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.