It’s Pride Week in Sudbury next week and like people in many of Canada’s major cities, Greater Sudburians are highlighting the triumphs and struggles of our gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender friends and neighbours.
Click here for a list of Pride Week activities.
The city’s LGBT community has put together a wonderful and inclusive program, offering events that are entertaining, poignant and educational — it looks like a great week.
I’ve always felt a certain connection to the LGBT community. I’m not sure what it was like in your high school, but at mine, theatre tended to attract the geeky, artsy, kind of outcast kids — like I was — and that included kids who would be coming out once they left the sometimes stifling atmosphere of home and high school.
The early 1990s was a different time. It wasn’t OK to be gay. Being gay or lesbian — or simply being accused of it — was a badge of shame and too often something worse.
It was something to conceal, to hide, to deny from everybody.
Walk down the street or the main hallway holding hands with your partner? Forget it. Go to prom together? No way. Get married — are you you kidding me?
In 1993 or so, a government-funded program to raise awareness about sustainability and the environment visited our school. It was one of those government programs where young people are hired to give “cool” presentations to other young people.
One of the presenters was a guy named Peter. Peter was both gay and Native — so he had two strikes against him in society right off the bat. Peter was the first person I met who not only didn’t try to hide the fact he was gay, but actually seemed quite proud of it. He wasn’t ashamed of himself (and rightly so).
That was a real eye-opener. Inspired by Peter’s example and self-assurance, and angered by society’s terrible discrimination against the LGBT community, a few friends and I started a short-lived gay-straight alliance. They’re commonplace now, but back then, it was unheard of.
Although we didn’t do much other than meet a few times and talk about our problems, we wanted to do something, anything, to show our peers and our teachers — everyone we considered square and vanilla — that it was, in fact, OK to be gay.
We wanted kids at school to know that they weren’t hated, that the problem was not with them, but with society.
I don’t know if we accomplished much, but ever since I’ve felt that connection to the community.
How the world has changed in two decades. Same-sex marriage is legal and celebrated. Gay-straight alliances are common in high schools. Same-sex couples star matter-of-factly in TV commercials. A trans teen has her own reality TV show.
I’m dumbstruck, in many ways, at how quickly society has progressed, how much more inclusive it has become, and how that inclusion continues to spread. Yes, there’s still a long way to go (the suicide rate among trans people is frightening, as is the level of poverty, addiction and homelessness among LGBT youth), but no one can deny how far society has progressed.
I’m hoping to get out to a few Pride Weeks events this week, though with young children it is a bit difficult to find the time. If I’m not there in person, I am there in spirit.
Greater Sudbury’s LGBT community counts plenty of talented, amazing people, who make incredible contributions to our city. It also counts plenty of average Sudburians.
And that might just be the best compliment of all — that most of the LGBT community is perfectly average, just like the rest of us.
From the amazing evolution of society to humanity’s amazing achievement in outer space: Pluto.
I’m still trying to wrap my head around what humanity has done.
We shot a piano-sized object from Earth, threading it through the gravitational pulls of planets and asteroids, to hit a moving target more than four billion miles across the solar system. A shot that took nearly 10 years from when we pulled the trigger to when we hit the target.
Four. Billion. Miles. I can’t even express how incredible an achievement this is. It’s a triumph of vision and innovation, and a testament to the fact I should have learned to love math.
Let me put it another way. Hitting Pluto is like standing in downtown Sudbury, putting your rifle to your shoulder and making a killshot on a deer that’s running across a field in British Columbia.
It’s staggering.
As a skeptic and a person who wishes more people appreciated the monumental contribution science has made and continues to make in our lives, I hope the excitement of the Pluto mission inspires a new generation of scientists who will take our world in exciting new directions, opening new vistas of discovery and propelling humanity into a future that today, we can only imagine.
From Pride Week to Pluto, from the continued evolution of society to achieving things once considered impossible, it’s an amazing time to be alive. Happy Pride Week and hello, Pluto!
Mark Gentili is the managing editor of Northern Life and NorthernLife.ca.
