Growing up lesbian or gay in Canada

Support for the family
Cherie got involved in PFLAG Canada's community education committee and later helped develop a diversity training curriculum that has been introduced to several local school boards throughout the Maritimes. She also facilitates support group meetings often attended by parents who've just learned their child is gay. What drives Cherie is best summed up by something her husband said last year when she took up the helm of PFLAG Canada: "If you can prevent just one family from experiencing a similar loss, it will all be worth it."

Times do change, but slowly, it seems, for a good portion of gay youth in Canada. While anecdotal evidence suggests that young lesbians and gays in large cities often – though certainly not always – have an easier time of it (plentiful support groups, visible gay communities, a general acceptance of diversity), huge gaps still remain when it comes to awareness, services, phone help lines and safe places to just be yourself for gay and lesbian youth in smaller cities, suburbs and rural areas. Ditto for resources for parents of such youth.

'Despair and loneliness'
I recall the despair and loneliness of growing up gay in rural Ontario in the mid-1970s. Looking back, it was a double-edged sword that I cottoned on to my true sexual identity so early in my teens. Talk about isolation! We didn’t have a "Will & Grace" on the tube back then. (Though I developed an intense obsession with John Boy from "The Waltons," only to turn my TV-time affections to Omar Sharif when the CBC aired "Lawrence of Arabia." And let’s not talk about "Starsky & Hutch," but I digress.)

With nowhere to turn, and no one to confide in, I cushioned myself from the
all-consuming pain of my daily nightmare – and white-knuckle fear of my dark secret being revealed – with escapist literature, hours of fanciful daydreaming and fistfuls of Mars bars. By the end of high school my tummy had ballooned in direct proportion to the burgeoning pain within.

Half-joking to one of my cousins some years ago, I described my adolescence and teenage years, in a really bad Marilyn Monroe voice, as The Seven-Year Itch that Became the Ten-Year Ache. In short, it was bleak, and it’s with a certain melancholy that I heard these same experiences echoed by many of the teens I interviewed for this story 30 years later.

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