I’m not up on my Aztec mythology, but one thing I’ve always remembered are the Centzon Totochtin, 400 rabbits that liked to drink and party and each represented a particular type of intoxication. They were the gods of good times, and their mom, Mayahuel, provided the booze: a thick, milky sap called pulque that was once one of the more popular alcohols in Mexico.
If you tasted it now, this would be hard to believe. It has the consistency of saliva and looks a bit like translucent milk. It bubbles a bit sometimes. It’s made from agave, largely the same kind of plant you get mezcal from, only the sap is uncooked (tequila comes from a specific species only—blue agave). In Mesoamerican times, it was enjoyed only by priests, the pregnant, the elderly and sacrifice victims in need of a pick-me-up. When the Spanish came around and messed things up a bit, everyone started drinking the stuff.
The first time my dad died, I was five. He was standing at the top of the staircase, proclaiming “the Chinaman kept giving me tequilas.” Then he fell flat on his face. The rest is haze: me in a room reading a Walt Disney activity book with “Kiki”, my Filipina nanny, while my Filipina mother, bawling, called the ambulance, and tall men in uniforms with stripes down their pant legs showed up to save the day.
My father didn’t actually die that night. In the end it was cancer, not directly alcohol-related, that brought him into the black. The years in-between are spotted with memories: him fighting with my mother on a night that she dumped out all of his expensive scotch; me, still a child, waking up to find out that he had driven our TransAm into a ditch. Our big alcoholic-and-son bonding moment was a night in Mexico. My mom took off after Dad refused to not drink x amounts of tequila. He ended up unable to walk, so I helped him back to the hotel room. It was Angela’s Ashes meets Wall Street, with Lionel Richie as the soundtrack. Luckily for all of us, Dad was a gentle drunk; our family didn’t have to deal with the trauma of physical abuse that so often haunts families with alcoholic parents.
The month before my First Holy Communion, my fellow Communicants and I did a little run-through in the basement of St. Rose parish with box blush wine and a bunch of unconsecrated wafers. The purpose of this was twofold: the eight-year-old lot of us were to get comfortable walking down a long church aisle cupping lit white candles (my friend Annie McCormick singed her hair anyway), and we were going to learn to take our first sips of wine without making a face.
“Real is taking care of your motherfucking family.”
-Kenny Duckworth Sr.
Kendrick Lamar’s Good Kid, m.A.A.d. city is one of the most remarkable albums of our time for a number of reasons. The music is groundbreaking, the lyrics are complex, and it appeals to all facets of what falls under the umbrella of hip-hop
But, in my mind, the most unheralded unique aspect of GKMC is one that’s most important to society as a whole. Through the voicemail skits that drive the narrative of the album, Kendrick introduces us to his parents. His real parents, not voice actors.
Perhaps this is the first truly intergenerational rap album.
Until now, the common trope has been the divide between what you listen to, and what your parents listen to. But rap is of the age where there are quite a number of mature adult fans with of-age children. This is probably best demonstrated in YouTube clips of a 2011, pre-GKMC Kendrick performing, when he takes a moment to tell the audience about how his parents raised him and then plays some of their favourite songs. His father’s? Tupac’s “Hail Mary”. His Mother’s? Snoop’s “Ain’t No Fun”, where Nate Dogg croons “When I met you last night baby, before you opened up your gap.”
Classic hip-hop records indeed, but a bit unconventional to enjoy with those who conceived you. But why is that? Why does our moral compass lead us to deny shared intergenerational interests when a few crass lyrics are involved? What if the Duckworth family is actually the prototype for a healthy enjoyment of hip-hop in the homestead?
Rahim Thawer works at a sexual health clinic in Toronto doing counseling with gay and bi men. He also works at an AIDS service organization doing bathhouse counseling. On July 1, he’ll be with Toronto’s Ismaili queers as they march in their first ever solo Pride contingent. Here, he talks with Denise Balkissoon about fetishes, racialization, HIV and, of course, The Ass.
DB:Why do south Asians need their own HIV prevention campaigns?
RT: A lot of people think that HIV/AIDS is still a gay white man’s illness, but in Toronto the rates are growing among women, including racialized women. What ethno-specific HIV organizations try to think about is, how can we reach our very unique communities? We’re working very strategically to do outreach in our cultural and religious communities. As great as some of the more mainstream organizations are, I just don’t think they have the capacity to tap into the important cultural nuances.
So this ad is a new campaign by The Alliance for South Asian AIDS Prevention (ASAAP) called “Protect Your Love.” That’s me in the train scene, but initially I was hesitant to participate. I thought it might be too reserved. I didn’t know what kind of messages it was sending out, whether it was trying to promote monogamy, or sell a particular version of same-sex love, etc. But, you know, it’s not. And it has some really important cultural nuances that can reach far and wide.
I think that racialized and historically marginalized people putting out their own messaging and doing outreach in their own communities is probably the most effective approach. It’s what community development really is.
DB: Do you meet very many non-white guys in your counselling practice who aren’t out, or don’t consider themselves “gay”? Who are they?
RT: Short answer, yes. But it’s important to recognize that it’s not only racialized men who aren’t out and perhaps married to women or leading otherwise “straight lives.” Our tendency to over-culturalize the phenomenon exposes our subtle racism and negative assumptions about these men.
Having said that, for the guys whom I have had conversations with that are non-white, they often talk about a range of things, from having fallen in love with their current (female) partners to the importance and value of having a family, to fulfilling family duty. Many speak about not having the option to “come out” at a younger age, or not ever considering same-sex attraction as a long-term relationship possibility.
The baby dykes on the dance floor
Wanna know How long have you two been together?
Just met today, I tell them
But they can’t hear over the thrum
Of music, bodies, lust
Three hours, I yell
And cast a glance at my date
We share a middle-aged smirk
But there is approval
In their mock-matron eyes
And they lean in to say:
We’re having a big gay marriage!
With an open bar!
A roast beef dinner!
Been there, done that.
My date mutters in my ear Me too, I whisper
I close my eyes and remember
That ours was a commitment ceremony
She and I weren’t legal back then
I wore my mother’s bridal gagra choli
And my aunties gave blessings with
Tin-foiled coconuts circling my head
I open my eyes to see
My handsome butch date
Watching me. You OK?
I nod, pull her in closer
Her hand reaches up my skirt
I suck salt off her neck
Later, she drives me to her place
I stay two hours
Before kissing her goodbye
Farzana Doctor’s second novel Six Metres of Pavement won the 2012 Lambda Literary Award and was named as one of NOW Magazine’s Top Ten Books of 2011. She will be reading at Proud Voices on June 30th at 5pm.
Esther Jun as Janet and Paul Sun-Hyung Lee as her father, Mr. Kim
Every second-gen* daughter of a workaholic immigrant father should go see Kim’s Convenience. Mr. Kim may be Korean, not Trinidadian, and he’s a shopowner in Regent Park, not an electrician-turned-politician in Scarborough, but I’m pretty sure he got his schtick from my dad. Item A: fatherly concern wrapped up in insults. Guaranteed my dad has come out with just what Mr. Kim asks Janet: “Why not do something ‘real’ and make your your low-earning, arty job a ‘hobby’? What? Why are you mad now?” Item B: Brutal, bone-cutting arguments about who owes who what, in terms of money, time and respect in this new land where none of the traditional rules apply. Item C: Oceans of intense love tussling for shelf space with old-school notions of masculinity, culture and honour.
Every member of the Kim’s cast did a fantastic job breathing real personalities into the classic immigrant archetypes that we think we understand, but probably haven’t though enough about. As a note-perfect Eau de Convenience Store wafted from the stage, Mr. and Mrs. Kim conversed in Korean, yet the audience kind of knew what they were saying. So real, and so brilliant.
I can’t say if Kim’s Convenience is actually Toronto’s play of the year because I am a boor who never goes to plays. But in this one, I saw myself, and I saw my city, not just its hardworking past, but its brave, mongrel future.
Kim’s Convenience is on now at the Young Centre in the Distillery. It’s almost sold out, but there are still tickets left in mid-June. Grab ‘em, now.
*Or maybe I mean first-gen? Copy editors and genealogists, help me out here.
That I grew up Roman Catholic strikes me as absurd. I am an obvious Chinese woman whose parents were born and raised in a marginalized Chinese community in Calcutta, India (now, Kolkata). Aren’t Catholics supposed to be Italian grandmas with wooden crosses in their kitchens? Or pale Irish schoolchildren lining up nervously outside church? I can’t tell if other people think my Catholic roots are strange too and they’re just being polite. Maybe the fact that seven in 10 Canadians identify as Roman Catholic or Protestant means that an Asian person claiming Christianity in multi-everything Toronto is simply ordinary.
For a long time it felt extremely ordinary to me. I was born in Toronto, attended two Catholic elementary schools in North York, and spent four years at an infamous all-girls Catholic high school in Willowdale: St. Joseph’s Morrow Park, more affectionately known as “St. Ho’s.” (Compared with what I later heard public students did in junior high, the majority of us in our hiked-up kilts were far from sexually obsessed hos.) Continue reading →
Here we have some appropriated photos of 10 religious buildings in Toronto that I have been to. Except this first one, I just think it looks cool.
I’ve never actually been to a Hindu temple in Toronto, although my father was born Hindu. If I had to pick one, it would be the BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Mandir in Etobicoke. Look at it!
Before the Toronto And Region Islamic Congregation mosque went up at Jane St. and the 401 in 1991, the prayers used to be in schools, rec centres, and my uncle’s basement.
This is St. Paul’s Basilica, the oldest Catholic church in Toronto. It’s a stand-in for a Catholic church my father can’t remember the name of, where we went to a really, really, really long wedding. Afterward everyone shook hands and said “Peace Be Unto You.” I didn’t know this was going to happen and also I am clueless so I said “Pleased to Meet You.” Continue reading →
Being both Muslim and queer always seemed like mutually exclusive identities to me. The ideological clash meant I simply could not be both. This wasn’t a satisfying way of looking at the world – I didn’t think I should have to repent for being a certain way. I began asking some big questions in high school and then really started to assert my own identity after moving away to university – somehow the academic space away from my family just allowed for it. It was a scary time of grappling with mixed messages and internalized fear and stigma.
By Chantal Braganza
