[URBAN NOTE] On Jack Layton, Brent Hawkes, and the space for difference

[rfmcdonald]

dewline's link to the eulogies given at Jack Layton's funeral reminded me of something important. The Reverend Brent Hawkes of Toronto's Metropolitan Community Church gave the longest of the speeches.

“Normally, it’s Christmas Eve, and the Metropolitan Community Church occupies this space. Normally, I look up there in the balcony and Jack and Olivia are sitting there. Normally, I greet them outside in the hall with their Santa Claus hats on.

People have said to me, ‘How do you prepare for this talk or speech.’ They say, ‘It’s probably the most crucial (speech) you’ve ever given. And I say, ‘Probably the most crucial, probably the most nervous I’ve been was my first meeting with my future mother-in-law and father-in-law.’ I know that I speak for everyone participating today that we are all so honoured to be asked. We are all so honoured to participate today, because we all want to give Jack justice.

Early in July, Jack and Olivia invited me to their home. To talk. The conversation began the way it almost began with Jack. ‘Friend, how’s John doing?’ John is my husband. And then, Jack said that … he wanted to talk to me about his funeral, and that he still intended to beat this. He still wanted to come back but he needed to cover every option, to make sure all of the plans were in place no matter what the result was. We talked about making the plans and filing the file and putting it in the filing cabinet – and hopefully pulling it out years later. And so we began a number of conversations about this service and about life and death and dying. And so today I begin to talk to you about life and death.

The interesting about Hawkes is that he's one of the most prominent queer Canadians alive, a man who performed the first legally recognized same-sex marriages in Canada. (I shouted extra-loud praise to him this Pride when his float passed by.) The really interesting thing about Layton is that, a heterosexual man, Layton is a man who openly supported gay rights from the beginning of his political career in the early 1980s, fighting against HIV/AIDS and for same-sex marriage, and, incidentally, having a gay man as his spiritual advisor.

I like living in a country and a city where this sort of thing is matter-of-fact and unobjectionable--at least, publically unobjectionable. It's nice that the space exists in Toronto to be queer and religious, to be queer and have that specific difference be just anoter one of those differences that don't really make a difference, like (say) left-handedness. It's really nice to live in a community where space for differences exists, and it's nice to have that fact be so quotidian as to be not worth special mention.