Pride: It’s Time to Shine, Yukon!
August is Pride month in the Yukon with smaller events planned throughout the territory from Whitehorse to Watson Lake and beyond.
Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Queer (LGBTQ)
Ten years in Whitehorse and ready to celebrate!
Born in the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, Antoinette GreenOliph came to Ontario at 13 years of age. She recalls that her family was the only black family in the neighbourhood and recollects the awkward questions and excluded feelings of growing up different. She fell in love with food at a young age. “I was …
The Queer Songbook Orchestra
The Queer Songbook Orchestra is a Toronto-based 12-piece chamber pop ensemble making their Yukon debut on September 30. The group formed in 2014 and has been dedicated to exploring and elevating queer narrative in pop music. “I was at loose ends after several years freelancing in the indie pop music scene in Canada,” said Shaun …
Pride in Dawson City!
Pride is back in Dawson City! Pride Week is happening from July 9–15 and, as part of the celebrations, a parade will be taking place on July 14 at 5 p.m.
Pride and joy … 24 Hours of Gaylight
This month, Yukon Pride: 24 Hours of Gaylight is happening for the sixth year in a row—and it just gets bigger every year.
Shifting perspectives and behaviour
May is Sexualized Assault Prevention month in Canada. Here at home, the Yukon continues to have a disproportionately high rate of sexualized assault compared to the rest of Canada.
Change is happening
This year’s 16 Days of Action to End Gender-Based Violence was packed with some powerful events.
Teaching kids about respect
As part of this year’s 16 Days to End Gender-based Violence campaign, former BC Lions player and 2011 Grey Cup Champion, J.R. LaRose will be returning to the Yukon.
Come as You Are
Don’t wait for your invitation in the mail – Yukon Pride isn’t an exclusive event. “I think sometimes that some of our straight allies, they feel like they need to be invited to an event, which I totally understand,” says Rian Turner who, along with Fi Griffin, Chase Blodgett and Stephanie Hammond, is one of …
A Southern Story with a Northern Connection
The OUT North Queer Film Festival brings film lovers an American documentary with a local twist on April 9. Southwest of Salem tells the true story of four young lesbian women accused of sexually assaulting two underage girls and using them in satanic rituals in the early 1990s in San Antonio,Texas. They were wrongfully convicted …
Is she or isn’t she?
We all wear our identities in various ways to show the world what tribe we belong to. Go to Toronto and you will see the Bay Street brokers in their slick-cut suits; go to Vancouver and you can tell the granolas by their hippie, back-to-the-land attire. Sexual-orientation-wise, it is usually just as easy to spot …
Fitting in is a fickle thing
My roots are in the east – specifically, a small coastal town in Newfoundland. My roots as an advocate are there too, buried amongst many memories of feeling like an outsider. I was “different.” A lot of those feelings came from subverting social expectations placed upon me as a woman. I have always been brazen, …
Writing toward inclusion
Practically unheard of – the top 10 books reviewed last year were evenly split between male and female authors. And never before: the number of men and women reviewing books in Canada is nearly equal. That’s what the Canadian Women in the Literary Arts (CWILA) discovered in its annual investigation of female representation among reviewers …
Celebrating Fathers and Gay Pride
June brings summer and Father’s Day, and is also a time of special significance to the gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer community (LGBTQ). June was chosen as Gay Pride Month to serve as a reminder of a pivotal moment in the fight for gay rights. It was June 28, 1969 in New York City …
Love, Honour, and Equality Under the Midnight Sun
Just when you think Yukon Pride is all about the party, the world reminds you that it’s not. Though the cheery posters and advertisements for 24+ Hours of Funky Gaylight promise a party not to be missed, they were created months before the shooting at an LGBT nightclub in Orlando reiterated there are still many …
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Interview with a Local Transman
Identifying as a transgender person in any community presents risks and challenges, which is partly why the transgender man interviewed for this article chose to remain anonymous. He lives and works as a man, and is only open about being transgender with a few people because, he says, prejudice against transgender people is real. “I …
Intimate, Insightful and Non-Traditional
It’s 1929, Virginia Woolf publishes her famous extended feminist essay, called “A Room of One’s Own,” exploring the gender disparity between women and men. Fast forward to 2016 and discussion around gender politics has widened to include people living beyond the male/female binary. Cyn Lubow’s documentary film A Womb of Their Own asks the question, …
The New Girlfriend is French filmmaking at its best
The New Girlfriend (Une Nouvelle Amie), a French drama from acclaimed director and screenwriter François Ozon, had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2014. It has received several international award nominations and won best picture at Spain’s San Sebastián film festival. The New Girlfriend is loosely based on the 15-page crime …
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The Danish Girl Attracts Controversy on Several Fronts
At some point, perhaps, acting credentials and not gender identity, will dictate who gets what role. Until then, high profile films like The Danish Girl and Dallas Buyers Club will continue to raise hackles in the transgender community for having cisgender (a term coined in the 1990s to denote a person whose self-identity matches their …
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OUT North Queer Film Festival Turns Five
Freeheld Throughout Freeheld we are reminded of how people are so often a combination of the ordinary and the extraordinary. A fictional account of the Oscar-winning 2007 documentary short of the same name, Freeheld is the true story of police detective Laurel Hester (Julianne Moore) and her fight to transfer her pension benefits to her …
Taking Pride
Stephanie Hammond won’t be dancing on the truck leading the annual Pride parade in downtown Whitehorse this weekend, as she has in previous years. Instead, she quips, she’ll be busy co-ordinating “dozens and dozens of floats” that are expected to take part in the third annual version of Yukon’s colourful celebration of diversity. “We have …
OUT North comes of age
Contemplating what to write about this weekend’s OUT North Film Festival, which runs from April 17 to 19 at the Yukon Beringia Interpretive Centre, my brain landed on the word “age”, and stubbornly refused to budge. So, with apologies for the occasional reach, what follows is a quick tour of how the thread of age, …
Films from the Out-side
The Yukon Queer Film Alliance are hosting the third annual film festival OUT North this weekend at The Old Fire Hall in Whitehorse. The eclectic festival delivers a variety of lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender-related films. “The first OUT North was in 2012,” says festival co-producer Debbie Thomas. “We take it a tiny bit at a time and try …
What it Means to be Two-spirited
In some First Nations, two-spirited people are a common part of the history of their culture. Will Roscoe, for example, writes in the book The Zuni Man Woman (1991) that two-spirited people have been documented for centuries in over 130 North American tribes in every region of the continent. The term refers to homosexuality or …
A Queer Look at Life
Rae Spoon is not the average musician. The transgender musician has become a household name in Canada’s burgeoning queer music scene.
Believing in the dog
First Prize PSAC Whitehorse Regional Pride Committee Short Story Contest It’s night. A man walks his black lab in the forest — and when the dog runs in between the pines, he’s almost invisible. The only sound is the man’s footsteps on the snow, the rustle of his jacket, his dog’s breathing. Normally, he enjoys …
Pretty and Witty and Gay
The Old Fire Hall in downtown Whitehorse will host the second annual Out North Film Festival on the weekend of April 19-21. Buoyed by last year’s successful debut of the only Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual,Transsexual (LGBT) film festival North of 60, organizers Fiona Griffin and Debbie Thomas have assembled a package of five features and six …
Vigils bring people together
In Philadelphia to attend a science-fiction convention, I received an email telling me that a young gay teen, Jorge Lopez Mercado had been dismembered, partially burned and decapitated in Puerto Rico. It was also only three weeks after American President Obama signed the Matthew Shepard Act, the new Hate Crimes Legislation. The man charged with …
Queer Coffee is a community saying hello
I don’t know what I was looking for when I walked into Baked Café for the Queer Coffee, advertised on ArtsNet. I knew I was going to interview Matt Koop-Pearce, the guy who created the event, but other than that, I think I was just curious to see who might show up. While many GLBT …
Walker’s Laramie Project shows the triumph of community
Clinton Walker, the director brought up from Toronto for The Laramie Project, has made me chili. Little triangles of toasted bread sit next to the bowl. Walker is staying at the Almost Home Bed and Breakfast, a cute B&B in Valleyview. He’s been here for six weeks now. In some ways, Whitehorse has become another …
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Nina Arsenault talks about the pursuit of beauty and truth
Nina Arsenault warns me that she’s not about to tell the “typical” transsexual story to Nakai Theatre’s Pivot Festival audiences. You know the story, she says, “Her name is Barbara, she used to be Markus, she never felt right in her own body, she met a doctor and now she’s getting boobs. It’s the same …
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Gay community sees hope in The Laramie
Then I was at the Big Band Dessert and Dance Saturday night, I saw a handsome man across the crowded room. Fat chance that I was going to have courage enough to ask him to dance. Are you kidding? I might be hit. He might yell at me. I could just see all the worst …
GenderQueer
The definition of genderqueer is people who do not fit within the traditional two-gender role of male or female. This may be someone who feels they have some of both genders, or someone who feels they have no gender. That’s a starting point, but it is actually a fairly simplified definition. More broadly, genderqueer is …
Speaking Frankly about Choices
Jessica Yee doesn’t mince her words. “As young people, our rights to our own bodies and spaces are fundamental to our own existence. They are our birthright,” the 25-year-old activist declares. Yee speaks about seeing people her own age experiencing violence and unwanted pregnancy and how that contributed to her work in sexual reproductive rights …
Bells for Bert and Ernie?
Recently, there’s been talk in the media concerning an online petition asking the Sesame Street producers to let Ernie and Bert marry each other. Apparently a few hundred quixotic slacktivists agreed, and “signed” this online petition. Yep. You heard me. The reasoning is that having these two Muppets marry would teach kids tolerance, in a …
Middle row, centre: Therapy and psychodrama
The last in Landmark Cinemas ‘Filmtastic Films series for this season screens this week at the Qwanlin. A Dangerous Method is the latest film from Canadian director David Cronenberg, and explores the historic origins of modern psychoanalytic theory with three very fine actors. Viggo Mortensen, (Eastern Promises, A History Of Violence) stars as Sigmund Freud …
