Prince of a Mini Kingdom

Well, well, well, it’s been a while! I hope everyone had a lovely holiday season and rung the new year in with style. If not, that’s ok, there are better days ahead! I would love to talk a little bit about who I am and where I come from, hoping that you will all have a better idea of the person behind the profile - some metaphorical nakedness if you will. In this instalment I will explain a little about my family as well as my queer experience growing up in a small rural community in Canada. My immediate and even extended family has got to be one of the most diverse I have encountered, which I feel has given me a pretty unique perspective of this world. Let’s get started shall we?

My parents were born and raised in Toronto and are part of the “Silent Generation”, which includes anyone born between the years 1928 and 1945. This generation is culturally similar to the Baby Boomers, yet are vehemently ‘not’ Boomers. My dad came from a Catholic household, while my mom was all sorts of denominations (Baptist, United, Anglican, and eventually Catholic). Their respective families were not happy about their inter-religious relationship in the early days. Eventually, they moved out to the country at the end of the 60s where they raised their first batch of three children. I'm the youngest of five and 23 years separates myself and my oldest brother, who also happens to be gay. I also have a sister in the queer community, an adopted Métis brother who raised two daughters on his own, and a straight sister who is married but was never able to have (human) children. We’ve run a lakeside lodge and campground for four decades in a very rural and conservative area. This was the environment into which I was born and it would influence my future decisions: I would later get my degree in sustainable tourism and a technical diploma in wildlife conservation, travel all over the world, yada yada yada. We’ll get to that later. At the campground, I felt like a little superstar, being the owners’ son and all. All the other kids were drawn to me, but at school I was the quiet kid with hardly any friends. It was like living two lives, with the third being my closeted queer life.

There was one school here that went from Junior Kindergarten to Grade 12 with about 500 kids total and I went there the whole 13 years. Since my family were not true ‘locals’ we were not very popular in the community, so having to go to that school for 13 years with the same people was difficult. There was never an opportunity to reinvent myself, everyone knew everybody and remembered everything. Now my gay brother (let’s call him Stuart/Stu) wasn't around much during my childhood, he was living a very out life in the city. He'd eventually come back but he was a broken man. He really has had a tough go of it; for example, he worked as an escort (no shame) in Las Vegas, got into heavy drug use, was sexually assaulted, lost his house and everything else he had in an arson attack after he moved back to this area. He contracted HIV just after the height of the crisis, but before that he had watched all his friends and lovers die around him while no one seemed to care nor do anything about it. It's the story we hear all the time from that generation - he lived it, and I witnessed the effects on not only him, but also what it did to my parents and the rest of the family. He'd eventually move into one of the cabins on the campground property in the mid-90s and would stay there for about 8 years with his partner. During this time, he helped a lot of people, mostly queer men who were drug addicts and/or HIV positive, but the story was always the same, they'd 'get better', go back to the city, then it wasn't long until we've heard they were back on the streets or dead. I believe one of the guys was a drag queen but he "gave up the lifestyle" and gave the lodge all his drag for our weekly karaoke nights in the summer. We put it all in what we named "The Tickle Trunk", a term borrowed from Mr. Dressup (lmao), this trunk full of drag was kept outside my bedroom door where it still sits today.

“My family literally built a community in which we couldn’t be ourselves… how fucked up is that? Gay was OK… just not too gay” - The Naked Canadian

As a young queer kid myself, I exhibited a lot of the similar qualities that Stu exhibited when he was younger. The possibility that I would grow up to be gay was a terrifying prospect for myself and also for my parents. I fought it as long as I could by never speaking in class, never going into change rooms, and avoiding anything that may suggest I was gay. At the lodge I had a little more freedom, but because I was like a prince to a mini kingdom I felt like every move I made was scrutinized, especially while Stu was living there. The similarities were right there for all to see. After I finally ‘accepted’ my sexuality, I then felt like it was my own personal mission to prove (to myself, family, and everyone else) that being gay wasn't a death sentence, that I could have a full and exciting life without the needs for drugs and sex. I wasn't close with Stu as a kid, and even now we aren't very close. I feel like there is a lot of resentment towards him to work through; for example, I blamed him for having to work even harder to change my parents mind of what it really meant to be gay, but through that process I lost touch with my own queerness and sexuality. Stu was always a hyper sexual guy, and it was really off putting when I was younger. His hygiene was never great, nor was the hygiene of the guys he brought home. The body odour! The bad breath and teeth! Ugh. Of course, not all gay men are like this, but this was what gay guys always looked like to me at that age, so I got pretty disease phobic with lots of internalized homophobia I'm still working through. I was so bloody close to what I described as 'the negative gay stereotype' (aka my brother) that I really really wanted to distance myself from it - hating rainbow flags, effeminate men, trans people, drag, gay porn, etc. I also had this irrational fear that Stu had already been with any gay man I would have met within a 200km radius, so my relationships were always long distance - extremely long distance (I’m talking South Korea in one instance, and El Salvador in another, I dated a guy in university and that was more real than any other that came after). I didn’t have to face my sexuality by being devoted to these internet guys, nor did I have to worry about displaying my affections in public by bringing them back home to our campground. I also believe that my online ‘sexy’ persona was birthed in order to express my sexuality without ever having to be physically intimate, which is not always an enjoyable experience. One of the only places I felt free was in the forest by myself, this is where I’d strip off and just ‘be’. Our guests probably assumed my and my siblings’ sexualities but we never flaunted it for fear of losing business or being judged. Stu couldn’t really handle being put back in the closet here, so moved to a place 10 minutes away to start a home business. My family literally built a community in which we couldn’t be ourselves… how fucked up is that? Gay was OK… just not too gay; for example, even though we had this collection of drag clothing I used to hate drag queens/performers. Luckily, I know where the hatred for drag stemmed from... and I'll explain!

As I mentioned earlier, we used to do a weekly karaoke in the summers and when everyone would get drunk enough the drag would come out. Well, during one evening my dad actually did a drag number with a guest who played the sax and the crowd went wild, I LOVED it! So I asked my mom the next day if I could do something like that and her response was: "well, your father can get away with it, but you can't." I didn't exactly understand, I knew I was a little "‘girly” at the time, so I didn't press it. Then one of my teachers read my class a book about a girl dressing as a boy for Halloween, so I dressed up as a girl that year; however, my parents made me change into what I thought was the next best thing, the grim reaper. I was a grim reaper many times after that because it was the only time I got to wear anything that resembled a dress (lol). So after we inherited this Tickle Trunk, everyone started dressing up in the stuff, but not me. This trunk of forbidden fruit was literally outside my bedroom. I felt like I “couldn't get away with it”, my cover would be blown - I now know that for both scenarios my parents were worried I would be made fun of and I can respect that, but damn! When your mother tells you that, it sticks with you. Eventually I started to hate drag as a whole, except when the straight men would do it during karaoke as a sort of ‘campground initiation’, which was the only ‘acceptable’ form. I allowed myself to laugh and enjoy it. It's problematic for sure as it takes on minstrel show vibes, it’s like wearing the skin of people viewed as “less than”, but in hindsight it was interesting to see a different side come out of these men and I lived for that. They really did bring it sometimes, so I don’t believe there was a purely malicious intent, although the humour was at the expensive of drag performers and trans people and that part is not okay.

“It’s nice to know there are allies out there, even in small conservative towns like mine” - The Naked Canadian

Unfortunately, I was one of those gay guys that used to explicitly state in his online dating profile: "If you want to do drag or have ever done drag, I'm not interested". I had such a great profile, explaining how adventurous and cool I was, but then I said that. No wonder I was never successful in the dating scene. I felt that way until embarrassingly recently (about 2017-18). I'm glad I have learned otherwise and forcing myself to watch Drag Race was the reason. The early seasons didn’t really help the cause, but as I got to the mid to later seasons I realized how wrong I was. I've since watched every season including All Stars, every Dragula season, every We’re Here season. I now think I would have been a fucking star if I was actually allowed to be myself when I was a kid because I literally would have been doing it every single week. Could you imagine! By the way, We’re Here on HBO is probably the best and most important show on TV right now when it comes to pure joy and education regarding not only drag but the LGBTQIA+ community, their families, and their allies as a whole, and they don’t shy away from the bullshit the queer community faces on the regular. It’s nice to know there are allies out there, even in small conservative towns like mine, so it has inspired me to get a little more public and vocal. It’s tough faking confidence though, but it needs to be done.

Anyway, Stu is 59 and is still with us, but he just got through a cancer scare. He once again survived, but how much can one person endure? He had a brief period of peace and happiness during his longest relationship (11 years), but he has gone off the rails again since losing that partner on New Years Day in 2018. He's got a host of mental illnesses (bipolar, hoarding disorder, PTSD, ADHD). My parents are still here too but this is putting them through the ringer again. I understand why he is the way he is, and I don't really feel the resentment as much as I did before, but I don't really know how to help him though - I don’t think I can directly. My queer sister (5 years older) has her own experiences, but the two of us grew up relatively close although the relentless bullying she faced in school would be deflected onto me at times. I’m close with my parents these days, they aren’t as evil as I may have portrayed them here. I think fear is what drove them to say or do certain things that inadvertently had a negative effect on myself and others, I’m sure they would have done things differently knowing what they know now. I’m happy to have taken the time to build our relationship and I’m glad to be caring for them as they age because I was away so much when I was younger. I went away, figured out who I was, and I'm here at the lodge again and looking after not only my parents but also the business, which I plan to queer up. I’d like to start hosting REAL drag nights if I can! Maybe one day I’ll even do it myself, I owe it to little me! I’m sure there will be some pushback, but I’d also like to market the lodge to more queer families because places like this are not easily accessible to them. I don’t care if I lose business anymore, it’s business I don’t want.

Well folks, that’s all I have for now! I hope you enjoyed this little queer biography. There is so much more but this is the jist of my experiences growing up in this environment!