Queer Progress: From Homophobia to Homonationalism is a title with something to repel everyone save for the cadre of progressives, career liars, and extremists that are author Tim McCaskell’s base and audience. The book is that subversive’s second de facto autobiography, and if you take it at face value it constitutes a history of gay and lesbian activism in Toronto. So that’s how I’m going to take it.

Here’s McCaskell reading at Word on the Street this year. I am reasonably sure I was seated directly behind Richard Fung, whom I’ll return to later.

Essentially everyone who played any real role in the history recounted in Queer Progress is White, as is Tim McCaskell himself. “White gay men and lesbians built gay Toronto” is a statement of historical fact that, when stated as historical fact, gets your mike cut off at a “community” event. But McCaskell proved it. [continue with: All the White people in Tim McCaskell’s book →]

I deny being “lonely.”

I was ahead of the curve on two right-wing-asshole issues I’ve covered recently. I shouldn’t have been surprised, and neither should you be. [continue with: Ahead of the curve on ARC and Evalion →]

I enjoy reading Anti-Racist Canada’s little blog. (It’s really all they have and all they do.) I drop them a line from time to time and leave constructive comments on some of their posts, which they read but wouldn’t be caught dead publishing. One such comment (edited):

[D]uring the time I’ve been reading your blog, I have seen scant evidence that ARC operatives have any ambitions beyond, as I like to say, dismantling white supremacy by screencapping Facebook comments. (And – again – that isn’t even the right way to archive them.) Your group’s name is not Anti-Racist Action, and now I see why. You aren’t really committed to action.

I do not really see a difference in kind between Soldiers of Odin Facebook commenters and Anti-Racist Canada bloggers. The term of art here is “keyboard warriors.”

Why did I have to write up a recipe for ARC and likeminded activists to zap Canada’s youngest Nazi? What the hell are you kids doing sitting around all day screencapping Facebook comments?

Now, is it also remotely possible that Ernst Zündel is long gone, white supremacists in Canada have little to no purchase on the public imagination, and, paramount above all, these guys just aren’t remotely the violent skinhead manqués you find in Scandinavia [and Finland]?

And on that last point, upon self-reflection, would you agree that ARC operatives are not remotely willing to do anything in the real world, let alone stand within punching distance of a Soldier of Odin, because you people are fundamentally nonphysical, intellectual, ideological, unable to do shit, conflict-aversive and afraid? And because the dudes in Soldiers of Odin and similar groups are built like a brick shithouse, experienced in fighting, aggressive, and fundamentally unafraid? [continue with: Confidential to anti-racist activists: Purple hair gets you laughed at →]

The long-awaited, and not well typeset, biography of hermit pornographer Boyd McDonald of Straight to Hell (q.v.; q.q.v.) includes one gem after another.

• Walt Whitman (inevitably):

  

  The subject of the portrait, long before he was acknowledged as the great American poet, comes across as a casually dressed and rather slutty gay guy. This is no anachronistic hallucination. Whitman in later years had occasion to regret his attitude: “I looked so damned flamboyant – as if I was hurling bolts at somebody – full of mad oaths – saying defiantly ‘To hell with you!’ ” Whitman also said this portrait “was much hatchelled by the fellows at the time – war was waged on it: it passed through a great fire of criticism.”

  His friend William Sloane Kennedy advised “that this repulsive, loaferish portrait, with its sensual mouth, can be dropped from future editions, or be accompanied by other and better ones that show the mature man, and not merely the defiant young revolter of thirty-seven, with a very large chip on his shoulder, no suspenders to his trousers, and his hat very much on one side.”

• McDonald pitched a column to the Christopher Street. I would have said yes to every article, giving extreme priority to this one:

  Hatchet job on William F. Buckley, Jr. Talks of a “cure” for homosexuality…. Catholicism has for him the appeal it has for all who lack sexual gifts: It assures them that the thing they’re not good at, sex, is wrong anyway. The really rich don’t talk about their servants any more than a typist mentions that lunch was brought to her at the coffee shop by a waitress; service compris. But after his – and the New Yorker’s – prolonged attempt at being snobbish with obsessive talk of his servants in his journals published in that magazine, he sabotaged the whole long article by revealing at the end that his mother eats pizza. Worse, he has dandruff (People magazine). “The Biggest Queen in New York” (in manner, not in sex life); piss-elegant peasant. Soft-cocked, hard-hearted; broad-hipped, narrow-minded; cold-assed, hot-tempered.

Denise Balkissoon is a local vizmin girl hack who has made a pretty solid career out of all of those things. She’s a diversity hire at the Globe and Mail, where she solicited “sex and relationship pitches for Globe Life.”

First, doesn’t Balkissoon realize she’s been ghettoized to the wymmynz pages?

Second, will she ever live the following down?

I unfortunately read something written by Jordan Peterson. It was astonishingly entitled. Trans/genderqueer people, you have my support.

So I ginned up a few “pitches” that would suit Denise Balkissoon’s politics. (Links added.)

1. Help! My girlfriend has a penis!

2. As an older gay man, all my boyfriends were younger Oriental boys. Don’t you dare call me a rice queen

3. When I got my boyfriend pregnant: One transcouple’s story

4. I asked a woman of colour to help detoxify my masculinity. Here’s what she learned

5. I’m a new dad suffering from postpartum depression after my C‑section. My friends don’t understand

6. My wife has a master’s in sociology. She thinks vaccines cause autism. She also thinks our son is a girl

7. My wife and I have three blonde children. How did we get so racist?

8. My gay friends got kicked out of their homes, were abused in Catholic schools, and died of AIDS. A brave transwoman of colour showed me how I’m an oppressor

9. Chestfeeding in public isn’t a crime

10. My lesbian softball team now has a 6′5″ shortstop with a beard. What I learned in the locker room rocked my world

11. Men get periods too: When the personal becomes political – and bloody

12. How Grindr changed my life: One transman’s story

13. “No, where are you really from?” One Swedish Muslima’s story

14. Some Indigenous men have blue eyes. Get over it!

15. My hijab means I can’t hold your hand in public. Now I know how gay men felt before Stonewall

16. Yes, I’m an “angry black girl” – and my people threw the first brick at Stonewall

17. Front holes and backhoes: Coming out as trans* at the construction site

18. “ ‘Do-me’ feminism”: How gender pronouns got me hauled before a judge

When asked to comment for attribution, Balkissoon didn’t.

Update

(2020.06.20) Balkissoon whines in the online pages of her new progressive employer, Chatelaine, about how racist the Globe and Mail was.

Denise Balkissoon was only ever and can only ever be a diversity hire, and will attract nothing but conflict to any newsroom. Furthermore, she’s Indic, and is not “Black” or “Indigenous,” neither of which racial designations gets a capital if White does not. At any rate, Denise here has a bright future ahead of her!

But, as with blue-haired Trigglypuffs, do not lick this toad.

The TeX Users Group or TUG is a decades-old organization for users of the mathematical typesetting language that is not exactly called TeX. Bizarrely, as a teenager I phoned up Prof. Donald Knuth, TeX’s inventor, at Stanford, whereupon his secretary corrected my pronunciation of his name.

In July, TUG held its biannual conference here in Toronto. I was invited to give a presentation to these typographers about TTC type ’n’ tile. I did, and you can read the journal article that resulted.

Now, by far the most interesting fact here is that the average age of the attendees of the TeX Users Group conference is the same as that of TeX – 50. (I exaggerate. Everyone started working on TeX in their 20s and just didn’t bother quitting.)

These are serious and learned and also technically competent people working on a seemingly obscure markup language that is still in common use in its intended fields. The speaking notes from my presentation were obviously in HTML, which journal editors converted to some version of TeX. I then just natively edited the TeX files in BBEdit despite my never having done that before. A reason why TeX is still in use is because it actually works.

TUG TTC Type & Tile Tour

I advertised to attendees that they could meet in the hotel lobby later that same day for a short tour of the subway. I arrived to a packed room and realized that everybody wanted to go on the tour. We ended up with two groups. I had never had the experience of leading, Pied Piper–style, twenty-odd aging computer scientists and typesetters across the humidity and noise of Yonge and Dundas in summertime.

Of course it was hard to hear, and in fact I tended to give impromptu lessons to the different groups twice over, but my audience was amazed by two facts: TTC has its own typography and TTC is really blowing it.

At Bay station, two things happened.

1. One audiencemember saw a break in the wall and diagnosed that the walls are not really made of “tiles.”

   

   Apparently they aren’t!

2. My friend from a large software conglomerate, a Ph.D. in reading acquisition who shall remain nameless except inasmuch as he is Kevin Larson from Microsoft, was bursting with excitement when I told him that a Grimes music video was filmed in Bay Lower. He almost but not quite squealed like a schoolgirl at being so close to somewhere Grimes had also been.

   You just never know with these people! And by the way, they loved me.

   

You could too.