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May 01, 2009

Queerly Canadian #11: Have I become a professional lesbian?

Posted by Cate Simpson at 12:01 PM ET

Queer people spend a lot of time thinking about labels. Picking one that fits, reclaiming offensive ones to alter their meaning, trying to avoid them entirely. Lately, I've started to worry about acquiring a label I never selected for myself: gay journalist.

I just finished an internship, and I'm returning to the freelancer's constant search for work, so I've been looking back over my portfolio and wondering: when editors read through my clippings, do they see reviews, news pieces, and columns, or do they see reviews of gay books, gay news, and a column about queer politics? I didn't set out to be a professional lesbian. I haven't decided yet what sort of journalist I want to be when I grow up so I want to keep my options open, but I worry that the more queer-themed writing I do, the more the label starts to stick.

My links to the queer community gave me my first breaks in journalism. Among my first publication credits were reviews of queer club nights for the LGBT section of a newly-launched magazine in my hometown of Edinburgh. These led to three longer pieces for the section, and I went on to work at a mainstream entertainment magazine. When I moved to Toronto, Xtra was the first freelance market to return my email, and quickly became my most regular and reliable source of work.

When you're trying to establish yourself in this industry, you can't afford to be choosy about what assignments you take. You're just grateful to be writing. And it's good to have a niche as a freelancer — it helps editors remember you. But at some point, a niche threatens to become a pigeonhole, and "gay writer" is a tough label to escape.

My dilemma is that to a certain extent, it is important to me to write about queer issues. Whatever progress we make and however integrated queer culture is with mainstream culture, we do still have our own concerns and our own history, and I think it's important to use the voice I have as a reporter to tell some of those stories. And since I am increasingly well-placed to do so, it would feel like an incredible betrayal of my own background to ignore these stories just because I'm afraid of being branded an activist.

All of these concerns were very much on my mind when I decided to start writing this column back in December. I was about to take a hiatus from most of my freelance work, including Xtra, and start a three-month internship, and I was ready to focus on broadening my experience. I had to think seriously about whether I wanted to weight my resume with another queer writing credit, especially since my being asked to write it in the first place suggested I was already becoming typecast. In the end, I decided that working with a magazine I had a huge amount of respect for was well worth the risk, but it was a tough decision to make.

The dilemma still rears its head every time I think about moving career forward. My best bet for getting into a big mainstream magazine is probably a story about something or someone queer, and I'm faced once again with deciding whether it makes strategic sense to do that, or whether I'd be shooting myself in the foot by refusing to capitalize on the most useful thing I have going for me.

More entries on: Queerly Canadian

Previous: Eco chamber #4: Fighting for the Fry
Next: Since when did we divorce the right answer from an honest answer?

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