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Celebrating Pride and Queer History in July
July is Pride in Muskoka! Muskoka Pride Week runs from July 18 to July 27.
This July also marks the twentieth anniversary of the Civil Marriage Act. On July 20, 2005, Bill C-38 received Royal Assent, extending access to civil marriage to same-sex couples across Canada.
“It is anchored in two foundational Charter rights: the right of every Canadian to equality without discrimination, and the right to freedom of religion,” said Irwin Cotler, Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada, in July 2005. “It protects the rights of minorities but does not take away the rights of anyone else, be they religious communities or opposite-sex couples.”
Join us in celebrating the Civil Marriage Act and Canada’s 2SLGBTQIA+ history and present with these books by Canadian members of the queer community:
Len & Cub: A Queer History
Meredith J. Batt
Leonard “Len” Keith and Joseph “Cub” Coates grew up in the rural New Brunswick village of Havelock in the early 20th century. The two were neighbours, and they clearly developed an inseparable relationship. Len was an amateur photographer and automobile enthusiast who went on to own a local garage and pool hall after serving in the First World War. Cub was the son of a farmer, also a veteran of the First World War, a butcher, contractor, and lover of horses. Their time together is catalogued by Len’s photos, which show that the two shared a mutual love of the outdoors, animals, and adventure.
Photographs of Len and Cub on hunting and canoe trips with arms around each other’s shoulders or in bed together make clear the affection they held for each other. Their story is one of the oldest photographic records of a same-sex couple in the Maritimes.
Len & Cub features Len’s photos of their life and tells the story of their relationship against the background of same-sex identity and relationships in rural North America of the early 20th century. Although Len was outed and forced to leave Havelock in the 1930s, the story of Len and Cub is one of love and friendship that challenges contemporary ideas about sex and gender expression in the early 20th century.
A Two-Spirit Journey: The Autobiography of a Lesbian Ojibwa-Cree Elder
Ma-Nee Chacaby
A Two-Spirit Journey is Ma-Nee Chacaby’s extraordinary account of her life as an Ojibwa-Cree lesbian. From her early, often harrowing memories of life and abuse in a remote Ojibwa community riven by poverty and alcoholism, Chacaby’s story is one of enduring and ultimately overcoming the social, economic, and health legacies of colonialism.
As a child, Chacaby learned spiritual and cultural traditions from her Cree grandmother and trapping, hunting, and bush survival skills from her Ojibwa stepfather. She also suffered physical and sexual abuse by different adults, and in her teen years became an alcoholic herself. At twenty, Chacaby moved to Thunder Bay with her children to escape an abusive marriage. Abuse, compounded by racism, continued, but Chacaby found support to help herself and others. Over the following decades, she achieved sobriety, trained and worked as an alcoholism counsellor, raised her children and fostered many others, learned to live with visual impairment, and came out as a lesbian.
In 2013, Chacaby led the first gay pride parade in Thunder Bay. Ma-Nee Chacaby has emerged from hardship grounded in faith, compassion, humour, and resilience. Her memoir provides unprecedented insights into the challenges still faced by many Indigenous people
Horses in the Sand: A Memoir
Lorrie Potvin
Horses in the Sand, the author’s sequel to her first book, First Gear: A Motorcycle Memoir, is a collection of stories that document a queer woman’s journey from her sparse beginnings as a child to becoming a tradeswoman, teacher, and artist.
With courage, humour, and frank honesty, the stories describe what it was like to grow up as a girl who was starkly different from “normal” and how “coming out” became a lifelong process of self-acceptance and changing identities. The stories also speak to the difficulties in participating in and maintaining healthy adult relationships when childhood beginnings are rooted in violence and trauma, and end with a triumphant account of fulfilling a long-time dream of buying land and building a home with her own hands.
Ultimately, the memoir is a celebration of making art, telling stories, and of finding her birth father, a family of half-siblings, and an Indigenous community whose presence she had always felt, but never knew she belonged to.
Pageboy: A Memoir
Elliot Page
The Oscar-nominated star who captivated the world with his performance in Juno finally shares his truth.
“Can I kiss you?” It was two months before the world premiere of Juno, and Elliot Page was in his first-ever queer bar. The hot summer air hung heavy around him as he looked at her. And then it happened. In front of everyone. A previously unfathomable experience. Here he was on the precipice of discovering himself as a queer person, as a trans person. Getting closer to his desires, his dreams, himself, without the repression he’d carried for so long. But for Elliot, two steps forward had always come with one step back.
With Juno’s massive success, Elliot became one of the world’s most beloved actors. His dreams were coming true, but the pressure to perform suffocated him. He was forced to play the part of the glossy young starlet, a role that made his skin crawl, on and off set. The career that had been an escape out of his reality and into a world of imagination was suddenly a nightmare. As he navigated criticism and abuse from some of the most powerful people in Hollywood, a past that snapped at his heels, and a society dead set on forcing him into a binary, Elliot often stayed silent, unsure of what to do, until enough was enough.
Full of behind-the-scenes details and intimate interrogations on sex, love, trauma, and Hollywood, Pageboy is the story of a life pushed to the brink. But at its core, this beautifully written, winding journey of what it means to untangle ourselves from the expectations of others is an ode to stepping into who we truly are with defiance, strength, and joy
Crooked Teeth: A Queer Syrian Refugee Memoir
Ahmad Danny Ramadan
‘Writing this memoir is a betrayal.’
So begins this electrifying personal account from Danny Ramadan, a celebrated novelist who has long enjoyed the shield his fiction provides. Now, to tell the story of his life, he must revisit dark corners of his past he’d rather forget and unearth memories of a city he can no longer return to. Starting with his family’s humble beginnings in Damascus, he takes readers on an epic, border-crossing journey: to the city’s underground network of queer safe homes; to a clandestine party at a secluded villa in Cairo; through Arab Spring uprisings across the Middle East, a reckless hoax that threatens the safety of Syria’s LGBTQ+ community, and a traumatic six-week imprisonment; to beaches and sunsets with friends in Beirut; to an arrival in Vancouver that’s not as smooth as it promised to be; and ultimately to a life of hard-won comfort and love.
What emerges is a powerful refutation of the oversimplified refugee narrative – a book that holds space for joy alongside sorrow, for nuance and complicated ambivalences. Written with fearless intimacy, Crooked Teeth is a singular achievement in which a master storyteller learns that his greatest story is his own
All the Rage: A Partial Memoir in Two Acts and a Prologue
Brad Fraser
A Canadian playwright’s rise to fame amid the terrors of the AIDS era. Brad Fraser suffered an impoverished and abusive childhood, living with his teenage parents in motel rooms and shacks on the side of the highway in Alberta and Northern British Columbia. He grew to be one of the most celebrated and controversial Canadian playwrights, his work produced to acclaim all over the world.
All the Rage chronicles Brad Fraser’s rise as he breaks with his past and enrolls as a performing arts student. He is pulled into the newly developing Canadian theatre scene, where he shows great promise. But his early career is one of challenge after challenge, some of which result from his upbringing and prejudice against his queerness. But just as many challenges arise from his combative personality and willingness to challenge the establishment.
Few Canadian artists have been as abrasive, notorious and polarizing as Fraser was in his youth. Woven through this tale of artistic development is his journey as a queer man coming into himself during the most exhilarating period in the Gay Liberation Movement, and the dawn of a global health crisis. What should have been a triumphant time in a young, successful playwright’s life was blighted with the terrifying emergence of AIDS, and the sickness and death of comrades and lovers. This is both the story of an artist’s evolution and an important work of gay history that has rarely been recounted from a Canadian perspective.
Written with Fraser’s trademark wit and candour, All the Rage is unsparing, sometimes shocking and always enthralling.
Love Lives Here: A Story of Thriving in a Transgender Family
Rowan Jetté Knox
All [Rowan] Jetté Knox ever wanted was to enjoy a stable life. [He] never knew her biological father, and while [his] mother and stepfather were loving parents, the situation was sometimes chaotic. At school, [he] was bullied mercilessly, and at the age of fourteen, [he] entered a counselling program for alcohol addiction and was successful.
While still a teenager, [he] met the love of [his] life. They were wed at 20, and the first of three children followed shortly. Jetté Knox finally had the stability [he] craved – or so it seemed. Their middle child struggled with depression and avoided school. The author was unprepared when the child [he] knew as her son came out as transgender at the age of eleven. Shocked, but knowing how important it was to support [his] daughter, Jetté Knox became an ardent advocate for trans rights.
But the story wasn’t over. For many years, the author had coped with [his] spouse’s moodiness, but that chronic unhappiness was taking a toll on their marriage. A little over a year after their child came out, [his] partner also came out as transgender. Knowing better than most what would lie ahead, Jetté Knox searched for positive examples of marriages surviving transition. When [he] found no role models, [he] determined that [his] family would become one.
The shift was challenging, but slowly the family members noticed that they were becoming happier and more united. Told with remarkable candour and humour, and full of insight into the challenges faced by trans people, Love Lives Here is a beautiful story of transition, frustration, support, acceptance, and, of course, love.
One Sunny Afternoon: A Memoir of Trauma and Healing
Rowan Jetté Knox
From the bestselling author of Love Lives Here, a deeply personal memoir about facing lifelong trauma head-on and bravely healing the scars that endure.
For writer and human rights advocate [Rowan] Jetté Knox, the inspiring story of [his] family’s journey of love and acceptance, when both [his] child and partner came out as transgender one after the other, was the hopeful beginning to their new lives. Their tale, shared in her memoir Love Lives Here and embraced by readers everywhere, quickly found its way to the top of bestseller lists. Yet in the spring of 2020, Jetté Knox began to experience targeted attacks on social media, and [he] soon became the subject of a small but very vocal group that criticized [his] book’s success and [his] advocacy work. The intensity of the backlash grew and drove Jetté Knox to contemplate suicide. But instead of taking [his] life, on one sunny afternoon, [he] went to the hospital to seek help.
One Sunny Afternoon is a searing testament to [Rowan] Jetté Knox’s extraordinary reckoning with [his] past and present, to find hope in [his] future. Triggered by the online harassment, [he] wades through [his] personal history and details the incidents of violence, addiction, and sexual assault that have haunted [him]. When [Rowan] eventually receives a diagnosis of Anxiety Disorder and Mood Disorder (also known as complex PTSD) and dedicates [himself] to recovery, [he] emerges with newfound strength, resiliency, and confidence.
One Sunny Afternoon is a profoundly moving and candid account of how trauma can shape us, but not define us, and reveals how even in our darkest moments–and on our most hopeless days–light can find its way in.
Check out our book lists on Beanstack for these and other recommended reads. You can also log your reading, write reviews, and participate in reading challenges!