[PHOTO] Six photos of Dalvay-by-the-Sea, Prince Edward Island National Park

Dalvay-by-the-Sea is a National Historic Site located at the eastern end of the Prince Edward Island National Park, built around a late 19th century oil tycoon's estate. The house, currently a hotel that offers afternoon teas, is located on the shores of the barachois known as Dalvay Lake.

[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• blogTO notes that Yonge and Dundas will soon be hosting a Zimbabwean meat pie restaurant.


• Beyond the Beyond links to a report regretful of past optimisim about geopolitics.


• Centauri Dreams considers extraterrestrial life and red dwarfs.


• Marginal Revolution looks at rent in Puerto Rico's public housing system.


• pollotenchegg maps economic change in Ukraine.


• Savage Minds calls for a decolonization of anthropology.


• Towleroad notes that the roommates of a gay Syrian refugee murdered in Istanbul are also receiving threats.


• The Volokh Conspiracy wonders what liberals will think of American Jews' religious freedom when the majority of practising Jews are Orthodox.

[NEWS] Some Tuesday links

• Bloomberg notes a raid of Amazon's Japan office by that country's competition agency.


• Bloomberg View looks at paranoia about Pokémon Go and suggests China is not trying to overturn the world order.


• CBC reports on the popular music and dance of Brazil's slums, and reports on the diet of ancient humans.


• The Inter Press Service notes that African farmers could feed the world, but first they need to work on their infrastructure.


• MacLean's shares the images of 25 Canadian websites of note in the days of the early Internet.


• Open Democracy calls for reform of British agricultural funding and reports on Venezuela's hard landing.

[URBAN NOTE] "The Case for Keeping Casey House in the Neighbourhood"

At Torontoist, Lisa Cumming describes the latest changes to hit Casey House, an HIV/AIDS hospice and hospital.

For almost 30 years, Casey House has provided care to Torontonians living with HIV/AIDS, home care, and other supportive healthcare programs. For some patients, it has been a home away from home when they needed the support most. Although it will remain in the neighbourhood, the hospital is going to move.

The change in location was driven by one goal: to expand the services and care offered to patients.

At its new site, a 58,000-square-foot facility adjacent to Casey House’s existing location, a new day health program will be launched, offering wound care, hot lunches, massage therapy, physiotherapy, antiretroviral therapy support, and connections to places like Fife House, where a patient can get peer and housing support.

Construction of the facility is scheduled to be substantially completed by December 2016 with occupancy commencing late 2016 to early 2017.

“We’re fortunate in that [the old building] is just across the street and that we’re able to continue to see it—that was part of our plan as well,” said Lisa McDonald, the spokesperson for Casey House. “We didn’t want to sell that building and have it torn down and it be used for condos or anything like that.”

Casey House is currently located at 9 Huntley Street, and while the new facility is a mere 97 metres away, at 571 Jarvis, it’s the site of a heritage property known as the “Grey Lady.”

[URBAN NOTE] "Geary Avenue is still Toronto's most interesting street"

blogTO's Derek Flack reports about the latest developments of my neighbourhood's Geary Avenue.

Geary Avenue TorontoOne of West Queen West's most iconic landmarks in the late 2000s was Thrush Holmes' neon-adorned gallery and studio space. Located just west of Dovercourt Rd. beside what would become the sales office for the Bohemian Embassy, it was a symbol of a neighbourhood defined by a creative spirit that had emerged from its industrial past.

When Holmes relocated in 2011 after five years, the character of the street and surrounding neighbourhood had changed immensely. The arts hub that was 48 Abell was gone, the Mercer Union moved north to Bloor, and the area had become the city's hallmark of hip living, complete with a roster of new condos and bars.

This isn't a sad story. Or at least it doesn't have to be. Toronto needs place likes the West Queen West we have today, but it also needs areas that will serve as breeding grounds for artistic endeavours, new ideas, and cultural experimentation. For now, the city still has such places in steady supply.

Where did Thrush Holmes go when he left West Queen West?

Geary Avenue, of course. That strange hybrid of a street where you're just as likely to find an auto body shop as you are a jam space, a brewery, an architecture firm, or an artist studio. In a city that's growing as rapidly as Toronto, it's places like Geary where you might take our cultural temperature.

[URBAN NOTE] "Toronto Might As Well Be Mars When It Comes To Storefront Weed"

NOW Toronto's Miles Kenyon reports on storefront marijuana's many, many problems in Toronto.

Raymond Hathaway, a Toronto paralegal who is suing the city for $1 million for interfering with his access to medical marijuana as a result of police raids on dispensaries back in May, doesn’t mince words.

"The raids are grand theft, destruction of property, and, from a patient perspective, criminal harassment on the basis of disability," Hathaway says, eliciting applause from dozens of members of the public gathered in a committee room at City Hall Monday, July 25, to spark discussion on the future of marijuana dispensaries in Toronto.

Hathaway’s lawsuit centres around his inability to access Rick Simpson Oil, a cannabis extract that is currently not available through any of Canada’s 34 Licensed Producers of medical marijuana. This, he argues in his lawsuit, constitutes a violation of his human rights.

“Dispensaries are not in a grey area and are not illegal,” he says, pointing to several court cases supporting patient access to medical marijuana, including R. v. Parker, a 2000 Ontario Court of Appeal decision that found prohibiting cannabis use was unconstitutional because some illnesses require it for treatment.

The city’s Licensing and Standards Committee voted June 27 to defer a discussion on the licensing of dispensaries until provincial and federal legislation has been passed on the matter.

[CAT] On a Toronto nightclub that apparently hosted a lion cub

The Toronto Star reports.

Toronto Animal Services has reportedly been called in to investigate a Toronto nightclub after photos of patrons holding a lion cub surfaced on Instagram, according to an animal advocacy group.

The images show patrons of Lavelle, a King St. W. club with a rooftop patio, carrying the cub.

This violates Toronto bylaws that prohibit possessing lions and other exotic animals, according to Animal Justice, an animal advocacy group who made animal services aware of the issue on Friday.

“It’s illegal in Toronto to parade exotic animals around nightclubs for marketing purposes,” said lawyer Camille Labchuk, executive director of Animal Justice, in a statement on the group’s website.

“Baby animals aren’t toys. This lion cub should be with her mother, not used as a prop for selfies,” she said, adding that Toronto Animal Services — which did not respond to requests for comment — was now on the case.

[URBAN NOTE] "The Weeknd donates $50,000 to U of T to launch Ethiopian Studies program"

The Globe and Mail's Ellen Brait reports.

Grammy-winning artist The Weeknd has donated $50,000 to the University of Toronto to help start an Ethiopian Studies program.

The artist, who was born under the name Abel Tesfaye, is a Scarborough native whose parents emigrated from Ethiopia. The Bikila Awards organization, which works to “foster academic, professional and business excellence and promote volunteerism among persons of Ethiopian origin,” reached out to Tesfaye for funding and he immediately responded. Previously, in 2014, the Bikila Awards organization had awarded Tesfaye with its Professional Excellence Award.

On Saturday, the Weeknd tweeted “sharing our brilliant and ancient history of Ethiopia. proud to support the studies in our homie town through @UofT and @bikilaaward”

The money will go toward a larger fundraising campaign which started last year when University of Toronto history and cultural studies professor Michael Gervers pledged a donation of $50,000 of his own money if the amount was matched by the school and the Ethiopian community. The campaign has raised $170,000 thus far.

Proceeds will go towards a course, to be offered later this year, in the ancient Ethiopic language Ge’ez. The school and Bikila hope to follow this with a full program in the future.

[PHOTO] Flag of Toronto, Bluffer's Park and Beach

The flag of Toronto was waving proudly over the entrance to Bluffer's Park and Beach early this evening.

[REVIEW] Coal from Hades, Nuit Rose

I learned of the existence of Les Mouches Fantastiques, a zine published in Montréal between 1918 and 1920 that was about as out and proud as a zine could be at that time, via a column last year by Daily Xtra's historian Michael Lyons.

In the autumn of 1917, a young woman named Elsie Alice Gidlow (later known as Elsa) was living with her large family in Montreal. She made a meagre living doing office work but longed for travel and the bohemian life. She published a letter in the Montreal Daily Star under a pseudonym, asking if there were any organizations of artists or writers in the city. A second letter published under her own name appeared a couple of weeks later, suggesting that the original inquirer (herself) and others interested should meet at her apartment.

Only a few among the motley crew had any real promise. Most of the men who showed up were middle-aged and looking to pick up, given the female name signed with the second letter, and left disappointed. The only man who really stood out to Gidlow was the “most astonishing, elegant being . . . a beautiful, willowy blond” named Roswell George Mills, a financial-page editor at the Star who also wrote a pseudonymous female advice column — possibly Jessie Roberts’s What Girls May Do.

Mills was unabashedly, flamboyantly homosexual. “Roswell confided his personal crusade to me,” Gidlow wrote in her autobiography. “He wanted people to understand that it was beautiful, not evil, to love others of one’s own sex and make love with them. Roswell had divined my lesbian temperament and was happy to proselytize; the veil of self-ignorance began to lift.” Mills introduced her to the work of Oscar Wilde, Edward Carpenter, Verlaine and modern psychologists who described homosexuality in more concrete medical — rather than condemnatory moralistic — terms. She built on his reading list and began to find her own authors to venerate. He nicknamed her Sappho, and they became lifelong friends.

Early in their writing careers, Gidlow and Mills were very involved in the amateur journalist community in North America, a loose network of organizations and self-publishers. Canada was well into a bloody war, which Mills had escaped as a 4F — “physically, mentally, emotionally and morally incompetent for the glory of killing,” he said — and this, along with their sexual radicalism and their weakening tolerance for Christian patriarchy, coalesced into Les Mouches Fantastiques (originally titled Coal from Hades).

The publication consisted mostly of poetry by Gidlow about women, with translations, allegorical stories, dramatic writing and “articles on ‘the intermediate sex’” by Mills, as well as contributions that satirized society or panned the ongoing war. Gidlow assumed the publication went out to only a hundred of their fellow underground writers, but she eventually received a letter from a woman in Havana who was impressed with the work. [Graeme Davis, a] priest and writer from South Dakota read Les Mouches, fell in love with Mills and moved to Montreal in the hopes of being with him.

There is a fair bit about Elsie Gidlow, a pioneering lesbian writer who made her life and loves in the United States. The author who got her start in Les Mouches Fantastiques with her poem "To Regina" achieved some kind of fulfillment.



There is rather less known about Roswell George Mills. We know some of his relationships, we know that he spent part of his life in Berlin before the rise of the Nazis and that he spent most of his life in New York City as a freelance journalist, but we know little of Mills' interior life. We know surprisingly little about the man who may well be the first out gay man in Canada.

Mills' life, and that of his lover Davis, was brought to life for Nuit Rose by Jeffrey Canton and Marcus Peterson in the cellar of Glad Day Bookshop on Yonge. In Coals of Hades, Canton as Davis and Peterson as Mills enacted an imaginary exchange of letters between the two in the early 1940s before the United States got involved in the Second World War. They remember their life together in Montréal, they talked about their very experiences as gay men--Davis the older, Mills the more cosmopolitan--and each wonders what went wrong. How did the promise of Les Mouches Fantastiques, the printed imagining of the possibility that being gay was not wrong, fail to come about?

Canton and Peterson's performances were good, one character's letter smoothly following another. Coal from Hades had been presented before at the Toronto Storytellling Festival, but the two men are clearly practiced and skilled performers. The story that they told together was a powerful one, one that has preoccupied me a bit over the past month. Why did it take so long for gay rights to take off as a movement? Was there any hope? Could the bravery of Les Mouches Fantastiques have seen some fulfillment earlier in the 20th century? Coal from Hades has made me think a lot about the issues it explores, and I'm grateful to it for that.

[AH] Was an earlier gay rights movement possible?

As I mentioned in my reaction to Coal from Hades, the question implicit in that work of whether an earlier gay rights movement was possible has been tantalizing me for the past month. Could we have had a Stonewall a generation earlier, or even earlier? Could the global gay rights movement have taken off earlier?

I'd like to believe this possible, for any number of reasons. I'm not inclined to think it was possible, simply on account of the overwhelming popularity of homophobic religion in even the most liberal countries. Even in France, where legal bans against gay sex had been dropped in 1791, homophobia was normal, and gay rights unimaginable: In Frédéric Martel's The Pink and the Black, for instance, the author's examination of the history of gay rights notes that while gay sex as such was not criminalized, any public displays seen as threatening to public morals were prosecuted as criminal offenses. If even in liberal France there was no way to create a public discussion about sexual orientation and civil rights, what prospect was there anywhere? The relative weakness of many civil rights movements in the pre-Second World War period is also another point against this imagining.

Am I wrong? I'd love it if you could tell me so.