ADAM IS THIRTY, GAY, AND QUEER. He grew up in the Head of Chezzetcook, a town on the eastern shore of Nova Scotia. It’s a small Acadian community. Adam is Acadian but doesn’t speak French. He wishes, now, that he’d studied it at school.
The area where he grew up was gloomy, very foggy all the time. Adam always jokes that he didn’t see the sun for the first twenty years of his life. The gloominess informed his attitude of general malaise.
Adam went to a high school that served nearly the entire eastern shore. Some people bussed for an hour and a half to get to school. There weren’t a lot of opportunities for him to see his friends outside of school. There was no public transit. There were no sidewalks. There was one highway with streets off of it. It wasn’t a place where you could walk to your friend’s house or see people if you didn’t have a car.
Adam grew up in a two-bedroom bungalow off the highway. He was really into movies when he was a kid. He always brought the free magazines from the movies home and would cut out the full-page movie posters. His bedroom walls were covered in posters for terrible movies he hadn’t even seen. He also had the Kill Bill poster. He downloaded Kill Bill and watched it really tiny because he wasn’t supposed to be watching it. Kill Bill is what made him realize movies could be art, which seems silly to him now, but it was important at the time.
Because he wasn’t out when he was growing up, it wasn’t a terribly difficult time, but that was only because he wasn’t really being himself. He was just doing his homework, having his girlfriend over, doing what he thought he was supposed to do. Adam was a big people-pleaser, and he was anxious about what people would think of him.
There was a Gay–Straight Alliance at his school, but it appeared to be all allied people. Some of the people in the alliance did eventually come out, but at the time, there were no out people in his community at all. Adam had one friend in the GSA. They’re both out now, but she wasn’t then. In Adam’s memory, it was his friend who really championed and pushed the GSA.
Adam came out when he was nineteen and was basically already leaving Head of Chezzetcook. He lived at home for two years of university, because he was trying not to take out too many loans. But he started to feel like he was getting to a point where he was coming to terms with who he was, and he needed to figure out how to deal with that. He started to tell his friends. He was also tired of staying on people’s couches and wanted his own place.
Adam moved to Halifax with three friends, into a place on the corner of a main intersection in the city. It was not the nicest apartment, but it was his apartment, and he could do what he wanted. All he had at first was an air mattress and a record player—and one Antony and the Johnsons record. So he would just sit on his little air mattress, in his little basement room, with one small window, listening to “One Dove.”
Adam doesn’t go back home very often, because it feels a bit weird. When he came out to his parents at twenty-three or so it didn’t go well. His relationship with them is still basically where it was when that happened. They had two conversations about it, and then just stopped talking about it. On holidays, he goes home, and it’s weird because they pretend nothing’s happening. Siblings and cousins will have their partners there, and there’ll be gifts for partners. And it’s just, like, Adam sitting in the corner, feeling like a crazy person, because he has this entire, very rich life, but he can’t share that with his family, because it’s too painful to talk about. So he talks about trucks, or a new drill he got at work that’s really useful. It’s easier than saying, “I’m actually really devastated by the current state of our relationship.”
Adam has a partner in Halifax. It surprises him how little things changed with his family after he came out. They’re all still posturing. It’s hard because people are always asking him, “What are you doing? What’s going on?” And anything that’s interesting in Adam’s life is usually queer in some way, so he says, “Nothing.” But he’s actually making his first short film. He’s been doing stand-up comedy for two years. He’s written three plays. But it’s all gay, so he can’t really share it.
The people in his family who are Adam’s age are more supportive and comfortable to be around. His brother’s a good guy who’s really defended Adam to his family. And he always asks after Adam’s partner. Adam doesn’t see his cousins as much. Last January, Trixie Mattel, one of the winners of RuPaul’s Drag Race, came to Halifax to do a comedy show. Pride brought her in and asked Adam and a couple of other people to open for her. It was such a cool thing., and Adam was really excited about it. He didn’t realize until afterwards, but a couple of his cousins were at the show. He got a message from his cousin that was like, “I thought it was really cool!”
Adam thinks his is a crux generation because they grew up during a time of a lot of technological change. The older generations interacted with each other differently, whereas with Adam’s generation, a lot of relationships started online, but it was a lot of clunky beta-testing of garbage technology. And then this new generation of younger queer people have all this incredible advanced technology, and everything is available to them.
Adam thinks that the millennial queer generation was, in some ways, lucky to have a really singular experience. Even though it’s tricky. Because they get to talk about it and create art about it that says: “Our lives are really weird and here’s why.”
The other thing he thinks is weird is the way millennials were encouraged to go to university to gain future employment. Community college and trades weren’t presented to Adam as options because he was good at school. Adam looks around and it feels like his entire generation is just, like, wildly educated and talented and living in basements.
Until a few years ago, Adam was very involved in queer advocacy work in Nova Scotia, working with the Rainbow Action Project, and he’s talked with a lot of queer people. He really likes talking with elder queer people, just to hear what their experiences have been. He always tries to keep in mind that we lost a generation, because the AIDS crisis decimated the community and disconnected the generations of queer people.