BLOG THIS | blog.thismagazine.ca: April 2009 Archives

It seems like everyone has a pipeline for finding love online. The jews have JDate,christian values are covered by places like Christian Mingle and even cheaters have place to go at the controversial and highly publicized Ashley Madison Agency.

Online is also an important venue where many disabled daters believe they can leave their various limitations behind and just be themselves. Some choose to secretly assume the guise of able-bodied avatars on the popular online MMORPG Second Life and play out their fantasies that way, while others peruse the chatlines and profiles on various dating sites just for them.

Today, I'm assuming the role of the famed talkshow host, by running down what's out there online for disabled daters of all stripes, hoping one of you will find your own Love Connection.

Dating 4 Disabled

PROS: They have an internal instant message, blog and email system. There are plently of people with all types of disabilities from mostly the U.S. and the U.K. with Canada and parts of Asia bringing up the rear, so you can meet, date and network with people from all over the world. You can specify not just your disability, but also your level of mobility. This is an important distinction that makes sure all disabled people on the site are not painted with the same brush and adds a level of discernment for users looking for a mobility level similar to, or above their own. Also, there are many profiles featuring able-bodied people who are attracted to people with disabilities. (Hardly in an X-filesian way, but they are out there and they're not just fetishists or devotees).

CONS: Mixed in with people who have documented disabilities, are people who list their disability as, "Obesity" or "diabetes". Though I acknowledge that diabetes can lead to disabilities like blindness and amputation, last time I checked diabetes is a disease, not a disability. I also don't consider a weight problem a disability, but I know it can lead to diseases. I'm not a huge fan of huge people taking advantage of supports designed for genuinely disabled people. For example, handicap parking and scooters to get around. (Someone had to say it.) Also, there are way too many people looking for friendship or chat on this dating site, which may be indicative of the struggle of some people with disabilities for true socialization beyond their computer screens. I couldn't tell if any of the airbrushed hotties on the front page are actually disabled. As an added bonus, the orange page layout is truly eye constricting.

EnableLove

PROS: EnableLove offers the ability to search for your potential love connection to great specificity, including disability, mobility level, age, location, marital status and type of relationship. You can also pinpoint the various attributes of a partner, like religon, marital status and whether they have children. The site seems much more focused on encouraging its members to take their relationships offline and into the real world. It doesn't just accept disabilities, but markets itself towards people with other "Life Challenges" and diseases, thereby publicly broadening its reach past just disabilities and avoiding false advertising.

CONS: The profile layout is sparse and impersonal and comes across much more as a list of criteria than an actual story that reveals something about the person. In the profile details, members can list their full postal code, which in the age of Mapquest could be a stalker's paradise.

Soulful Encounters

PROS: Soulful Encounters takes the focus away from the disability starting with the name and stopping with the fact that it truly is a site managed by people with disabilities, for people with disabilities. They present themselves as a support group for the newly minted members of the disability community and parents of kids with disabilities. The site has numerous forums and chatrooms on any topic imaginable. The profiles are set up much like a Myspace page, with imported videos, graphics and a comments page. The customization level is unparalleled.

CONS: It's the type of site where members run the risk of spending their days getting lost behind a computer screen and never meeting their matches in real life. It tackles so many issues and tries to serve so many types of members that finding a realistic love match could easily be lost among those who just want to chat as friends, or those who aren't currently single. Its "Differently Abled" terminology is a little too much of a politically correct cliche for my taste.

Disabled Dating

PROS: This is the disabled community's answer to eHarmony. Their search program promises to take your character and values criteria and finds your match among the 5 million members they claim in their database. They report pinpoint accuracy and unlike eHarmony, they don't screen out the gay population and 5% of the people that use their site aren't unmatchable, so I'd at least have better luck here than I did on the real eHarmony.

CONS: The other sites listed above are free, while this one you have to pay for if you want anything more than a trial membership (receiving messages). Truly, whatever horse you bet on for a longterm relationship, has real money riding on it here. Plus, the site skews to an older, more clean cut crowd, but if that's your style, by all means...

Love Byrd

PROS: Turn! Turn! Turn! To everything there is a season...WAIT! STOP! that's The Byrds not Love Byrd. Love Byrd is like dating with a cyber coach at your side. While it features internal email, blogs and instant messaging, there's also a dating column written by a journalist named Tiff Carlson who happens to be a quadriplegic. I a dating etiquette guide for men and women and a Dear Abby-like advice column called, "The View". The beauty is, it's all accessible while you're chatting up your latest catch, so if you need to look something up, just scroll down the sidebar.

CONS: The interface is complicated and busy. I also had a strange sense that I had stepped into Oprah's "Remembering Your Spirit" segment. Everything seemed particularly geared to a middle-aged female audience. Sometimes there is so much instruction and advice, that actually taking that first step in meeting your match can seem very overwhelming because every little nuance in the dating game is intellectualized. This site is suffering from a serious case of T.M.I.

Hopefully, that was enough of a primer on the online disabled dating scene to help you make a Love Connection--Happy Hunting! As for me, as Chuck Woolery use to say before a commercial break, "I'll be back in two and two!"

Aaron is a freelance journalist living in Toronto. His work has appeared in Financial Post Business, Investment Executive Newspaper, and TV Week Magazine, along with Askmen.com. He is a regular contributor to Abilities Magazine and is currently plotting a weekly web comic called GIMP, with artist Jon Duguay, about a handicap school bus driver who wakes up after a crash to find he's the last able-bodied person on earth — and he's being hunted.

More entries on: ThisAbility

April 29, 2009

Film Club Contest!

Posted by annette at 03:51 PM ET | Comments (0)

We're giving away a signed copy of Guy Maddin's new book, My Winnipeg, to the ninth person who emails filmclub@thismagazine.ca telling us what their favourite Guy Maddin film is.

my winnipeg.jpg

Thanks to Coach House Books for helping us out with this contest!

For more information about My Winnipeg, go to www.chbooks.com. The Toronto launch of the book is happening at 7:30pm on May 12th at Revival, 783 College St. It's $5 at the door, or free if you buy a copy of the book.

More entries on: Film

April 22, 2009

Eco Chamber #3 - Earth Day Special: A movement, not a day

Posted by Emily Hunter at 12:26 PM ET | Comments (0)

Calendar showing April 22 One day. That's all. That's all the time dedicated to the environment by 174 nations. That's all the time some one billion people globally will participate in environmental action. That's all, out 365 days a year, and two generations elapsed, since the modern environmental movement began. Earth Day — that is all.

Today's Earth Day is the 39th Earth Day since its inception on April 22, 1970, by U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson. Earth Day began with the aim of raising awareness of the environment. Today, the Earth Day Network encourages year round participation in the environment. But, typically, people join together on this one day, April 22nd, to do their part by attending an Earth Day festival, planting a tree, or going to a teach-in. But at a time when the entire Arctic ice sheet could be history as early as 2013, is this really enough?

Beyond Earth Day, there is the exploding WWF campaign of Earth Hour, that saw participation of nearly one-sixth the earth's population in 2009 (compared to just a hundred million the previous year). There are many cities that extend Earth Day into Earth Week activities. Planet Green is calling for an Earth Month, where "taking the next step" includes environmental volunteerism and "greening your life." Some, like Greenpeace Canada, call for a green year by making every day Earth Day, and counsels such things as going vegetarian and cutting back on plastic bottles.

But we need more than an Earth Hour, an Earth Day, an Earth Week, an Earth Month or even an Earth Year. Simply flicking off lights for an hour, planting a tree one day of the year, attending "green" events, volunteering occasionally, or recycling and using fewer plastic bags is not enough. We need more than that. We need an Earth Movement.

An Earth Movement is a social uprising — a mobilization of people with a singular goal: the sustainability of our planet and our lives within it.

Now is the time more than ever for an Earth Movement, as we face things like:

Ocean fish stocks gone by 2050 amid rising demand.
Destruction of the Amazon rainforest from logging and industrial agriculture. (The Amazon rainforest is not only a huge carbon sink, but also a home to 22 million people and one third of all species in the world.)
The waste that's stampeding us off a cliff. Ontario alone, despite the pride in its recycling program, produces 12.4 million tonnes of garbage annually while only 3 million tonnes is diverted into recycled goods.
And let's not forget global climate change. Scientific international consensus states that it is 'virtually certain' there will be a 2°C temperature rise this century — some even argue that a 4-5°C rise is inevitable. Which melts the Greenland and west Antarctic ice sheets, displacing 130 million people as the sea level rises.

However, there is reason to be optimistic about the Earth Movement. The Environmental Protection Agency in the U.S. declared on Friday that CO₂ and five other greenhouses gases are indeed a threat to human health and welfare. Backed by President Obama under the Clean Air Act, this is paving the path to stricter regulations on automobiles, coal fired power plants, and other major emitters.

This sign for optimism has been brought about by a critical mass of activism, public advocacy, and engaged citizenry that has been on the rise for some time. Today there are over 12,000 environmental groups in the U.S., and roughly an equivalent number in Canada. This is the movement that is igniting climate action in Washington and paving a way forward on environmental issues.

The Earth Movement is very much alive — but everyone needs to be engaged in it. Small actions, by people who consider themselves 'green' because they volunteer for environmental causes, bike to work, and hand out the occasional leaflet, are not enough. It's mostly self-serving it doesn't lead to the massive changes that are needed. Though these micro individual changes are good, the macro scale is where the most change needs to happen.

"We're not going to solve this one light bulb at a time, but we just might if we can build one light-filled, light-hearted, lightning-fast movement.," says Bill McKibben, co-founder and director of 350.org, a group that is organizing a global demonstration on October 24, 2009 in Copenhagen.

Therefore, a movement is what we need — not baby-steps by a few. I needs to remain united and inclusive, unlike the movement of the '70s that has since fractured and dissipated. It may seem like I'm asking for a lot here. I am.

But this can happen. Change has happened in the past and it will happen again. It happened because of people, not institutions and politicians. It was people after all who fought the Women's Suffrage movement; people who fought for the Civil Rights Movement. It has, and always has been, citizens who have changed the world.

But we need action and active citizens now if the Earth Movement — and we ourselves — are to survive. It can't be just rhetoric, conversation over the water-coolers or idle thoughts. It can't be just individualistic changes. And it can't be just one day.

Being an activist does not necessary mean standing on the frontlines all tht time. Activism can mean many things, not holding up signs and yelling. Some things we need to do now are promote a green economy by training ourselves and others with the right skills. Over the next few decades, there will be an explosion of green jobs in fields like retrofitting buildings, constructing wind, solar and wave farms, manufacturing parts for those energy farms, urban agriculture and healthy farming, modern efficient urban planning, and public transit.

Activism can also be bringing an environmental angle to other aspects of your life: advocating for green politics in all parties; environmental journalism and writing; speaking out for green causes; documentary filmmaking on eco-issues; art-activism; green education; guerilla gardening; eco-feminism; promotion of green health; connecting ecological causes with social causes such as aboriginal rights; promoting green science and technological development, and so on.

You can be a part of this movement in many ways. But we have to do more than one day's work, and build a worldwide — dare I say — revolution.

Emily Hunter is an environmental journalist and This Magazine's resident eco-blogger. She is currently working on a book about young environmental activism, The Next Eco-Warriors, and a documentary on illegal whaling in Antarctica.

More entries on: Eco Chamber

ThisAbility #24: Domesticity with a Disability

Posted by Aaron Broverman at 10:26 AM ET | Comments (0)

Sit Down Chef

Ever notice that when you combine the words domestic and toxicity, you get domesticity? Well, I'm chock full of 'domesticity'. I know first hand what happens when extreme heat is applied to a ceramic plate. You can literally hear it wane before it bursts into a million lethal shards and invades the tile island of your kitchenette. Now there is a blood river on my floor, thanks to that new deep gash on the bottom of my foot. Time to get a girlfriend, no? That, or at least an able-bodied roommate to bail me out.

That's by far the worst domestic disaster I've ever been at the centre of, so far. Much is written about inaccessibility in the disabled world, but I've never seen anything about how a disability affects your domestic aptitude.

Some might attribute my lack of finesse in this area to the fact that I'm a guy, but there are a lot of guys,even guys with disabilities, who can pull off wonders in the kitchen. For me, whatever I cook is about my own survival and saving money, not presentation. The bottom line is never whether I cooked it from scratch, but how soon I can digest it. The more complex the recipe, the more the preparation cuts into my eating time. I'd be kind of lying though if I didn't admit that my disability didn't affect my skill in the kitchen. Hell, there's a whole profession built around teaching people with disabilities the lifeskills necessary for daily living.

Occupational therapists [O.T.] taught me how to dress myself in preschool, and I remember them touring the kitchen at my parents house figuring out ways to help me bend down and transfer cookie sheets from the oven to the centre island without losing my balance. I forget what we came up with, but whatever it was, it wasn't good enough to stick. Though my balance is better now than it was at the time, and I could probably pull off baking the way my kitchen is configured, I still don't bake. The convenience of the bakery section is just too irresistible and though homemade baked goods have that nostalgic familial quality every time you bite into them, I can generally take them or leave them. Somewhere deep down, (really deep) I probably still fear the potential for my own Hansel and Gretel moment. It's like an adult version of that time you were a toddler and you were resistant to using the 'Big Boy Potty' because you were afraid you'd fall in, and just as irrational.

Most of the domestic tricks I learned didn't come from an O.T., but are just part of living, learning, and knowing older people with similar disabilities who already figured stuff out for themselves. For example, if I need to cross the room to take a glass of juice to my desk, I use a plastic cup with a lid on it to avoid spillage. I can transfer plates and bowls very easily, but sometimes the level of minute concentration that goes into keeping the plate flat and balanced is higher and more deliberate for me than for the average person. Technology helps too. I have very lttle of it, but it makes a big difference. Things like the One-Touch Jar Opener and an electric can opener saves me copious amounts of time.

A lot of my deficiency in the kitchen has to do with how I was raised. My younger brother is able-bodied and he became the de facto chore monkey in our household, so all the skill in the kitchen that mothers naturally pass to their children went to him. Not that I was totally incapable of cooking something had she bothered to teach me, but perception of ability (or lack thereof) went a long way in my household. A long time ago, mom decided to choose efficiency and speed for what she needed done around the house rather than use the work as a learning opportunity that may have served my longterm development and growth.

To be fair, I wasn't the most enthusiastic advocate for my development in this particular regard. My younger self milked my perceived lack of culinary ability for all it was worth to get out of any household chores that no one was making me do. As a result, any cooking skills I ended up with, came thanks to my grade 8 cooking class. Sure, I did contribute some at home. I loaded the dishes every night and did my own laundry, but when it came to meal time, I was always relegated to the menial prep tasks like washing lettuce. Obviously, I'm paying for it now, so to all parents of kids with disabilities, please teach your child all the culinary skills you have that were ever passed down from previous generations. The finished product may not look as good as you would like and it may take double the time it would if the able-bodied kid in your family did it, but your offspring with the disability will thank you in the long run.

As for the other domestic chores, spilling fabric softner can be avoided with either a Downy Ball or some Dryer Balls. Also, liquid soap comes in lighter containers than powdered soap, but if you only have powdered soap and your laundry room is down the hall, a cup with a lid works well for transport.

By far the biggest key to keeping my place clean is my wonderful cleaning lady. Mine comes once every two weeks. I just hired her this year (too proud to relent and ask for help in previous years) and she has been manna from heaven so far. I found that the constant bending required for vacuuming and cleaning the washroom really put stress on my lower back. I could never really put my sheets back on my bed and have them stay there for very long and there are countless odds and sods I have no hope of doing myself, like hanging pictures. After initial skepticism, I went to Craigslist to find Angela, and now I highly recommend it.

My last bit of advice is don't be afraid to hire help when you need it. Too many men seem to rely on their significant others to maintain their household. Look at it this way, if a third party takes care of it, you reduce the potential for argument and have lots of time for other extracurricular activities.

More entries on: ThisAbility

April 20, 2009

In the age of Facebook, campaigns need to grow up already

Posted by Graham F. Scott at 11:40 AM ET | Comments (5)

Ray Lam scandal

Yesterday Ray Lam stepped down as the NDP candidate for Vancouver-False Creek because one of his opponents objected to photos appearing on Lam's Facebook account. In one, a person "believed to be Lam" has his hand on an unidentified woman's breast (the picture appears at right). It seems safe to assume neither of the people depicted in the photo is sober. In another of the offending photos, the person "believed to be Lam" has his underwear showing and people are tugging on it. Boy, what the youths of today get up to.

I'm not saying the provincial Liberal party in B.C. can't pounce on a political hot-potato and exploit it if it's there for the taking, but honestly, it's time to step back and rethink this type of politicking in the age of Facebook.

It's a cheap, prudish attack, and we know the script well by now. A candidate broadly pantomimes that they are shocked, simply shocked, to find that his or her opponent isn't a saintly asexual teetotaler, and finds him- or herself duty bound to express that shock to the nearest reactionary media outlet. Usually, the attacking party, or sometimes a bored reporter, casts around for some ancient photo or blog post or mp3 of their opponent saying something embarrassing or irrelevant or offensive; the attacker then publicizes this piece of (usually) digital detritus and declares themselves offended; the defendant usually resigns in order to avoid "being a distraction" to the campaign, which is code for "everyone knows this is bullshit but a handful of loudmouth cretins won't stop talking about it."

The Lam photos are embarrassing, sure — even, gosh, inappropriate. But we've got to get over this idea that once-upon-a-time impropriety automatically and forever disqualifies you from public service or political candidacy. It's simply not realistic, and it's getting less so. In 10 years time, what political candidate will not have a backlog of evidence of their vaguely indelicate youth waiting to surface? She's flashing her hip tattoo! He's ironically throwing a gang sign! Quick, call the radio station, the public has to know! It's been used by candidates on both the right and the left — there are officious busybodies of every political stripe. Enough.

I don't write this post to defend Lam; I write it to condemn this asinine, priggish brand of political campaigning. You're running an election for the Province of B.C., not class president on Gossip Girl. Grow up.

More entries on: Provincial Politricks

April 17, 2009

Eco Chamber #2: Countdown to Copenhagen

Posted by Emily Hunter at 12:45 PM ET | Comments (0)

Copenhagen Climate Convention logo The countdown to Copenhagen is 233 today. That is the number of days left until the Obama administration must sway its own domestic politics by getting Congress on side of climate action, and prove real leadership in global emission reductions. It's a very short timeframe, especially when, in a state of economic turmoil, one big "E" seems to take precedent over another, economics over ecology.

Come December, 170 countries will come together at the Copenhagen Climate Convention in Denmark to attempt at an agreement on reducing greenhouse gases. The Copenhagen agreement will replace the Kyoto Protocol. But like Kyoto, if there is not real leadership from the U.S., the Copenhagen agreement will fail too.

More than leadership, Copenhagen comes down to American politics. Republican and Democratic senators alike are more interested in economics than ecology today, and that attitude will further stall any significant action on climate change. Many scientists say we no longer have any time to wait.

"I frankly think that this Copenhagen is the last chance for us to deal with this problem," Andrew Weaver told the Montreal Gazette recently. Weaver is an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) contributor and author of Keeping Our Cool: Canada in a Warming World.

With the Arctic now melting faster than scientists had previously believed — possibly reaching 100 percent summer melting as early as 2013 — global climate change is pushing us toward a precipice. International consensus says that by 2050 it is "virtually certain" that temperatures will rise to 1.5° to 2°C, unless there are sharp carbon reductions. Every decade there is delay, experts say, temperatures will continue to rise by half a degree.

On the earth's surface, this temperature rise means that young people today will be living in a vastly re-shaped world when they are older. Thirty percent of species will be at risk of extinction; there will be widespread aridity and crop failure in the global south, where most of the Earth's population lives; and we will see up to 12 meters of sea level rise. That doesn't even get into the new geopolitical world we will be living in, with mass human migrations and conflict.

As we come to a close of the first decade of the 21st century, with emissions only rising, now, more than ever, is the time for action. People around the world en masse are calling for it. This year's Earth Hour had over eighty countries and one billion individuals participating, according to WWF Canada's Communications Director, Josh Laughren, who spoke about the Earth Hour event on the Green Majority radio show on April 10th. That's a huge leap forward from last year's Earth Hour, with 35 countries and between 50 and 100 million participants.

WWF is calling this year's Earth Hour a "global phenomenon." Earth Hour is meant as a symbolic action on the fight against global climate change. By dimming lights, people are voting for the earth and creating a mass demand for action.

However, US deputy special envoy for climate change, Jonathan Pershing, told the Reuters news agency that global climate agreements are complicated. "Finding common ground will take some time."

In domestic American politics, the situation is further complicated. With a recent Congress bill passed that now requires any cap-and-trade climate plan needing sixty votes to see the light of day. And with the two U.S. parties preoccupied with the economy, the prospects for a cap-and-trade bill looks dismal.

President Obama's election promise was to have swift action to combat climate change. the promises included cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 14 percent by 2020 and a cap-and-trade emissions plan. However, on the recent climate talk in Bonn, Germany, as part of a series of talks leading up to Copenhagen, delegates were disappointed with the U.S.'s vague and far-reaching plan to cap emissions. Obama's rapid action on climate now appears cautious and slow.

But slow and steady is a luxury we can no longer indulge in. And people around the world are making a stand for climate action now. At the recent G20 Summit in London, UK, 4,000 protesters were part of a "Climate Camp" protesting against the proposed cap-and-trade systems with slogans including "Nature Doesn't Do Bail-Outs." The activists argued that cap-and-trade is just another system for emitters to hide behind, while true emissions reduction remains on the back burner.

At the same G20 conference, over 20,000 protestors took over the streets of the central banking district, rioting about the economy. For many in Washington, this "separate" issue of the economy is often a fig leaf to hide more inaction on the climate. But economics and ecology are not two mutually exclusive entities. Rather, with a failing economy comes opportunity: opportunity for sustainability, with green industries and jobs, less dependency on oil, and more renewable energy.

Our world is out of check, but we have an opportunity for a sustainable one. Copenhagen is the first and last opportunity for Obama to make it so. But a slack pace will not get us there. Instead, we have 233 days — and the world is counting.

More entries on: Eco Chamber

April 16, 2009

Queerly Canadian #10: Teach them well, let them lead the way

Posted by Cate Simpson at 04:46 PM ET | Comments (0)

Last week an 11 year-old from Massachusetts called Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover (right) hanged himself after enduring daily taunts at school, many of which were homophobic. This comes, as this press release from the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network reminds us, just over a year after the murder of 15 year-old Lawrence King, who was shot by another student because of his perceived sexual identity.

In an age where queer people are protected by various anti-discrimination laws all over North America, why are we still failing to extend these freedoms and protections to our youth? Among queer teens in the US and in Canada, suicide is the number one cause of death. We can do better.

The article above lists some harrowing facts and figures about homophobic bullying in American schools, but Canada is generating some scary statistics of its own. Last year, a Statistics Canada study based on data from a 2004 survey reported (PDF link) that LGBTQ youth (and adults) were three times more likely to encounter violent victimization and discrimination. Sexual minorities account for 30 percent of teen suicides in Canada, which is particularly significant when you consider that they only account for around 10 percent of the teen population overall.

Why is it that we’ve come so far in making our cities safe and welcoming places for queer people, but we can’t do the same for our schools? It’s not enough to legislate against discrimination and hope that the growing acceptance of sexual minorities will trickle down to our youth. Because messages that say otherwise are still pervasive in our society, and we need to give young people the means to fight back. We need to make sure teachers are willing to step in and protect kids like Carl Walker-Hoover, and that they know what to say when they do. We need to start educating, and we need to start younger.

I would be remiss at this point if I didn’t mention the queer youth projects that exist in Toronto. Planned Parenthood’s Teens Educating and Confronting Homophobia (TEACH) runs workshops in schools all over the GTA, and Supporting Our Youth has an ever-expanding roster of programs and drop-ins for queer and trans youth. But we don’t rely on third party organizations to teach the other basics of human interaction, so why should it fall to them to explain to teenagers why singling out gay kids is wrong?

Parents start instructing children in the differences between right and wrong before they start school. Schools teach traffic safety, ethics, healthy eating, even first aid. Why isn’t basic anti-oppression training on that list? Why can’t we educate our children about the full range of human relationships that exist when we explain to them what marriage is, what families are about, how babies are made? How many more teenagers have to die before we get over our fear of talking to young people about homosexuality, and realize that we can’t afford to be squeamish about these conversations?

We try to build better worlds for our younger generations. We try to protect them from the mistakes we made, and we try to teach them the lessons we had to learn for ourselves. But when it comes to homophobia, we are failing. Instead, we are loading our youth down with prejudice that ill equips them for the real world, and condemning them to start from scratch, to learn for themselves as teens and adults the respect for difference that has come to us slowly, if at all, and remains — even in 2009, even in the most urban and diverse of settings — so tenuous.

More entries on: Queerly Canadian

April 13, 2009

Eco Chamber #1: Past and future at the far end of the world

Posted by Emily Hunter at 03:10 PM ET | Comments (1)

[Editor's Note: Emily Hunter, who covered the 2008-09 Sea Shepherd Antarctic campaign for This Magazine, is taking up a regular post writing her new blog column here, 'Eco Chamber'. The column will run every Friday; this first installment is presented as a preview.]

My heart was beating through my chest as I came within a feet of a harpoon ship and the lethal spike on its bow. But this was unlike the times I had come close to harpoon ships before. Coming back from covering an anti-whaling campaign in the Antarctic, ambushed and attacked by Japanese harpoon ships for weeks, you would think I would be used to seeing these gunner ships. However, this particular ship, the Cheynes IV, was apart of an old Australian whaling fleet and was now an on-land museum of Australian history. The harpoon ship was no longer operational, but my adrenaline kicked in nonetheless as I walked up to it.

Having finished my time onboard ship with Sea Shepherd, the radical anti-whaling campaigners who pursued the Japanese whaling fleet all winter, I took a road-trip down to Albany, Western Australia. A little over 30 years ago, a group of radical activists including my parents, Robert and Bobbi Hunter, protested Australia's whaling here. Leaving almost daily with two Zodiacs off of Albany's coast in September 1977, they were able to harass the Australian whaling fleet. Their protest lead to international attention on Australia's whaling, a national inquiry and the end of the whaling industry in Australia.

Today, Australia is one of the strongest anti-whaling nations in the world. It both supports anti-whaling groups like Sea Shepherd and lobbies against countries that continue to kill whales, such as Japan. And over 30 years later, what I found in Albany in my own visit was a beacon of change. The main industry today in the city eco-tourism and whale-watching. An industry that has brought more income to the city and its citizens than the whaling industry ever did. As tourists from around the world come to Albany to learn about whales and see the great animals alive.

The old whaling station and its harpoon ships in Albany, owned and operated by the Cheynes Beach Whaling Company, are relics of the past. It's now been turned into a museum called Whale World. There, visitors can venture through an old harpoon ship, the Cheynes IV, and the old whaling station, including its processing decks, boiler rooms, storage, and so on.

In Albany, organic local foods are the standard for residents. And the majority of Albany's energy is produced with green wind power, powering 75 percent of the city's energy needs with 12 1,800 KW wind turbines. Albany residents have lowered their greenhouse gas emissions by about 77,000 tonnes annually, which roughly equivalent to the annual emissions of 13,000 homes in the UK.

But out of all of this, the most surprising thing I experienced in Albany was to have an ex-whaler as my tour guide of the city. Kees Van der Gaag is a dutch whaler who came to Australia in 1969. As a master and gunner of the Cheynes II for the Cheynes Beach Whale Company between 1970 and 1977, he always enjoyed the chase but dreaded the kill. After a meeting of minds with anti-whaling protestors in 1977, he quit whaling and found work on a tugboat instead. Now retired and in his 70's, he is a stanch protestor against countries that continue to whale.

"It is horrifically cruel and completely unnecessary," Van der Gaag tells me. "I know better than most, because I used to be a gunner myself."

Whale meat, used in Australia for dog food and in the manufacture of missile lubricants 30 years ago, is not used for anything more crucial today in Japan. There, it is served in cafeterias in high schools, jails and military bases — and still used as dog food. Some things have changed, but others have stayed the same.

It always seems in environmentalist circles that as one battle is won, another one begins, or the larger war rages on undaunted. Counties like Australia, Canada and England no longer kill whales. This is primarily because of protests, such as the one in Albany 30 years ago, that led to international pressure and an international ban on commercial whaling (commercial whaling being the main culprit for landing the great whale species of the world on endangered-species lists in the first place). However, countries such as Japan and Iceland have pried open loopholes and commercial whaling still continues in some parts of the world. These days, nearly a thousand whales, including endangered species, are targeted every year in the Southern Ocean.

But even though the ecological battles of the past may seem lost at times and the eco-fight today is even more global and apocalyptic than ever before — there are symbols that we must hang on to. Albany is one of those symbols.

The city is proof that things can change. The jobs and industries of Albany have been partly transformed into a sustainable green economy. The city is doing better financially because of it. And the chief offenders themselves, the whalers, are now environmentalists. This all happened because of some pretty simple ideas. But those ideas drove people to action. Things have changed for the better in the past and can change again. But it is people, and it has always been people, that make the differance.

More entries on: Eco Chamber

April 07, 2009

ThisAbility #23: House Call

Posted by Aaron Broverman at 02:26 PM ET | Comments (1)

House plays a mean cane air guitar

That air rocker on the right, with the sunken face, is one-half of A Bit of Fry and Laurie, British actor Hugh Laurie, but that's just in real life. He is better known to North American TV watchers as Gregory House, the brilliant, cantankerous, Vicodin-addicted, prostitute-purchasing, don't-give-a-shit, diagnostician at the fictional Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital.

House's biting wit, deductive skills and drug-seeking behaivor brings to mind Sherlock Holmes for most, but for me he also represents an aggresive push-back against the way people with disabilities are depicted in popular culture.

I would even go further and say that like Murderball before him, the character has provided an antidote to the saccharine apologist attitude people choose when relating to people with disabilities in their community. Like Murderball, House has put people on notice and has become another reactionary answer to a society that still struggles to take disabled people seriously. However, while Murderball responds with physical aggression, House responds with aggressive intellectualism.

Obviously, House can't ever fully be a catalyst for a shift in the way able-bodied society relates to people with disabilities because Hugh Laurie is not a disabled actor. I recognize that this will always impede the beacon the character otherwise represents, but Laurie should still be given mad praise for losing himself in the character so fully that, in the moment of the show, it doesn't really matter.

Putting that flaw aside, House reprsents a "Finally" I've been waiting to yell at my TV for a long time. I delight in the disabled prick. When I first saw Murderball at the Hot Docs Festival in 2005, someone offered to hold the door open for me as we left the theatre and another audience member shouted, "You better do it, or he might hit you with his chair," refering to the aggressive, "mad as hell and not going to take it anymore" attitude the wheelchair rugby players in the film display.

The film worked. The realization that disabled people aren't all quiet little lambs had started to sink in. Sure, he was joking, but the first place people go when they're slightly uncomfortable is humor and hopefully through humor, the absurdity of their previous assumptions dawns on them and change happens.

House holds this mirror up to people as well, using biting wit and sarcasm to play on his co-workers assumptions about weakness, frailty and the traditional gently P.C. bedside manner we've all come to expect from doctors. He is disarming and it's in the "Oh my god, I can't believe he just did that!" moments that real realization occurs. The, "Oh right, not all people with disabilities are soft, sympathetic and positive all the time; they can be assholes too."

It's 'assholedom' driven to showing you how ridiculous your assumptions about capability can be. House doesn't pick sides either, it's not like the disabled are completely infallable and everyone is screwing them over. This is explicitly represented in the season 3 episode Needle in a Haystack when House takes on a wheelchair-using hospital employee so he can get his handicap parking spot back. The crux of the episode has House trying to convince his boss, Dr. Lisa Cuddy, that use of a wheelchair has no bearing on parking spot priority because "using a chair is easy and not limiting in the slightest." He decides to illustrate this by betting her that if he can get around in a chair for a week, she must give him the parking spot.

See a few clips from the episode below:

Not only does Needle in a Haystack play on the tendency of instituitions to avoid relating to people with disabilies on an individual basis, (instead choosing to staunchly stand behind legislation and mandated requirements beyond all logic) but the episode also plays on the unspoken beefs the able-bodied population has with disabled people who exploit their circumstances for personal gain — "Did that bastard in a wheelchair just cut me off?"

House is a catharsis for me. Most of what the good doctor says is probably what I would say to you if the inhibitors in my brain were completely shot.

More entries on: ThisAbility

April 03, 2009

Queerly Canadian #9: House-proud?

Posted by Cate Simpson at 11:31 AM ET | Comments (0)

For-Rent sign

This column is brought to you today by my apartment hunt, which even though it's being spearheaded by my girlfriend, is taking over all the other things I am supposed to be doing with my afternoon. It's funny how being gay can complicate the most mundane of experiences — not just public bathrooms (that double-take) and dating, but completely banal things like moving house.

I have to wonder, for instance, about the "LGBTQ-positive space" checkbox on U of T's apartment listings website (I'm not a student, but my girlfriend is). Ontario has laws about housing discrimination, so the landlords who don't check that box aren't actually allowed to refuse to rent to queer couples. But would we want to rent from them?

It's unclear what it means if someone doesn't check the box. Do they actually hate gay people, or did they just not see it? Do they assume that the box is only for people who would be especially delighted to rent to a queer person? Is it significant that the majority of listers who leave it blank aren't actual landlords but people advertising a room in their already shared apartment?

This box is causing me all kinds of extra stress and anxiety, because whenever I find a listing with a conspicuously absent "LGBT friendly" line, I worry about what we'd be exposing ourselves to by hiking over to view that apartment. (There's also a box for "international students welcome," which seems equally suspect to me, but we'll leave that for now.)

Being queer makes you feel suddenly very visible when you're doing things like apartment hunting, or anything else that involves you having to declare yourself as a couple to a total stranger. Like going to a restaurant on Valentine's Day. Or getting a lawyer to endorse your statutory declaration of common-law union (something else we did this year).

When I moved into my current apartment, it is hard to express the anxiety of the weeks between when I moved in and when my girlfriend finally called our landlady to tell her I was there. When she and her roommate signed the lease, the landlady pointed out that they were welcome to move their boyfriends in, so we knew an extra person was okay in principle. But calling her and saying the word "girlfriend" seemed like it might be slightly more complicated.

The call itself, when it was finally made, seemed to go well enough, until the landlady called a surprise meeting with our roommate. Was she coming over to reprimand her for moving lesbians into the house? Was she going to demand that all three of us leave immediately? Neither, it transpired; she just wanted to make sure our roommate was okay with having a third person in the house and with being responsible for my rent contributions.

All of which makes me think that, for some of us at least, the possibility of homophobia is ultimately far more wearying and harmful than the actual, far less frequent, fact of it. Obviously, it's an indicator of progress that I can make this statement, that I can consistently expect but rarely encounter discrimination. But I still eagerly anticipate a time when I don't carry that niggling unease, and when pronouncements like "LGBTQ-positive" aren't necessary anymore.

[Creative Commons photo by Turkeychik]

More entries on: Queerly Canadian

April 01, 2009

ThisAbility #22 Are We There Yet?

Posted by Aaron Broverman at 03:06 PM ET | Comments (0)

Are We There Yet?
"Keep control gentlemen, keep control." Ah, the sound of the stern classroom reprimand of yore, really takes me back. I have to remember though, I'm not a student in this group (even though I don't look a day over 15 to most people). However, I am a little jealous because this group of junior students from Streetsville and Mississauga secondary schools has arrived at Toronto's Lorraine Kisma Theatre for Young People to see Are We There Yet? for the first time.

Back when I was in school, sexual education started in grade one, with a purple and yellow rooster puppet named Rusty, who counseled kids on inappropriate touching (some psychiatrist somewhere is definitely making a living off of stories about this puppet). In the later grades, there were PBS specials featuring a camera up the birth canal and a repetitive jingle that's still stuck in my head, "My body's nobody's body but mine/You have your own body, let me have mine." There wasn't anything like Are We There Yet?

Edmonton's Concrete Theatre has been touring this award-winning play for grade 9 students to schools across the country for 12 years. Many of the students who've seen the show over its history, have come back to tell the company how the play helped them navigate sexual pitfalls later in life, or prevented an early pregnancy. They've performed in front of kids with special needs before (for a deaf audience, it took two hours just to do the first half), but the heavy participatory nature of the play itself, means its different for every audience who sees it, and every cast who performs it, every single time.

Today, the students from Streetsville and Mississauga just happen to have Autism or Asperger Syndrome and I'm playing the part of Jane Goodall, the outside observer. A piece of all of us here (cast, crew, me) is excited to see how a highly interactive sex-ed play would play in front of this audience. Actually, the fact that we assume it could be remarkably different(even the fact that I'm writing about it now) says more about us than it does about the students in the audience.

Autism: The Musical probably set the current standard for the public as a window into the arts as therapy for autistic children, but (surprise, surprise) today's show wasn't full of uncontrolled outbursts or complete emotional shutdowns typical of autism's public face. So, if this isn't going to be a blow-by-blow of the challenge faced by cast members in kid wrangling, why did it make ThisAbility this week? First of all, the attitude that we should even be educating people with disabilities (much less those with mental disabilities) about sex, in a way that isn't disability specific, is still much rarer than it should be.

Are We There Yet? represents the blatantly correct assumption that disabled people are, and continue to be, sexually active, so they should be educated sooner rather than later. If anything, the fact the students had autism and aspergers enhanced the experience, as many of them had insights and perceptions beyond even the adult test audiences early in the show's run.

Disabled audience or not, Are We There Yet? attacks the subject matter in a way that nobody I know of has. Penned exclusively for schools by playwright Jane Heather and directed this time by one of Concrete Theatre's founding members, Mieko Ouchi, the show operates from the premise, "What if sex-ed was taught in the same public way as drivers-ed?" Suddenly, words like "headlights", "stick shift" and "glove compartment" are rife with sexual innuendo; even the act of driving is one big double entendre. However, this aspect is rudimentary compared to the level of participation the play demmands from its audience. The show's cast of two men and two women (Ryland Alexander, Nick Green, Monice Peter and Nadien Chu) each play characters trying to navigate their personal boundaries, or wondering how to bring up the topic of using condoms with their partner. In each scenario, they're turning to the audience for help.

Great, nobody knows more about personal boundaries than these students. Personal boundaries, and how not to violate them, is the first day issue of every special ed class I've ever sat in on. Once it was established that the characters on stage didn't want to break up, the level of frankness and practicality with which the teens in the audience dealt with relationship issues, shocked many of the people on stage, and many of the teachers in the back row. You could hear it in the momentarily bewildered "How do they know this?" tone coming from the actors when taking the student's suggestions.

It's because of a precocious kid in the front row, who suggested to the character uncomfortable with putting on a condom that he, "make it entertaining and add some whipped cream," I learned that whip cream is okay for play because it's water soluable, but Cool Whip is not because it's petroleum based and will break down the condom. Sure, Shawn Fowler from Planned Parenthood Toronto filled in the gaps, but if it weren't for my buddy in the front row, the topic wouldn't have been on the docket for discussion. So, my friend, if you're sitting in your school's computer lab right now and seeing this, here's a cyber fist bump straight from me to you.

Like most of us who see Are We There Yet?, by the time they get to the part where you get to create your own teen guy (if you're male) and teen girl (if you're female) you're already so invested in the process that you legitimately want to see your boy succeed in his relationship, like some proud parent. The students from Streetsville and Mississauga took this coaching responsibility to the nth degree, with one going as far as role playing to Nick (the actor) exactly what he wanted him to do. Many of them became adamant enough to channel Cus D'Amato as he trained Mike Tyson, or Burgess Meredith when playing Mickey Goldmill in Rocky. I actually saw a student massage Nick's shoulders and literally say, "Get in there!"

Sometimes the students were so passionate, the actors had trouble keeping up with the suggestions. Creating their ideal man or woman by shouting out characteristics, quickly became a verbal Jackson Pollock painting. Suggestions were thrown out every which way and then the group sat back to see what stuck on stage, admiring their work through the organized chaos of its creation.

In a way, Are We There Yet? shows kids that when you first start out, sex is just that, (barely) organized chaos. So, who better to contribute to the performance, than a group of students who are pros at learning how to deal with the chaos in their own heads on a daily basis?

More entries on: ThisAbility

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THIS MAGAZINE: BECAUSE EVERTHING IS POLITICAL

April 30, 2009

ThisAbility #25: Love Connection

April 29, 2009

Film Club Contest!

April 22, 2009

Eco Chamber #3 - Earth Day Special: A movement, not a day

ThisAbility #24: Domesticity with a Disability

April 20, 2009

In the age of Facebook, campaigns need to grow up already

April 17, 2009

Eco Chamber #2: Countdown to Copenhagen

April 16, 2009

Queerly Canadian #10: Teach them well, let them lead the way

April 13, 2009

Eco Chamber #1: Past and future at the far end of the world

April 07, 2009

ThisAbility #23: House Call

April 03, 2009

Queerly Canadian #9: House-proud?

April 01, 2009

ThisAbility #22 Are We There Yet?