Gay in the Suburbs

Gay in the Sub­urbs
By Adam Cristo­bal

This arti­cle appears in full in Sad Mag issue 7/8.

Every­one knows a Kurt Hum­mel story, a heart-felt or humor­ous story akin to that of Glee’s coiffed coun­tertenor. The sub­ur­ban ado­les­cent gay male is now cliché, and his tale a quin­tes­sen­tial part of high-school chron­i­cles. Such a tale’s tropes have been well estab­lished: It is usu­ally told as a tragic por­trait of an out­cast pro­tag­o­nist, brought to a dra­matic cli­max of homo­pho­bic con­flict, and pep­pered with awk­ward quips about some locker-room mis­un­der­stand­ing between said pro­tag­o­nist and some sul­try class­mate man­i­fest from hor­mon­ally charged pubes­cent dreams.You know that story, or at least a vari­ant of it.

But this—this is not that story. It is one thing for queer youth to grow up in the sub­urbs, but it is entirely another thing when LGBT fam­i­lies set­tle in the sub­urbs. Down­town Van­cou­ver and San Fran­cisco form two ends of one big West Coast rain­bow, but Vancouver’s vibrant LGBT com­mu­nity is vir­tu­ally nonex­is­tent in our city’s sub­urbs. Can LGBT fam­i­lies set­tle out­side the down­town core, in areas where the den­sity of queer indi­vid­u­als ebbs with the den­sity of other human beings? Is the rainbow-coloured picket fence pos­si­ble, and if it is, what are its impli­ca­tions for the LGBT com­mu­nity at large?

Three years ago, Nathan Pachal and Robert Bit­tner tied the knot in Lan­g­ley and have lived there ever since. Both hus­bands are in their late twen­ties, but nei­ther has lived in Van­cou­ver proper. Nathan works as a broad­cast tech­ni­cian; Robert is a Mas­ters can­di­date at the UBC Depart­ment of Eng­lish. The lat­ter com­mutes to cam­pus to study queer young-adult lit­er­a­ture. “Lan­g­ley doesn’t really have a dis­tinct LGBT com­mu­nity,” he tells me.…

Con­tinue read­ing in Sad Mag issue 7/8.

Photo: Laura Nguyen.