canadian and US health care systems, nursing student Soma Davidson writes, “the medical-industrial complex leaves trans and gender variant bodies yearning for attendance to needs long ignored. [...] We live and breathe in defiance of a school of thought based on two genders, eternally rooted in two unchanging bodies.” As an example of gaps in medical knowledge, she speaks on how doctors should consider the hormonal side effects of prescribed drugs; a certain drug should not be prescribed to a person transitioning if the side effects oppose their hormone treatment plan, but these side effects are not considered by all doctors.

A lack of medical training is not the only issue, as there are other barriers for queer and trans people to receive the care they need. Trans people are twice as likely to think about and attempt suicide as other queer people, and access to genderaffirming health care has been shown to reduce this rate. However, coverage for gender-affirming procedures – such as FFS and HRT – is restricted by most Canadian provinces. In Quebec, a diagnosis of gender dysphoria is required to medically transition, subjecting trans individuals to distressing psychological evaluations. Bureaucratic barriers, such as long wait and referral times as well as copious paperwork, also prevent trans people from accessing such care. Yukon’s health care legislation, on the other hand, is considered the “gold standard” by trans advocates. It covers most procedures that can be essential to medically transition, including HRT, FFS, and voice training.

3480 McTavish St, Room 107 Montreal, QC H3A 0E7 phone 514.398.690 fax 514.398.8318

advertising & general manager Boris Shedov sales representative Letty Matteo ad layout & design Mathieu Ménard

dps board of directors Natacha Papieau (Chair), Saylor Catlin, Louis Favreau, Gabrielle Genest, Asa Kohn, Antoine Milette-Gagnon, Boris Shedov, Philippe Shi, Laura Tobon, Anna Zavelsky

Overwhelmingly, there is a pervasive cisnormativity and heteronormativity in health education that prevents health professionals from effectively treating queer people. Medicine continues to harm intersex people, for example, by performing medically unnecessary operations on intersex children when they’re too young to know their gender identity. These irreversible procedures, aimed to make the body conform to the gender binary, can result in sterilization, chronic pain, scarring, gender dysphoria, and lifelong psychological trauma. Moreover, in an article in BitchMedia, queer women reported “a lack of medical language around [their] experiences and a dearth of experts who focus on queer women’s reproductive

In 2021, an article in the Canadian Medical Association Journal called on Canadian medical schools to implement a national curriculum standard to include queer and trans health training in the licensing and assessment process. The article cited that 2SLGBTQIA+ Canadians experience disproportionately poor health outcomes, with worsened outcomes for BIPOC. The creation of a national standard for queer and trans health care education and physician competency would help bridge this gap. Groups like the Canadian Professional Association for Transgender Health are working toward a country “without barriers to the health, well-being and self-actualization of trans and gender diverse people.” The Centre for Gender Advocacy at Concordia has compiled a crowdsourced map of Montreal clinics that have a history of discriminating against trans people. If you are looking to access gender-affirming care, the Union for Gender Empowerment at McGill and the Centre for Gender Advocacy can point you to appropriate services. BIPOC Women’s Health Network provides anti-oppressive and feminist health care resources for health care providers, medical students, and racialized women in Canadian communities. The Daily calls on the McGill School of Medicine to survey its curriculum and mandate high-quality teaching hours on queer and trans health.

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McGill Adds Gender Marker “X”

Decision Result of Quebec’s Passing of Bill 2

Ellie Wand News Contributor

On June 7, the National Assembly of Quebec passed Bill 2, which allows Quebec residents to change their sex designation to “X” on official government identification documents. This comes after months of controversy and discussion surrounding the Bill, especially in regards to its initial draft, which was first introduced by Minister of Justice Simon Jolin-Barrette in October of 2021.

The initial drafting of the bill was alarming to many individuals who would be affected by the proposed legislation for a few reasons, particularly due to its reliance on gender-affirming surgery. The first drafting of the bill required individuals to undergo genderaffirming surgery in order to change their sex designation. Otherwise, gender and sex would be listed as separate categories. As was pointed out by activists, this requirement would force individuals to come out, potentially impacting their safety.

This initial draft had “many aspects that would have set trans rights back a decade,” Andrea Clegg, Equity Education Advisor, Gender Equity and 2SLGBTQ+ Education at McGill, said in an interview with the Daily. Six months after the bill was proposed, Minister Simon JolinBarrette eventually backed-down and modified the bill to drop such requirements after outrage from

the queer community. The passing of the modified Bill, Clegg said, represents a “smashing of the gender binary” as it recognizes that “trans, intersex, nonbinary, [and] gender non-conforming members of our society [didn’t] fit within the way the government was categorizing people according to gender.”

To reflect the passing of Bill 2, as of September 1, McGill students are able to select X as their legal gender marker within McGill’s Student Information System. Andrea Clegg calls McGill’s decision “a first step towards inclusion” as it will mean that applicants and students will be able to “navigate through various systems in a way where their actual identities and their legal identities are reflected in how they’re captured in various systems.”

According to Madeleine Elise Nadler, Business Analyst Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion at Enrollment Services, McGill’s

decision marks McGill as a “leader in terms of 2SLGBTQ+ equity, diversity, and inclusion”. McGill is “not only the first [university] in Quebec, but [...] one of the first [universities] in Canada among the U15” to add X as a gender marker.”

Concordia University, in contrast, has opted to remove gender markings entirely in lieu of Bill 2, whereas the University of Toronto currently only has a neither option in addition to the standard male and female options. The University of British Columbia, on the other hand, currently has no non-binary options — only the binary options of male and female.

Nadler points out that this decision will help to alleviate bureaucratic barriers that individuals who do not identify within the gender binary often face, as it will make it easier for them to access documents in which their legal identity and lived identity are aligned. For “students

[...] trying to get recommendation letters for a job or apply to other universities [this decision] helps a lot with removing these barriers and having easier navigation with these systems,” says Nadler.

Brooklyn Frizzle, the Administrative Coordinator of Queer McGill, wrote in an email to the Daily that although this move was “undeniably a step in the right direction”, they wonder why the university waited to make this decision until there was a legal requirement to do so. “What was stopping the University from using X gender markers, at least internally, as other institutions and even governments, have been doing for years?” they questioned.

Frizzle also points to the University’s track record with preferred name usage. According to the SSMU’s Preferred Names Use Report, “59% of respondents who attempted to register a preferred name or a legal change of name with Student Records were unsuccessful,” and only 13.9% of respondents had their

correct name on all IT services. Students who wish to change their gender designation to X will have to go through a similar process.

Frizzle concludes that McGill’s “reluctance to be ‘progressive’ until it becomes palatable”, their “hesitance to act until after the dust has already settled”, and the university’s track record with preferred names, marks McGill’s decision as “another bare-minimum, performative publicity stunt, re-branded as transformative change.” They write that if McGill “intends to present itself as a cutting edge, forward-looking institution, it must be prepared to set trends — not wait to follow them.”

In order for McGill students to change their gender marker to X, they are required to email a completed Personal Data Change Form with an accepted legal document—a list of which can be found on the eCalendar under Legal Name—to legaldocumentation@mcgill.ca.

“What was stopping the University from using X gender markers, at least internally, as other institutions and even governments, have been doing for years?”

- Brooklyn Frizzle

Hyeyoon Cho | Design Editor

For “students [...] trying to get recommendation letters for a job or apply to other universities [this decision] helps a lot with removing these barriers and having easier navigation with these systems”

- Madeleine Elise Nadler

McGill’s New Exhibit on LGBTQIA2S+ Activism

Showcasing the McGill Community’s Activist Histories

Nina Tavernier News Contributor

On October 26, the vernissage for the exhibit “LGBTQ2AS+ McGill Student, faculty, and Staff Activism” took place in the McLennan Library Building. This exhibit, curated by Dr. Alex Ketchum and Jacob Williams, showcases the work of students, faculty, and staff who advocated and supported the rights and safety of LGBTQIA2S+ communities at McGill, specifically highlighting activism from the mid-20th century to the current day. Though the materials in the exhibit span McGill student, faculty, and staff activism in 1914 to the present, they specifically focus on the period from the 1960s onwards. The Daily spoke to Dr. Alexandra Ketchum, the McGill professor who organized this exhibit, to learn more about the exhibit and to gain insight into why it is needed at McGill.

“I think there wasn’t a lot of awareness on campus about the activist history,” Dr. Ketchum explained when asked what inspired her to create this exhibit. “I wanted to help connect current folks on McGill’s campus with these past histories both because they’re inspiring, and because they help us see patterns in different things that happen around campus, which I wanted

people learn about the different opportunities on campus. With this in mind, there is a section of the online exhibit dedicated to outlining the LGBTQIA2S+ clubs,

interact with these histories.” Dr. Ketchum also emphasized the importance of learning about the histories, especially with ongoing occurrences of homophobia and transphobia on campus. She explained that “it’s really easy to take for granted certain gains or rights that have been won, but we have to remember how hard folks had to fight for those things,” emphasizing the importance of showing all the important activist work that took place at McGill.

a scholar in Indigenous Studies, calls “Damage Centred Research.” Yet she expressed that it is equally important to look at joy and celebration, because “things aren’t unimportant because they’re fun,” which is why the exhibit features Queer Joy as one of the central themes.

themselves. Dr. Ketchum also hopes that having the vernissage in the McGill Archives, which she found daunting during her own experience as a student, “makes it feel a little less scary, too,” as part of her goal of trying to “break down barriers of things that can feel intimidating.”

to draw attention to.”

Dr. Ketchum also pointed out that before the pandemic, “you had groups that had been meeting in person and organizing events, but when the pandemic happened and we moved online, it became harder for new students and new faculty and staff to know about what clubs are on campus, what organizations to join.” She felt that this had reduced the amount of student, faculty, and staff organizing on campus, and wanted to help

organizations, and student groups at McGill, allowing students, faculty, and staff to see what opportunities are available.

When asked what impact she hoped the exhibit would have on those who visit it, Dr. Ketchum said that she felt it was important that it was on the main floor of the library; “it means people who don’t plan to visit it can see the materials and say ‘wow, I had no idea that Gerts Bar was named after Gertrude Stein,’” which means that, even if for a short time, “they

In the exhibit, the materials are organized around five themes: Queer Joy; Student, Faculty, and Staff LGBTQIA2S+ Organizations and Clubs; Discrimination and Backlash; Academic Programs; and HIV/AIDS and Health. The Daily asked Dr. Ketchum why she chose these categories, and she explained that “it is really important to focus on the bad things that happened, and we can’t erase those histories, but I didn’t want it to be trauma-based, I didn’t want it to only focus on negativity.” She also said that she “didn’t want it to be just in terms of resilience, because resilience is something that sometimes you’re just forced into.” Dr. Ketchum explained that she felt that at times, when telling stories about marginalized communities, it can often be framed in what Eve Tuck,

Dr. Ketchum also hopes to draw attention to the resources that the Archives Gaies du Quebec and the Archives Lesbiennes du Quebec (ALQ) have, which is why the exhibit contains a poster about where all the materials for the exhibit were found. She explains that when she was a student at McGill, it was hard to find information on the ALQ, and so she wanted to make it more accessible to students, both to find resources and deposit materials in the archives

“As we’re seeing a rise in discrimination against queer people, especially against trans people, in the US and Canada, I think it’s important to show all the important activist work that’s been done,” explained Dr. Ketchum.

The digital exhibit will remain accessible after the physical exhibit ends in December, until at least September 1, 2032. It can be accessed at lgbtqactivismatmcgill.com.

“As we’re seeing a rise in discrimination against queer people, especially against trans people, in the US and Canada, I think it’s important to show all the important activist work that’s been done.”

- Dr. Ketchum

Emma Bainbridge | News Multimedia Editor

“I wanted to help connect current folks on McGill’s campus with these past histories, both because they’re inspiring, and because they help us see patterns in different things that happen around campus, which I wanted to draw attention to.”

- Dr. Ketchum

Archiving For Social Justice

QPIRG and ArQuives document activism in Canada

Saylor Catlin Coordinating News Editor

“The bulk of our collection [is] ephemeral materials,” explains Ha Nhuan Dong. “Posters, zines, pamphlets that we collect or were donated towards us that relate to social and environmental justice.” Dong is the Resource Coordinator of the Alternative Library at Quebec Public Research Group (QPIRG)McGill, located at 3516 Parc Avenue, just a couple blocks away from McGill campus. The Alternative Library is dedicated to providing hard-to-find materials that contribute to QPIRGMcGill’s anti-oppression mandate and support its working groups, according to the organization’s website. “The most important thing for us is to archive those ephemeral and often not recognized materials,” Dong told the Daily

The QPIRG Alternative Library also buys books and educates people, Dong adds, and is therefore not that different from a regular library. Yet it is distinctly “alternative,” he explains, as they “collect and distribute knowledge related to justice” in the “specific activist context.” QPIRG’s Alternative Library is part of a larger network of other loosely related independent, alternative libraries in Montreal, including – but not limited to – those at QPIRG-Concordia, the Center for Gender Advocacy at Concordia, Queer McGill, the Labour Library at AMUSE, and the Simone DeBeauvoir Institute. Most of the libraries in this network are led by students, and most have a nonhierarchical approach to functioning and archiving, per Dong.

Those who work at the QPIRG Alternative Library collect donations whenever possible. Dong explains that they often gather freely-distributed materials from activist movements on campus and then add them to their collections. “Even though it is very

hard to achieve and hard to maintain,” he says of the collection process, “it is a crucial part to let people know that this part of history existed so that organizations and activists of later generations can refer back.” However, the library is not structured as a formal archive. “The challenge is how to make [our materials] publicly accessible and easily navigable, in a database that people can search in an easy way,” Dong says. “But our goal has always been collecting these things as material evidence of activist existence.”

the ArQuives, and Daniel Payne, reference archivist at the ArQuives.

Ho started the presentation by giving an overview of the history of the ArQuives and how they functiom today. She first explained that the ArQuives came out of the Gay Liberation Movement in Toronto, which happened from 1969 to1973. Following a series of protests and gay and lesbian organizing, in 1971, the BodyPoliticwas established – Canada’s first gay and lesbian magazine. The magazine was organized as an informal collective, and remained influential for Canada’s gay and lesbian community throughout the ’70s and ’80s, explains Ho. In 1973, the Body Politic established the Canadian Gay Liberation Movement Archives with the goal of preserving documents generated by the Gay Liberation Movement. The name has since been changed to the ArQuives to reflect the organization’s mandate.

Researchers can go to the ArQuives in Toronto and visit the research room to see the collection, Ho continued. It is here where reference archivists like Payne work and help researchers navigate the collection. “We receive hundreds of reference requests every year, and that’s from researchers across Canada and internationally,” Ho says. “Most of our researchers are academics, filmmakers, artists, etc.”

She explained that much of the collection was digitized during the pandemic. Researchers can now explore digitized materials by using the reference services to search the ArQuives’ collections. Those who are curious can also visit the Digital Exhibitions page on the ArQuives website, which allows you to explore highlights from the collection digitally.

“Traditional archives have typically excluded marginalized folks”

- Ariana Ho

The QPIRG-McGill Alternative Library also organizes justice-based activities. On October 27, they hosted a free, virtual presentation from the ArQuives, one of the largest LGBTQ2S+ archives in the world, located in Toronto. Similar to the QPIRG Alternative Library, the ArQuive’s mandate is to “acquire, preserve, organize, and give public access to information and materials in any medium, by and about LGBTQ2+ people, primarily produced in or concerning Canada,” and to “maintain a research library, international research files, and an international collection of LGBTQ2+ periodicals,” according to the organization’s website. The presentation was delivered by Ariana Ho, senior archivist at

“Traditional archives have typically excluded marginalized folks from their collections, including but not limited to BIPOC, LGBTQ2S+, disabled, underhoused or newcomer experiences,” Ho wrote to the Daily. “The ArQuives aims to fill some of these archival erasures and gaps.” She emphasized that the ArQuives is a community archive, started and led by the community.

Ho says that the ArQuives have historically been volunteer-run, with volunteering just recently picking back up again after the pandemic slowed their operations. “We had somewhere around 150 volunteers, some of whom have been involved since the 1970s,” she adds. Today, there are eight people on staff on short-term contracts. Ho explains that the ArQuives do not receive operational funding, and while they do occasionally receive government grants and foundational support for specific projects, they are heavily reliant on generous donations from community members.

“You can learn about things like Halloween Drag Balls in the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s, the first gay and lesbian protest in the early ’70s, the history of trans health care activism in Ontario, and much more,” Ho says.

When it comes to their collections, Ho says that they generally don’t turn away donations unless they don’t have the capacity or space to house materials. “Donors will oftentimes bring in T-shirts, buttons, horns, personal papers, and organizational papers from organizations that they were a part of,” she says. They look for donations that relate to everyday queer life. “We don’t simply collect the records of those who have a big impact,” Ho told the Daily. “Preserving the histories of everyday folks is important to us.”

The ArQuives are also home to a multitude of fonds, or materials grouped together that share the same origin and that are the product of a singule agency, individual, or organization. Ho spotlighted the Bernard Courte fonds, the Dykes on Mykes fonds, and the Chris Cushman fonds, all available for perusing.

Ho ended her presentation by acknowledging that a large percentage of the ArQuives’ records centres around the lives and work of gay, white cisgender men, and have historically failed to preserve the records and history of racialized queer and trans folks. She highlighted some of the ongoing initiatives in efforts to increase the representation of marginalized members of the LGBTQ2S+ community in the ArQuives. For example, Ho discussed the Trans Collection Project, “which consists of conducting outreach with members of the trans community, assisting in the collection of trans materials, and preparing the records for permanent storage.” She also spoke of the ArQuive’s collaboration with the Roots and Rites/ Routes and Writes Project, when they hosted a creative non-fiction writing workshop for young queer and trans South Asian writers to create an archive of their experiences to be preserved at The ArQuives.

Next, Payne presented strategies to use when searching the collection. He demonstrated that you can sort results according to collection source, description level, collection/fonds, material type, decade, and more when searching online to narrow your search. He emphasized that it’s important to keep in mind that the archive is not a library. “You oftentimes go to a library that is organized through broad subject headings,” he explains, “and an archive is kind of almost a hacking of that whole system.” Alternatively, the archive is organized from the “bottom level up, based on individuals that lived through various time periods in history. We build up our collections through the way they saw their worlds.”

You can explore the ArQuives’ collection through their website or by filing a reference request. There’s also an open call for on-site, remote, and hybrid volunteers; you can apply at arquives.ca. In Montreal, you can visit the QPIRG-Alternative Library at 3516 Park Avenue, open on Mondays and Wednesdays from 2:00 to 6:00 PM. You can also check out material from the Alternative Library by registering to become a member, for an optional fee of $5, through the library’s Linktree.

“Our goal has always been collecting these things as material evidence of activist existence.”

- Ha Nhuan Dong

Tamim Sujat

Paradise Rot (2019)

Jenny Hval’s genrebending novel tells the story of Jo, an international student trying to figure out her place in a new country and a new stage in life. Jo’s experience in this new city doesn’t go as smoothly as she had hoped: her roommate has no boundaries, and her house acts more like a living entity than an object. This is one of the weirdest books I’ve ever read. At its core, Paradise Rot is a coming-of-age story, but as the lines between reality and imagination blur, the story begs you to question your understanding of sexuality, bodies, and gender.

Yehia Anas Sabaa Culture Editor

The Haunting of Bly Manor (2020)

The Haunting of Bly Manor tells the story of a haunted, stately mansion in the English countryside. The show is seriously scary – it had me scared of the dark for weeks and on high alert for ghosts – but also features gripping storytelling and stellar performances (for everyone who is also in love with Victoria Pedretti) that make it hard to look away despite the horror. It additionally features a slow-burn WLW romance, which without giving too much away, is seriously unexpected and absolutely heart-wrenching.

Saylor Catlin News Editor

Homoeroticism meets Western meets absurdist comedy, Ravenous (dir. Antonia Bird) is a great, unsung classic of ’90s horror. Set during the Mexican-American war of 1846, Second Lieutenant John Boyd is exiled to a remote military base in the western United States. His unit encounters a mysterious stranger, Colqhoun, who warns them of a certain Colonel Ives who murdered and cannibalized his friends. Featuring a sparkling cast of idiosyncratic characters and teeming with wit, the movie offers a striking indictment of Manifest Destiny and American imperialism.

Nowhere (1997)

In Gregg Araki’s cult black dramedy, aloof yet uncomfortably in-yourface teens run amok as their peers either repent and face bloody rapture or continue their debauchery and meet lizard-faced alien invaders. Bad trips, allusions to Christ, and gratuitous sex scenes are intertwined into a spiralling narrative headed to the depths of meaninglessness. The film is awash in stunning sets, startling light displays, and outof-this-world costumes, but the characters’ peculiar tenderness and vulnerability still comes through. It all ends with the most beautiful, heartbreaking, and frustratingly absurd queer confession of love I have ever seen.

Will Barry Commentary Editor

Olivia Shan Managing Editor

Carmilla (1872)

Laura, the protagonist and narrator of the story, is being preyed upon by Carmilla, a vampire. Considered a classic of Gothic fiction, Carmilla explores themes of duality, lust, and sexuality. The story also challenges Victorian concepts of gender roles. The publication of the novella predates Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) by 26 years, and is one of the earliest examples of vampire fiction! If you’re looking for a short read with a WLW romance hidden in plain sight, then Carmilla is the book for you.

Yehia Anas Sabaa Culture Editor

Ravenous (1999)

PRIDE IN

The 2019 San Francisco Pride Parade and what

Awais Khaliq | Features Contributor

On June 30, 2019, in the beating heart of America’s LGBTQ+ community, San Francisco’s Pride Parade gathered queer people from all corners of the country. Having grown more effervescent since its inauguration in 1970, San Francisco Pride has cultivated a hub of culture and love. Today, LGBTQ+ rights in the US have greatly progressed since the troublesome 70s, so why is there a need for a Pride Pa rade in 2022?

Pride is often considered unnecessary as it is believed that discrimination against LGBTQ+ individuals is a figment of the past. But Pride is still an essential celebration because the systems that have harmed past generations of queer people continue to remain intact. To this day, many people cannot afford to feel safe within their iden tity. I feel my heart race whenever I walk past someone while wearing clothes that express who I am but could be judged as too “feminine.” Trans people are still denied the medical care they desire and require to feel at peace with themselves. Lesbian and bisexual women are still subjected to significantly higher rates of violence. Non-bina ry people are still invalidated and put in harm’s way for making the conscious choice of denying to subscribe to hegemonic gender values.

The experience of being queer shouldn’t be reduced to the pain that we as a community have experienced. Queer joy, which is seldom represented in the media, is a symbol of resis tance that Pride provides a space for.

PICTURES

The sole purpose of Pride is not about fighting inequality; we are not the victims that others have portrayed us as. The experience of being queer shouldn’t be reduced to the pain that we as a community have experienced. We are incredibly resilient and strong-willed. Queer joy, which is seldom represented in the media, is a symbol of resistance that Pride provides a space for. Being proud and unabashedly queer is a right that we deserve to cherish.

It’s so easy to feel alone in a battle against the traditional perceptions of gender and sexual identity while forging an identity that feels true to ourselves. There is no other feeling that can amount to being surrounded by people who understand my struggle. Pride is important because it gives people, including me, a place to reflect, find comfort, and have fun without worrying about whether others will criticize their queerness. It gives me so much validation to see queer relation ships thrive and younger people awestruck in a crowd of people they can look up to. Still, some will insist that Pride is an unnecessary show of hedonism that society needs to rid itself of. When a simple demonstration of unity allowing queer people to express themselves is considered an unwanted protest, that’s when you know pride parades are very much still necessary.

Genevieve Quinn | Photo Editor

it represents for Queer people all over the world

Being proud and un abashedly queer is a right that we deserve to cherish [...] It’s so easy to feel alone in a battle against the traditional perceptions of gender and sexual identity while forging an identity that feels true to ourselves.

Fostering Queer Spaces and Causing Sapphic Panic

An interview with ElleLui

Meena Thakur Commentary Editor

This week, the Daily sat down with Eloise Haliburton and Lucia Winter, the producer and cofounder of ElleLui, a Montrealbased lesbian/queer production collective. We discussed the importance of safe queer spaces and how these spaces are made.

The McGill Daily (MD) : Could you tell me a little bit about what ElleLui is?

Eloise Haliburton (EH): ElleLui is a fairly young communityoriented organization. We think of ourselves as community organizers. Lucia [Winter] and Taylor [Douglas] started it a little over a year ago. Especially given the context of the pandemic, they found that though there are other lesbian and sapphic oriented organisations in Montreal, a lot of them were still not running events. So they were like,

“instead of having a little party with my friends in my living room, let’s find somewhere that we could have a few more people together.” It’s gotten a lot bigger now, but I think the mission remains the same. We want to be a space that is welcoming to everyone who identifies with the lesbian or sapphic experience or the queer experience. There’s so many different labels, but just a space to create and foster community, which is often not as available to people who aren’t cis, gay, and male.

For a whole bunch of different reasons, traditionally, a lot of queer spaces are not too oriented towards people who are not what Lucia, Taylor, Ray (Resvick), and myself are. I’m on the project because I wanted to work with that mission, and Lucia and Taylor started it because they wanted to help create a space like that.

MD: Could you talk to me a

little bit more about how one does find non-cis male spaces that are still queer – both from an organizer perspective and as an individual looking for these spaces?

EH: It’s definitely challenging. I think one thing that has been really valuable in connecting with

new people is other organizers, for example, QueerMTL. They’ve been very deliberate about resharing our stuff, which allows us to connect with people who may be looking for queer spaces but who don’t know exactly how to start finding lesbian and

sapphic spaces.

My main source of queer community was roommates, partners, and lesbian meme accounts. I think there’s a lot of value in the digital queer community, especially for people who are closeted or who live in more rural areas where their queer community is not immediately around them. So, for me, when ElleLui started their events, that was probably the first in-person queer event I had gone to in Montreal in a really long time. But for us as organizers, I think there’s a lot of time and energy that Lucia and Taylor put into building relationships with different venue organizers so that we can have those conversations on the importance of a space for us. Because I think a lot of people get that it’s important to have queer spaces, but the kind of details and minutiae of what a safe queer space actually looks like is something that can only be

“We want to be a space that is welcoming to everyone who identifies with the lesbian or sapphic experience or the queer experience. There’s so many different labels, but just a space to create and foster community, which is often not as available to people who aren’t cis, gay, and male.”

-Eloise Haliburton

Julia Mela | ElleLui

developed and created when you have an organizer or owner who’s willing to listen to you about those details. Part of it is looking at spaces that have already been used by other organizers and part of it is building relationships to find new people. But Lucia can speak more to that.

MD: What does a safe, positive, queer, sapphic space look like? What would the test be for a venue?

LW: I don’t think there’s any litmus test, necessarily. But to be honest, a lot of the relationships that we’ve forged with owners have mostly been – this sounds awful – vibe-based. We’ve had venues where they’ve, for example, charged people for water, and we’re like, “that’s not something that we do at our events and water should be free.”

That’s just something that we believe. And they either go “oh, okay, I hadn’t considered that. We’ll give free water,” or they go “no.” For me, if we get too many of those types of “nos,” then it’s not worth it. Because people expect a certain standard in terms of accessibility from event series that call themselves queer safe spaces. And free water just happens to be one of them.

Gender-affirming security is one of them, gender-affirming bartenders, et cetera. So it’s not really one thing.

EH: I think also having the ability when we’re working with venues, to say “okay, this is the space that you’ve created, and for this night while we’re running our event here, we need to be able to do things the way that it’s important to us.”

club or bar that I think is really cool that isn’t necessarily queer. That’s not to say that there aren’t already amazing queer-owned spaces that are very affirming that we work with quite often. But there is something very lovely about working with a venue that perhaps hasn’t done a queer event before, who then works with us and realizes, “oh, this is a community that our venue hasn’t catered towards and we can.” And you start seeing them putting on more queer events that have nothing to do with us, and that is lovely to see. It’s a very real footprint that I think that queer events can put on mainstream spaces.

MD: Why is there a need for physical spaces versus virtual spaces for people to gather?

how do you interact with other queer groups around Montreal?

- Eloise Haliburton

Lucia Winter (LW): A lot of the venues that we started off working with were spaces that had never hosted queer events before. It was definitely an effort to get venue owners to really understand the intricacies of what queer and specifically lesbian spaces look like – and should look like –in terms of accessibility and safety and conscientiousness towards different genders and different sexualities, and what that means in practice in a venue. Like Eloise said, we have worked with places that other organizers have worked with, but we’ve also forged a lot of our own connections, which I think makes this a little bit special in the sense that Taylor’s and my idea going into this was that we wanted more mainstream, visible, full-of-lesbian spaces. We’d be taking over spaces that were for everyone and making them specifically lesbian.

Thinking about one relationship that we had recently, we got to a point where we were able to have a conversation with the people working at the door to say, “hey, look, we need you to be on our side.” It’s important for the people who are working there to be able to say, “hey, I get that you like this venue, I get that you come here other times. But tonight we need you to understand that this is a space for people who are allies or who are within this community.” And it’s interesting. I have had a lot of conversations with people who don’t seem to be part of our community and maybe people who think our community is “super fun” – and, no, this isn’t a fun, hot, sexy, for-your-eyes lesbian party. This is a space that is important to protect. It’s not to say that people who aren’t lesbian, saphic, or queer can’t be in the spaces. It’s about knowing that people who are in our spaces, regardless of gender and regardless of the labels that they put on sexuality, can understand the need for these spaces.

MD : You mentioned that you usually take spaces that aren’t necessarily queer and transform them for your events. Why is it that you take these normally non-queer spaces and use them for queer events? Or is it out of necessity?

LW: It’s mostly out of sheer desire to go to a queer space at a

EH: I think everyone’s journey to figuring out who they are – cis, trans, queer, straight, whatever it is – is complicated. You need to have experiences with people you can see yourself in to understand that. For me, it was a whole journey, but being able to be in spaces of queer attraction and queer expression is pivotal to building confidence and understanding who you are. There was one event where someone came up to me, I was working at the door, and was like, “can I ask you something? This is my first time here; my friends just heard about it and they said we should go. But I didn’t know until tonight that maybe I was into women. It’s literally being here that I realized, what do I do?”

And that’s what this is about: having spaces where people can be queer, grow in their queerness, express their queerness in ways that maybe they didn’t know they wanted to before, or in ways that they don’t feel like they could in other spaces. That’s what this is about to me.

LW: Causing sapphic panic. I love that. That was cute.

EH: And by the way, if that person ever reads this, I think about you. Yeah, I hope you’re doing well.

MD: So what is it like to exist as an independent collective, and

LW: I think one of our priorities is collaborating with people whose visions and missions align with ours. And we’ve collabed with event series like Sweet Like Honey MTL, which do events for BIPOC queer people and lesbian/ sapphic people, and Blush Party, who have been around since 2019. And we’ve collabed with a graphic design studio that’s queer-run. We are collaborating with a classical music collective. We are using whatever influence we have to branch out and help other series or just have fun with them. We’re independent from any established institution, but I would say that part of our success has been the fact that the queer community of Montreal is very interdependent and very interconnected. Part of working with other groups, other event series, other initiatives, is affirming one another. We strengthen each other. And I think that’s the only way to create a healthy community. We are all friends now, we all go to each other’s events, we all support each other, and that’s really important. We all throw fun events together and do something good. That feels really good.

MD: I see that ElleLui has grown fairly quickly. How do you see this collective growing in the future?

LW: I can tell you my dream, which is to put on festivals for queer people. I think that if I were to make ElleLui my full

time job, which as of now is not possible, I would do that. But my dream is to put on a sapphic festival with sapphic artists and singers and get sponsorships to do that. In the meantime, it’s really a matter of continuing to create fun events that people go to until we can get to a point of influence where that would be possible.

MD: Finally, how can people get involved?

LW: We have an artist callout form on our website where artists can upload their materials and we can take a look to see if we can work with them. We also have a volunteer sign-up form, and we have an event idea pitch form if people have an idea to put on an event.

EH : We have way too many events going on. But in January, I think we’ll definitely pull some ideas from there and reach out to people if we end up using anything. You can always hit us up on Instagram @elleluimtl and send us your material. We have an open mic night once a month, more or less, and that’s a great place for people to come out, share their stuff with the community – and we have hired people from that before. Or you can email us at info@elleluimtl.com.

Part of working with other groups, other event series, other initiatives, is affirming one another. We strengthen each other. And I think that’s the only way to create a healthy community. We are all friends now, we all go to each other’s events, we all support each other, and that’s really important. We all throw fun events together and do something good.

- Lucia Winter

“That’s what this is about: having spaces where people can be queer, grow in their queerness, express their queerness in ways that maybe they didn’t know they wanted to before, or in ways that they don’t feel like they could in other spaces”

- Eloise Haliburton

This is a space that is important to protect. It’s not to say that people who aren’t lesbian, saphic, or queer can’t be in the spaces. It’s about knowing that people who are in our spaces, regardless of gender and regardless of the labels that they put on sexuality, can understand the need for these spaces.

QUEER CROSSWORD