Anyone worried about the religious right in the US (or elsewhere) - or who's ever wondered where America's frequently evil foreign policy comes from - should read this old interview with Jeff Sharlet, the journalist who's done more than anyone to expose the activities of a Christian fundamentalist group known simply as The Family ( Read more... )

Well, the American election is over. I don't expect the US to transform into a utopia and I expect there's going to be a lot of disappointed people -- no one gets to be president without being friendly with megacorporations, and you don't step on those people's toes without losing all your funding for the next election ( Read more... )

We're still waiting for a Quebec election. I'm not exactly enthused. I'll be voting for a party that I hope does well, but has never won a seat in the assembly, so I'm not exactly expecting to be overjoyed on election day.

I have higher hopes for our neighbours to the south. The good news is that in state-by-state projections of electoral ( Read more... )

So I made it successfully to Victoria, and I've been on the run most of the time I've been here,seeing old friends ( Read more... )

I wrote another instalment in my LGBT history blog -- the invention of the "gross indecency" laws.

I've been reading about some pretty horrendous gaybashing in Pink Blood. I think the worst is a 50-year-old school teacher named David Curnick who was stabbed 146 times in Vancouver by a guy he'd picked up ( Read more... )

I finished Gentlemen of the Road yesterday. It was a brilliant novel. At first the pacing seemed odd -- too breathless -- until I discovered that (true to its 19th-century style) it was originally published in weekly instalments in a newspaper. Probably, also, it's that Chabon is used to writing 500-page novels, not 200-page ones ( Read more... )

For the first time, one of my letters was read on CBC. Nothing major -- just about three sentences (about Tom Lukiwski's homophobia) on the political program, The House.

(For anyone actually interested, the podcast is here. I'm somewhere between 40 min and 50 min in ( Read more... )

Brad Wall, the Conservative premier of Saskatchewan, is suing the Canadian Press newswire because he feels he was misrepresented by one of its headlines: “Tape with Sask premier and Tory MP has racist, sexist, homophobic comments: NDP ( Read more... )

For those of you who aren't on montrealais's LJ, I re-post the following snippet of a story that appeared in Canada.com about an ex-gay therapist abusing his patient:

"WINNIPEG - A former Manitoba Bible college counsellor was convicted Thursday of repeatedly molesting a young student during a role-playing game in which he promised to make the sexually ( Read more... )

Pride Montreal

In case you haven't heard, Montreal's local pride parade, Divers/Cité, has been cancelled this year. This comes after years of strange experiments, like holding the parade at night (which pleased no one), everyone is wondering what the Divers/Cité committee is thinking ( Read more... )