By Frank Moher
On this dreadful day, I don’t need to write in regards to the shootings in Orlando. I need to write about my buddy, Rick.
Rick lives simply outdoors of Nanaimo, a metropolis of about 80,000, throughout the water from the island I reside on. He’s been a celeb there for a very long time, first as the town’s most outstanding drag performer, and extra not too long ago as an actor with numerous of its theatre firms, and President of the Delight Society. That’s him to the left, strolling in in the present day’s Delight parade.
Rick grew up in Nanaimo, and skilled all of the crap you’d anticipate a homosexual child to expertise in what was then a working-class city, like having “Rick Meyers is a fag” spray painted throughout the aspect of a bridge above a principal thoroughfare. A number of homosexual folks in small locations reply to that form of abuse by shifting to a bigger centre, the place they’ll discover extra neighborhood (and security), and Rick did reside in Vancouver for some time. However then he got here again to Nanaimo, and helped flip it into the extra progressive and gay-friendly place it’s in the present day.
For instance, whereas Nanaimo’s had a Delight Week since 2002, that Delight parade in the present day was its first, as is the rainbow-coloured crosswalk you see Rick trying out beneath, on the night time it was painted. Rick was one of many principal forces behind each. In case you reside in a bigger centre, you could assume that was a bit overdue, and lots of people in Nanaimo would agree with you. However while you lose many of your finest folks to locations like Vancouver and Toronto, some issues simply take a bit longer to occur.
Anyway, Rick is an instance of what occurs when any person sticks round in a neighborhood and decides to make it higher. And that’s why I needed to jot down about him.
However in fact in writing about him, I am writing in regards to the shootings in Orlando. It takes a number of braveness to be a homosexual man, or every other member of the LGBTQ neighborhood, even in the present day. In reality, I’m unsure it’s appropriate to say that Nanaimo or anywhere else has actually turn into “gay-friendly”; homophobia hasn’t disappeared, it’s simply turn into extra furtive (although maybe there’s some justice in the truth that now it’s the homophobes who must be furtive). Being homosexual particularly takes a number of braveness within the land of the free and the assault rifles, because the Orlando shootings have reminded us in essentially the most ugly, horrific, stomach-turning method potential. And it’ll take much more after in the present day. Are you able to think about what it will likely be prefer to spend Friday night time at a homosexual bar within the U.S., or to stroll down the streets of a homosexual neighbourhood, after in the present day? I can’t, probably not. That’s what is called hetero (and maybe Canadian) privilege.
Which is why I’d moderately go away it to those that do know to attempt to present perception into Orlando, if it may be peered into in any respect. As an alternative, I’d like to jot down about Rick, on the market in the present day on the entrance of the parade he created, courageous, resplendent, spreading pleasure as he handed, his go well with jacket glittering within the daylight, even on this darkest of days. Unbeaten. Proud.
