PREFACE

OR, DONNING SOME
GAY APPAREL

 

 

This book you’re holding—be it physically or as ones and zeros via your device of choice—came about out of an accidental Christmas holiday tradition. If you’ve read any of my other holiday stories, especially “Handmade Holidays,” it won’t surprise you to learn I’ve long approached Christmas with a mix of trepidation, frustration, exhaustion, and the grim resolve to make it into something good.

That resolve was tested the first year I had a Christmas tree. I’d bought the floor model from the Christmas store in the mall where I’d worked Christmas Eve at the bookstore. I’d taken the tree home, set it up, and then realized I’d made a particularly foolish mistake.

I had no ornaments.

By coincidence, a friend gave me a cross-stitched ornament that year inside the Christmas card she sent, and I hung it on the tree alongside a bunch of candy canes, and while the following year I did buy some plain ornaments, I also received another ornament as a gift from a different friend. I added ornaments to my tree as memories of the year, and ornament by ornament—some years more than one—my tree turned into a reminder of how far I’d come.

Instead of that first year, where it was a rather stark reminder I was flying pretty much solo and had very little to work with, decorating the tree these days has become my favourite part of the holiday season, because as my husband and I pull out ornament after ornament, we relive our vacations, laugh about funny moments, sniffle over people (or pets) no longer with us, and thereafter spend a great deal of our holiday season looking at our tree and seeing the wonderful life we’ve made for ourselves.

And then, inevitably, someone turns on Christmas music or a holiday classic movie, and I die a little inside.

Okay, that’s overstating. A bit.

In my defence, having worked retail for decades and being forced to listen to “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” and all the other holiday songs from mid-November onward, I think it’s quite fair that I loathe the return of the rotation of holiday noise. Someone give that chipmunk his goddamned hula-hoop and put me out of my misery, would you?

More than that, though, it’s all so damned heteronormative. The holiday ads, the holiday songs, the holiday movies. If we queer people do exist, we’re the sassy elf-like friend who cheers on the clueless heroine about to bump into a lumberjack in some small town and fall madly in love with him and give up an amazing career she worked her ass off to achieve, all so she can help him save his family Christmas tree farm.

(Okay, I admit it. I watch these movies like I mainline candy canes, but I wish we had the same volume of sugar-coated holiday movies for queer people. I’m so glad they’re starting to exist, but more please. They’re not immortal Scotsmen. There can be more than one.)

The music, though? The classic stories? Oof. Take the way Rudolph is so freaking ill-treated by everyone else right up until he becomes useful. It just makes me cranky, and I was having a conversation with some queer friends about exactly that ten years ago when inspiration struck. Over the space of a few evenings, I wrote “Dolph.” A queer take on a holiday tale.

Mostly as an amusement, I put it up on my blog. To my surprise, quite a few people really liked it.

A year later, as my social media reminded me I’d written “Dolph” the year before, I got it into my head to do it again, and that year “Frost” happened. Then “Reflection” the year after that. And so on. I got asked quite a bit if I’d considered releasing “Dolph”—some people printed the story out and told me they re-read it every year, even—and then “Frost” got picked up for a year’s best anthology, which was pretty awesome. Continue this accidental tradition year after year, each year a new story on my blog, including one bonus story from about five years ago, when I was asked to take part in a publisher event, and, well, here we are. Ten years later, eleven stories, with “Folly” brand new for this collection.

It’s been a tradition of mine for a decade now to don this particularly kind of gay apparel on holiday cheer which hasn’t often included queerness, and I’m happy to be able to finally share it this way. I hope you enjoy it. Also, I must take a moment to acknowledge two pieces of public domain holiday cheer: “The Christmas Hirelings” by Mary Elizabeth Braddon and “The Romance of a Christmas Card” by Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin. Excerpts of the former are used in “The Doors of Penlyon” and excerpts of the latter—and the poems inside the titular cards in question—are used in “Not the Marrying Kind.” Those are both lovely stories and I suggest you check them out, but given their time and place, they weren’t exactly donning any gay apparel of their own.

Oh, and one final thing. One of the stories in this collection, “Most of ’81,” takes place in 1981, in Toronto. For those outside of Canada, it’s important to note that year a massive police raid on bathhouses called “Operation Soap” happened, kicking off major protests and leading to what’s often called “Toronto’s Stonewall” and then the end of the year levelled a particularly rough kick at the throats of queer people when the Ontario Legislature voted against including sexuality in the human rights code. And, of course, the end of 1981 was also when news of the “Gay Cancer” in New York was starting to be heard elsewhere. This is why the hero of that particular Christmas is retreating into a solo holiday as the story opens.

Merry Christmas. Or Bah Humbug.

I’m partial to either.

 

’NATHAN BURGOINE,

NOVEMBER 2024