A Three-Tiered Shit-Dyke: Joy Needs Love Needs Sex, Sunnyvale, 23/04/2016

One of the benefits of being on Netflix, as opposed to even a post-watershed cable TV channel, is how explicit you can be with sex. Sex is an essential part of the human condition, rooted in our physicalities. No matter what kind of sexuality you may have – and your sexuality is as singular as you are – you will have some kind of sexuality. Even asexuality as a human is a relation to sex. Humanity can’t escape from sex, and we shouldn’t want to in the first place.

Western morality has separated sex from love for so long that a lot of us are still digging our way out from that situation. But we have to understand that the truest, deepest loves express themselves in the greasiest, nastiest, most freakily creative sex. The greatest fucks aren't just genital fucks, but mind-fucks. There should be no difference between body-fucks and mind-fucks – there are only fucks. Body, thought, and spirit intermingling into a dense and complex integration that produces more than either body could become on its own. This is sexuality at the molecular and spiritual level. This is love.

Prince died two days ago. What else could he have taught us but this?

The deepest, most affecting, and frankly most beautiful love story in the entire world of Trailer Park Boys and Sunnyvale Trailer Park is that of Jim Lahey and Randy. Their sexual tension is still thick, solidifying every time they’re on screen together this season. It’s all the more tense because they never act on it. Jim is yearning for Randy, with increasing desperation. But Randy reacts to Jim differently here than he ever has before. He’s loved Jim, he’s been angry, jealous, frustrated, certainly. But now he seems scared. 

Just look at the way Jim rubs cream on Randy’s tortured, wounded nipples after Barb, Donna, and Candy’s latest attack. They’re horribly wounded, the flesh bruised deeply. And Jim rubs tenderly, with the soft brushes of fingertips that penetrate past skin to the heart, to the soul. He’s crying, sorrowful, shredded and quivering. There’s been a crime here, an assault. And Jim's response isn’t like a lawman. He doesn't go out for revenge, like it was some retro Dirty Harry plot. His response is to heal. The answer of love.

Yet Randy’s afraid. He stops Jim. Stops his love. What could have happened to provoke this attitude in Randy toward the only one who’s ever really loved him? When you watch “A Three-Tiered Shit-Dyke,” you wonder about this question. This new season will be incomplete if it doesn’t offer some kind of explanation – and it’ll have to be an answer with the magnitude to match how radical a permanent cleave between Lahey and Randy is.

This season has already seen radical transformations to the landscape and characters of Sunnyvale, and it looks like more are coming. We’ve seen Barb transform into a destructive force and Jim abandon his role as Sunnyvale’s voice of authority. We’ve now seen what looks like an end to the love story between Jim and Randy that's been an important element of Sunnyvale from its earliest days in Canada’s self-consciousness. Now there’s another radical change: Ricky is being pressured to stay out of a criminal lifestyle, and is doing his best to make an actually legitimate living. How successful he’ll be is another issue entirely.

In fact, let’s have a closer look at Ricky here. Of the three Trailer Park Boys of the title, Ricky is the least intelligent. He mangles common sayings, he fails to understand very basic things about ordinary life, like how to dispose of large-scale garbage and how to plan for an actually sustainable retirement. Ricky knows he's pretty fucking stupid, but despite that, he’s still pretty fucking stupid.

Yet there’s one area of life where Ricky is one of the most intelligent people in the whole community of Sunnyvale. Maybe even in the whole city of greater Halifax and the whole province of Nova Scotia. Maybe even one of the smartest people in Canada. That’s crime. Specifically, petty crime like ripping off bicycles from racks to sell at shady bike shops, breaking into houses, and selling fake lottery tickets. He’s also a master horticulturalist and manufacturer, but only when it comes to growing marijuana and refining weed into other products like hash, concentrated hash oils, currency made from hash, and the strongest dab you can’t handle.

Ricky is a verbal and intellectual moron, except for when it comes to calculating a crime. When he’s over-emotional, he gets impulsive and reckless – I still have fond memories of laughing my ass off as Ricky ripped a massive ATM from the walls of a bank. But look at how he plans and improvises his way through the gang’s petty crime spree in “A Three-Tiered Shit-Dyke.”

First, there’s the bike theft at the college. He knows what the bikes are worth and exactly what you have to do to steal them as fast as possible. And when those two hapless student security staff cycle over themselves, Ricky knows exactly how to talk his way out of the situation. He talks with perfect confidence as if he and the crew are some casually dressed contractors, slips them some hash, shit-talks their boss with them, and gives them just enough of an excuse for plausible deniability that they can walk away. 

When they go to that affluent neighbourhood nearby to case for easy robberies, Ricky is the expert reconnaissance man. He knows exactly what to say to appear like an innocent passerby to residents who are still at home, and can break into a house with ease. It doesn’t matter than he can’t pick the lock – he can still get in there and start robbing. 

The problem Ricky encounters in that rich neighbourhood doesn’t have anything to do with any mistakes he makes. It’s that the police have become too attentive. Law and authority are more present in that community, faster, more efficient than seemingly anywhere. The boys are surprised that the police showed up this quickly. They aren’t supposed to be this competent. Ricky talks his way out of the situation with the same ease as he handled the campus security patrol, because he’s only intelligent as a criminal. But he shouldn’t have had to deal with them. The cops arrived whole minutes sooner than they should have. 

Something has changed. Many things have changed in and around Sunnyvale. This isn't the only thing. But the attentiveness and professionalism of the police is the most obvious. The most remarkable. We aren’t dealing with George fucking Green here anymore. What could have caused this new generation of actually professional police officers to appear?

These kinds of cops aren’t typically around Sunnyvale itself. The standard police patrols can easily be kept away with a few well-placed sexual acts of Randy just outside the gate. These kinds of cops come to Sunnyvale after a break-in at an affluent suburban neighbourhood. These are forces of law and order who could actually be a threat to Sunnyvale. Robbing from the types of people these cops protect may actually have consequences – piss these cops off, and you might not get out of jail in time for next season. There’s a new order in town.

Remember some of those conversations a few episodes ago about a new subdivision going up near Sunnyvale? It was just a throwaway comment, but in the light of these new, competent cops in Ricky’s life, we have to take seriously the likelihood of radical change coming to Sunnyvale. Not from any open, violent invasion like Barb’s, even though that is pretty fucking dangerous. No, this is a more creeping, invisible danger.

Could suburbanites be coming to the borders of Sunnyvale? Threatening their joyful anarchy and chaos with actually competent police and law? 

Is this Barb’s actual plan for Sunnyvale? She’s never really been part of the Sunnyvale community before. She was always an authority figure, always at some distance from the real rhythms and styles of Sunnyvale life. Barb has been a creature of law – keeping Jim from drinking, trying to run the park according to explicit rules and regulations. At least that’s how I remember her.

So far this season, we haven’t really heard a justification for Barb wanting to take control of the trailer park. I mean, we’ve heard her justify it as revenge on Julian for weaselling his way into majority ownership while she was shipped off to jail with Donna and Sarah at the end of Season Nine. But that’s not her total motivation – it can’t be. Yeah, she could take Sunnyvale’s ownership back from Julian, but then we’re left with the question of what she’d actually do with it. 

But Barb has never really been part of Sunnyvale. Sunnyvale’s freedom and chaos has always irritated her, hasn’t it? If Barb Lahey has had a nemesis over the last 15 years, it’s been Sunnyvale itself, the trailer park that refuses to calm itself and conform to her wishes for a quiet, uneventful, straight life. Now Barb is unrestrained, a violent bully who has embraced an aggressive lesbian life. Sunnyvale, always Barb’s nemesis, has finally broken her. Yes, Julian was the person who screwed her out of a potentially fruitful real estate investment. But that’s just money. It was Sunnyvale itself that broke Barb’s soul.

With a new, high-end suburban development creeping closer and closer to Sunnyvale, that land is getting more and more valuable. Sunnyvale’s land is more valuable than the people who live on it. I mean, nobody who lives in Sunnyvale even bothers to pay their lot fees. It’s effectively a community without money. No real estate developer could ever make money from Sunnyvale as it is. 

But with the people gone, and only the land remaining, it’s a multi-million dollar investment property. Nothing would satisfy Barb – who’s become a primal drive for revenge and violence – more than destroying the entire society that slowly ground her down into the creature of hate that she is.

It Was Once Described to Me as “Gay Interest,” Composing, 17/03/2016

In the middle of all the madness that my life is today – communications contracts, a part-time sales job, volunteer work with the Syria Film Festival and the New Democratic Party – I still have new ideas for stories, novels, and films.

I say this as I continue to develop two independent film projects this year – Here Is a Man with director Lee Skinner and the film version of You Were My Friend with the theatre version’s lead actress Sam Nemeth directing. Even though I’m still working on these projects, I also think about other stories that would be interesting, provocative, and important to tell.

I have always found sports culture to be
pretty gay already.

A couple of weeks ago, I was talking with my GF about a very strange night I had back when I lived in St John’s. This happened to me more than a decade ago. 

I was invited to a party at a friend F’s house. Nothing out of the ordinary there. But F’s boyfriend The Clam set up her front room as a movie theatre – a projector and a white screen covering the entire north wall of the room. But this wasn’t to watch a movie. It was to watch a Toronto Maple Leafs hockey game.

I remembered this night, and it stuck in my mind, because I’ve lately seen a lot of examples of Leafs fandom here in Toronto. I walked into the screening room and saw 15 fellow 22-year-olds bathed in the blue light of the projected rink, eyes fixed on the screen, their faces twisted by adrenaline, screaming in a demented ecstasy whenever a Leaf would take the puck. It was half religious mystic enthusiasm and half simultaneous seizure. I was a little disturbed.

So I did the only rational thing. I went to the kitchen and hung out with all their girlfriends for the rest of the night.

Telling that story a couple of weeks ago, the GF commented about how incredibly gay it was in that improvised theatre. That got me thinking of a story.

I'm not gay. But I think I'm more comfortable with alternative sexualities than the average North American white cis straight male, if only because gay people have been normal to me for my entire life. They’re in my close family and some of my oldest friendship circles. 

I’ve never been alienated or mystified by gay existence the way many men still apparently are. I think that’s why Lee Edelman’s philosophy of homosexuality alienated me so much. The notion that gay existence is radically different from straight life with its valuation of reproduction, is itself radically strange to me. Gay existence is my uncle, some of my oldest friends. 

I feel like it would be disingenuous of me to tell the story
of a gay man exploring gay and homosexual subcultures,
at least until I found a collaborator for the project –
whether a film or a novel – who was gay, and would
help me build a narrative from his experiences.

But I can’t tell a gay man’s story. I don’t have that kind of positionality. It’s difficult for me to get inside the headspace of someone who’s experienced those internal and social struggles his whole life. If I told a story of a gay man on his own terms, I know that I’d slip away from its visceral reality.

But I can tell the story of a straight man learning the stories of the gay men around him. Here’s the basic shape of the story I’ve thought about from this image of the ecstatic hockey game. It would be very explicitly gay. Think of an X-rated Alice Munro.

Calvin comes from a small city in Toronto's wide orbit. When he moves to Toronto for university, he meets up with a friend from high school a year older than him, Justin, who’s come out. They get to know each other again, Justin introduces Calvin to the city, and they have a semi-drunk sexual encounter that convinces Calvin that he’s very much not gay. But the night remains friendly, and their platonic love for each other deepens.

This Calvin-Justin story unfolds in flashback, interspersed with a mystery plot. The narrative begins with the kind of party I described, with this sexually charged hockey ritual. Unlike my night at that party, Calvin actually succeeds in hooking up with one of his friend’s girlfriends. 

He and Samira have a wide-ranging conversation, which includes some of her frustration with her boyfriend Marcus, and after a few more (what neither of them will admit are) dates, they start having an affair. Calvin eventually starts getting curious, ostensibly on Samira's behalf but also from a strange curiosity, about what secret life Marcus has.

From Mark Duplass' film Hump Day, which consists
almost entirely of conversations between two straight
men trying to convince themselves that it will not be
gay when they have sex with each other.

The narrative unfolds similarly to The Big Lebowski. Sequences of Calvin’s affair with Samira and investigating Marcus’ double life are interspersed with hangouts with Justin and his boyfriend Jamal. This gay couple is a sounding board for the investigation, and we also get to know their situation. Justin could pretty easily come out to his progressive white family, but Jamal is alienated from many of his old friends in his more socially conservative community.

Eventually, Calvin discovers that Marcus is involved in a secret club of straight-identified mega-fans of the Toronto Maple Leafs who regularly organize orgies of aggressive sex among their all-male membership. 

It’s one of these homosexual-but-not-gay subcultures that Jane Ward talks about in this illuminating lecture. She talks about different rules and caveats that exist among these communities of straight men who have homosexual sex with each other, to separate the act of sex between men from the self-identity of being gay. I found it an interesting dynamic.

That's all I really have of the story. I don’t know how it will end. I don’t have all the details. Samira's character is still incredibly hazy. All I really have a handle on is the relationship between Calvin and Justin. And the dynamic that this isn’t a story of gay people themselves, but of a straight man exploring the subtleties of gay and homosexual subcultures.

A Post-Pride Post: My Gay Interest Content, Composing, 30/06/2014

I spent this weekend at World Pride with my girlfriend and her best friend Dreamy. It was an absolutely mad weekend, and despite my new sunburn, I had a wonderful time in the most ludicrously deranged bacchanal that I’ve ever experienced. I think Toronto now knows its physical limits in terms of how much of a party it could sustain without breaking. Let’s just say that after this weekend, I’m extremely glad to get back to work.

As my overstuffed workweek begins again, I thought I’d share some ideas at the heart of one of my fiction projects, A Small Man’s Town. This is the sprawling novel about life in St. John’s in the 2000s that I’m turning into a book of linked short stories so that I can sell it to a publisher more easily. 

The stories all revolve around subtle, slow-dawning epiphanies. My favourite short stories are by James Joyce, though my too-late discovery of Alice Munro’s work has brought a new element to my influences. You could say the modern stereotype of the short story involves a moment where the protagonist comes to understand some fundamental aspect of his life differently, or more truly, than he had before. My short stories in this collection all have this moment of realization, but we see how it doesn’t really change the characters at all.

When it comes to the gay characters in my St. John’s stories, you see this best with the two stories featuring Nadia, my 21 year old Palestinian lesbian. She’s a central character in the collection’s first story, which was also the first scene that I thought of when I first conceived of A Small Man’s Town in 2007. The campus protest scene was originally much more ludicrous, and was played for cartoonish laughs. Its current form is more subtle and cynical.

It’s a protest against the Iraq War, a scene that takes place in early Fall of 2003. The first speaker is a local leftist activist, who almost brings the rally to a halt with her ridiculous defence of the Ba’ath Party as brave resisters to American imperialism. Newfoundlanders will probably know which local politician I’m skewering there. Her friend Laurie, who organized the protest, throws Nadia on stage too early to try to save the rally (instead of doing any public speaker herself), and ends up sputtering through her speech in a moment of stagefright. The next day at a party intended to celebrate a successful protest, Nadia and Laurie reconcile over a block of hash. 

Their friendship is central to a later Nadia-focussed story, which describes how Laurie and her boyfriend became Nadia’s first friend when she moved to St. John’s. This story focusses on the fallout of Nadia’s only real relationship during her university years, with an egocentric girl named Jen. They only date for six months, and it’s implied that Jen was cheating on Nadia with men — she was more interested in amassing sexual experiences now that she was living independently in the city. 

Nadia, however, fell stupidly in love with a woman who was only ever using her, like a lot of people do in their 20s. One New Years’ Eve, when Jen rubs her promiscuity in Nadia’s face one night until she’s reduced to tears, Laurie comes to her defence, kicking Jen out of the party* and helping her feel better about herself. 

* A lot of the major events in the university-centric stories of this collection happen at parties and rock shows where people are drinking heavily. This is when people’s most honest natures tend to emerge.

What was most important to me for these characters was establishing the complexity of their friendship. Too often, I’ve seen relationships between straight women and lesbians depicted according to stereotypes, and within the swirling network of these stories, I wanted to have one set of friends who would just relate to each other as people instead of The Gay Best Friend™ or close friends who are Awakening Their Latent Sexualities™. 

Laurie and Nadia are a decent person who’s sometimes too full of herself and a sweetheart who can become terrifying when she loses her temper and despondent when her heart is broken. I wanted to offer people a story that offered that kind of complexity in such a simple friendship.