I had a tiny moment today at the bike shop that really got me thinking. So here’s a #thinkythink post where I try (and maybe fail) to put it into words.
I remember, when I was a kid, my father telling us about growing up in a small Northern Ontario town, where the milk was delivered in bottles by horse and buggy. The local phone service was a party line; private phone numbers didn’t exist til he was in his teens. The moon landing happened when he was in his twenties, and he witnessed the development of such wonders as television, then colour TV, then VCRs and home video cameras, and eventually cell phones and the internet and smartphones with apps for everything, to say nothing of mind-boggling advances in medical technology and so much more. The pace of technological change that has happened in the lifetime of people who are in their 80s today is staggering. That any of them have managed to keep up is nearly miraculous.
When I think about it, it’s kind of hard to even get my head around – hard to imagine what it would be like to grow up that way. The experience of hearing the clop of hooves and the rattle of glass and knowing your milk would be on your doorstep with a thick cap of cream to skim off, hearing the squeaks as your mother hand-cranked the washing and hung it to dry on a line, where it would freeze in cold weather and come back inside as stiff sheets of icy fabric. The experience of hearing the whole neighbourhood talking anytime you wanted to reach a friend. And the experience of watching all that fall away and be replaced by new, faster, tighter, more.
But I’m starting to get a glimmer of that experience of enormous change over time myself. I typed on message boards when I was 12, but the chatting I did on the home computer on the weekend didn’t have much to do with my schooling, where we sharpened our pencils on a wall-mounted device with a crank and the shavings landed in a garbage can below. We used those pencils to write in “cahiers Canada” and our teachers used chalk on boards, or, by high school, overhead projectors with “acétates.” I taught myself to two-finger type on a typewriter, learned to load film into a camera to take photos and to develop them using chemicals in a darkroom, wrote my undergrad papers by hand after doing research using a card catalogue. I played Tetris on an original Nintendo as a teenager and got a Nokia cell phone with a snake game on it, where black pixels moved around on a tiny, sickly green screen to my endless amusement. Amazon was an online bookstore. Google was just one search engine – we also used Ask Jeeves, Alta Vista, Yahoo.
But the place where I feel change the most is less tangible than technological devices, and harder to pin down.
I remember being terrified to hold hands with my first girlfriend in public, and doing it anyway, but being constantly on the lookout for violence. I remember hearing that people were pushing for same-sex marriage, and scoffing at the idea – not because I thought queers shouldn’t be able to get married, but because I was raised in a soup of homophobia so thick that I simply could not see any possibility of success. I grew up expecting to be alone forever because I could not imagine marrying a man, and those were presented as the only options. It took me years to come around to the idea that it just might happen, that it might not be just some brave activists screaming into the void on the fringe of society. And along the way, suddenly queer – being queer, having queer friends or family members, considering queer rights and feelings and lives – became something people talked about as opposed to whispering it or simply holding a silence so tense and sharp that it cut us to pieces.
I remember finding queers who were existing and living their lives, finding queer spaces, finding queer books and films, finding queers online and in history. And every time it was thrilling. Discovering that we were real and present, and always had been, and were around every corner – it never got old.
Until it did. And that’s the change I’m not sure how to put into words.
Today, I brought my partner’s bike to the bike shop down the street from me. Got to chatting with the mechanic, to whom I’ve brought my own bike, Esmerelda, for many years now. “My partner’s bike” blah blah. Filled out the slip in my partner’s legal name, which is recognizably a woman’s, though in reality he’s got a more complicated identity than that and goes by different names and pronouns in different circumstances. We were complaining about high pollen counts and allergies interfering with our cycling. “I don’t feel it badly, but my partner does,” he says. “He’s constantly sneezing and coughing, keeps thinking he has COVID…” And so, without making a thing of it in the least, we came out to each other. I felt a flicker of “oh, hi” but that’s it.
The bicycle was invented over 200 years ago and it went from being a jaw-dropping novelty to a banal, everyday, everywhere piece of technology. Queers have been around forever, and have scandalized the world for that entire time, including here and now – the violence is still real and present, and in some ways worse than ever, for all our successes. I don’t mean to discount that or fail to recognize the range of queer realities out there. We are still being cut to shreds by silence in places, and drowned in the soup of homophobia, and so much more. And we make history and make change. And yet we are also banal, everyday, everywhere people. We eat and shit, we have jobs and families, we buy milk at the store and do the laundry and type things and talk on the phone and go to school and play games and watch TV, and we get our bikes tuned up. Sometimes by each other, and it’s just no big deal at all.
Sex Geek 