All too often, people with disabilities are left out of the body positivity conversation. That’s why when Andrew Gurza was asked to pose in Toronto alt-weekly Now magazine’s “Love Your Body” issue in January 2015 completely naked, he felt excited and hopeful to start a dialogue about bodies that are not typically considered beautiful. “I like […] More »

The online version of Maclean’s recent piece on young women really doesn’t do the print version justice. “Inside the Dangerously Empty Lives of Teenage Girls” was splashed across the cover, along with two dangerously empty looking girls. As usual, the cover suggested something more comprehensive and controversial than the actual article inside the magazine—in this […] More »

In today’s Verbatim, we’ve got a transcript of my interview with Alisa Palmer, director of Cloud 9, currently playing in Toronto at the Panasonic Theatre. Cloud 9 is British playwright Caryl Churchill’s 1979 play that masks a scathing critique of English colonialist notions of sex, gender, and race beneath a fast-talking and often absurd family […] More »

John Mathenke was once arrested for being gay but, after failing to pay the customary bribe, was forced to have sex with the policeman. He had an orgy with a priest who publicly excoriates homosexuality, along with five other Masaai boys. And his Arab trader clients curse him during the day, but come back looking […] More »

Has a transsexual ruined your life lately? Because if you believe what you see on TV, trans people are lurking everywhere, just waiting to pounce on unassuming heterosexuals. Trans characters on TV are like those early depictions of gay men, before they started cropping up as every woman’s best-friend-slash-fashion-adviser. It’s depressing to argue that the […] More »

Ever the  moral hinterland, the U.S. state of Texas has recently been in the news for an exceptionally despicable practice: charging victims of sexual violence up-front payments for their own rape kits, which pack a financial wallop of up to $1800. No one has conducted an official poll on the matter, but I’m fairly confident […] More »

We’re less than a month away from Pride Week in Toronto, which kicks off with the Dyke March — also known as the Saturday when thousands of half-naked queer women take to the streets between Church and Yonge. Lately, I’ve been wondering if this mass shedding of clothes isn’t really about celebrating our sexuality and […] More »

Coming out is a near-universal queer experience. The coming-out story recurs again and again in queer cinema: it’s our version of the coming-of-age tale. But where the traditional narrative and reality diverge is at the assumption that coming out is something that only happens once in a lifetime. In the movies, the quiet boy starts […] More »