E-Readers: Threat to the Snooping Houseguest

For the past year, I have been the proud owner of an e-reader. A kobo actually. E-readers are fascinatingly low tech devices. They do one thing and one thing only, but they do it very well. They let you carry the book you are currently reading, and scores that you have read or would like to read, wherever you go.

The key to an e-reader is something called e-ink. It is the technology, if you could call it that, that is used to display the print on the page. It is not like the display on your iPhone or on a tablet, or even a computer screen. The makers of e-readers have chosen a format to display the words on a page that is specifically designed to make reading easier.

The key benefit to an e-reader is that you can get books quickly and relatively cheaply.

The one thing that is lost with an e-reader is the feeling of accomplishment that you get in finishing a book and putting it on the shelf.

For minor books this is really not an issue and if your house is already full of books it is actually a benefit. But I still buy major hardcovers, like Franzen’s Freedom or Hollinghurst’s Stranger’s Child in hardcover.

Ultimately the growth of e-readers is going to have the biggest impact on our ability to snoop what others are reading.

Husband of a Soon to be Published Author

I may soon be joining the ranks of famous spouses. I will be known mostly as the husband of, like Michael Wilding, Larry Fortensky and Rosie O’Donnell’s ex Kelly. Yes, my husband is soon joining to become a published author.

The publisher notified us toward the end of the Christmas holidays that they would be buying the rights to his novel, and we are overjoyed. This has been a labour of love for him for a number of years now, and finding a publisher was really the icing on the cake.

After a couple of years of proofing stories and making marks with my little red pen, I am now reading contracts, trying to figure out what exactly royalties are and trying to help Jeff find a suitable headshot. There are actually quite a number of rather mundane tasks to be undertaken, like ensuring the Toronto Arts Council gets credited with “supporting” the correct story, and getting a US International Tax Number (ITIN) in order to fill out a W-8BEN for the IRS.

Things are, however, mostly in the hands of the publisher who will be doing line editing and copy editing (I learned the difference) as well as selecting a cover.

I am looking forward to my friends reading this bildungsroman looking for any character that resembles me (if there is I will sue). And if there were a character that resembled me, I would like to have Ashton Kutcher and not Philip Seymour Hoffman play me in the movie.

EM Forster – A Personal Favourite

Around the time of the publication of perhaps his greatest work, Howard’s End, E. M. Forster, one of the great novelists of the 20^th Century, expressed in his diary his “weariness of the only subject that I both can and may treat – the love of men for women & vice versa.” While Forster was able to portray beautiful, complex and multifaceted heterosexual love stories, from Margaret Schlegel and Henry Wilcox in Howard’s End, to Lucy Honeychurch and George Emerson in A Room with a View, in his private life, Forster was avowedly homosexual.

For much of his life, Forster lived with his mother. His longest relationship was with a married policeman. That relationship began quite late in his life, starting a few years after he lost his virginity on an Egyptian beach at age 38. Interestingly, he describes this as “losing R” – respectability.

(If Forster looked anything like this portrait by Dora Carrington, it might explain his late start.)

Forster was able to slip at least one same-sex love story into his Edwardian novels. As a teenager ran across his 1905 novel The Longest Journey, which contains a beautiful description of love between two students at Cambridge University at the turn of the century. Their love is never consummated – the chilling Agnes intervenes, leading the protagonist away from his dorm room amour and into a loveless marriage. There was certainly a message there for a gay teen reader in the 1980s, but I digress.

His inability to reconcile his identity with his Edwardian view of respectability created a private torment eventually took a toll on Forster’s published writings. He produced the best known of his works at a time when he was living as an entirely celibate man.

As his personal life began to take some shape, and he developed his own adult relationships, the last novel to be published in his lifetime was released – a Passage to India, in 1924. A Passage to India was his greatest commercial success.

He did produce one great novel which was published after his death, Maurice, a gay love story which follows a man from his time at university, through a failed romance with another student, on to a long term love with a games-keeper. (The relationship with the games-keeper would be considered doubly transgressive, crossing class lines – novelist Jilly Cooper has suggested that Forster’s relationship with the policeman showed that he liked his men a bit common, a comment which says as much about her as it does him).

The Merchant-Ivory adaptations of Forster’s major novels are on TCM tonight (Thursday September 15). Maurice, starring James Philby and Hugh Grant, airs at 3 a.m. La plus ca change.,.

Yes, There Are Good Gay Books

A gay man who likes to read is in a somewhat awkward spot. Eventually one wants to see some representation of gay life, in whatever form, in the literature one reads. This is a feeling common to other minorities as well. From what I have been told and have read, African Americans like to see African Americans portrayed in literature, and Jews want some Jewish characters. Not all the time or exclusively, just once in a while.

The difficulty for a gay man is that, frankly, there are not a lot good books to choose from. There are a lot of what I call “torso” books. The reason I call them this is that the covers of these books usually feature torsos (unless it the cover is a Steve Walker cover, and in that case it is a back because he cannot paint from any other angle). Ecstasy is taken, men sweat on dance club florrs, boy finds boy, boy loses boy, boy loses underwear and gets sand in his naughty bits, and so on.

A torso book:

Torso books are filled with sex scenes, party scenes, drug scenes, and are generally very poorly written. There are literally thousands of them and the lead authors pump them out regularly, at least annually. They can be found online in the “gay lit” section of on-line publishers. I suppose they have a place and someone seems to like them. But frankly, for the most part they are terrible. For the serious writer, the “gay lit” label is a real ghetto, and one that can be very difficult to escape.

There are a much smaller selection of well-written books in which gay characters can be found, including works written by both gay and straight authors. These books are generally not considered to be “gay” literature, but still have their circulation in some ways circumscribed by having chosen a partially gay narrative. Some of the major authors from recent years that would fall in this category would be Colm Toibin, Michael Cunningham and Alan Hollinghurst.

Alan Hollinghurst is a particularly interesting example. His background, as a reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement, suggested that he would be a writer of literary fiction, and the quality of his writing certainly placed him among the best authors of the past twenty years. However, his works, until his most recent novel, included very frank descriptions of gay sex. He challenged the perception that a literary novel could not contain graphic gay sex and still be considered literary. The critics cautiously embraced him, over the years, and he was nominated for the prestigious Booker prize in the 1990s and finally won the award in 2004 with his sprawling novel about the Thatcher years, The Line of Beauty.

His most recent work, The Stranger’s Child, is one of the most finely written novels to be produced in years. It is the type of novel one tries to read slowly, not wanting it to end, even though it is almost 600 pages long. Interestingly, the sex scenes are not particularly graphic or frequent, and not exclusively homosexual. Also, the most dominant character in the book is woman (Daphne), demonstrating that he can indeed write through the eyes of a woman as well as a man.

The Stranger’s Child is a excellent novel, with echoes of Forster, Waugh, and Hollinghurst’s own earlier works. It was released to great critical acclaim this summer in Britain and is being released in North America in October. (The biggest buzz generated around the Booker’s shortlist this year was that it left Hollinghurst out).

And if you are looking for a torso book with great prose and character development, Hollinghurst did do a rather fun novel a number of years called the Spell. It is a quite an entertaining romp, if you are looking for that sort of thing.

A Canadian Who Can’t Skate

From the time I was a small boy,  fall meant new skates. My father would take me to Canadian Tire, past the rows and rows of shiny CCM skates, and buy me new skates for the winter. They would get some for me to try on, always a little larger than the year before and ask, “How do those feel?”

“They’re too tight.” All the skates I tried on felt too tight. Always. My feet did not like being in skates.

Years later, I saw an exhibit at the British Museum of the tiny shoes worn by Chinese women with bound feet. They showed pictures of the bound feet. That is how I felt in skates.

My dad could skate. He won a hockey scholarship in high school. Naturally everyone thought I would take to hockey too. There is a picture of me around Christmastime 1967, barely two years old, on the new rink outside Toronto’s new City Hall, my ankles buckling, knees together, held up by my mother’s hand.

I was thrown onto rinks every winter from the late Sixties and into the early Seventies. My mother would try to teach me to skate, my father tried to teach me, I had professional lessons. I couldn’t do it. Because I hated it. Ice is hard, and it’s cold. If you fall, you will find ice about as forgiving as a marble floor. When I did fall down, I was sure someone would skate past and run a skate through my mitten, severing my little fingers. (Tommy next door told me this could happen.)

Meanwhile, my sisters learned to skate, the neighbourhood kids could skate. I got good enough to propel myself forward in a straight line, but never learned to turn or stop, so I always ended up hitting the boards and falling down.

I still played hockey every year, for a time. In hockey, if you cannot skate you play goal. I spent many Saturday mornings shivering at the goal at the base rink (Only Canadians would spend their winters in an air-conditioned building). Finally, I got a reprieve. We got two back to back European postings and I was able to spend six winters without seeing skates. By the time we came back, I was old enough to have some say about what I did and didn’t want to do.

Today I still can’t skate. I married another man who can’t really skate either.

And my dad just bought a hockey stick for the new season. He’s 71.

That Chair

After my partner – now husband – and I settled in together my thoughts naturally turned to creating a nest for ourselves. Hence the name of this blog.

We have tried to slowly build a aesthetically pleasing home for ourselves without breaking the bank. The most recent issue is That Chair.

A few weeks ago, my partner raised his eyes from his writing, looked around the living room and pronounced “There is no dialogue between that chair and the rest of the living room.”

For my straight friends, let me explain: a lack of dialogue among your furniture is a bad thing.

The chair in question is a beige Ikea Ektorp chair. The inexpensive Ektorp is one of the best-selling pieces of furniture in the world, sold by Ikea in across North America and Europe, including such fashion-forward countries as Italy and Spain. Yet it is bulking and uncomfortable, a frump, a true Marjorie Main of a chair. It is not even very comfortable. Here it is:

So we begin our search for a suitable replacement. Our couch is fairly contemporary, the other chair in the living room in an antique.

I looked for its replacement. But where to look? I started in the neighbourhoods downtown that are filled with espresso bars, overcrowded cafés and homosexuals walking the sidewalks in pairs. I found a few possibilities. Here are some:

Oops. That is a pair of homosexual possibilites. Here is the chair:

But it clearly needs re-upholstering and is just too mid-century to work. It would create argument rather than dialogue.

So I thought, why not go new?

Toronto offers a lot of choices if you are looking for new furniture. There are the chains. One click and you can choose a whole room. No thanks. If I were HGTV star Sarah Richardson, I would go right to Elte in the Castlefield design neighbourhood. But every time I go in there I cannot get past the $1200 sheetsets near the door; I am scared to go any further.

So instead, I tried a place on Dupont. It was a sunny Sunday afternoon and the three floor showroom was full of couples browsing, some with toddlers in hand (“Get down from that sofa, Madison”). The mixture of furniture was rather eclectic, but they had quite a few things I liked. The pieces seem a bit bland with the display fabric, but could easily be punched up with the right fabric choice:

But the prices left me slightly uneasy. Even at full price, they seemed a little too low. So I went home and checked out the stores website and they mention that they import from all across the world, including Europe and Asia. This is clearly code for: our furniture is made in a Chinese sweatshop and will last about 18 months.

I did find a place that actually sells upholstered furniture made in Canada and the United States. And I chose this one:

Now all I have to do is pick a fabric. One with some pattern in it to give it some punch. But there are only about 800 fabric samples to choose from so it should take me about a year to choose one.

I will post a picture when I do.

When Are You Getting Married?

The following is a piece I wrote a couple of years ago before my husband and I got married, about the Big Question:

When are you going to get married?

Before gay marriage became legal in Ontario and British Columbia in 2003 (and across Canada as a whole in 2005), we did not even have to think about it. It was just not possible. But now that it is, some friends are being to ask when we will take the big leap.

It some ways it was easier before – no decision was necessary. All those awkward thoughts (am I ready to commit to spend the rest of my life with this person? I am willing to make the financial and legal commitments to him?) were not pressing for us. Now everything has changed.

If we decide to get married, the good news is that neither of us has to spend $5,000 for a rock smaller than a pea that will go on the other’s hand.

But there are a lot more other things to decide. The minimalist approach would involve going to Toronto City Hall, asking a couple of friends to be witnesses and then jetting off, just the two of us, to some romantic destination. Some have even skipped the honeymoon portion all together.

But what about a “real” wedding? My partner is an avowed atheist, so a church wedding would be out. If one was religious, there are a lot of churches here in Toronto that would marry you. The largest Canadian Protestant church, the United Church of Canada, is very gay positive. And there is always the MCC.

There are many restaurants and hotels here in Toronto that will gladly be the venue for your nuptials. And there are other vendors who are happy to take your money, such as those that provide the venue and you provide the catering. (The best caterer in town here is probably Daniel et Daniel and they have a lot of experience with gay and straight weddings). And the florists, the limo, etc. (A girlfriend who is dying for us to arrange our wedding actually pulled me aside at a shop with beautiful displays of invitations to try and motivate us to make the decision.)

With all the vendors, we would need to take care to find people who are not opposed to gay marriage. They are becoming fewer and farther between in Canada, but some are still out there.

At least we do not have to worry about dresses.

And there is the money question. When it comes to the amount you can spend, the estimates are really dazzling. How big an equity loan does one want to take for a one day (but once in a lifetime) event)?

A lotof the decisions are closely tied with the numbers of people that one invites. Who will come is a good question. We all know that some relatives will not come. For me, this is a particularly sensitive area, since no one from my family would come, except perhaps my sister and her husband. It is good to keep the numbers down but everyone would think I was an orphan. And the mix of friends! How would my work friends fit with my bar friends? Once you start inviting people from work, where do you draw the line? And are former tricks that one is still friends with fair game for invites?

And the music? Do we get a DJ and have him play the extended version of the Village People’s Go West and Pansy Division, or do we gone with things like Nat King Cole’s When I Fall in Love?

And then there is the question of the bar. Emily Post says that cash bars are a no-no, and as the hosts we would like to pay. Some of our potential guests are non-drinkers, but a few really like a good drink so God knows how that would end up.

In the end, I am tempted to do something small and romantic. Maybe marry with just the two of us at City Hall and have people over later for a catered thing at our place with the booze flowing. Or just the two of us on a hillside in Whistler, British Columbia.

I will of course let you know what we decide. In the interim, for those of you from other countries who are gay or lesbian, remember that Canada will marry any couple, gay or straight, without any residency requirements.

………………………………….

AFTERWORD

We did end up getting married. We had a beautiful wedding in a friend’s backyard, with about 35 of our nearest and dearest. We did use Daniel et Daniel, played both the Village People and Nat King Cole, but chose not to scare our guests with Pansy Division. Our guests drank an extraordinary amount of Moet et Chandon. No one from my family was there. And getting married was the best decision I ever made.

Gay Nesting: Whither Suburbia?

I am the gaynester. Last year, my husband began writing a widely read blog on wordpress called as the gay groom (gaygroom.wordpress.com). He has written about, among other things, our same-sex wedding in Toronto in 2009.

Rather than dealing with the Big Day When We Got Hitched, I plan on writing about how two men go about making a life together as a couple, a process that I will call “nesting.” Nesting includes the physical elements of setting up a home together, including choosing a place to live and the various stylistic decisions that go along with that (these elements of interior design style are particular traumatic for a gay couple, because of the relentless expectations of friends, ourselves and Nate Berkus, that our homes will be far more aesthetically pleasing than our heterosexual friends).

But nesting goes beyond the mere physical elements of setting up a home. It involves developing daily routines and traditions that make up a life together.

One of the most basic elements of gay nesting is choosing where to live. In recent decades, across Canada and the United States, gays have settled into little ghettos in formerly working class neighbourhoods, and have renovated and improved their homes, with house prices rising accordingly.

But what about the suburbs, with their newly built homes and big box stores? They have been largely scorned by gays for decades, but is that reasonable? Should we write them off? I have decided to look into the issue.

My husband lived in the suburbs prior to moving and joining the gays in the city. Shall we move back and take advantage of the large lots and expansive livingspace they promise?

I have decided to take a look into a suburb called Milton, which is about 30 miles from the centre of Toronto, where I work, and features a direct rail link into the city. Milton was for many decades a small town beyond the periphery of the suburbs, but urban growth has reached the town and it has increased in size rapidly.

There are benefits to living that far out of the city. The homes are new, requiring less maintenance, and the lots and the houses themselves are larger, generally at least double the size that they would be in the city.

What types of houses do people live in if they choose Milton?  The houses seem to be all of a similar general type. I will give you a look at a typical one.

This attachment is floorplan of a typical Milton house, called, rather oddly, the Thistle Bay:

thistlebay

This is what such a house would look like:

The Outside

Now I am generally opposed to homes with rooms described as a Great Room, unless the property in question is in England, is at least 20 by 30’, and feet and is used only when the King comes to dinner. But looking at the floorplan, you can see that we could put in a flatscreen, some carefully chosen contemporary furniture into the offending room and we would be able to while away our evenings in style and comfort. A few well placed accessories and we would be as comfortable as we would be in any drag bar.

But I wonder though, what happens to gays who move to such a place? Are their trees toilet-papered? Are they merely shunned? So I went to a message board for one of these communities and asked whether the neighbourhood was at all gay friendly?

The answers were uniformly welcoming and positive. One woman went so far as to encourage me and my husband to buy the house next door to hers (she even mentioned it had a hot tub). Gays who lived out there wrote what a great place it was to live.

But inside my gut, there is a sense that gays are in fact an urban race. And I like living somewhere where I don’t have to get in the car to get a carton of milk. I can take the subway a few stops to the opera. In Milton, the restaurants would all be chains. The stores would all be of the big box variety. And my friends would all live far, far away. So it is the city for us, small lots, methadone clinics and all.