Check out that stare: behold its ruggedly confident, make-my-day machismo. Yes, Barry Neufeld’s got a good thing going—or at least he thinks he does. Hence the self-satisfied grin. But perhaps he can’t afford to be so smug. You see, Barry Neufeld has just had his card marked. Those of you who subscribe to my blog but don’t live in Canada won’t have a clue who or what I’m talking about. So allow me to introduce you to…
Review by Daniel Gawthrop published in the Georgia Straight July 26, 2017 A Queer Love Story: The Letters of Jane Rule and Rick Bébout Edited by Marilyn R. Schuster. UBC, 650 pp, hardcover On October 24, 1994, an arthritic and wheelchair-bound Jane Rule made her long-awaited appearance in B.C. Supreme Court as an expert witness in Little Sister’s bookstore’s epic legal battle with Canada Customs. Rule’s testimony was big news: here was a seldom-seen icon…
Published in Plenitude - Your Queer Literary Magazine Feb 23, 2015 Daniel Gawthrop (New Westminster) Commenting on a favourite gay novel: “Reading Alan Hollinghurst is a guilty pleasure on par with eating foie gras: you know you probably shouldn’t—the very idea seems decadent and passé, redolent of neocolonial tastes—but oh, how the finer notes linger on the palate. “Hollinghurst’s class-conscious novels, which typically explore some aspect of failed nostalgia for the British Empire, offer delicious…
So, just how “progressive” is Pope Francis, really? So progressive, apparently, that he has been compared to the ill-fated John Paul I: he of the long forgotten, 33-day papacy in 1978 and the mysterious, did-they-or-didn’t-they-poison-him demise. “If I was Pope Francis,” wrote one blogger on June 3, “I’d be hiring a food tester right about now.” That was in reference to the pope’s comment that atheists who do good need not be excluded from the…
The last time most Canadians heard from Remi De Roo, it was in a carefully worded letter of apology vetted by his lawyer. In June 2000, the year after his retirement as bishop of Victoria, De Roo was publicly lambasted for having approved the purchase of Arabian show horses and then a parcel of land in Washington State—investments that were bleeding the diocese dry. In his public mea culpa, he said he had approved certain transactions…