(no subject)
It's been a quiet few days. I've been holding off printing my novel before I can actually get a copy to one of my three editors -- that way I won't be able to snatch it back in a panic state, deciding it's terrible. I've been making minor adjustments to things I wasn't quite happy with.
I've spent much of the last week doing research for my website. Spent the day at the Archives trying to dig up information on Canada's first victim (in 1891) of the "gross indecency" laws, a man with the astonishing name of Napoléon Lamoureux.
Records from that era, though, are spotty and hard to sort through. I couldn't find any minutes of trials for that time and place, nor subpoenas, and the handwritten notes judges take during the trials didn't include his or any of the other men arrested for the same crime that year.
I only know these men were convicted, because they show up at the St. Vincent de Paul Penitentiary and are recorded as having been convicted in Montreal.
In brighter news, one of Canada's best-known gay activists, Brent Hawkes, was awarded the Order of Canada last week. The Order of Canada is the country's highest civilian honour, something like a knighthood in Britain. Hawkes -- an openly-gay Protestant minister -- performed the same-sex wedding that triggered the court case that finally got us same-sex marriage. But he has a gay-activist résumé going back more than thirty years.
I'm really proud to be in a country that gives gay activists honours like that, even if that kind of recognition was a long time coming.
I've spent much of the last week doing research for my website. Spent the day at the Archives trying to dig up information on Canada's first victim (in 1891) of the "gross indecency" laws, a man with the astonishing name of Napoléon Lamoureux.
Records from that era, though, are spotty and hard to sort through. I couldn't find any minutes of trials for that time and place, nor subpoenas, and the handwritten notes judges take during the trials didn't include his or any of the other men arrested for the same crime that year.
I only know these men were convicted, because they show up at the St. Vincent de Paul Penitentiary and are recorded as having been convicted in Montreal.
In brighter news, one of Canada's best-known gay activists, Brent Hawkes, was awarded the Order of Canada last week. The Order of Canada is the country's highest civilian honour, something like a knighthood in Britain. Hawkes -- an openly-gay Protestant minister -- performed the same-sex wedding that triggered the court case that finally got us same-sex marriage. But he has a gay-activist résumé going back more than thirty years.
I'm really proud to be in a country that gives gay activists honours like that, even if that kind of recognition was a long time coming.