It’s August, so I am feeling nostalgic about Provincetown. It’s been a while since I’ve been, but for a number of years, my boyfriend, friends and I would rent a house for a week and fill it with love, food, laughter and sex (not necessarily in that order).
Provincetown has always been such a magical place for me that I wanted to write about its transformative powers. “The Sun in Our Bodies” explores the pull of the seaside village on one couple’s relationship.
Those of you who have read The Family Way might notice similar characters or plot points. I wrote this short story while also writing the novel, so I guess each is inspired by the other.
Last month, Violet Hour presented Queer & Italian in Montreal at the Istituto Italiano di Cultura Montreal as part of the Fierté Montréal Pride celebrations.
I got the idea for this event after learning that Montreal’s Pointe a Calliere Museum had recently wrapped their Italian Montreal exhibit with no real mention of the contributions of LGBTQ Montrealers of Italian origin. I felt this would be a good opportunity to correct that omission, celebrating our accomplishments while also creating a conversation around what more can be done to create change and foster acceptance among the old guard.
The event took the form of a screening of the short documentary Creative Spaces: Queer and Italian Canadian and a panel discussion about the past, present and future of queer Italian-Canadian culture in the city featuring Gaspare Borsellino (Gruppo Italiano Gay e Lesbico di Montreal), V Di Gregorio (CIAO – Canadian Italians Against Oppression), and Steve Galluccio (Mambo Italiano). I hosted the talk, which you can now watch below.
There was a lot of electricity in the room that night and many of us left wanting more events like this (I’m working on it, so stay tuned).
Given that June is Pride Month, Accenti Magazine asked if they could publish my essay, “Pictures and Parades,” about a series of photographs taken by me or my friends at Montreal’s Pride parade over the years (the first image I write about is below).
Back in the late 90s and early 2000s, I worked for Divers/Cité, the organization responsible for producing Montreal’s LGBTQ Pride Celebrations at the time (here’s a super clip of some of the interviews I did). Landing that job was life changing for me in the same way that Pride parades were also transformative. I used to buy upwards of a dozen rolls of film to capture the week(back when we didn’t have smart phones or digital cameras). Sifting through the physical copies over the years, they all tend to blend one into the other, but in some of the images there are the invisible moments of my then young queer life.
