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Beauty: Robyn’s Story

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It’s not a beautiful dog park.
That’s the first thing to understand.

There’s no charming fence or wildflowers or benches. The grass is mostly dirt. The mud never fully dries. Someone has zip tied a broken gate shut in a way that feels unsafe and sincere. The sign says CLEAN UP AFTER YOUR DOG, clearly replaced too many times.

And yet.

Every morning, we arrive like a loose congregation. Names learned accidentally, through repetition, through dogs yelling them across the field.

My dog drags me in, nails clicking, vibrating with the promise of chaos. She does not care that I am tired or half inside yesterday. She believes in the dog park with a devotion I haven’t felt since my early twenties. Her faith is absolute.

Beauty shows up first as sound.

A chorus of barks, each one a dialect. The deep woof of the older shepherd patrolling the perimeter. The shrill yelps of a tiny dog who has no business being this brave. The breathless scream of my dog when she sees her best friend, a grey Frenchie with the face of a warm croissant that grew opinions. Love is loud.

Humans trail behind, holding coffee, leashes, grief, the last threads of sleep. We look worse than our dogs. This feels important.

At the dog park, no one asks the questions I am used to answering. My haircut, my clothes, the way I move through the world—none of it requires translation. I am simply the person with this dog.

There’s a woman with a shaved head who always wears the same hoodie. She throws a tennis ball perfectly. There’s a couple who move in orbit. An older man talks to every dog like they’re his nephew.
No one blinks at anyone else. Bodies arrive as they are.

And then there’s the person I notice every day.
They arrive late, jogging a little, apologetic. Their dog is a disaster, ears too big, body shaped like a comma, heart outside their ribcage. The leash is always tangled. The dog park hums when they arrive.
They are not beautiful in the way magazines understand. Their hair is often wrong. Their clothes are practical. They move through the gate with the posture of someone who has learned how to take up space carefully.

I recognize that posture.
I have practiced it.

But beauty does not care about permission.
It shows up when they kneel to untangle the leash. When their face softens as the dog barrels into another body and they wince, not with embarrassment, but with awe. You’re alive, that wince says.

Dogs do not perform gender. They do not care if you are hot, impressive, healed, or legible. They smell you. They decide. Relief settles into my shoulders when I unclip the leash.

I do not have to be careful.
I do not have to be palatable.

I watch my dog play with a three-legged husky who runs like the wind learned a new rule. Beauty, right there, without a lesson attached.

A trans kid, maybe seventeen, maybe twenty, comes sometimes with their family’s dog. The dog wears a rainbow collar. The kid keeps their hands in pockets, shoulders tight, chin tucked, bracing for impact that never comes.
Their dog barrels back, mud streaked and ecstatic, and stops inches from their knees. The kid flinches, like they are used to being collided with in ways that do not feel like love.

But this is love.

The dog sits, trembling with joy, tail sweeping the dirt. The kid hesitates, then kneels. Both knees in the mud. They bury their hands in the dog’s fur and press their forehead there like it is an altar.
The sound that comes out is not careful. Not small. A laugh that breaks open and turns into something softer, almost a sob, almost relief. No one stares.

When they stand, their shoulders have dropped an inch. 
Beauty, sometimes, is that inch.

Someone always brings too many treats. Someone always forgets bags. Someone always steps in something and says a word they regret. We forgive each other constantly, in ways that do not make the news.

I realize, standing with mud on my cuffs and my dog’s leash wrapped around my wrist, that this might be the only place in my day where my queerness is irrelevant. Not erased, just unremarkable. Just another fact, like the weather.

The person I do not stare at sits on the cold bench and scrolls their phone. Their eyes follow every movement. When the dog comes back, muddy and triumphant, they open their arms without hesitation.

And I see it, before I mean to.
Their dog does not leap or demand. It circles, then presses its side against their shins, leaning its full weight there as if gravity has chosen them.
They crouch slowly, and the dog tucks its head beneath their chin like it has found the exact place it belongs. No spectacle. No audience. Just contact.
Their hand moves along the dog’s back. Tension leaves their shoulders. Their face softens. They close their eyes.

And that is it.

No performance. No apology. Just a body leaning into another body and staying there.
Beauty is not loud in this moment. It is steady. The choice not to pull away.

The moment lasts maybe three seconds. Someone calls a dog’s name. A fight almost starts and does not. A tennis ball sails overhead. The world resumes its ordinary chaos.
But something has shifted in me.

I think about all the places I have been told beauty lives. Mirrors, approval, before and after photos, the quiet violence of almost. How often queer people are taught to earn beauty, to present it correctly, to make it legible so it does not scare anyone.

And here, in a muddy, imperfect dog park, beauty is unbothered.
It rolls in dirt. It drools. 
It shows up late. It loves badly and openly.

When we leave, my dog is exhausted, happy, ruined. The sun has crept higher. People wave. The person I do not stare at meets my eye for a second and smiles, not performance, just recognition.

On the way out, my dog pulls back toward the gate, unwilling to leave this temporary, holy mess. I let her pause. I always do.
Because beauty does not live in perfection.
It lives in places where bodies are allowed to be what they are.

Even here.
Especially here.

Beauty: Gregory’s Story

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“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”
– Maya Angelou.

It was late, after movies and Nintendo, with our stomachs full of pizza. My friend René and I lay on my bed, both of us in oversized boxer shorts, our skinny bodies pressed together in the dark.
My heart pounded, blood rushing everywhere, as if my body already understood something my mind had not yet fully grasped.
We had ended up like this after about twenty minutes of silent readjustments, little movements disguised as casual shifts but really meant to bring us closer. I could feel the faint acne on his chest, the wiry hairs scattered there. My own chest was bare, as it still is. Tentatively, I held his chest, and he placed his hand over mine, holding it there. His cold toes slid over my feet and, for the first time in my life, I knew what it felt like to give comfort to another man.
We were fourteen.

Even now I can see it vividly, almost like I am watching from above, two boys sharing something tender and unspoken in the safety of the dark.
René was, by all accounts, a bad boy. He smoked cigarettes, swore, and got in trouble at school.
He had posters of women in bikinis on his bedroom walls. He played hockey and was good at it, fast and aggressive, with a reputation for being a bit of a troublemaker on the ice. His parents spoke French, and when I joined them for dinners, his father’s eyes would flicker between us, full of suspicion. Even though René and I came from different worlds, it felt like René did not notice the differences, or maybe he just didn’t care.
“You’re not like other guys, Greg,” he said once as we played video games in my parents’ basement. He did not look away from the screen as he said it, his voice low and matter-of-fact. “I can talk to you about stuff.”
He did not elaborate on the stuff, but I understood what he meant. You let me be me. And I did.
With me, René was silly and unguarded. He danced to girly music in my room and did impressions of MADtv characters. The mask he wore around the hockey team or at school would slip away, leaving someone softer, someone freer. We roughhoused and he would try to stick his cheese puff-covered fingers in my mouth. His teasing never felt cruel. It felt like affection.
I watched him constantly, my feelings for him growing in ways I did not yet have the words to name. His scruffy, matted hair. The strong jawline that hinted at the man he was becoming. His bedroom eyes, the raspy voice of adolescence. I memorized the way he walked around my room shirtless, playing air guitar. The way he spoke politely to my mom when she brought us snacks.
The way he shrugged in his oversized Montréal Canadiens jacket with his baggy jeans, their frayed and wet hems dragging through the winter slush.

I followed him everywhere. Across the street to the hockey rink, to his games, even on overnight tournaments. I tagged along with his girlfriend Tara and her friends, who giggled and cheered from the bleachers. While the girls bought corn dogs and danced to the Macarena during intermissions, I watched René skate. He was strong, fast, and undeniably beautiful to me.
But the hockey rink was not always kind. One evening, as we watched the game, a man in a trucker hat muttered a slur loud enough for me to hear. My friend Kelly snapped at him to shut up, but he did not even flinch. His words hung in the air, thick and vile, sinking into my chest. I never told René what happened, even though I wanted to, it seemed like something I had to
carry alone, something I’d learn to do for a long time in my life.
René always insisted I come to his out-of-town games. His parents, strict and traditional, made Tara sleep in their hotel room while René and I shared a room and a bed. At night, after everyone else had gone to sleep, we stayed up watching TV and eating junk food, our legs tangled together under the blankets.
One night, exhausted from the day, he fell asleep on my shoulder. His sweet gummy worm breath mingled with the scent of his sweat and deodorant. I did not move, afraid to wake him, so I sat there perfectly still, tracing the hair on his arms with my fingertips.
I did not know what I was feeling. I only knew that I wanted to protect him, to take care of him, to offer him something I did not yet understand.
Then everything started to change.
He started pulling away. At the rink he brushed past me without a word, hand in hand with Tara.
He made excuses not to hang out, saying he had plans with his teammates or needed to be alone.
Each rejection was a blow and I did not understand what I had done wrong.
Eventually he reached out and the last night we spent together, just the two of us, felt different.
He seemed restless, burdened, his usual warmth muted by something I could not name. When we finally went to bed, we lay in the dark inching closer in our familiar way. And I gathered the
courage to hold him, I could feel his sadness, heavy and unspoken. He sniffled once and I wondered if he was crying.
I touched him gently, tracing the hollow of his chest with my thumb, my nose buried in his hair, breathing him in, trying to hold the moment still.
I did not have language for what I was feeling yet, but I knew it was important.
For most of my childhood, beauty had meant something simple. Nice clothes, nice faces, things people pointed at and admired. But lying there beside him, I understood something new. Beauty was not what I saw when I looked at him. Beauty was what I felt when I noticed him.
It was the way he could be tough in the world and soft in private.
The way he trusted me enough to let the performance drop.
The way closeness could exist without explanation.

I realized I loved him, and I also understood he could never love me in the same way. And strangely, that was somehow beautiful, even though it hurt.
For the first time I saw the inner life of another boy, and it was complicated and tender and a little sad. I began to notice it in other men, too, as I grew older. The gentleness they hid, the expectations placed on them, the weight many of them carried, whether anyone spoke about it or not.
That was when beauty changed for me.
It was no longer appearance.
It was recognition.

We grew apart after that. He quit hockey and got into trouble, fights, arrests, gangs. The last I heard he was in prison, and despite my searching over the years, I cannot find him anywhere.
I still think about him sometimes. With a little melancholy.
Not because I am still in love with him, but because that was the moment I first understood what beauty actually was. It was not perfection, and it was not desire.
It was the feeling of seeing another person clearly and caring about what you saw.
That night did not just give me my first love.
It gave me the beginning of how I would see men for the rest of my life. Tender, full of contradictions, multitudes as Whitman would say.
And even now, when I notice tenderness where the world expects hardness, or gentleness where someone has been taught to hide it, I recognize it immediately.
Because I have seen it before.
I saw it first in a fourteen-year-old boy lying beside me in the dark, pretending to be asleep.

Beauty: Luis’ Story

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Watch this video of Luis telling his story!

When I was young, I went through a collage phase. I probably looked all around my house for whatever magazine I could get my grubby hands on. I specially recall the damage to a beautiful special edition magazine of Princess Diana.

I know this because my mum told me after asking her about this botched magazine she, to this day, still keeps around. I can only imagine how my mum felt after I destroyed it. Our relationship has had its ups and downs, but in my mind, my mother is deeply associated with the image of Princess Diana and their admirable capacity to be graceful to those who need it most.

I grew up as a pretty happy child up until late middle school when I became depressed, as many other gay men have at some point in their lives. Again, my history with mental health has its ups and downs. I’ve banked my share of hours with therapists but recently I’d plateaued in my progress. Last year, I made a breakthrough. I honor my story by highlighting the importance of taking yourself to therapy. 

The DIANA Magazine in Question
The DIANA Magazine in Question

One symptom I keep a look out when gauging my state of mind is my capacity to find beauty in life. I believe a sense of beauty is a psychological skill we can train or lose. To see it, notice it, name it, replicate it. At my worst, I stop watching TV shows, I stop eating sweets, and I isolate myself. Inversely, I write more poetry when I am processing negative emotions, this skill has allowed me to tap into my sense of beauty and pull myself out of a downward spiral. I’d like to share a spoken word poem about what I think psychological beauty is:

I’m on my knees. The congregation says Grace.
I look up towards high ceilings, the tainted glass,
Dramatic imagery in art, stone, oil, wood, brass.
Engulfed in what they say is beauty, yet I don’t see your face.

My favourite part of going to mass is leaving.
Outside, street vendors sell all types of food.
Outside, what is actually a religious experience
Tastes like fried, steamed home cooked goods.
Outside, I eat sugar just to help boost my mood.
My sister and I resist the Sunday public shaming,
My parents show us grace, your beautiful face.
I’m not asked to go with them again, embraced,
and still picked up for a meal, my soul’s soothed.
Coming out decades later, I still seek sanctuary.
The figures I look up to had a wardrobe change:
tiny underwear, leather jockstraps, tails, fangs.
I’ll say it again, out of one patriarchy and into another.
Penis penance. Men moan confessions to each other,
Some carry a cross, others prefer to be tied to it,
Time’s still spent on my knees doing other things
Giving or receiving Gay Communion. I don’t sing,
But what comes out my choir has a similar ring,
The sound of falling icons and featherless wings,
The premium and peace speech therapy brings.

Confess.
Humbling, paying alms to sort unclaimed shit out
Going to counseling cause someone else did not,
What’s that about? Tinted glass bias, guilty eyes
Projecting self esteem into simple average guys.
Confess…
People can be “nice” but very unkind in thoughts
Because that’s how people pleasing comes across.
Truth is I’m scared of a drag queen’s entourage,
Cunty vibes encouraged, community sabotage.
Confess!
I don’t trust men to be a secure emotional space
I’m afraid that’s a reflection of what I do, am too,
If I use authenticity to camouflage my true face,
Interpersonally challenged with a deep lack of self awareness.
At least that’s my impression.
Doctor it’s been two weeks since my last session
Our last convo has become my confession, I pray:

Grace. For lack of a better word, I ask you for air.
Begrudgingly, as a child you brought me despair,
Betrayed at how empty your brand made me feel
If your love depended on God, others to be real.
I prayed the gay away for years. I couldn’t dare,
Be associated with such a strong feminine name.
And still you’ve forgiven me, as is in your nature,
To mold me as a kid, teen, adult, with true nurture:
Not idealized under judgment but understanding
Of my delicate features, my edges, how I feel injured.

Dented by your many falls from grace. Disgrace
Means facing that which lives in the dark, fowl,
Scowl, I crawl and brawl and embrace them all.
My beasts take a breath as I feed them a meal,
My demons are cordial if I listen and let them be
My hells are manageable, if I show myself ways
To renounce a saint’s life, see myself face to face.

The point was never to climb back up to Grace,
But to hold you as we go down and into the ground.
I found, we can find sanctuary in this hellscape,
Through a loving, poised, graceful, headspace.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and depression has a way of placing a gray filter in front of those who battle it, which makes asking for help a bleak task. As a gay man in therapy, I’d say most of my work depended on unlearning behaviours, overcoming trauma and learning to embrace love, uncertainty and the freedom to be my best queer self. It’s messy, trying to figure ourselves out; I know I struggled with not knowing who I could be. I documented my journey of self discovery using social media, each post made me value the beauty of being able to find beauty in a life lived. Each post’s a puzzle piece with rough edges and contradictions, each attempt gave me clarity about who I was not, diversifying my self image whilst unifying my confidence. I welcomed the New Year with the following poem:

One choice makes me larger
Another makes me small. Decide: do or do not. 
Two parties playing tug of war on a dance floor.
What would secure men do in this circumstance?

Get down, boogie, focus on the tempos for once, 
Be the baddie that gets low, create my own flow.
Try to understand men’s body language: a glance.
Eye contact. Hello. After that you’re on your own.

Quick turn to see if you’re still looking. You know, 
I wrote a spoken word poem about this moment,
But there was dialogue, actions, scripted truths.
The countdown starts, fumble, miss my queue.

I’m putting pressure on myself to not perpetuate
That which was done to me. I hesitate and wait,
For impulse to shake the electrodes off my head.
Regress to make progress, act before I overthink.

If it’s still within me. I’m sure. I’ve gotten this far, 
276 [281] posts later yapping of the glory and gore
Of being gay in 2026. Now for a new resolution:
To give myself the grace I’ve always needed, evermore.

Despite synonyms, I was conflicted with resonating to the word “grace”, I knew of her but talking to her, through therapy and poetry, made me feel like I was being reacquainted with an old, healing, friend who knew I could be my worst qualities, and still saw me as a person worthy of love. If I try, if I succumb to my fear and bail, if I get depressed again, grace can be a colorful filter to feel aesthetic, confident, even regal. And that feels sourced from within, feels like me. Like an inverted vision board, my life regained value because I prioritized this feeling whilst posting about travelling, cooking, existential, surviving or in the words of another incredible graceful figure, Catherine O’Hara:

“[Taking] a thousand naked pictures of [myself] now. You may currently think, “Oh, I’m too spooky.”, or, “Nobody wants to see these tiny boobies.” But believe me, one day you will look at those photos, with much kinder eyes and say, “Dear God, I was a beautiful thing!” Oh, and make sure you submit those photos to the Internet. Otherwise, your own children will go looking for them one day and tragically, they won’t be there.”

What groundbreaking conclusion psychological help has bestowed upon me is realizing that I find the capacity to look past “the cringe” with the love and kindness my mum, Princess Diana or even Catherine O’Hara would have given a loved one quite beautiful. Counseling, speaking, writing, sharing my thoughts, gives me a space where I can see beauty, notice it, name it, and replicate it by being more graceful to myself and hoping it’ll make me more graceful to others. Changing my point of view so that the world might seem changed, too.

Beauty: Lou’s Story

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It’s been an exhausting day of travel and emotional upheaval to make it to the musky back seat of a stranger’s used minivan in the parking lot of the massive hub that is the Cleveland Airport. It’s 2013, I’m 19 years old, going into my third year of college, and I just completed my first solo flight. Well, technically, first two solo flights, if you include the short little jaunt to my neighbouring Province and then the connecting international flight to the States. I’ve been preparing for months and months for this day.

Every early morning shift at the pool, every denied invite to go out, every bring-your-own-lunch-to-school dollar has been saved to get me here. Here, now rolling along Ohio’s highways, letting the bare landscape whizz on by. The sky is bright and expansive, the emotional forecast… not so much. In the time that it took for me to sprint from my first flight to my connecting flight, the terrifying turbulence that had even my phased-by-nothing seat mate gasping, and now this backseat’s “eau de B.O.” sitting with 4 other strangers who have come from God knows where, has me convinced me I do not want to be here. I want to be the opposite of here. I want to be home. I want home. I am so far from home.

The barren rolling hills start to turn green as we drive through forests that look nothing like the dense and mighty cedars of the Northwest Coast. Sunlight streams through the branches with ease and everything within looks aglow. Somehow this is both mesmerizing and multiplying my aching homesickness. The roads wind as the minutes tick on by. Small talk has arisen amongst us strangers as we share where we are coming from and how we first heard about this retreat. People seem nice. Polite.
Typical church personalities. I know this type well. I am this type. My Christian resume is thorough. Take a look at my contributions to its contents from the last week: I have five scribbled prayers in my notebook from the two boarding lines I have waited in today. I have checked off my communication responsibilities to schedule someone back home to cover my spot on the church Praise Team for the Sunday services. I am fully backed by the leadership of my Presbyterian roots after seeking the blessing of my pastor, his wife, a Christian mentor, and a member of session… just to cover my basis. And I have whole-heartedly believed that this, this one-week International Prayer Retreat, this is the path that God himself has made for me. And if it wasn’t for this divine calling, this clear conviction, that tenacious little flame of faith I have been fanning for the last 6 years, I would have already been on my third flight of the day, my flight home.
These strangers are my people, and I know how to “people” well. I know how to present myself and hide myself at the same time. I am so good at it, that I genuinely can enjoy the connection despite the storm I keep at bay inside. But today, these whiffs of a middle-aged man’s unwashed workout gear resting in the confines of a tightly packed automobile, these foreign roads with their foreign colours of green in their foreign sunlit forests, and the choppiest of internal waters, the crashing waves start to pool at the corners of my. smiling eyes and I am not sure how long that smile of mine will convince these strangers that I belong here.
In actuality, this minivan commute is just under an hour, a fraction of time amongst my travel day, but within those 57minutes I have entertained the fear that drives almost all that I do; I DO NOT belong here. But if I don’t belong here, if I don’t hear from God, if I don’t get answers and nothing changes, if I don’t change, if I leave just as broken as I have arrived… I won’t belong back home either. Not in my church, not in my family, not in my circles, not in myself. And if I don’t belong at home, I do not have a place of belonging. The truth will become loud and clear… I DO NOT belong.

I’ve only let a few silent tears leak down my cheeks. Subtle enough to wipe them away like the sweat I see the elderly man named Everett in the first row of seats attempts to wipe from his brow. I have observed his leaning posture and shaky hands. His voice deep but raspy as if it held strength before his muscles atrophied. My guess is Parkinson’s, muscular dystrophy, old age? His wife, sitting beside him, fanning her also flushed face, sees his fable attempt, pulls a tissue from her bag and wipes his brow for him. God, that is all I crave and yearn for. To sit in the discomfort of it all, in any state, in all circumstances and turn to look into the eyes of my love. My person. And see my belonging. Please God, let this bravery of coming here lead me one step closer. Not one more step closer to the man I grew up thinking I was going to marry, I have prayed in the depths of this closet far too long for me to believe in this Pray the Gay Away scheme anymore. No, I desire something far more reasonable. This is my last-ditch effort to get close enough to God for him to give me the grace to not desire what I am not supposed to desire. Celibacy, a current coffin of a closet, I need desperately transformed into something I do not mourn. Please God, please won’t you do this for me. Or maybe, just maybe, could there even be a fragment of a hint of a hope that this retreat could get me one step closer to finding her?

The minivan rolls to a stop at the far end of a pull-through driveway. Through the tinted windows, amongst the towering maple trees, lay a small lodge with a trail of cabins off to the right-hand side. The main building, larger than the rest, is framed by dozens of windows, which allow me to see through to the other side, where the wrap-around deck borders the rushing river beyond it. It is stunning… and yet, its beauty does nothing to calm me. How many tears can I pass as sweat? The sliding door of the van is rolled open and we pile on out, gathering at the top of the gravel pathway that leads down to the lodge. My mind is busy. I bet that the lodge has the phone I will need to call my parents. I bet that the lodge will have the computer that I will use to search for flights home. I bet that the visa in my orange Velcro wallet will be able to cover the expenses of making my way back to my precarious belonging. Once I am home, then I can figure out some way to pay off the bill of this mistake and figure out a new way to earn God’s favour.
As we unload the trunk of all our luggage, I’ve run through my exit plan 18 times; it’s foolproof. We are instructed to meet in the lodge to meet our mentors and other fellow retreat goers, so down the path I go. I am certain I will not be meeting anyone who doesn’t have practicality in my purposed plan to skip introductions and make my leave. Before making it down the tiered steps directly in front of the lodge, my mental preparations are interrupted by the sound of heavy footsteps approaching. I look up to see a mammoth of a man walking up the steps. Blue denim overalls and a buttercup yellow golf shirt that encompasses his big, round belly and wide shoulders. When I look up to see his face, I see sweet blue eyes hiding behind half-rimmed glasses and a trimmed white beard circling his beaming smile. Undenounced to me, Santa apparently lives in Ohio during the summer months.
In the smallest of moments between my observations and festive judgements, this jolly man meets my gaze, raises both arms above his head, joy radiating from his face and exclaims…

“LISA!!! YOU MADE IT!!! I AM SO HAPPY YOU ARE HERE!!!”

If ever there was a single moment that has defined who I want to be in this world, it would be the welcome I received from who I now know as my beloved friend John, endearingly known to many as Papa John. In all the wonder and awe I have found in this world, who knew a big old white guy with a certified twang from the South would become my definition of beauty. I did not call home that day. I did not book an emergency flight home. Instead, I spent a week in the bright green forests of Ohio redefining the God I thought I knew. Those seven days of prayer planted the seed of my belonging. Not to religion, not to church, not to celibacy, not within or outside the guise of rights and wrongs, my understanding of sin or the work of earning and deserving love. I began the work of believing in my own inherent belovedness, learning and leaning into the wisdom held within my body, the power of my imagination, my creativity, my goodness. I started to find belonging in myself.

Beauty came to me. Beauty showed up when bravery said, “There is a different way.” Beauty befriended me, not because my eyes were open or my heart was less hard, but because of the softness of the heart who was willing to see me. Papa John saw me. Freeing himself from expectation and norm, he chose to love with arms high above his head.
I’m 32 now. I graduated college. Moved out. Became a teacher.
Branched out with my bravery. Found queer community. Found more of me. Loved more of me. I spend my days living in the beauty of belonging to myself. I fell in love with the woman of dreams I never allowed myself to have. And our love, this love that found me, is an arms-high-above-the-head kind of love.
Beauty came to me, became part of me.

And I belong to me. To her. To a love I now endearingly know as beauty.

Beauty: Meaghan’s Story

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I want to forewarn you that this piece has been called “jarring,” so, like, prepare yourselves. Also, before I begin, I want to assure you all that I am okay, and it’s okay to laugh. 

I’ve always known that I’m pretty, but I didn’t always believe that I am beautiful. 

My philosophy in life is “when someone compliments you, believe them! And if more than one person says it, you know it’s true!” I remember the compliments about my pretty face going back as far as my memories do. How many times have people told me that I don’t need makeup? Everyone was in agreement that I was pretty. But pretty is for your face. Fat girls are allowed to be pretty, but beautiful? Now that is a full body equation, in which being fat is the ultimate negative. 

It is a truth universally acknowledged that you have no worth until you are skinny.

I was always fat. I have a distinct memory of being 3 years old and my “boyfriend” telling me that if we were going to stay together I had to lose weight. I grew up in a family with people who hated their bodies more than anything (my mother hated being fat so much she went to Mexico to have experimental weight loss surgery). I’ve been put on every fad diet there was! One of them would surely lead me to the beauty I so desired.

Does anyone here remember HotorNot.com? Strangers on the internet assigning attractiveness a numerical value. That 3.8 stayed with me for over a decade. But I now know that was a skewed scale, and being a fat girl was a ticket to the bottom. There was no way a fat chick on the early internet was going to get anything but tricked and abused. Basically every man I was with before the age of 20 tried to garner my attention with generic compliments so that I would sleep with them. Sleeping with someone to feel beautiful is a trap set by men to beguile women who have been told they’re worthless their entire lives.

So how does someone whose entire being is rooted so deeply and generationally in fatphobia fall in love with their body? Enter a fetishist!

There’s something to be said for chubby chasers. They sure can make a girl feel beautiful. It was not the first time I’d been called beautiful, but it was the first time I actually believed it. Until then I thought everyone calling me beautiful was lying, blowing smoke up my ass, or trying to be nice. But this man, he was enraptured.

He also cracked the code of my autistic brain, and helped me understand myself and my beauty through quantitative data. Small true facts that cannot be refuted. My blue eyes, my smile, my giant titties, my formerly glorious ass, my hourglass shape, my blonde hair. Everything was broken down into data for my little computer mind.

I redefined the HotorNot scale. While I am more than the sum of my parts, having great parts gave me an even higher sum. There was a 1-10 scale for every body size.

And at 300lb I was a 10.

Having someone wax poetic about my body and my beauty was intoxicating. Now, remember earlier when I talked about young fat girls on the internet getting tricked and abused?….you’ll never guess what happened! I have 10 min so tldr: insidious feeding, isolating me from my friends, and I seriously think he may have still been married the entire time.

The crucial mistake he made was giving me self-worth in my own body. I took that confidence, or what my friends would describe an incredibly inflated sense of self, left that loser, and walked forward in my life never again forgetting what a bad bitch I am.

Oh wow, Meaghan loves herself so the story is over with 5 min to spare! Alas, that is not where this tale ends.

Cut to almost 3 years ago: I finally agreed to get a breast reduction to stop the crippling of my back. The bitch of it is: I don’t even want it haha. I am obsessed with my beauty and the idea of losing one of my most striking features is terrifying. But what’s less cute, is turning into Quasimodo because I’m being a dumbass. The world however is not making it easy. About 85% of people I tell that I’m getting a breast reduction go, “noooo” but a fair few of them are cishet men so their opinion doesn’t really count.

My doctor sent out the request to 3 different plastic surgeons who all returned with the same answer, “patient must be under 33 on the BMI.” 33. I was 300lbs. They need me to be 207lb.

So as you can probably spot, I am no longer 300lb. For the last two years I’ve been forced to lose weight by plastic surgeons so that they will give me medical care.

Weight loss! Extreme weight loss! The thing I was always told would change my life! It would fix all my problems! I would be truly happy! People will love me more! I will be prettier! 

Except I’m being forced to change my body against my will. I have no happy feelings associated with it. Everyone else is happy for me. Everyone around wants to celebrate me for it.

I knew it would be a frequent topic of conversation so, I decided before I would even start losing weight, that I needed a cutting line to say to people who brought it up. Because if I’m one thing, it’s a cunty bitch.

My friends and I workshopped and came up with, “I have an eating disorder thanks for bringing it up.” Which is very fun to say to people and watch their faces drop.

But, losing weight for me has sucked. I have hated the whole process. I hated having doctors tell me that the only way I’ll lose weight is by taking Ozempic. And, because I’m a cunty bitch, I said, “watch me!”

This is not my first rodeo! Do you think a girl who grew up perpetually on a diet doesn’t know how to eating disorder? You want me to take Ozempic? I choose anorexia. And guess what, it has been extremely successful.

Now it’s always fun when someone comes up to tell me that I look healthy knowing I’m making the least healthy choices I have in my entire life.

And you know what else happens when you lose weight? Your body changes. There is no way to predict how it will change and that was my biggest fear at the beginning. And some of it was well-founded.

Now, I just need to take a second to mourn my ass. It was so beautiful and bouncy and huge. And then covid happened and I stopped walking and she shrunk. And then weight loss happened and she lost heft. And now I have been downgraded to a nice ass. At least she can still clap though!

Anyway, I am in a new body that I’ve been forced into, and I no longer see the same value in my parts. I’m between normie weight and fetish weight. My body is in the liminal space where I’m at the upper end of normie stores, I am at the lower end of the plus size stores, so nothing really fits. Even in my own closet nothing fits. I can’t buy new clothes because I still have more weight to lose, so until then I just get to look frumpy.

But here I am in my new in-between body. I can still dress her up and get my daily quota of compliments. But because I no longer feel attached to my body, these compliments don’t hit quite as much as they used to. The body dysmorphia has only just begun, because I still have my big ass titties.

My therapist likes to remind me often that, “you don’t always have to be cute.” But I was raised a girl, with all the socialization that comes along with that. I do always have to be cute. Yes I have value in many other areas of my life (come on, 2 masters degrees), but it has always been my beauty that I am most obsessed with. It was something I was told I could never attain. A moment of feeling truly beautiful, and defying all the voices from my childhood, and fully loving myself.

I do recognize that while my body is changing, it is still beautiful, and all of the things that were true about me at 300lbs are all still true about me now. And I mean, being a 9 is great…unless you started as a 10.

Beauty: Drew’s Story

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Beauty is mercurial and elusive.
It’s subjective. It changes and evolves. As does your perception, as you evolve with it. And apparently, it fades with age — unless you’re Brad Pitt.

Beauty has almost gotten me into trouble.
When I was a kid, I wasn’t into hockey sticks, jumping off trees onto the sidewalk head first, or whatever else boys were supposed to like doing.
I was sensitive. Not in a dramatic way — just… attentive. I didn’t want to wear my mom’s high heels or makeup, but I was fascinated by the pretty things in nature.
Flowers. Plants. Bugs. Furry animals. Mostly rabbits and skunks, because that’s what we had around. And lots of garter snakes.
While other boys were trying to shoot the rabbits with BB guns or pull the wings off insects, I was firmly in the catch-and-release camp. An early environmentalist without knowing it. Because I was admiring what I thought was beautiful.

My father did not see this as charming.
He was traditional. Grumpy. And convinced that boys were supposed to like cars, and fighting, smoking cigarettes, and whatever passed for manliness in the 1970s. He didn’t complain when I would bake a chocolate cake after school for dessert, which I am sure was on the not-so-masculine list.

Thankfully, my mother let me like what I liked. Now, she wouldn’t have been thrilled if I’d shown up in her best church shoes — and as a deeply religious woman, she would have prayed hard about that. Til her eyes bled. You don’t want to upset the Virgin Mary with drag too early in life.

By the time I hit my teens in the 80s, I thought I had beauty figured out. I had a modified Flock of Seagulls haircut and some truly committed eyeliner. You know the haircut — you can hear it before you see it.
I wore clothes that, in retrospect, should probably have been illegal. The 80s were a dark time: cheap asymmetry, massive shoulder pads, poor judgment, apparently a lot of cocaine.

As a kid, beauty was something outside of me. As a teenager — suddenly social, suddenly sexual, and wildly clumsy at both — beauty became about me. Or at least the shell I was walking around in. When you realize how much belonging matters, you start dressing for your tribe. We thought we looked incredible. Completely badass.
That is, until the real badass kids showed up — mullets, Mötley Crüe t-shirts — and we immediately ran away. If they threw anything at us, the thick coating of hairspray probably would have softened the blow to our young brains.

This was also the moment I realized something else:
I thought the guys around me were pretty too. Not in a competitive way. In a way that made my stomach drop. That realization opened an entirely different can of worms — one that would take decades to sort out.
Beauty, it turned out, wasn’t fixed. It kept moving. Expanding.

Fast forward about 25 years. Two University degrees. Many pints of beer. A series of very short-lived almost-relationships. Not because I didn’t want one — I did — just not with the wrong guys.

I found myself living on Pender Island in a van, pretending to be Jewel, having exhausted the entire gay male population of the island. All one of them.
So, I joined Manline. Also known as Lavalife. Pre-smartphone, Grindr, and Scruff. You use what you’ve got.
Every day, as the dial-up screamed and squealed, I waited. Hoping someone — anyone — had flamed me, or woofed me, or whatever it was called back then. As the page loaded, painfully, line by line, I saw his smile. My future husband. And I could feel it: oxytocin flooding my body — that ridiculous, euphoric high of being in love. I remember thinking, “I need to lock this beauty down.”
So I did. I put a ring on that. We built a life together.
Then we adopted — which was many things: complicated, exhausting, worth it. But not especially beautiful. That’s a story for a different day. Maybe a Vancouver Queer Stories entitled “Queer Parents Who Survived Parenthood”.

Around the same time, I finished my nursing degree at UBC. I worked in medicine, psychiatry, emergency, community mental health — and eventually landed in the Downtown Eastside, leading an outreach team working with people the system had failed over and over again.
I was intimidated. I had barely been there before. I was walking into single-room-occupancy buildings no one should have to live in. Truly. Shame on the city and the province for that.
I listened to stories of trauma so severe I couldn’t understand how anyone survived it. I remember thinking, there is no beauty here. This is a war zone.

But slowly — walking down Hastings, visiting clients, sitting in meetings with other service providers — something shifted. I started to see it.
Beauty was in the relationships. In the community. In the way people looked out for each other. In their resilience. In the small kindnesses — and in the gratitude they showed me, just for showing up as the nurse.

Was it always beautiful? Absolutely not. I ran from people who didn’t want me there. And if you’ve ever seen me play softball with WESA, you know I’m built more like a tortoise than a hare. The adrenaline helped.
But the thread that ran through everything was connection. Shared trauma bonds people deeply.
You would be amazed how far a little respect goes. These are the people our society treats as disposable — the reason NIMBY exists — and being treated like a human, even briefly, restores something vital.

That work forced me to face my own prejudices. It stretched my understanding of beauty in ways I didn’t expect.
Like a lot of things, when I was twenty and thought I knew everything, it turned out I knew very little.

And honestly?

I’m still learning what beauty really looks like. And I am very grateful for what it has taught me so far.

Beauty: Kailey’s Story

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I’m floating – what feels like 100 feet above the river – suspended and looking out at its brownish winding path, lined with grassy knolls, dotted with picnicking couples, dogs sniffing the air, and work-out groups walking.

I fall – back down, the trampoline below meeting my feet for only seconds before I’m joyously flung back up to catch another glimpse of the afternoon scene in Vienna, Austria.

Years of competitive dance training never leave the toes; Mine, pointed, and experimenting with various split jumps, star jumps, and toe touches – making fun shapes in the air with each bounce – tears flowing from my eyes, but drying almost immediately as the wind pushes up and down against my cheeks with each bounce.

The ukulele mashup of Somewhere Over the Rainbow and What a Wonderful World by Israel Kamakawiwoʻole guided me here – ‘oooo mmm ooo mm-mm-mm-mmm, oo oo oo’ – playing on loud speakers at the base of this floating water trampoline on this rather plain river.

I spent all morning taking in classically beautiful art and music – a Mozart concert, and several art galleries and museums over at the aptly named ‘Museumsplatz’ area of Vienna. It was all stunning, but somehow this day had even more beauty in store for me.

With no real itinerary, I asked a stranger what I should do with my afternoon and they said to ride the train out to this river – so I did.

I had been solo backpacking around Europe for a few weeks before this particular day. The year was 2010, I was 21, and I had refused to bring a cell phone with me on this trip. “I want to do an old school Euro trip, with pocket dictionaries, printed maps, and forced conversation with locals” I told my poor mortified mother. I was flying by the seat of my EuroRail pass, hostel hopping, and checking in with home via 10-minutes of computer time at the hostels. Smart phones hadn’t yet seized our attention as humans at the time – so I was all spongy, ready to take in what Europe had to offer. The feeling of complete freedom on this trip remains unmatched in my life since … No one really knew where I was, no one in these places knew who I was … I could be anyone to anybody, trying on a new version of me any time I wanted.

After my 2 euros ran out, my 8 minutes of glorious jumping time was done and I left the trampoline, stumbling slightly as I readjusted to the solid ground below.

“Servus!” I hear from behind the fenced-in exit area. I caught her eye. “Servus, Hallo!” she repeated. Mmmm… could she be talking to me? I checked around me before offering a wave and a meek “Me? Hello?” back. Apparently my Canadian was showing in that response as she promptly switched to English.

“Are you a cheerleader?” she asked, adding “you’re very good. I was watching you.” I assured her I was not, but that I danced a lot growing up, and appreciated the kind words. I figured that was the end of our interaction but she continued walking with me as I exited the gates. She said, “My cheerleading team is rehearsing for a competition and we’re down one girl for practice today… Can you fill in for her?”

After trying my best to convince her that I was not at all skilled in cheerleading moves, lifts, stunts or tricks, I agreed to help out for the day.

We walked along the riverside for a bit, speaking very little, before she veered off into a forested area to the side. Following her I suddenly felt a bit nervous… Was this young woman plotting to kill me? Or bring me to some cult leader? Or was she maybe hitting on me? Was this going to be the beginning of a sapphic screenplay I’d write someday?

We came to a clearing in the forest where two other girls waited. They weren’t your stereotypical Hollywood cheerleader types – they seemed a bit like a group of misfits – which made me feel immediately at ease. They taught me some lifts – I was to be a base support for the flyer. The trust they placed in me, a random stranger girl from Canada, was pretty unbelievable.

I did my best, but I honestly think I was a bit of a let down to the girl who scouted me. It was tough work! After about an hour of practice, we wrapped up. They asked about my availability for their competition in a few weeks … and I had to break it to them that I was due to be in Spain to teach drama and dance at an English summer camp. But I did for a moment consider leaving everything behind and joining this cheer team in Austria.

We snapped a crappy photo on my digital camera – one of the best shots of the day – capturing the true beauty in the real people, the real connections, in Vienna – rather than just the “beautiful” things set out for tourists’ eyes.

I never spoke to the cheer girls again… And I sometimes wonder if this magical day had happened today, how would social media and our obsessively connected world shape this memory… What are the ways in which it would become distorted? Or the ways it would be enriched? How many shots of my split jumps would I need to take before landing the perfect one for instagram? Maybe I’d still be in touch with the girls, planning visits to one another’s countries. Looking at a photo of how I was only really 5 feet in the air might crush this memory of flying. If this was just another story I posted, would it have remained interesting enough to be told here tonight?

Not being tethered to a device that summer, I’ve always stored the memory of the river trampoline and accidentally joining an Austrian cheerleading team purely, and vividly in my mind.

Jingle Tales: Darren’s Story

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Like many, I was in my late teens before I realised I liked men. But those weren’t the first signs, no. For those, we go all the way back to the 80’s! Most of the strongest memories of my childhood come from Christmas as a kid, and that’s where my first obsession with a man started! His name is Santa Claus. 

When I was a kid, my parents had a Christmas Eve tradition of bringing me and my siblings to visit relatives to exchange gifts. First up would be my grandaunt Maggie. She was a sweet woman that we loved dearly, but she was stern and her husband was cranky, so we tended to be on our best behaviour in her house. She usually had some new fancy chocolates for us to eat, and we always knew that she would give us a box of those before we left, so it was worth behaving for that hour.

But then we would visit my grandparents. Their house was small and cosy, walking in to their kitchen just smelled of Christmas. The wood fired range would usually have been burning all day, so there was a feint smell of smoke. This was enhanced by the smell of the ham that would be slowly cooking for dinner the next day, and the Christmas pudding and cake that was waiting for us eat! Not to mention the boxes of biscuits, tins of chocolates, and almost no limit to how much of anything we could have! As we ate, my grandparents would tell us stories about how different Christmas was for my Mam and her family back in the day. I could never fully comprehend how they handled Christmas for 13 people in that tiny four roomed cottage… not four bedrooms, four rooms, total! Of course my parents would enjoy a tipple or two… it was the 80’s… and it really was so happy and joyous, my favourite day of the year so far! That was until we got into the car to go back home and my Christmas fear would kick in. Why you ask? Well, by the time we were leaving my grandparents house, it would be dark and close to our bedtime. My little head would fill with fearful questions. “What if Santa Claus came and we weren’t there? Would he go and not leave us any presents? What if he put us on the naughty list for being out so late?” This wasn’t helped on several occasions by my parents pointing to flashing lights in the sky and saying “look, it’s Santa”! My terrified little body would crouch down into the rear footwells of the car the rest of the way home, totally shaking in fear and praying he wouldn’t see me! As soon as we arrived home, I would make a mad dash for the house, and you have probably never seen a kid get ready for bed as quickly as I did those evenings! For my parents, it was the perfect play.

I never really had anything to worry about, as the next morning after my parents made us lineup down the stairs in order of age (the youngest going first), we would burst into the sitting room. “Look, Santa came”, my Mam would cry every year. It was a moment of pure joy for us, but also legitimate shock that Santa Claus had been in our house! It was scary, happy and exciting all at the same time! Every year it would blow my tiny little mind that this magical person, who held so much power, had been in our house while we were asleep. But that was just the beginning of the excitement, then we had… the presents.

I truly got some great gifts as a kid. Some of my most memorable ones are the year I got my first proper bike. It was a blue and yellow BMX, I still have a photo of five year old me on it! There was the year I got a toy kitchen, and the year I got my first keyboard! It’s pretty embarrassing to reflect on, but the memory of that keyboard is also accompanied by the memory of me refusing to go to bed on Christmas night until after I’d performed for my parents friends that were visiting… and by performing I mean pressing the auto-song button and pretending to play. At the time you could not tell me they were not impressed, the next Elton John… but I’m fairly confident now that they were entertaining me more than I was entertaining them. 

While I was very excited by what I got every year, I always had a close eye on what my sister Alison got! She was the girly girl sister so dolls were always part of her haul. And as great as my gifts were, I was sometimes quite sad that I didn’t just get to play with her dolls… or more specifically, their hair. I alway felt like I could only play with them when no one else was around, and Christmas Day was great for this because she had lots of dolls so it would be easy to sneak an old one away while she was entertained with the new ones! This never really lasted long, she’d usually find out later and get mad at me… especially if I thought that Cindy needed a haircut. That didn’t go as down well as I’d hoped, but I don’t ever remember being reprimanded for playing with dolls and I don’t ever recall my parents not wanting to get me the gifts I asked for… I just was never brave enough to ask for my own doll.

As I grew up, the joy of Christmas changed, it wasn’t gone… it was just different. Throughout my teens, I was more “normal”. I received gifts that were broadly in line with what my friends were getting. Gone were the kitchens and keyboards and in were the PlayStations and CD players. Although I did get Janet Jackson’s Design of a Decade for Christmas in 1995 which I’m sure was a sign of things to come, however I was 22 before I asked for something which was truly meaningful again.

This isn’t meant to be a story about me coming out, but just before I told my parents I was gay, I remember thinking to myself “They’ve got to know right? What about all the gifts they got me as a kid? They weren’t typical boys toys. All the times I played with my sisters toys or “borrowed” her boyband cd’s. Surely they have an idea, right?”. They didn’t, and me being gay came as quite a shock to them… which came as quite a shock to me. 

During one of our conversations in the days after, they asked if I had a boyfriend. I did, so I told them about him and how great he was, but they were angry and my Mum said that he would never be allowed into the house. At the time this was very upsetting, and it was actually a big part of why I moved out of home shortly after. I wanted to live with my boyfriend and be with him all the time. He was perfect, and better than any gift.

Over the next couple of weeks with some distance between us, my parents began to accept me for me and the healing began. So when Christmas came close and my Mam asked me what I wanted as a gift that year, I knew there was only one thing that was on my list. I wanted them to meet Alan for the first time over Christmas. It was the only thing I asked for that year. At first my parents were tentative, but we were in better place so they eventually agreed. A few weeks later, on Boxing Day in 2005, two extremely nervous boys walked into that house together as a couple for the first time. And it was great, perfect even. My Dad was, and always will be a tough nut to crack but he knew Alan was important to me, so he shook his hand and made awkward small talk for about five minutes before retiring to the sitting room (this was good) and once my Mam discovered that Alan loved to drink wine, he was like a second son to her.

Over twenty years later, we still celebrate Christmas as an expanded family every year. It looks a lot different now, but we still make an effort to exchange gifts and keep alive some of the traditions that have meant a lot to me and my family since a very young age. I often think about the dolls I used to sneak away and play with, how I would sit there brushing their hair until I was found… I never did get a doll of my own with plastic hair to brush, unless you count my husband’s one attempt at drag as Lady Anal – that came pretty close.

Jingle Tales: Sarah’s Story

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My story starts, as all good Christmas stories do, with a divorce.

Specifically, the divorce of my parents, who split up when I was six when my mom fell in love with another woman. In 1982 small-town Ontario this was a bit of a scandal, and when the homophobia proved to be too much, Mom moved to Toronto to be with her new girlfriend.

My brother and I would hop on the greyhound bus every other weekend to visit her, swapping our big house for her tiny co-op apartment in the city. I loved taking the subway, going to art exhibits, visiting the big library with books I’d never find at home. We were introduced to interesting new things like the lesbian softball league, Take Back the Night marches, and drag shows.

Mom was a vibrant, passionate woman who threw herself into this new life. I hated leaving her at the end of the weekend, and I hated that at home her gayness was still largely a secret.

Under her charismatic exterior mom was also insecure, and sometimes sad. Her new relationship was chaotic, with undercurrents and breakups I didn’t understand. As a kid, I watched helplessly as her moods rose and fell.

My story takes place during one of these break-ups, and it’s low. I was about eight, that my brother and I went to Toronto to spend the holidays with Mom. It was her first Christmas without a partner in years. In our family, Christmas had always been a bustling, cheerful affair, with turkey dinner, grandparents, cousins, the fancy silverware, tablecloths.

But that year, mom surprised us by announcing we’d be going out to a restaurant for dinner on Christmas day, just the three of us. She wanted us to be excited, but I felt disappointed that we weren’t doing our regular things.

Maybe she was trying to make new traditions, or maybe she didn’t have the energy to cook a holiday meal. I don’t know, but whatever the reason, there we were on that brutally cold Christmas day, bundling up to walk to the restaurant she’d chosen. I remember zipping our coats up to our noses and pulling our toques down almost over our eyes for the walk over.

The streets were empty – I imagined everyone else gathered around big tables with big, happy families. As the snow crunched under our feet, I missed home, my dad, my dog, the feeling of being part of something bigger. This didn’t feel like Christmas.  

Once I saw the restaurant she’d chosen, I was even more disappointed. It was a stark, low budget kind of place with metal tables and fluorescent lights. A chalkboard outside said Turkey Dinner in a messy scrawl. Inside, several sad-looking people ate alone. The smell of grease hung thick in the air. Even the Christmas music playing through the tinny speakers didn’t make it feel festive.

I nudged my brother and pointed to one of the diners – a large man with a big round belly and a long white beard, though it was kind of yellowed and dirty. He wore a thick, moth-eaten blue sweater.  “It’s Santa,” I whispered jokingly. My brother rolled his eyes. The waitress brought the guy another beer and a plate of fries. His weathered hands shook as he ate.

No question, this place was depressing. 

Still, I knew that my mom was trying to make Christmas special, and I wanted her to be happy. She said we could order whatever we wanted, which was unheard of – mom was always on a budget.

The waitress came by – an older woman with a greying ponytail. “What a special night!” she said.

We were trying.

I ordered a milkshake, then wondered if I shouldn’t have because of the cost. I built towers out of the little jam and peanut butter packets that were still on the table from breakfast.

Mom put on a smile, but behind it, she looked tired. I kept talking, telling her everything I could think of about school and my friends. My brother was quiet as usual, looking like he’d rather be anywhere else.

Mom lit a cigarette and smoked while we waited for the food to come. She kept opening the menu – I could see her scanning the prices, doing the math in her head.  

We drank our milkshakes, then ate our dry turkey with lumpy mashed potatoes.

Mom asked if we wanted dessert, but we both said no, not wanting to stress her out any more.

The bell over the door jingled, and I looked up to see Santa leaving, pulling his ratty plaid jacket on as he went out into the cold.

Not even Santa wants to have Christmas here, I thought.

Finally, after what felt like the longest meal of my life, mom pulled out her wallet and motioned for the check.

The waitress came over to our table and smiled. “Don’t worry,” she said. “It’s been taken care of.”

Mom blinked “What?”  

The server pointed to where Santa had just been sitting. “That gentleman asked if he could buy you dinner.”

Mom blinked again, tears in her eyes, still unsure of what was happening.

The server patted her hand, said “Merry Christmas hon. There’s pie on the way.”

The smile that slowly filled mom’s face brightened to a thousand watts. And with that we had her back, laughing as we devoured our pie with whipped cream.

We left the diner giddy, talking over each other about how we’d seen the real Santa that night. It was still cold, but now I noticed the holiday lights twinkling from people’s apartment balconies.

We may not have had tablecloths, or extended family, or fancy silverware, but Santa bought us dinner!

I’ve returned to the memory of that night so many times over the years. It’s like I’m looking in through the diner’s fogged-up window to see two sad blonde kids with messy hair and a mom in a thrifted red sweatshirt trying her best to make Christmas merry. And a guy with a white beard – and probably not a lot of money himself – who sees them.  

This story is a love letter to that man and his unexpected kindness.  

But it’s also a love letter to parents going through hard times.

See I feel a kinship with my mom, with who she was back then, now that I’ve spent quite a few Christmases on my own, trying to conjure magic for my kids, sometimes when I was barely holding on myself. I’ve watched my kids negotiate lost traditions and adjust to new normals. And honestly it’s been hard at times.

I wish I could tell that young version of my mom, she’s doing a great job. That it’s okay to be sad at Christmas. I wish I could tell her thank you for taking us to a restaurant, even if it’s not what I wanted at the time. Thank you for trying something new. And thank you for being brave enough to follow your heart, for falling in love and coming out, even though it wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows.  

You gave me the courage to do the same.

 I want to tell her it all works out in the end – her queer daughter will grow up knowing the beauty of chosen family and evolving traditions.

That her daughter will be grateful for that night, and how it reminded her to believe in miracles.

Jingle Tales: Helen’s Story

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I still remember when my sister broke the news. We were downstairs in the basement of our childhood home, watching the Simpsons. During a commercial break, my sister leaned over and said, “There’s something I need to tell you.” 

I looked at her, seriously. 

“Santa isn’t real,” she said. “It’s just mom and dad bringing down the presents.”

I said nothing, turning back to the TV. The commercial break ended, and we returned to watching The Simpsons. It was the episode where Homer is downhill skiing. He starts losing control as he picks up speed. He tries to recall what the ski instructor taught him earlier that day, but his thoughts quickly turn to having seen his neighbour Ned Flanders in a skin-tight ski suit. As he flaunts the new suit, Flanders famously says to Homer, “It feels like I’m wearing nothing at all!” 

As Homer continues to pick up speed, he can’t get the image of Flanders’ perfectly sculpted ass out of his head. He grimaces.

“Stupid sexy Flanders.”

When I looked up that episode to see when it aired, it was the year 2000, which means I was 12 years old when my sister revealed the cataclysmic life-changing news about Santa. I think we can agree that 12 is probably a little old to be believing in Santa Claus, but also that it’s kind of beautiful that my parents and my sister let me go on believing for as long as they possibly could before it became, like, really socially unacceptable.

Like, you would probably assume that having received said news, any reasonable 12 year-old would spend a few days mourning the inevitable loss of their childhood and then move on. Dear reader, this was not the case. I continued believing in Santa until I was 17 years old. 

With every passing year, I insisted that we keep the tradition alive: demanding that all of us kids sleep under the tree to see if we could catch Santa in the act, even going so far as to leave him cookies and a glass of milk (though by that time, my parents had gently suggested that Santa might enjoy a splash of Bailey’s).

I imagine that psychologists would have a field day with this particular childhood obsession, which, when I look back, feels a little embarrassing. But, then, I consider why it was I stopped at the age of 17 believing in Santa. What was happening at that time?

When I was 17, I decided to pursue a career as a pastor in a conservative Evangelical Christian denomination. While most girls my age were getting high and sneaking out to have sex with their boyfriends, I rebelled against my parents by becoming a raging fundamentalist. 

When I announced to my church friends that I wanted to become a pastor, they told me women pastors just didn’t exist. For a lot of people this lack of support and outright discrimination might kill your dreams, setting you on a different path, maybe even turn you against the career you’d been hoping to pursue. But, what my fundy friends didn’t know was that I had 17 years under my proverbial chastity belt believing in “something that didn’t exist.” I just blinked and went ahead and applied to become a pastor anyway. 

It turns out that believing in something that really probably doesn’t exist, well it turns out this is a critical skill for anyone wanting to go to seminary. After four years, I graduated from the Canadian prairie bible college known as “Bridalquest”. I was unmarried (spoiler alert, I never really had a problem with the girls dorms being separate from the boys). I went on to pursue a master’s in theology at a much more reputable and accredited university. I was ordained an Anglican priest and a year into my first parish, I came out. 

Once again, friends and mentors from my fundy days wrote to tell me being gay was nothing more than make-believe. This time, I realized that between believing in Santa Claus and believing in the God of white Chrisitan Evangelicals, that I actually had a combined 34 years of believing in “something that didn’t exist,” that is, a mythical old white man with a beard who keeps a running list of your bad behaviour. 

There’s a line from the Christmas carol, “Santa Claus is coming to town.” It goes, “He knows when you’ve been sleeping, he knows when you’re awake, he knows when you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake!” 

Is it Santa? Is it God? I mean . . . 6/7.

By sharing this story tonight, I don’t in any way want to underplay the very real discrimination that we experience as queer people both as we seek out career paths and as we make ourselves known in the world. I was blissfully naive for a lot of those years, and there were still some really shitty things that happened that I wouldn’t wish on anyone. 

I want to say, though, that there is something beautiful, something queer about believing in Santa Claus or whatever mythical story it was for you in your childhood. That something beautiful, that something queer is the ability to imagine a world, an existence for ourselves that others might not be able to or might not be willing to picture for themselves. This is our holiday magic.