It hasn’t been widely heard, but during the pandemic, young trans activists have been calling on the LGBTQ community to invest in the skate park under the Van Horne Viaduct in Mile End on Thursday evenings. During this curfew period, there were even a few police interventions.
The writer Gabriel Cholette participated in this movement, his heart beating, because for him it was a heterosexual place where he feared not being accepted as gay, but where there was also this excitement of crossing a border. One more.
“It was really a cry from the heart, we needed space,” he recalls, recalling that the Legault government talked all the time about family, and practically not about communities, about these families that we choose, as important, if not more, than the traditional family.
“That’s where we see the power of the terms used,” he notes. “We were stuck in our three and a half years of not seeing anyone, and our psychological supports were in our community to which we had no access.”
This experience reminded him of the student spring demonstrations of 2012, which was his political initiation at the age of 19. The writer wanted to archive this movement in skate parkwhich inspired The straight parkhis second book published by Queer Tryptique.
I was impatiently waiting for this book, because it was at the height of the lockdown, during the pandemic, that I discovered with a certain delight Gabriel Cholette through his first work, The underground notebooks. In the social desert we were going through at that time, this writing full of intoxication reminded me of the strength and fragility of youth, that moment in life when we are so intensely with each other.
Read our column “Magical Nights”
Gabriel Cholette is particularly gifted at depicting the multitude; one feels a bit like in a painting by Hieronymus Bosch when reading these tales of nightlife, which were first a confidential artistic project on Instagram.
This young writer has a doctorate in medieval literature and does not hide the fact that the aesthetics of the Middle Ages have a certain influence on his writing.
We find the same fever of Underground Notebooks In The straight parkwhere he asserts himself and reveals himself more, relying more on color photographs that reveal some characters encountered in the story. This is reminiscent of the work of Nan Goldin, or the films of filmmaker Larry Clark, quoted in the book, “even if he was canceled.” And, why not, the manuscripts of the Middle Ages, which mixed illustrations and fragmented texts.
The straight park is a committed work, “a denunciation of heteronormativity, of the violence that is done to gays, a sort of militant punch,” he specifies.
The title of the book is intentionally provocative. “It may be shocking for straight people to be called straight, but we spend our whole lives being called gay. I think gay people are often focused on defining themselves, but it’s also an effect of the domination of straights in a culture that leaves us in the shadows or misrepresents us. I wanted to turn the camera back on heteronormative culture.”
From childhood to adulthood, from school to skate parkthis culture is omnipresent in the narrator’s life, in his conflictual relationships with his father – Gabriel is the son of a poet from the Montreal counterculture, Mario Cholette – and more particularly in his painful story with a violent partner, who does not assume his sexuality. This guy refuses that their love be known, and beats him up as soon as he appears “too” gay. In short, the straight park is not confined to a place under a viaduct, rather it is the norm in which we live.
PHOTO MARTIN CHAMBERLAND, THE PRESS
In his book, Gabriel Cholette denounces heteronormative culture and violence against gays.
Gabriel Cholette evokes Monitor and punish by Michel Foucault, because that’s how he felt, monitored and punishedas soon as he just wanted to be himself. And when you don’t dare to step out of line to protect yourself, it’s the feeling of imposture that takes over, inevitably. “Michel Marc Bouchard says that before learning to love, homosexuals learn to lie,” he quotes. “The slogan ‘Queer is resistance’, I really believe it. When you are a queer individual, you still resist the codes that are imposed on you.”
We like to say that these days, everything is better for gays, but violence against the LGBTQ community is increasing, there are even lunatics who set ambushes on dating apps to attack them. New technologies, good old dark times that continue. Certainly, there have been advances.
But in my life, I’ve always had to break down boundaries. In my swimming club, in high school, at university, there’s always an awkwardness when we talk frankly about our lives, which creates a gap. We try to please and to filter what we think. Gay literature showed me that I can live this way, but also talk about it openly.
Gabriel Cholette
And according to him, we are living in an important moment in queer literature in Quebec. “In fact, it is a strong moment in Quebec literature, and queers have breathed a breath of life into this literary landscape, I am convinced of it. It comes from a need. I think that there are many young gay people who are reaching their thirties and who have discovered themselves in literature. Very early on, I think we made the choice to be writers, because we found our environment there, and now, we are flourishing. I am thinking of Antoine Charbonneau-Demers, Jean-Michel Fortier, Kevin Lambert…”
But his cult book is The Goddess of Fireflies by Geneviève Pettersen. “An aesthetic revelation for me,” he says. “The Saguenay language that is used, this world where drugs are tackled head-on, it opened my eyes to what literature could do. Each text that I write is a bit of a tribute to The Goddess of Firefliesbecause I find that I am still a little in the universe of this first shock.
It is also an aesthetic shock when you read The straight parkwhere Gabriel Cholette comes into the world as a writer, in a way, with, in passing, a surprising birthing scene. He who has always written ended up understanding, by showing his texts around him, that it is frankness that works best. “Those thoughts that we hide from everyone, they are precious, because they speak to people. But it was a slow work to agree to write what I did not dare to say out loud.”
The straight park
Queer Triptych
126 pages