Queer by Shaun Brodie

The prairie landscape of Southern Saskatchewan provided very few indicators of what a queer life would look like in the early ’90s, or if it would ever be accepted at all. The only immediate references to anything “queer” were the playground taunts of “fag” and “homo” that would cause any young person questioning their sexual identity to skip a heartbeat or two, even if the jabs were not aimed directly at them. Burrowing myself deep into the closet and rationalizing my attraction to other boys as simple curiosity about how I might measure up (it’s interesting what you can convince yourself of when you are young and terrified), I played my best straight man all through the theatre of adolescence. 

Fortunately I had a brother five years older who, though I don’t believe he suspected I was gay at the time, introduced me to a couple of things that I could quietly latch onto, and which helped me navigate these years. 

Kids in the Hall was on well past my bedtime, but my brother would come up to my room draped in his duvet, hide me underneath it (me bear hugging him from behind, legs wrapped around his and standing on his feet) and sneak me past mom in the kitchen and down into the basement, where Scott Thompson and the other Kids would alter my perception of the world with their unapologetic queer characters and outlandish skits. 

The other small treasure he gave to me in 1992, when the Rheostatics released their album Whale Music. The fourth track, simply titled “Queer,” is a letter from a boy to his older brother, after the elder sibling had been kicked out of the house by their father and had run away to another town, after dad discovered he was gay. Loyal, loving, and pissed at his dad, the boy writes a letter that is a touching gesture of acceptance; the line about how he wishes his brother had been there to see the day he scored a hat trick against the team that called him a “fucking queer” sends a shiver through me to this day. 

While it would still be years before I would directly confront my sexuality, this song’s overt handling of the subject and its fuck-you defiance in the face of that homophobic town elevated me, and the sentiment of brotherly love and loyalty was and is something I strongly hold on to. 

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Shaun Brodie is the artistic director of the Queer Songbook Orchestra, a Toronto-based twelve-piece chamber pop ensemble dedicated to exploring and uplifting queer narrative in pop music.