Growing up lesbian or gay in Canada

This story was originally titled "Life on the Outside" in the November 2007 issue. Subscribe to Canadian Living today and never miss an issue!

Mark Tewksbury recalls the June afternoon in the early 1980s that he sauntered down the hallway to his locker at St. Cyril Junior High School in Calgary and instinctively knew something was not right: his locker wasn't shut the way he'd left it. He felt sick the second he opened the door. The word fag, scrawled in large black pen across one of his binders, leapt out at him. "One little word, but one that was loaded with enough hate that it brought my entire world tumbling down," says the guy who would go on to make Canada proud when he brought home a gold medal in swimming at the Barcelona Olympics in 1992.

Sadly, some of the abhorrence that gripped the frightened Grade 8 student was self-directed. He would later write in his candid autobiography, Inside Out: Straight Talk from a Gay Jock: "I hated myself so much in that moment. I wished I could be different than this. I was tired of being alone. I was tired of feeling like a freak. A fag. The easiest target in school."

Awareness and education
Fast-forward 25 years and Mark, recipient of the 2007 Fight Against Homophobia Award (Prix Lutte Contre L'Homophobie) by the rights group Fondation Émergence, has spent much of his time and energy raising awareness and educating teachers, students, parents and business folks about same-sex issues so that today’s lesbian and gay youth don't experience such hate, and if they do, that they're not left to struggle alone.

Weekdays frequently find Cherie MacLeod in various New Brunswick schools talking to students about a rainbow of diversity issues, including what it’s like to be gay, though she herself is not. What has landed Cherie in these Maritime classrooms is her resolve to stamp out homophobia, which she knows, when left unchecked, can ruin families and lives. She watched one of her relatives experience the worst form of rejection for being gay: rejection from his own family. Though Cherie and her parents accepted the young man's sexuality, his own parents did not. He died of cancer in 2004 without any reconciliation with his mother and father.

'The huge need for education around gay issues'
"It wasn’t just homophobia," says Cherie, who was by then married with two children and living in Moncton, N.B. "It was ignorance." In her grief, Cherie turned to the local chapter of PFLAG Canada, the support group formerly known as Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays. She is now the executive director of the organization, which has 70 chapters across Canada. "It was an intense period of grieving, and I found PFLAG Canada to be a very supportive place to deal with my sadness, but also some of my anger. I quickly became aware of the huge need for education around gay issues and diversity in general."

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