Author: Vincent Mousseau

  • Lock Nº 1

    Lock Nº 1

    September 16th. Overcast. I woke up at around three thirty in the morning, into the kind of night that still has an old apartment folded inside it, a door that used to slam a particular way. I sighed, got up, and made the bed. For once I didn’t run the usual math, didn’t lie there ashamed of being awake or trying to force my way back under. First, coffee. Then my face in the sink, water first, then quiet. It felt less like insomnia and more like being told something I finally had the good sense to listen to.

    I left the house around six and walked slowly through the streets of Vieux-Montréal, almost no one else out, down toward the Vieux-Port. Right where the canal drops into the lock, the ground turns to wet grass on a short slope, still slick from last night’s rain, and I went down it carefully to sit at the edge. The water’s loud where it falls. Across it, the old grain silos stand hollowed out and covered in graffiti, most of their windows long gone. A couple of people pass with their dogs, moving at the same half-asleep pace I am. Past the silos, the Tower of the Port of Montreal, and further east, the Jacques-Cartier Bridge.

    Even at this hour you can see what the city’s been doing to itself all month. Vinyl banners and informational placards for the cycling championships, zip-tied to every fence between here and downtown, that plasticky smell already lifting off them in the morning air. Avenue du Parc has been closed since the fifth for a stadium they’re building to hold thousands of people, on a street I used to just walk down to visit a friend. It all comes down by October 4th. Someone’s already decided the exact day all of this chaos stops.

    My door never told me that. It just stopped, the way it stopped, and I spent longer than I’d like to admit doing arithmetic on when it might happen again.

    Every ten years or so my body announces it’s time to go. The first two times I didn’t argue with it—I just left, fast, already knowing where I was headed before I’d finished packing. This time is the first time I’ve had an actual date instead of just an itch. Not a guess about when the feeling might resolve, an answer: the end of this year. A date I can walk toward instead of a feeling I have to keep re-litigating at four in the morning: the same certainty Avenue du Parc has right now, its own.

    I didn’t do the old arithmetic this morning, knowing exactly when normalcy will return. Instead, I made coffee and let the not-sleeping be information instead of a verdict, the same way I’ve finally let the decision itself be a fact instead of a question I keep reopening.

    It’s twenty past seven now, the sky finally clearing. I’m sitting at the edge of the lock, taking a sip of my now lukewarm coffee, watching the water keep doing exactly what it’s always done here, on no one’s schedule but its own, the same as it will after October 4th, the same as it will after December.

  • Controlled Edges

    Controlled Edges

    Most of the water I return to has some kind of edge built around it. The fenced-off harbour path. The Grand Quai. Ponds engineered to look wild. Canals with their concrete banks doing the work water used to do on its own.

    The VM/S Hercules sits across from Habitat 67 and doesn’t move. It has a name, once you squint for it. It was built in 1962 in Sorel, sheerlegs, an A-frame made for lifting, and it travelled this river for most of its working life doing exactly that. Now it stays mostly in the Old Port and is called on less. Not retired, exactly. Something closer to held. Government property, docked in plain sight.

    A few feet from where I sit, a sign. No swimming. No fishing. Someone decided what this water is for, on my behalf, before I arrived.

    I exist in the wake. The totalizing wake. There is no space for breath here, only movement — the cars, the bus, the gulls lifting and landing, everything but this one barge in constant motion around me. I come to the water for stillness and mostly find its opposite, except for the one thing here that isn’t allowed to move either.

    Some mornings that’s enough. Watching what refuses to move, until I can, too.

    The other morning, I learned the edge extends past the water.

    I was smoking outside the Canadian Centre for Architecture, headphones on, not paying much attention. A security guard told me I couldn’t smoke there. Fine, I said. I tapped the cherry off against the picnic table and let it fall into the grass, and she started yelling. Destroying property. Making a mess. Burning things. I had done none of those things, but she kept going.

    A colleague of hers stepped outside while this was happening. White. Vaping, a few feet away, right in her face, unbothered. I looked at her, then at him, and said there was only one difference between what he was doing and what I’d just done, and I’d let them both spot it.

    Same season, an election just starting: the Parti Québécois blaming immigration for overcrowded schools. Even the children of immigrants counted as immigrants, counted as a problem still to be addressed. A guard and a governing party, working the same instinct at two different scales.

    Montréal is the city I have loved most in this country. I want to say that plainly, without qualifying it into something smaller. Kiki balls on a Saturday I can still feel in my chest. My book club, the one night a month I don’t have to explain myself to anyone in the room. I have wanted to put down roots here, to build, to let this place keep doing what it has done to me, which is genuinely a kind of enlargement. And still: it will not be home, because it will not let itself be home. I dedicated a great deal of who I am to understanding this place, and the place cannot fully receive that back. I knew this before I let myself know it, at the start of a PhD that is, in every sense, about here.

    Toronto isn’t a memory I’m working through. It’s a door standing open right now. Things are lining up that would bring me there within the next months or years. I left that city once, on purpose, and I’m having to reckon with what it means to go back to a place I already chose to leave. The cost of living is similar to here. What I’d be paying for instead is not having to carry this particular weight in my body every day. I don’t know if that’s a fair trade or the only trade available to me. A whole new person, maybe. And back. I don’t know.

    I have started, without quite deciding to, planning routes to water there the way I do here. Looking at neighbourhoods. Noticing which of my habits, the long walks, the reflecting, the writing by whatever edge I can find, are portable and which only work on this particular shore.

    The Hercules doesn’t move. The lapping here returns eventually to the Atlantic. So does the water off Lake Ontario. This body, made of water. Near these bodies of water, however they’ve been fenced, however they’ve decided what I’m allowed to take from them.

  • The Pull

    The Pull

    Punamu’kwati’jk, five o’clock, watching the fog clear off Kjipuktuk’s skyline across the water. Cranes over the harbour, more of them than I remember, and I lose count past fifteen. I’m on a half log, cut flat like a bench, right against the rocks, right against the ocean.

    The fog had gotten on the ferry with me on the way over, climbing aboard slow the way it does, moving through everyone on deck like weather moving through a place that expects it. Then the foghorn went off into the city and for a second I didn’t know where I was. I watched the Angus L. Macdonald Bridge disappear into it, becoming everywhere and nowhere at once. Perched on this log, right at the lip of the ocean, something held me still that doesn’t usually hold still. Walking in Tiohtià:ke, this same pull always points me east. Out of the city, toward leaving. Here it just kept me in place.

    The fog found me again the next day, on a bus.

    Halifax to Charlottetown, the Maritime Bus, cheaper than I expected and lower-tech too. A gas station in Amherst with three-lettered parking spots standing in for what I’d pictured as a real transfer terminal. I watched the soil change from brown to red as we got close to the Confederation Bridge, and then we crossed it. On a bus you sit high enough to see the water on both sides, which you can’t from a car, and the water was fogged in the same way the harbour had been, visible for two or three metres and then just gone. Another version of the same disappearing.

    Charlottetown gave me both of the things this region seems to hold at once, sometimes in the same hour. A Black server at the hotel restaurant, loud and warm with us over a meal, doing what our communities do when we meet in rooms like that. And, walking around later trying to find somewhere to eat, being gawked at, then followed through a Shoppers Drug Mart by a security guard I eventually had to confront. I’m not about to steal anything, I told him. I’m just Black. He kept following me anyway, and I thought about what it costs the Black folks I’ve met who live there—live this—full time, every day.

    The next morning, Broadway and I gave our workshop.

    Two hours on the history and structure of ballroom, then a voguing class. One attendee had come back specifically because they’d missed the first session we gave in February. They’d been practising in between. Watching them vogue, having clearly kept the thread going on their own, I understood something I already believed but hadn’t felt this concretely: that person is probably headed to Halifax eventually, once they’re out of school there, and if they are, we need a scene ready to receive them when they arrive.

    That’s the thought that kept unspooling into our next day of workshops in Dieppe. I found out recently that a friend’s organization in Halifax is funnelling nonprofit money, thousands of dollars, directly toward building a ballroom scene. Deliberately outside any institutional structure, using the institution against itself. It’s exactly the kind of structural intervention I want to be doing. Standing in Place 1604 the morning after, in front of Dieppe’s city hall on Emancipation Day, waiting to screen Paris Is Burning before Broadway’s vogue class, I caught myself already halfway into a thought about a postdoc, and had to correct it mid-sentence. Not here, I thought. Not this bench, not this plaza. Somewhere in Atlantic Canada, doing this work with Black queer communities in some structural capacity, maybe.

    The logic underneath it is one I already teach: build for the one person who otherwise has no access, and you build structures that lift everyone. I’ve been saying that for years about ballroom. It hadn’t occurred to me until this trip that it might also be the logic for a decision about where I live.

    The water held me still here in a way it doesn’t at home. The same fog that disoriented me on a ferry found me again on a bus, and neither time did it feel like a warning. A security guard in Charlottetown made a different fact legible to my body, one no amount of thinking about postdocs will undo. Both are true about the same place at the same time, and I haven’t found the framework yet that holds them without one cancelling the other out.

  • Circuit

    Circuit

    July 24th. Mid-afternoon, mostly cloudy. I move from the harbour up to Barrington. I hang a right on Spring Garden and keep walking until I reach Dal. Back down University Avenue instead this time before returning to the water again. I didn’t decide to do any of that. I was halfway through before I clocked that I’d walked my normal cycle, the exact circuit from two years ago, the one I was on the first time I started thinking about fugitive cartography. Same season, even. It felt like I was trying to catch up on what I’d missed. Near Kuowaqe’jk, colonially called Citadel Hill, Parks Canada has put up new panels. The polished, informational signs tell some story about the place at the corner of Brunswick and Sackville. The road beside them is still built like pedestrians are an afterthought. Nobody’s touched that.

    I ran into my friend Sara at Levantic Café the next morning, a Syrian-owned café near where I’m staying, in a neighbourhood that’s clearly expanding around it. We started the PhD at the same time. She had a kid, moved a few streets away from here, and I barely knew either thing until she told me over coffee. Fifteen minutes and she’s building an entire life. She used to live a few blocks from where I used to walk laps. Life goes on.

    July 25th was mostly sunny and warm. I’m in Kjipuktuk for the week: I was hired to give a workshop to a handful of young people starting to build a ballroom scene in this city. We talked about history, the structure of categories, how to create something out of nothing and have it mean everything to those who need it. Small group, sharp group, and they loved it. Watching them start to take the shape of it into their own hands, I felt honoured in a way I don’t have a better word for. To contribute to the making of a space like ballroom, in a city with a Black culture this deep, is not a small thing to be handed.

    Early for a community barbecue, my friend Riley and I tried to make our way down to Africville. As usual, the roads didn’t cooperate: a U-turn in an industrial parking lot, streets that felt like you shouldn’t be driving on them at all. How hard it is to get there is its own statement. By the time we got close it turned out to be the weekend of the annual Africville reunion: the community’s time with itself. Beautiful, and also none of my business. We returned the way we came.

    The barbecue happens every year, the hosts’ own tradition: Black queer and trans people and the folks who love them, gathered to eat, drop out of the rest of the world for an afternoon, build something across generations. I ended up there more or less by accident this time, and it turned out my entire doctoral committee was in the same backyard. I’d first come to this barbecue in 2022, two months before I’d started the PhD, with an ex. That’s also where I met the person who’d later become my supervisor, before he was anyone in particular to me, and the rest of my committee was there that same day too, before any of them were part of my life in that way. Everyone I’d eventually need had been surrounding me from the start. What I didn’t have yet was the structure to receive it, so I had to leave Kjipuktuk and come back changed enough to sit in that same backyard and actually take it in. Four years on, I’m relating to these folks more as peers now than as people I was hoping to be good enough for, which made what they told me land differently: the work is innovative, they needed me to know that, and it read less like approval from mentors than recognition between co-conspirators. I joked about defending on the spot. Nobody laughed like it was only a joke. I felt recognized and validated and seen, and I’m not going to be cute about how good that was.

    My supervisor and I talked in person there too, which sometimes feels like the only way to get past the hedging that comes over email. The defence will take place in late August, probably, possibly even later. Which means cancelling my graduation request for the second time and waiting again on a date that isn’t mine to set. The thing itself is handed in. From here it belongs to schedules and readers and rooms I won’t be in. There’s real relief in that anyway, one I didn’t expect. I can hold my lease in Tiohtià:ke through December, keep the pace of life I’ve built there a while longer instead of dismantling it on someone else’s calendar. A job that I was hoping to apply for is now off the table, since it wanted the dissertation defended by mid-August. Everything else is still moving, just with a bit more certainty now.

    I left the barbecue and walked the length of the peninsula, a joint going, the sun doing that last low thing it does before it actually sets. No real reason to walk that far except that my legs wanted it and I let them have it. Down Connaught, the evening still warm enough that I didn’t need to pull the Land Back hoodie out of my backpack. A left down Edgewood, past École Saint Catherine’s Elementary, the rainbow someone painted across its whole face still bright even in the fading light, Bienvenue and Pjila’si over the door, half-swallowed by grass and shrubs nobody’s cut back. Then a right down Oxford, and a detour I didn’t plan down Allan, to pass the last building I lived in in Kjipuktuk, with a relationship that was as bad as they get while I was in it. My body knew the block before I did. Everything went tight, thirty seconds ahead of my understanding why, and I let myself feel it the whole way past the door instead of speeding up, let it sit in my chest for the length of the building and past the end of the fence before it let go on its own. Down Welsford, following the desire lines across the Commons, dusk properly settling in now, and I was back on the circuit I’d started the trip on, closed without my ever deciding to close it.

    I sent a friend a voice note that night saying I felt great, and I did. I also have decisions to make about where I go and what I build and who I build it with, and none of the walking answered a single one of them.

  • Every Ten Years

    Every Ten Years

    July 8. Sunny. I pass under the Chinatown gate a little after seven, heading down Saint-Laurent toward the water. This is one of a few routes I take most mornings, meandering through the Quartier des Spectacles some days, down along René-Lévesque others, but they tend to end the same way, at the river.

    I couldn’t sleep, which is why I’ve been up since six thirty or so. The sun was barely up. Construction vehicles made their slow way down the cobblestones on Sainte-Catherine, and crews were taking down the stages from the jazz festival and the Francos, packing up the tents that covered the VIP areas, loading the barricades noisily onto a flatbed truck. On a festival night at nine, the whole city presses into that square and the stages look like they were always meant to be there. This morning they were planks and cable, and the people touching them were thinking about their shift, their coffee, the hour. The square was built to be watched. Nobody was watching it under this morning light, and it went about its other life.

    There is something about being in a space at a moment when its occupation isn’t its principal concern. The streets get louder around this time. People hurry through the métro stations toward work or school. I was the only one wandering, and I was wandering because last night the framed picture on the wall beside my bed flew off the wall when I adjusted the curtains. I was tired. I opened them without much attention and the frame came down and broke. This happened in the same weeks I’d been telling people my dissertation is finished. I handed it in at the beginning of June. It’s out of my hands. It’s also waiting for a defence date, and a position I want to apply for needs that defence done by mid-August. I no longer know if that’s possible. Finished is a word I have been using the way the festivals use their stages. It holds the square together for the night. In the morning there are planks.

    I keep thinking about the ball last week. If a stage can come down overnight because a festival ends, a community can be taken apart just as fast by a policy that decides who gets to stay. Some people I love from the scene here were forced back to Europe, largely because of what immigration policy in this province has become. They were hired to come back for a week, to give workshops, to be celebrated. The room was love and joy and it was exactly what I needed. What stays with me is the shape of it. A community looked at an absence that policy had made and decided it wouldn’t stand, at least for a short time. People coordinated resources and made calls and booked flights so that a thing that’d been taken apart could be put back together in front of everyone. I’ve watched this city dismantle a lot. I’d forgotten how deliberately it can also rebuild.

    Ten years ago I moved here from Ottawa. Ten years before that I left home at fifteen, out of a childhood I’ll leave folded for now, except to say that leaving was how I survived it. Now I am 36, and the itch has been building for over a year, stretched across my body and my writing both, the same restlessness surfacing in what I make as much as in what I feel. For the past year I have been telling myself the story that the city is drawing something out of me and the drawing points toward departure. But I’ve started to notice the arithmetic. Every ten years or so my body announces that it is time to go, and every ten years I have believed the announcement was about the place. Leaving has always been my first answer, formed long before any of the questions I have since applied it to. It’s possible that safety lives in this city. It’s possible that Tiohtià:ke holds what I’ve been looking for, and that the itch is an old reflex arriving on time. If I leave, I want it to be because something specific needs to be better somewhere else. I want departure to be a decision I make with my whole attention, the opposite of how I opened the curtains.

    So I keep going past the gate, down to the edge, where I have been taking my coffee most mornings. I sit in the shade with a book or my laptop and look out over Habitat 67, watch the river move in its slow waves against the docks, hear the hulls knock against them, the water carrying a mineral cold up off its surface even in July. See the Tower of the Port of Montréal on the far side. The river keeps its own schedule. It was moving before the festival infrastructure went up and it will be moving after, and it was moving before me, and my people crossed water I will never fully account for. This is where I go back to the ancestors, the ones the trade took, the ones the water carried and didn’t carry back. When I sit there long enough, the question of leaving gets quieter. The water makes the question wait, the way the square waits under morning light for whatever it’ll become next.

    I don’t know what to do with all of this yet. I know there’s value in it. I know I’m not finished, and for once I’m saying that word carefully.

  • Trophies

    Trophies

    Eight-thirty and I’ve been awake since six. The body has been doing this since I sent the dissertation in: waking itself before I decide to wake, some obscure bodily alarm I didn’t set going off in the dark. I ended up at a coffee shop I’d never tried before–less by choice and moreso because all my usual spots are all still closed–an oat milk moka slowly going cold in my hand. I don’t fully know why I came to sit here, under this ash tree at the edge of the Lachine Canal, except that the body has been leading and the mind has been following.

    The bike path is busy even now, this early. Commuters, runners, a construction worker setting out cones thirty meters from where I’m sitting. Birds are picking crumbs off the stone edge of the canal, and I can see an RTL bus from Longueuil crossing the Mill Street bridge above my right shoulder, moving through without stopping.

    The story broke a few days ago: officers from Station 39 in Montréal-Nord had been stopping Black men and men of Arab origin at rates that required formal explanation, issuing tickets on the basis of ethnicity, making racist remarks inside a unit culture that circulated them as ordinary. The investigation had started in March, already underway before anyone outside the unit knew to ask. Then, in the coverage, a detail: some of them had been ripping off locs during police interventions and keeping the pieces as trophies.

    Trophies.

    What I notice is which part of this incident dominated the headlines. The stops, the tickets, and the remarks are the texture of daily life for people in that neighbourhood: the unremarkable climate of being under a specific kind of management. It took the “trophies” to produce the press conference, the mayor calling it disturbing, the police chief holding the room with his own face as evidence that the institution has changed. Frank B. Wilderson writes that anti-Black violence circulates as atmosphere, the condition against which civil society confirms its own moral coherence. Scandals like this, almost predictable in their recurrence, are necessary precisely because the atmosphere is not. The trophy takes the heat so the remarks and the tickets and stops don’t have to. Then the reform response arrives on cue: body cameras, reassignments, oversight, the machinery that allows the atmosphere to be named without being changed.

    This logic doesn’t stop at the institution. A progressive journalist in this city who has covered SPVM violence for years and has built a sizeable following opened their Station 39 video with: “The SPVM is scalping people.” The image is vivid, which is the point, which is also the problem. Anti-Black violence is passing through a progressive media network as affective content, producing moral feeling in audiences who will likely never be stopped in Montréal-Nord on a humid Tuesday evening. The feeling confirms alignment: it circulates, metabolizes into outrage, and then the next story accumulates. I want to be clear about this: none of this requires bad faith. Civil society built the execution scaffold, and we mount it before we decide to. This is what Wilderson means by background affect: the Black body in pain as the ground condition that civil society, including its critics, requires in order to feel itself.

    Vincent Woodard writes about the consumption of Black bodies as inherited logic: the taking and keeping of the souvenir. Locs accumulate over months and years, the hair carrying its own time, and cutting them during an intervention is taking that time alongside the dignity and the agency and the flesh. What the officer does with the trophy and what the viewer does with the progressive journalist’s video share a structure. In both cases, the Black body is made available to someone who is not subject to it, received and held briefly, used to produce something — possession, feeling, the confirmation of one’s moral position — and then the Black body remains where it was: in Montréal-Nord, subject to the next ticket, the next racist remark, the next unjustified stop. The trophy is the version that made the condition legible. The underlying assumption was already there before the scissors, before the camera, in every interaction that didn’t make anyone’s feed.

    Saidiya Hartman says gratuitous violence doesn’t require justification. It enacts a prior condition. The analysis is not a shield against it. I have been studying this for four years. The dissertation on my committee’s desks right now is over a hundred pages about how communities care for themselves when institutions won’t, and I am sitting here under this ash tree at eight-thirty in the morning with a chest that weighs more than it did yesterday. The knowing doesn’t stop the landing.

    A duck comes down the canal with a few others trailing. The water here is built, cut through Kanien’kehá:ka territory in the 1820s to make commerce legible, to route water according to a particular purpose, to bend it to the capitalist’s will. There is still life in it. Their attempts at control failed, as they always do. Water finds a way.

    Christina Sharpe writes about residence time, the measure of how long an element stays in water. Sodium for 260 million years. The water doesn’t release what entered it. This canal connects to the St. Lawrence connects to the Atlantic, and the Atlantic received—and the Atlantic holds. Holds the bodies, holds the names that were never written down, holds the ones whose lives were rendered unremarkable long before the Station 39 officers kept their trophies. The surface in front of me has always been holding something it won’t disclose, and I have been sitting beside it long enough that I stopped checking.

    I was starting to gather myself to go when I realized it was raining. Had been raining for a little while, actually. There was no forecast for it, so I hadn’t brought an umbrella. The ash tree had been holding it off without asking—the canopy dense enough to keep me dry—while the canal surface in front of me was already pocked with it, thousands of small entries. I hadn’t noticed because I was protected. I don’t know how long I’d been sitting inside this weather I couldn’t feel.

  • Période de questions

    Période de questions

    June 10th. Twenty to six, and I’ve just arrived at Centre Saint-Pierre for RÉZO’s annual general meeting. The long tables usually here have been folded and pushed against the right-hand wall. Plastic and metal chairs in rows facing a screen. Fluorescent light. I find a seat and the shaking starts, low and steady. There is one woman in the room. No Black people.

    By ten to six I can read who is staff and who is board. I take out my notebook. The body does what it does in rooms like this — holds itself a certain way, stays within a shape the space expects, files everything it notices without letting that noticing show. Fourteen days before, I had published a piece about this organization and sent it directly to its executive director and board. Two days after that, the executive director confirmed receipt and told me it had been received by everyone I had intended, that there would be more reflections soon. I had also published the piece publicly on LinkedIn, where the organization was named and tagged, visible to the funders and sector partners and researchers who follow it. Tonight is the annual general meeting. I have yet to receive a written response. I came because the meeting is public and the community this organization built a program for, and then let go of, deserves someone in the room when its year is accounted for.

    Before the meeting opens, the executive director tests the sound. He opens a laptop, opens YouTube, types musique into the search bar. The algorithm returns Aya Nakamura first. There is a pause before he clicks. Copines loads. No sound.

    He works through the settings. A young Black tech enters the room — the only other Black person who has come through the door, and he has come to work. He locates the problem, works on it. While they’re at it, the video ends and Tyla’s Water starts automatically, one Black woman’s voice following the other’s into the same silence, neither one selected, neither one heard. A few minutes later, the tech fixes the system. He leaves.

    Rodrigo, the board’s president, opens by announcing he won’t be running for re-election. The territorial acknowledgement that follows is Concordia University’s, read verbatim. A text written for another institution’s rooms, carried into this one without the labour of being re-situated.

    At twenty past six, Kevin arrives. He is the only Black member of the board, and the only Black person who entered this room as a member tonight. The meeting has been running for fifteen minutes. The opening, the acknowledgement, the beginning of the financial report — already done.

    The financial audit is presented by a Black woman, external to the organization, hired for this function. The working sound system carries her voice across the room — this is what it was fixed for, this is the first voice it produces — as she presents a surplus of about twenty-four thousand dollars for the year and accounts for the organization’s finances with the precision of someone engaged for a single purpose. She finishes. She leaves.

    The tech came to work. The accountant came to work. The two voices surfaced by the algorithm came to test whether the room could carry sound. I came as a community member and was not spoken to once — not by staff, not by board — for the hour and forty minutes I was there. There were looks, several of them, across the whole evening. The particular flicker of recognition from people who know exactly who you are and what you sent them fourteen days ago, who saw it posted publicly on LinkedIn with the organization named. Their recognition went nowhere. It registered me and moved on, and kept registering me and moving on, each time it happened, across the whole meeting, the room processing my presence the way it processed the two voices the algorithm returned: surfaced, used, set aside.

    The budget for the coming year: a dedicated line of eighty-two thousand dollars for the chemsex project, in partnership with the Direction régionale de santé publique. A grant received six months ago that would have funded more chemsex workers had conditions not changed. Seven positions cut at the end of March. A new funding source for a program that cannot yet be named. The precarity of project financing acknowledged as the sector’s structural reality — and it is, I want to be precise about that, the instability is real and organizations across this city are living inside it. No dedicated funding line for Kominote.

    Then the annual report, not yet published, available in two weeks. In the rundown of services, I hear the word Kominote spoken aloud in an institutional setting for the first time in two years.

    Six meetings this past year. Eight people per meeting.

    I sit with that for a moment. Two years of institutional silence, two annual reports in which the program and the person who built it didn’t exist on any page, and now the name said aloud, in this room, while I am in this room, unaddressed. He can say the name — that isn’t what the pause is about. The pause is about what comes after it, which is: nothing else. Convive, the Spanish-language group, gets its registrations and activities and long descriptions. The chemsex project gets its staff trainings, in active development. Kominote gets one breath and the meeting moves on. HoT, the group for trans men and trans masculine people, is mentioned as also continuing this year. I didn’t catch the details. I was still inside the hearing of the name.

    The board section is thorough. The person presenting lists membership requirements carefully: there must be at least one person living with HIV. That requirement exists. There is no requirement about racialized members. There is no requirement about Black members. The 2020 report I wrote for this organization — the one it called un point tournant dans l’histoire de notre organisme — required a board composition of minimum 33% racialized members, including at least one Black person, as a governance requirement. Because the presentation tonight was detailed and specific, the absence is not ambiguity. Six years. It was never made a rule.

    The institution counted the sessions it did not sustain. It listed the requirements that were never written.

    After the services section, the moderator asks if there are questions or comments.

    The room tightens as people look around at each other, avoiding my gaze. A collectively held quality, bodies readied, the expectation of confrontation. Everyone in that room knows the piece exists. The executive director confirmed its receipt and forwarded it to every person with authority here. The tension has a specific shape: the room is waiting for me to make myself a scene.

    I say nothing.

    This is not retreat. The argument is already on the record, made carefully and in full, using the organization’s own documents as evidence, delivered to the people who could act on it. What a raised hand would produce is a different kind of record: the one where I become the disruption to be managed, the affect to be addressed while the substance waits. I have watched this organization manage that particular sequence before. At SMASH, their annual conference, in 2025, I pressed a white presenter on why a session built on photographs of Black people contained no analysis of what being Black meant for the people in those photographs, for the statistics being shown, for the rates of criminalization and healthcare exclusion the data was already documenting. What the institution managed afterward was my affect. Not the presentation. The following year’s SMASH program contained no Black-specific health content. The word does not appear in the document.

    So I stay quiet, and the room’s readiness for a fight moves through the agenda and dissipates. Two silences in one room tonight. The voices that were loaded and never played. The voice that declined to perform. Both of them the post’s.

    The meeting ends at quarter to eight. I close my notebook and go.

    Here is what I knew sitting in that room that the room did not say.

    RÉZO is not an organization that lost its federal funding and had to make impossible choices. The original Advance program — five years of federal money coordinated nationally by the Community-Based Research Centre, with RÉZO as the Montréal partner — funded Kominote, and it ended. That ending was real. But a second cycle followed. Advance 2.0 runs from 2022 to 2027 with the same partners, RÉZO still the Montréal coordinator. Federal money is flowing now. I was sitting in a room where the organization’s 2026-27 budget was being presented, and that budget exists inside an active federal funding relationship. The sector-wide precarity is real and I am not dismissing it. What it does not explain is where the cuts specifically landed — because that determination is institutional, made inside the precarity, and the record shows what it produced.

    SMASH is what RÉZO built with those resources. The conference was created in 2019 as the francophone pillar of the Advance alliance and confirmed at the AGM tonight as continuing alliance programming. Which means the specific federal funding stream that once sustained a support group built by and for Black GBTQ men now sustains the conference where I was managed for naming anti-Blackness in one of its rooms — the conference that answered that naming by removing Blackness from its program the following year. RÉZO runs an independent budget and workplan, and the choices about what to build within the mandate belong to them. The redirection is RÉZO’s redirection. The same mandate. The same federal relationship. Different choices about what gets architecture.

    HoT makes the choice legible. I was sitting in a room where HoT was mentioned as continuing in 2025-26 — the group for trans men and trans masculine people that, like Kominote, was an Advance-era program that lost its footing when the first grant ended. The most recent annual report shows HoT on its fourth cohort, named and described, with documented plans to expand. Kominote appears nowhere in that report, or the one before it. Both programs apparently ran this past year. The report in two weeks will show what each looked like. But the 2024-2025 record already answers the question the funding cliff raises: when two programs fall off the same cliff and the organization rebuilds one with institutional architecture and leaves the other to run on whatever labour held it together outside any documented support structure, the cliff stops being the explanation. What remains is the choice.

    Which brings me to the six sessions. Eight people each time. Running in 2025-26 after two years of documentary absence, with no funding line, no named partnership, no dedicated position. Steve Bastien built Kominote and ran it through its first years. His name disappears from the 2024-2025 annual report alongside the program — gone in the same transition, without acknowledgment, the way the internal anti-racism committee also went: there in 2022-2023 as a named organizational priority, absent from the next two reports without explanation or account of dissolution, as though it had simply stopped being something worth noting. Whether Steve was the one who held those six sessions in 2025-26, or whether the community found another way to sustain what the institution had dropped, is not on any record I have access to. What is on the record is that the institution will count those sessions as its own in the report published in two weeks. The labour that made them possible will not appear in it.

    I want to add something I didn’t say in the last piece. The 2020 report specified a campaign against racism in LGBTQ+ spaces, with its form to be determined by a consultative committee made up exclusively of racialized people. The campaign that launched in 2022 was real. It said what needed saying. I wrote that before and I meant it. What I didn’t write: it was produced through a professional advertising relationship with Upperkut, with community members as consultants to production rather than governing committee. Participants from Kominote — people who had described, in sessions built on trust, what it felt like to be reduced to the surface of their bodies in spaces that were supposed to hold them — had those descriptions worked into campaign content and distributed on the apps where those reductions happen. The apparatus that named the consumption reproduced it in the act of naming. Both things are true and I have stopped needing them to resolve.

    And the extraction has operated twice, not once. The 2020 report produced institutional currency — the turning point language, the sector legitimacy, the funder credibility of an organization that had commissioned rigorous community research and named what it found. That currency was spent. Then the BLM statement, published six days after George Floyd’s murder, naming Kominote specifically, naming the structural obligations the moment required — that statement is still live on the organization’s website. Still in circulation, still producing legitimacy, still available as evidence that the organization understands structural racism and is committed to addressing it. The structural transformation it named is not documented as implemented in any annual report. The commitment is retained. The obligation is not met. Tonight: Kominote’s name spoken once after two years of silence, six sessions counted, next ones unfunded, the page still live with Dates à venir! The naming costs nothing. Each naming produces another small increment of the same currency the turning point produced in 2020, and the obligation that would have required actual redistribution remains, as it has remained, unnamed.

    I have been in relation to this organization since 2017. That summer I was a young outreach worker doing harm reduction in communities the state had largely abandoned, learning two things simultaneously: what care looks like when it actually reaches people, and what an institution looks like when it houses harm without naming it. I had no full language for what I was reading then. The body read it anyway, developed its grammar for it — the low shaking that started tonight before the meeting opened, settled across the ninety minutes into something steadier, the room’s recognition of me without address becoming just another thing the body metabolized and kept.

    What nine years of that grammar has produced is this understanding, which I want to state plainly.

    The anti-Blackness I have been describing does not work by exclusion. Not the door closed, not the service refused, not the hostility you can locate and confront. That form is real and it is not this form. This form welcomes you in. It hires you. It commissions your knowledge and calls what you produce a turning point. It launches the program your community asked for. It funds the program while the funding architecture compels it to. It builds a campaign from your community’s testimony and receives the coverage. It keeps the commitment on its website. It confirms receipt of the analysis that names all of this and says there will be reflections soon.

    And through all of it, it does not change its structure. The governance requirement is never written. The training is never documented. The program is not rebuilt when the resources return — or it runs on absorbed and unrecorded labour, and the institution counts the sessions it didn’t fund. The money moves toward the conference. The accountability infrastructure disappears from the record. The meeting that was going to happen, happens.

    What makes this form distinctive is that it cannot operate without us. It needs the needs assessment, the community’s attendance, the testimony, the turning point, the Black voice the algorithm surfaced into the search bar, the Black tech at the sound board, the Black accountant at the podium, the Black member in the plastic chair not speaking during the période de questions. We are not incidental to what this institution presents itself as. We are the input. The welcome is not the opposite of the extraction. The welcome is how the extraction works. We are brought in so that what we carry can be used, and the structure that would make our presence binding rather than useful is the one thing that is never built.

    The body knew this in 2017. The language has caught up.

    The piece went out on May 27th. Receipt confirmed May 29th. More reflections soon. The AGM was June 10th. No written response has arrived in the fourteen days between. The budget presented that night was the budget. The board requirements listed in detail were the requirements. Nothing in the fourteen days of looking into it produced an amendment to either. The deferral was named, and the AGM is what came after it.

    I don’t know where this lands. The annual report arrives in two weeks and I will read it the way I read all of them — alongside everything else this organization has published about itself, because its own documents have always been the evidence. Something is in motion. I am not in a hurry. The work doesn’t depend on the institution answering. It depends on staying in relation to the people the institution was supposed to be answering to, which is what required being in that room, and what will require being in the rooms that come after it.

    One Black woman’s voice returned by algorithm as the answer to a search for music, clicked into the silence, not heard. Another arriving automatically behind her, also not heard. Neither one reached for, both of them used, the apparatus moving on when they didn’t produce sound, the shaking in my body settling across the evening into something steadier, the body done warning and simply present.

    I closed my notebook. I got up from the plastic chair. I went.

  • Saskatchewan!

    Saskatchewan!

    The train came through while I was still settling into the grass, while the ground was still negotiating with my weight. Slow, rounded cars on the tracks between the canal bank and the silo, heading toward the harbour. I could read the side of one as it passed. Saskatchewan! with the exclamation point. Green paint, the province’s name in a typeface that expects enthusiasm. The train slowed. Stopped.

    I’d come from my coffee shop. The usual people, the particular warmth of a Thursday morning in a place that has become a place, where someone knows to ask what you’ve been reading. Someone asked what I’d recommend and I said All About Love by bell hooks without having to think about it. Then I walked here, to this thin strip of grass between the canal and the river, Lock No. 1 just down from where I’ve settled, the Daniel McAllister moored somewhere behind me. I didn’t decide to come. The body has been here enough times to know the way.

    The grass is long and undisturbed around me, dandelions in every stage, some still yellow, some gone to seed, the white puffs of them catching what little light the grey sky is offering. Gulls overhead. The canal moving the way still water moves, everything happening at the surface, nothing disclosed about what’s underneath.

    The car is across the water, directly in front of Silo No. 5. The silo is nearly half a kilometer of corrugated metal and concrete cylinders, the last structure of its kind in the country, built to receive grain shipped by rail from the prairies and export it by sea to Europe. Its scale is wrong against the sky in the way that only very old industrial things are wrong, too large to be decorative, too ruined to be functional, present in the way that monuments are present even when no one intended a monument. The tracks run directly into the building. Tags on its walls reach floors that require real commitment to reach, people going to extreme lengths to mark presence on something the city hasn’t decided what to do with, evidence of unauthorized arrival at heights that shouldn’t be accessible. The car sits below all of it, still announcing itself, grain from treaty land at the door of a building that stopped opening thirty years ago.

    I don’t know what to do with any of this. I keep looking.

    Leanne Betasamosake Simpson writes that the first thing a snowflake does when it lands is form bonds with its neighbors. A snowflake lands and immediately begins joining. Slow deformation. She calls it sintering: communal transformation, bonds with staying power. Fractal. What we do on a small scale is how we exist at the large scale.

    I’ve been coming to this water since winter. Sintering. Forming bonds at this bank through repetition that accumulated across a season, a snowpack building without announcement. When I started coming here the canal was grey and iced-over, the willows bare, the bank a different kind of undisturbed. The willows have leafed out since then. The dandelions have gone through their whole cycle and started again. I finished Theory of Water a few days ago and recognized something I had already been doing, the practice visible in retrospect the way a path through grass is visible only after it’s been walked enough times. Simpson gave me the word after the knowing had already happened.

    The grass holds the shape of me. The sky is doing what it’s been doing all morning. Across the water the silo stands in its wrongness against the clouds, the same wrongness it had in February when I first sat across from it, and I am a different kind of settled than I was then, bonded to this bank through the accumulation of mornings, through every time the body led and the mind followed after.

    There’s a water strider near the edge of the canal, just below where I’m sitting. It moves in short quick jumps, and where it lands it leaves a small circular ripple that moves outward and flattens before the next one arrives. The ripple moves through water going somewhere: canal to river to St. Lawrence to Atlantic. The strider doesn’t know. It leaves its mark anyway.

    Simpson writes that her ancestors spoke to their ancestors through the sound of rushing water, and that locks close off those channels of communication. Lock No. 1 is just down from me, the Lachine Canal cutting through Kanien’kehá:ke territory since the 1820s to make this stretch of the river legible to colonial commerce, to move grain and goods eastward toward the sea. The locks try to control what the water does, but it always finds its way past the container, moving through the gates regardless. The sound is still there.

    The water moves east. The St. Lawrence runs to the Atlantic. I look at the surface of the canal, the way it holds the grey of the sky without giving it back, dark green-brown and nearly opaque, the colour of something that keeps rather than reflects. You cannot see the bottom. You cannot see what the water is holding. This is what the water always looks like from here, from the mouth of things, where the canal opens into river opens into sea. I have been looking at this surface since February and it has never once disclosed what is underneath.

    Christina Sharpe writes about residence time, the oceanographic measure of how long an element stays in the water. Sodium has a residence time of 260 million years. Sharpe thinks this alongside those Africans thrown, dumped, jumped overboard during the Middle Passage. She is not speaking in metaphor. The chemistry of seawater holds what entered it. The dead did not go somewhere else. They have a residence time. They are in the water still, in what Sharpe calls the wake, which is the path behind a ship, which is a keeping watch with the dead, which is a coming to consciousness all at once. Alexis Pauline Gumbs has listened for them in that water, attended to what it carries, what it will not release. Simpson has learned from them both, has brought this knowledge to this river, to this territory, to me sitting at the mouth of the canal on a grey Thursday morning in May not knowing what I am sitting beside until I do.

    Every drop of water on this planet is all the water that has ever been here. The canal is fed by the St. Lawrence. The St. Lawrence opens to the Atlantic. The Atlantic received my ancestors, which means the Atlantic holds them still. There is no distance in this. I am not drawing a line between here and there. I am sitting at the mouth of the canal, at the threshold where the water I have been looking at since winter opens into the water that has never stopped being a grave, and they are not two different bodies of water. The surface in front of me is the same surface. The opacity I have been looking at all morning, the water that holds the sky without giving it back, is holding other things too, has always been holding them, will hold them for longer than I can think about without losing my footing. 260 million years. The dead are not in the past. They are in the residence time, which means they are here, which means the water I have been sintering beside, forming my small bonds, accumulating my mornings, is the same water that received them and did not let go.

    The water strider leaves its mark. The ripple moves through what is, and has always been, full.

    Down at the lock, people are fishing. Unhurried, present, the particular stillness of people who have been at the water long enough to stop waiting for something to happen. The sound of water moving through the gates, which Simpson’s ancestors might have known as something else entirely.

    This has always been a meeting place. Long before the canal was cut and the locks built and the silo raised, this convergence of water gathered people because the water itself required it. Confluence produces meeting the way certain conditions produce certain weathers, because a place where waters join is a place where everything moving along those waters eventually arrives. You don’t choose a meeting place so much as find yourself already in one.

    I arrived here through repetition without deciding to. The water required it.

    The sound at the lock. The people still fishing. The silo enormous and still across the water, the tracks below it empty now.

    At the end of this month I hand in the dissertation. Then the defense. Then it leaves my hands and becomes whatever it becomes in other people’s hands. I have been building this argument for years, and the months at this water were part of that, the body arriving here before the mind had a name for why. I’m standing at a confluence, the way this canal opens into the St. Lawrence opens into whatever is further east, the water moving past the point where you can follow it. You don’t choose what comes next so much as find yourself already in it.

    At some point while I was sitting here the Saskatchewan! car moved on. I got a photo before it did, from where I was in the grass, but the train has continued toward the harbour or somewhere further east. The silo is still there. The tracks are still there. The locks, the people fishing, the sound of water moving through the gates. The dandelion puffs lifting off one by one into the grey air.

    The car said what it said and kept moving. I get up from the grass and go.

  • Les inscriptions sont fermées pour le moment

    Les inscriptions sont fermées pour le moment

    The conversation is over. My friend and I are sitting in the particular stillness that follows something hard, the kind where the next thing hasn’t become possible yet. I know how to be here. I’ve learned, over years of this kind of work, how to stay inside difficulty without flinching toward resolution, and that knowing didn’t go anywhere when I closed my practice. That was partly the point. The practice closed so that this could happen differently, in the register of friendship rather than the session note, the billing code, the annual registration, the showing up that doesn’t require an intake form.

    Which means I also know what comes next. I know how to locate a resource, how to identify which organizations are genuinely adapted and which ones will make someone feel worse for having tried. For this friend, this need, I reach for RÉZO, Montréal’s primary sexual health organization for GBQ men, before I’ve finished the thought. The body already moving toward the answer while the mind is still formulating the question. Something that becomes reflex when you’ve been inside a community long enough, when you’ve given enough of yourself to a particular ecosystem of care to know where things live inside it.

    I open the site. The navigation has changed. The page has moved, nested now under a sub-sub-section I have to locate before I can locate what I came for. I find it.

    Les inscriptions sont fermées pour le moment.

    My body receives this before I do. Something settles low in the chest: not sharp, the specific weight of something already known arriving as confirmation. The body has a grammar for this particular texture of disappointment, has developed it over years and in relation to this specific institution. I stay on the page longer than I need to. Dates à venir. I close the tab.

    My friend is still there in the way people stay with you after a difficult conversation. Still needing something. I sit with the quality of not having it to give, which is different from not knowing it existed, different from not having tried.

    I’ve known RÉZO since 2017. That summer, I was an outreach worker for their sex worker program, young, newly arrived in this kind of work, learning what it meant to move through communities the state had abandoned and then appointed institutions to monitor. The work itself was real. I was doing harm reduction with people who had built their own forms of survival inside that precarity, and something in me recognized that, was drawn toward it, was learning from it. That part I kept.

    There was a supervisor. His relationship to Black men’s bodies was legible to me that summer before I had full structural language for it. The institution had chosen not to have language for it either, which is its own kind of position. What surrounds that kind of behaviour inside a professional context is often more instructive than the behaviour itself. The silences. The way certain things circulate without being named, without anyone being required to account for them. The particular atmosphere of an organization that’s decided its progressive commitments are self-evident and therefore require no examination. I was a young Black worker inside that atmosphere, doing real work, learning two things simultaneously: what genuine care looked like when it reached people the state had abandoned, and what an institution looked like when it housed harm without naming it. You learn things from what an organization doesn’t say. I filed that knowledge somewhere and kept working.

    Training, supervised hours, three provincial registrations, insurance, continuing education requirements, documentation, all of it building toward a practice and toward a growing clarity about what the credential required in exchange for the legitimacy it conferred. It asked me to convert genuine care into something auditable, to route what happened between me and the people who trusted me through frameworks designed to make it legible to institutions rather than useful to people. I stayed inside that structure long enough to do real work and also long enough to understand what it was costing. I closed the practice deliberately in order to hold this differently. In the register of community, of friendship, of care that doesn’t require the state’s recognition to be real. I believed the infrastructure for that kind of work existed. That belief is what I was carrying when I opened the tab.

    In 2020 RÉZO hired me to lead a community needs assessment. The question was precise: why were Black queer and trans people structurally absent from the organization’s users, and what would it actually take to change that. I consulted 38 people, 21 in individual interviews and 17 through an online survey, with trans and non-binary participants deliberately over-recruited because the existing research on Black MSM health had excluded them as a matter of course. The consultation ran mid-COVID, which meant planned group discussions were cancelled, interviews moved to screens, and anonymity was compromised for participants who weren’t out because payment required a name attached to a cheque. These constraints are named openly in the report because that kind of transparency is part of what makes a document trustworthy rather than authoritative.

    What the community described was specific. They talked about walking into RÉZO and feeling immediately that the space had been built around someone else, that the staff’s frame of reference didn’t include the particular ways anti-Blackness and homophobia operated together in their lives, that being Black and queer in Montréal’s LGBTQ+ spaces meant being hyperlegible in some registers and invisible in others. They described the sexual fetishization of Black men as a documented harm operating not at the margins of those spaces but at their centre. They described needing something built from the ground up around their actual experience, not retrofitted from programming that had been designed around a different community’s needs entirely.

    The report that came from that process wasn’t a set of suggestions. It required a Board composition of minimum 33% racialized members including at least one Black person and at least one Indigenous person. It required anonymous CVs as standard hiring practice. It required mandatory anti-racism training built into onboarding for all staff and volunteers, with documentation, on a schedule the organization would be held to rather than one it could determine for itself. It required a dedicated support group animated by and for Black community members. A public awareness campaign against the sexual fetishization of Black men inside LGBTQ+ spaces, because the community had named that fetishization specifically and the report took them seriously. The specificity was deliberate. The consultation had been thorough. The report matched it.

    The document landed. RÉZO received it, the document they’d hired me to produce, and called it “un point-tournant dans l’histoire de notre organisme.” The report is still linked on the Kominote page. Still available to download. The organization’s own words about what this moment represented are still on the record, attached to the page of a program that’s no longer running, below a banner that reads: Les inscriptions sont fermées pour le moment.

    Kominote launched in 2021. Discussion groups, individual consultations, thematic workshops covering sexual health, discrimination, mental health, the specific experience of navigating LGBTQ+ spaces that hadn’t been built with Black queer people in mind. An awareness campaign against the sexual fetishization of Black men. RÉZO had asked what the community needed and they’d said, and then they’d come when something genuinely responsive was offered. The community showed up. Twelve people across twenty-five sessions in the program’s second year. Individual consultations running in parallel. People moving from one-on-one support into the group because the group was what they’d been looking for. They didn’t need to be convinced.

    Then political appetite shifted. Funding dried up. RÉZO’s own 2024-2025 annual report opens by acknowledging a reduction of sexual health funding. This is real. RÉZO has undergone significant restructuring in recent years, losing substantial staffing capacity across multiple intervention teams. People lost their jobs. Programs lost capacity. Communities lost services that had been built over years. The organization has been navigating a genuine crisis, not a managed inconvenience, and that context belongs in any honest account of what happened next. It does not, however, determine where the cuts landed. That determination is institutional. The funding landscape is genuinely difficult, and it does not explain what happened next. The Chemsex/PnP project expanded during this same period. It received more than 267 hours of individual accompaniment in 2024-2025, two support groups, multiple staff, detailed coverage across several pages of the annual report. Convive, the Spanish-language group for Hispanic GBQ men, is described in the same document as essential and thriving, 182 members, 12 meetings. Funding pressure is distributed unevenly and the distribution is legible if you read the annual reports alongside the Kominote page. Neither the 2023-2024 nor the 2024-2025 report mentions Kominote. Two consecutive years of institutional silence. In that same 2022-2023 report, the last one to mention Kominote, Chemsex/PnP appears for the first time: a new program still in development, four meetings held.

    The page stays up. The report stays linked. Les inscriptions sont fermées pour le moment. Dates à venir. The organization keeps the political currency produced by the consultation, the report, the community’s attendance, and sheds the obligation that currency was supposed to carry. This isn’t neglect and it isn’t bureaucratic failure. Neglect would be passive. What this is, is the active maintenance of a progressive reputation built on work the institution is no longer doing, for a community that came to everything Kominote offered and was not sustained. The box is ticked. The community member looking for a group session finds a banner. RÉZO gets to keep the turning point. The community gets dates à venir.

    The summer of 2017 is where this grammar comes from. Not a case being built but a way of reading being learned, through the body, before the language caught up. Black presence instrumentalized to produce legitimacy, to signal progressiveness, to access funding, and then the institution withdrawing once the currency has been extracted, leaving the community that produced it without the infrastructure their presence was used to justify. The needs assessment the institution commissioned and praised and didn’t implement. The program the community filled and the institution didn’t sustain. This isn’t a pattern of failure. This is a pattern of extraction, and it’s been operating at RÉZO for as long as I’ve known the organization.

    HoT and Kominote were built under the same federal project funding, the first phase of the Avancer alliance, which ran from 2018 to 2022. HoT followed a needs assessment, produced a guide for trans men and transmasculine people having relationships with men, and became a program. The community it was built for came to it. Kominote did the same. Federal project funding is always time-limited. When that first phase ended, both programs hit the same cliff and RÉZO had to decide what to sustain.

    The 2024-2025 annual report describes HoT as being in its fourth cohort, nine people enrolled, with plans to rebuild the group for 2025-2026. Its registrations are also currently fermées pour le moment. The difference is that HoT exists in the report: named, accounted for, assigned a future. Kominote doesn’t appear in either the 2023-2024 or the 2024-2025 annual report. Not to note a pause. Not to signal a rebuild. Not once. Two programs, the same funding origin, the same cliff, the same direction of travel while Chemsex/PnP expanded, while Convive grew, while the annual report filled pages with statistics about what the organization chose to sustain. A community’s needs don’t contract because a program’s enrollment does. The pattern isn’t about one program or one community. It’s about which communities RÉZO decided, in practice rather than in stated values, to keep building toward when the federal money ran out.

    Architectural decisions are decisions. Convive has its own dedicated portal in RÉZO’s primary navigation, built into the site at the same architectural level as the main sections. The site exists in three languages, structured partly around this portal. Where something lives in a navigation structure communicates institutional priority as clearly as anything in an annual report. Kominote sits under a sub-sub-page of the services section, below a banner that by now you know.

    This isn’t a critique of Convive or the community it serves. The contrast isn’t between those communities. It’s between what the institution decided to sustain and what it decided not to, and what that pattern communicates about where Black queer people actually sit in RÉZO’s hierarchy of commitments, as opposed to its stated one.

    In 2022 I presented Kominote’s findings at SMASH. Black queer and trans community members had said what they needed, I had documented it, and I brought it to the conference of the organization that had commissioned the work and called it a turning point. That’s the before.

    SMASH 2025. A presenter had used photographs of Black people throughout their slides on sex work and health access without once analyzing what being Black meant for the people in those images, for the statistics being presented, for the disproportionate rates of criminalization and healthcare exclusion the data was already showing. I asked, in the room, why racialization had been absent from a presentation that had used Black bodies as its visual evidence. The answer was that there hadn’t been time to get into everything. I said that was a choice, and that the choice didn’t align with the use of those images. The presenter, a white woman, became upset. A white man well known in the space went to her and said, “en tout cas y’était ben énervé,” offering her comfort by reducing what I had said to a matter of my affect. Not the presentation. Not the question. My affect. A Black trans friend who had been at the conference with me heard it and told me. I addressed him directly and in public. What followed was the organizers moving to calm me down — not to address the comment, not to address what any of it meant in a space organized, ostensibly, around the health and dignity of the communities whose images had just been used as backdrop. The angry Black body was the disruption. Everything that had produced the anger was not.

    RÉZO didn’t address what happened in any way the community would recognize as meaningful. Nothing reached the people who had been in that room. Nothing suggested the institution understood what the afternoon had revealed about the space it had built.

    SMASH 2026. No sessions on Black people. Multiple sessions on chemsex and PnP, across different framings and angles. The conference that couldn’t hold a question about anti-Blackness in 2025 found no place for Black-specific health content in the following year’s program. The 2026 program is the institution’s answer to the 2025 question, more complete than anything said in the aftermath of that afternoon, more honest about institutional priority than any statement of values on the website.

    I’ve been carrying what I know about this institution since a summer in 2017. The specific and accumulated kind of knowledge that builds when a body is right about something before the mind has language for it, that builds through years of acquiring the language only to watch it change nothing. I know what it means when an institution commissions a report, calls it a turning point, and files the turning point. I know what it means when a community fills a program and the program isn’t sustained. The body kept the record across all of it. So did I. The difference between those two things has gotten smaller over the years.

    My friend is still there. Still in the particular aftermath of a hard conversation, still needing something that should exist, that did exist, that was built specifically for them and for people like them by a process that asked the community what it needed and received an answer and turned that answer into a program and called the whole thing a turning point in the organization’s history. The report that produced Kominote is still on RÉZO’s website. Still linked from the page with the closed registrations. Still available to download. It describes, in the organization’s own commissioned language, exactly what RÉZO was asked to become and exactly what it hasn’t become. The turning point is still there. The program it turned toward is not.I don’t know what my friend will find when they look for support next. I know what I found when I looked for them. The report and the page are both still there, sitting on the same server, attached to the same organization, available to anyone who knows where to look. The evidence isn’t mine. It belongs to RÉZO. They hired me to write it, they praised it, they linked it, and they left it there, attached to the absence it was supposed to prevent. That is the record. It doesn’t require my anger to be legible. It is legible on its own.

  • Place d’Youville

    Place d’Youville

    May 20th, 10 AM. Twenty-three degrees and the wind is moving through the field in a way that keeps changing its mind. I’m sitting near the old Customs House, just off rue McGill, in what is now a wide green space ringed with historical plaques. This is where the first Parliament of the Province of Canada convened in 1844. The building burned in 1849. A mob set it on fire the night Governor General Elgin signed the Rebellion Losses Bill. The plaques are careful about this.

    I came here without a book, which almost never happens. I’d nearly finished the nonfiction I’d been reading and realized it on the walk over, so I stopped at a nearby bookstore, bilingual, Francophone in its orientation. I wanted fiction for once. Something more porous, less argumentative. I asked if they had anything by Black Québécois authors in French.

    The question on the face.

    What followed was Dany Laferrière, of course, and then a migration story. When I said migration wasn’t the direction I was looking for, the category shifted without either of us naming the shift: non-Black Palestinian and Colombian authors. I clarified. Black francophone fiction, I said, broadening it, not requiring Québec specifically. That didn’t help either. The broader frame returned the same result.

    Each time I offered more information about what I was actually asking for, something tightened in the person’s jaw. At some point I watched her notice the same gap I’d been watching from the beginning. That must have done something to her. Being seen not to know by the person you couldn’t locate.

    The reflex is what I keep returning to. If I had walked in and asked for Québec literature with no further specification, I suspect the shelf would have looked different. The reflex showed it. If every Black Québec story is for you a story about arriving, you cannot imagine Black people as having always already been here. And if your frame for not-white is general enough that Palestinian and Colombian and Black are interchangeable categories, then Blackness isn’t what you’re reaching for. It’s a placeholder. It’s difference, undifferentiated, available to be filled with whatever the shelf has to offer.

    The presence precedes the Haitian immigration narrative by centuries. Black people were enslaved in Nouvelle-France. In this city. In the predecessors of these buildings. The Parliament whose ground I’m sitting on held its first session while that history was still recent and living in specific bodies. Charlène Lusikila and I traced some of this a few years ago, in a paper about why the intercultural frame in social work keeps failing Black Montrealers: treating Blackness as something that arrived, rather than something the city was organized against from the beginning.

    There are no plaques for that. The city decided what to mark. The decision is ongoing.

    Near the end of the conversation, the person pulled out a book by Rebecca Makonnen. Transracial adoptee, they said, with a slight shift in register, as though this were a different route to the same destination, more legible somehow. And I’ve been sitting with that grammar ever since. Laferrière gets to be called Québécois now. He’s Haitian, too, and I’m not taking anything away from what that means. But notice what had to happen first. The migrant who earns recognition through what the community decides is exemplary. The adoptee. Each route requires prior authorization from the same structure that just spent ten minutes finding me migration stories when I asked for Québec literature.

    I could claim Québécois. The claim would be legitimate. I’ve been here long enough, loved this place through several versions of itself and several versions of myself. What resists in me when I reach for that word is not uncertainty about who I am. It is the specific difficulty of loving a society that keeps showing you the conditions attached to its love. Loving it anyway. Both of those things are true and they don’t resolve each other and I’ve stopped asking them to.

    All I wanted was literature.

    The field is quiet. A few tourists reading the plaques with the careful attention of people who arrived this morning and will leave by evening. The St. Lawrence is so close to here, obscured by the Customs House to my left, the one that has been deciding what moves through it since 1838. The new book is in my bag, barely opened, bought because it was the least fraught option available.

    The city put a park here. The grass is doing its patient work over the ground where the Parliament burned and the river keeps moving past all of it, indifferent and uninterrupted. The wind is still changing its mind.

    I might return the book.