I Still Hate New Year's Day

Watching as teenage Simon masturbates to completion while hidden away in the upper branches of a large tree on his family's dairy farm in the opening scene of Quebecois filmmaker Guy Édoin's Marécages (2011) makes my heart race with familiarity. I reflect melancholically on this vignette I know all too well, followed by the harsh depictions of small town life: the economic precarity, unforgiving manual labor, and a burgeoning queer sexual desire with few places to go—all told in a way that only a person who lived it could. The stereotypes of rurality and queerness, best exemplified in Montréal filmmaker Xavier Dolan's reprise of Tom à la ferme (2013) where viewers are treated to depictions of conversely idyllic and grotesquely violent queer country life, are conspicuously absent in Édoin's film. I watched Marécages shortly after I moved to Montréal to begin a PhD at twenty-eight, living in a city for the first time in my life. I was depressed, questioning my life decisions, feeling suffocated between the demands of grad school and a disastrous end to a long-term relationship, as well as adapting to the callousness and anonymity of big city life. Yet what became increasingly clear over the coming years was that my desperate search for a connection to queer history and representations of queer life that reflected my own, only led me to urban enclaves and narratives that were deeply unrelatable.

I resented having to leave Maine to pursue the kind of education I wanted. I resented that all queer history inevitably led me to New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, or some other major urban center in the United States far from home. 2010's "It Gets Better" was the apotheosis of the urban-centric narratives I grew up with—just get thee to the city and everything will be better, excise your past. I had so few opportunities to learn about where I came from, local nonurban queer histories, while the mythology of Stonewall always loomed in the background as the most significant historical referent to my own queer life. So in search of a queer past I made the pilgrimage from central Maine to New York City a few times. All I found was a decidedly unremarkable bar and a small triangle-shaped park with an equally unremarkable set of statues to mark a past I yearned to be connected to, but mostly felt alienated from.

Gay Pride, the annual celebration of the Stonewall Riots turned orgy of pink consumerism and virtue signaling opportunity for straight politicians and "allies" alike, is sometimes colloquially referred to as gay Christmas but functions more like gay New Year's—a party with no politics marking another year passed. The ritual has been exported globally through U.S. cultural imperialism and international NGO-ification of nascent queer and trans groups outside the so-called West. Indeed, it's baffling that hosting gay pride in the spirit of Stonewall and gay marriage legislation are now the litmus test of modernity in places where neither translate as useful tools for liberation and self-determination of sexual minorities. I am indebted to Dennis Altman's early work outlining the globalization of the Western epistemologies and definitions inherent to gay rights discourse, but I see similar opportunities to interrogate how queer urban epistemologies envelope and render invisible the possibilities of nonurban queer life.¹ The nonurban queer is simply an urban queer-in-waiting, waiting to leave what can only be conceived of as violent, backward, and small-minded places.

You would be hard pressed to find much record of the time the Lesbian Avengers came to my hometown from New York City in 1993 to "help" with a sexual orientation-inclusive nondiscrimination referendum only to be literally locked in a room by local dykes who found their condescending urban arrogance unpalatable and damaging to the local organizing efforts. There's no scholarship, aside from my own, on the ten sexual orientation-inclusive nondiscrimination referenda in Maine between 1992 and 2005.² No one marks the anniversary of Scott...