Category: Politics

  • 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.

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  • 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.

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  • Consequence as Weather

    Consequence as Weather

    The coffee shop near the Palais des congrès is already full of Liberal Party of Canada convention delegates when I join the line outside. Cop cars are parked down the street. Inside, every table has a staffer. Suits. Baseball caps. lanyards. Louboutins under a table where someone’s set a Prada bag on the chair beside her. Laptop messenger bags open across tables the staff need to turn. Pins with Mark Carney’s face. Meticulously curled hair. Khakis. The particular self-assurance of people who’ve decided their presence anywhere is appropriate. Then one woman moving through the room with an umbrella from the Fairmont, the red of her dress the party colour, coordinated, intentional. She passes a barista without looking at her and something tightens in my chest that’s been tightening for days.

    I’m wearing a keffiyeh and I notice the moment they notice it. Something shifts in the room that nobody names. A delegate near the door clocks it and looks away with a speed that’s its own kind of statement. I’m used to being read in spaces like this, used to the particular attention that Black presence draws in rooms that have decided they’re for everyone. The keffiyeh adds a layer. They know it and I know they know it and we all sit with our coffees pretending the room isn’t doing what the room is doing.

    The REDress Project places empty red dresses in public spaces to hold the shape of the women who are gone, the ones this government decided this week, this specific week, don’t require sustained investigation or resources. The woman with the Fairmont umbrella didn’t choose red for that reason. The colour was assigned. Coordinated. By a party that also welcomed Marilyn Gladu across the floor, a woman whose votes against queer and trans people are part of the parliamentary record, and called it coalition. This is the party that marches in Pride parades. That points to marriage equality as proof of its character. I’m a queer person in this room and I’ve known for a long time that the shelter had conditions. My body doesn’t receive Gladu as shock. It receives her as confirmation, one more piece of evidence landing on top of everything already stored, every previous moment the walls showed how thin they were. That’s how it accumulates. Weight settling into the chest and the shoulders and the jaw, invisible from the outside, carried forward into every room where you’re told to be grateful for the protection. The woman in red moves through the coffee shop. The barista clears a table. None of them look up.

    This is my coffee shop. At the counter there’s a different kind of exchange available, the kind between people who’ve been showing up for each other across enough ordinary mornings that the terms are established. We don’t have to say much. I make a joke. He laughs in a way that’s also an exhale. We talk briefly about what it costs to serve people who treat you like infrastructure, who order without eye contact, who leave without acknowledgment. Nobody says Liberal Party. Nobody has to. The room keeps doing what it’s doing around us.

    Three tables away a delegate checks his phone. This government is complicit in a genocide and has spent considerable resources avoiding that word, and cut funding for investigations into missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls, and Two-Spirit people this week, and has used every available tool to avoid the connection between those two sentences. The funding, the votes, the abstentions, the phrasing carefully chosen to avoid the words that would require action. Somewhere a family is in rubble. Somewhere a child is being pulled from concrete. Somewhere a woman is missing and the file’s been defunded. Here we are, here I am, here they are, in Tiohtià:ke on a blustery Thursday morning. The woman in red passes the window on her way to the Palais. The Fairmont umbrella catches the light.

    I finish my coffee. Close my book. The room’s still full when I push through the door and turn south toward the Palais des congrès, toward the metro, past the cop cars still parked where I left them.

    Around the Palais the police are everywhere. The apparatus arranged in a perimeter around the people who command it, who fund it, who’ve always been the reason it exists in the form it does. The woman in red moves through that perimeter without breaking stride. I’ve never been the person that apparatus was arranged to protect. The people I love have never been that person. The people whose deaths we mark and carry forward, the ones the red was supposed to hold, whose files were defunded this week, the ones in rubble whose names this government will not say, have never been that person. The police are at the Palais des congrès because the people inside it put them there.

    What stays in my body is the knowledge that nothing I feel or say or write will reach these people in any way that costs them anything. They’ll leave the Palais and return to their lives and the decisions they make will continue to land on the same bodies they’ve always landed on and they’ll sleep. That’s what impunity actually is. The ability to move through the world without your actions ever returning to your body as consequence. I’ve spent my whole life in a body where consequence is the weather. Where what I do and how I move and what I wear and who I am carries risk in rooms like this one. They’ve spent their whole lives in the other kind of body. The kind the police are arranged to protect. The kind that gets to feel frustrated about service at a coffee shop without that frustration being a threat assessment. We’re in the same city on the same Thursday morning and we’re not in the same world.

    These systems don’t hold forever and the people inside them know it even when they perform certainty. I’ve watched enough of these rooms to recognize the particular discomfort of people who’ve learned to read threat and have started to feel it coming from directions they didn’t expect. It’s in the way the delegate clocked my keffiyeh and looked away. It’s in the way entitlement requires an audience that keeps agreeing to the premise, and that audience is getting smaller and louder about its refusal. The collapse of these systems will be disorderly and the people with the least protection will absorb the most of that disorder on the way down. That’s not a prediction. That’s the pattern, repeating. The keffiyeh. The barista who laughed in a way that was also an exhale. The agreement these people depend on is breaking and they can feel it.

    The most honest thing that happened this morning was a small pastry set beside a coffee without a word, between two people the room wasn’t watching. I’ve been thinking about that on the walk down here, about what it means that the thing that held the most required the least. The police were outside the coffee shop when I left. They’re all the way down the street and around the Palais des congrès, the same apparatus, just more of it, arranged in a perimeter around people who’ve never had to think about what a small thing costs or what it holds. I’m still thinking about the pastry.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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  • Time, Held

    Time, Held

    Time arrives before anything happens. It shows up early, settles in, rearranges the day around itself. You learn it through how the body prepares. Through the way the chest stays slightly lifted, like it’s waiting for a tap on the shoulder. Through how often the jaw tightens when the phone lights up. Through the reflex to count days without meaning to.

    Empire works through this kind of time. It lets it sink in slowly. It gives people enough room to adapt, enough repetition to make endurance look like a personal trait. Lives stretch around renewal dates and review periods. Everything keeps moving, but nothing quite lands. You learn how to hold your life lightly, how to keep your belongings minimal, how to stay ready to shift without being told to move.

    People live for years inside extensions. Inside temporary permissions. Inside measures that circulate without ever settling into something solid. Life fills the space anyway. Dinners get made. School lunches get packed. Work schedules get memorized. Love keeps happening. All of it unfolds on ground that never fully firms up. You learn to distribute your weight. You learn where not to lean too hard.

    Joy still arrives, but it comes with an internal clock already running. You feel it tick while you’re laughing. While you’re planning. While you’re letting yourself believe something might hold. Celebration becomes careful. Plans stay provisional. Even rest carries a low hum of alertness, as if the body doesn’t quite trust that it can go all the way down.

    This kind of time wears people without leaving marks you can point to. It teaches the body to stay available. Sleep thins out. Attention fragments. You start measuring life in cycles you didn’t choose. Renewal cycles. Processing cycles. Waiting cycles. Each one asks for patience. Each one takes a little more capacity with it.

    Policy relies on this. Fatigue funnels what feels possible. When energy gets spent managing uncertainty, very little remains for anything else. The week becomes the unit of survival. The future starts to feel abstract. You make decisions based on what requires the least explanation, the least exposure, the least risk of being noticed.

    Urgency moves unevenly through this system. Some situations stop everything. Others stretch on quietly, absorbing days, months, years. Loss waits its turn. Harm gets filed, deferred, assigned a new expected timeline. You feel the delay in how long it takes to breathe normally again, in how quickly hope retracts when it gets too loud.

    The language surrounding all of this stays calm. Dates appear. Updates get promised. Progress gets implied. These words move smoothly through official channels. They sound steady. They invite trust. They ask for composure. They ask people to keep showing that they can handle it.

    And still, time gets made elsewhere. In kitchens where stories don’t arrive in order. On dance floors where the body follows sensation instead of sequence. In care networks that move when someone needs something, not when a form clears. Memory bends time. Touch compresses it. Grief stretches it. None of this asks to be scheduled.

    These practices don’t wait for recognition. They happen because life keeps insisting. Because care has its own tempo. Because people stay with each other even when everything else feels provisional. These rhythms don’t resolve the waiting, but they interrupt its authority.

    Empire manages time by distributing it unevenly. By deciding who gets to arrive and who must remain in motion. Who is allowed to settle and who must stay ready. Who is worn down slowly enough that it looks procedural. Paying attention to time means noticing how power moves quietly, through calendars, deadlines, queues, and the long spaces in between.

    There isn’t a clean ending to this. Time under empire leaves residue. It stays in the muscles. It shows up in how cautiously people plan, in how often joy gets delayed, in how carefully hope is rationed. Naming that doesn’t make it disappear. But it does bring the clock into the room. It lets the weight be felt together.

    And sometimes, that shared awareness is where movement begins.

  • Unmoored

    Unmoored

    The morning after the election, the city looks the same. Dry streets, brittle air, leaves pressed flat against the pavement. A jogger passes, breath clouding the cold, and somewhere, a car alarm starts and stops. Montréal continues its routine with the precision of muscle memory, a city that knows how to disguise grief.

    Inside, the kettle cools on the counter. I stand at the window, watching the light shift across the buildings. The light is hard, metallic, the kind that makes everything appear sharper than it is. The silence in the room feels heavy, almost physical, like something you could lift with both hands.

    Last night, Soraya Martinez Ferrada and Ensemble Montréal won the municipal election. The radio speaks of renewal, pride, stability. I picture the rented ballroom where speeches rang out: the clink of glasses, the smell of fabric softener and stage lights, laughter spilling into the dry streets, volunteers walking home beneath banners that promised progress.

    Progress, they say. But I can’t feel it. The air still carries the weight of something unspoken. Every party with a chance built its platform on the same foundations: language purity, economic austerity, the management of difference. Whether they spoke of pride, efficiency, or neutrality, the promise stayed constant: belonging for some, permission for others, surveillance for the rest. Strategic voting wasn’t the failure. The ballot was the trap.

    Some will say the vote split the left. They’ll insist that if we’d all lined up behind the same banner, things might have turned out differently, as if the problem were arithmetic and not ideology. As if the left they’re mourning hadn’t already increased police budgets, backed racial profiling, and dressed austerity in green. As if we were meant to keep voting for the same forces that have made so many of us less safe in our own neighbourhoods. There’s grief in watching people mistake management for care.

    Anger doesn’t erase love. It sharpens it. Even as the slogans collapse, I keep seeing the city’s face in the small things that once felt like home. I’ve loved this place through every version of myself. Montréal shaped my language, my work, my survival. It taught me the pace of winter light, the generosity of strangers, the way care grows inside contradiction. It held me through uncertainty and exhaustion. It’s where I built kinship, where I learned that love can live inside ruins.

    Lately, that love feels unreturned, and I know I’m not alone in feeling the distance widen. This loss feels like mourning in slow motion. What’s changing isn’t only the skyline or the slogans but the city’s sense of itself, the fragile coexistence that once made it possible to breathe here. Policies that promise safety and pride have become instruments of surveillance. Community centres lose funding while police budgets grow. Streets that once felt like gathering places now echo with a quieter kind of fear.

    I watch it happen and recognize the pattern. The same language of order and belonging spreads far beyond Montréal, across the provinces, across the border. It’s a choreography of control disguised as care, a politics that tightens around what it names as protection. Each new measure asks again and again: who gets to belong, and who must disappear? I grieve not only the policies but the narrowing of imagination they bring, the loss of what this city once taught me, that people can make worlds together even when institutions refuse to.

    The city that once felt expansive has begun to fold in on itself. The word values fills the news, followed by neutrality and order. The province denies systemic racism even as its laws rewrite language, dress, belonging. Policy takes the form of open arms that never quite reach. Every speech about inclusion carries the faint scent of repetition. This isn’t a sudden change. It’s the slow drift of habit, hardening like ice across the Saint Lawrence. The denial of injustice has become an everyday reflex. What I feel now isn’t surprise, but recognition. The city mirrors everything beyond it until reflection itself becomes suffocation.

    That reflection doesn’t stay on the glass; it settles beneath the skin. The air thickens around conversation. What begins as policy ends as posture. The city lives in the body: in the jaw that tightens before speaking, in the breath that hesitates before it leaves. Doing Black queer and abolitionist work here means learning to breathe within narrow margins, shaping language that can move through corridors built for silence, carrying whole conversations in the space between what’s said and what’s permitted. I’ve written reports no one read, proposals that came back without comment. Each silence taught me another dialect. I’ve learned the rhythm of translation, not of language but of self, a fluency in shrinking. That quiet labour settles deeper still. The lungs forget how to widen. The skin learns to anticipate tension. The body absorbs every moment of being misunderstood.

    And yet, grace persists.

    A friend leaves soup at my door. A neighbour cracks a joke, and we both laugh longer than expected. A kiki ball fills the night with sound, and laughter becomes a kind of heartbeat. These gestures don’t repair anything. They make living possible within a structure that resists it. The tenderness of this city lives in the people who refuse to stop loving it. They keep planting, cooking, teaching, dancing, writing. They hold each other through exhaustion. They create small interruptions in the machinery of forgetting.

    Love keeps me here. It isn’t safety. It is endurance, and endurance has a cost. I’m tired of pretending that staying is a choice. They say patience. They say progress. They say it takes time. But time is what they’ve stolen.

    I’m nearing the end of my PhD, standing in the quiet between endings and beginnings. I’ve started reading job postings from other cities, looking for roles that might let me live and work at a distance. I read slowly, careful not to look too far ahead. I tell myself that leaving could continue what began here, that movement could be a form of care. Still, there’s guilt in mobility. Even leaving is a privilege, though it doesn’t feel like one. I’ll cross borders others can’t, carrying a passport built from contradictions. But staying has its own kind of disappearance.

    Lately, I’ve been imagining what life might feel like elsewhere. The thought arrives gently, without certainty: rooms with different light, mornings that move without hurry, work that grows without needing to explain its own worth, air that feels generous. Beyond this city, there’s no clear refuge. Borders reopen old wounds. Fires, floods, droughts, storms, fear. Billionaires call their escape routes progress while governments trade care for resilience.

    I keep hearing the same logic in every headline. The slogans change, but the project’s the same: control the language, control the border, control the breath. What’s happening here isn’t local; it’s the rehearsal of a world learning to survive its own cruelty. Everywhere, the same sentence repeats: you’re on your own.

    And yet, even in that sentence, I hear an echo — the sound of people refusing to let the world end quietly.

    I think about the scale of this unravelling, and about the people who still find ways to love. I think about how living with honesty feels like defiance. I want to spend what time remains building something that holds life, like a room with open windows. I want to work with intention, to write with purpose, to live without apology. I want to move through a world that gives instead of withholds.

    Montréal stays inside me: the bagels on Saint-Viateur at two in the morning, the smell of snow, the hum of the métro at night, church bells layered with ambulance sirens, the sound of languages mingling in a café, the sight of people helping each other carry groceries through the rain, laughter and smoke drifting from balconies into the dark. These memories form a pulse. They remind me that a city isn’t only its institutions; it’s the gestures that persist. I hold those gestures close. They’re what keep the city alive when the headlines fail it.

    When I walk to the river, I listen. The water moves without hesitation. It carries the weight of the sky and keeps going. I think of other seasons: the river in thaw, in flood, in stillness under ice. The city has always tried to contain it, yet the current keeps finding its own line. I stand at the edge and feel the cold reach my fingers. Behind me, the city hums. Ahead of me, the current folds into itself, steady and endless.

    Movement feels like a kind of truth. I don’t know if I’ll leave, or when, or where I’ll go. I only know I’ve started to listen for motion. Montréal lives in me: the rhythm of its languages, the tension of its contradictions, the lessons in its beauty and its harm. I’m still here. I’m already elsewhere.

    I want a life that breathes. I want to find places where care isn’t a performance, where living doesn’t require permission. I don’t know if those places exist, yet I move toward them, in thought, in hope, in practice.

    The river keeps its rhythm. The wind carries the scent of cold. I whisper gratitude for what this city has given, and for what I’ve learned in its arms. Then I turn toward home, where the kettle waits on the counter, and the light settles once more across the window.

  • There Is No Word for This Grief: On Gaza, Famine, and the World That Watches

    There Is No Word for This Grief: On Gaza, Famine, and the World That Watches

    I wasn’t supposed to be writing this.

    I’m supposed to be writing a comprehensive exam about temporality and health. About how Black queer people live and care for one another in timeframes not designed for our survival. I’m supposed to be providing therapy tomorrow—offering calm, presence, holding—for clients navigating their own overwhelm, grief, burnout. I’m supposed to be finishing a manuscript, drafting another talk, prepping for the next ball.

    But there is a genocide happening in Gaza.

    And I am broken.

    And that’s not what this is about. But it’s also what everything is about.

    Because I don’t know how to move through this world anymore.

    Not in a poetic way. Not in a metaphor. I mean literally. My body doesn’t know what to do with itself. I sit still and I shake. I eat and feel nauseous. I sleep and wake up in a sweat. I walk outside into wildfire smoke so thick that Tiohtià:ke now has the worst air quality in the world—and even still, I know I’m breathing freer than a child in Rafah.

    And what do you even do with that kind of knowing?

    There is a level 5 famine in Gaza.The highest designation possible.
    Thousands of children are already dead from starvation.
    More will die in the coming days.

    And the food is already there.
    Just metres away.
    Across the border.
    In trucks.
    In planes.
    In warehouses.

    Blocked.
    By policy.
    By intention.
    By design.

    This is not a crisis. This is not a natural disaster. This is not an unfortunate byproduct of war. This is a settler colonial genocide. A calculated campaign of extermination. Ethnic cleansing disguised as self-defence. Starvation weaponized. Infrastructure targeted. Grief made endless.

    This is the logic of Zionism.
    This is the logic of empire.
    This is what it means to disappear a people in real time.

    And the world watches.
    Scrolls.
    Shrugs.
    Argues.
    Donates, maybe.
    Then forgets again.

    Because forgetting is the luxury of the unaffected.

    And if you know what it is to be Black, to be queer, to be Indigenous, to be trans, to be displaced, to be criminalized, to be border-crossed or borderless, then you already know this truth: the world is not neutral.

    Not when it comes to genocide.
    Not when it comes to who gets to live.
    Not when it comes to who the world calls human.

    What’s happening in Gaza isn’t unimaginable.
    It’s entirely imaginable.
    That’s what makes it unbearable.

    This is what genocide looks like in the age of livestreams.
    This is what settler colonialism looks like when the camera’s always on.
    This is what fascism looks like when it doesn’t need to hide anymore.
    This is what it means to beg for mercy and be called a terrorist.
    This is what it means to scream for food and be met with silence.
    This is what it means when a child’s life is worth less than the narrative.

    And here we are. Watching.
    In real time.
    As Gaza bleeds.

    I’m not here to offer hope.
    Not the kind you can package.
    Not the kind you can sell.

    Because if you’re watching this and still talking about “both sides,”
    If you’re more outraged by broken windows than by bombed hospitals,
    If your solidarity is contingent on respectability, strategy, or PR optics,
    If your grief only activates when white bodies are harmed,
    Then your humanity is not mine.

    And I am not interested in convincing anyone that Palestinians deserve to live.

    Because life is not earned.
    Freedom is not a prize.
    Liberation is not a matter of debate.

    Palestinians do not need your approval to resist.
    They do not need your permission to mourn.
    They do not need to be perfect victims in order to be spared.

    They are not being starved because of Hamas.
    They are not being bombed because they resist.
    They are being exterminated because they exist.
    Because they are Indigenous.
    Because they are still there.
    Because they refuse to disappear.

    And I am wrecked by this.

    Not just as a witness, but as someone who knows what it means to be told that your life is too complicated to matter.
    Who knows what it means to scream into silence.
    To live in a body that the state treats as collateral.
    To walk through a world that sees your death as routine.

    But this isn’t about me.

    It’s about a father holding the body of his child and saying I’m sorry I couldn’t protect you.
    It’s about people breaking apart stale bread to share with twenty others.
    It’s about the doctor who keeps treating the wounded in the rubble of a bombed out hospital.

    It’s about the poets still writing.
    The dancers still dancing.
    The children still drawing keys to homes that no longer exist.
    The elders still planting seeds in soil they know they may not survive to harvest.

    This isn’t resilience.
    This is refusal.

    This isn’t optimism.
    This is survival strategy.

    This isn’t a tragedy.
    It’s a crime.
    An atrocity.
    A catastrophe authored by cowards in suits and suits in tanks and tanks in children’s bedrooms.

    And still, somehow, there is singing.
    Still, somehow, there is prayer.
    Still, somehow, there is resistance.

    Still, somehow, they live.

    And I want you to understand what it means to keep living in the middle of a genocide.
    To not just breathe—but to love.
    To not just exist—but to refuse.
    To not just survive—but to fight.

    So no, I don’t have the words.
    I have this grief lodged in my throat like shrapnel.
    I have these tears that feel like they betray the scale of the loss.
    I have this ache in my chest from trying to hold space for others while knowing the world is falling apart.
    I have the unbearable knowing that every second I spend writing this, someone else is dying.

    And still—I write.
    Because silence is complicity.
    Because bearing witness is not enough, but it is necessary.

    Because abolition means all cages.
    Because solidarity means now, not after.

    Because Palestine is not a symbol—it’s a place, a people, a love, a struggle that stretches across oceans and generations.
    Because to be Black and queer and abolitionist and breathing in this world is to take a side.

    And I will say it again and again and again, even if my voice shakes:

    From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.

    And may we live long enough to see that day.

    And may we never forget what we did—and didn’t—do until then.