Queer Granddad

Looking through social media posts about the planned Drag show protest in Kelowna today I noticed quite a few people were unaware of why protesters are calling Drag performers and transgender people groomers and pedophiles. I decided to write a blog post to give some background. I attended the event to show solidarity with the queer community and see first-hand what all the fuss was about. I was expecting the police would need to be called. A poster inviting people to join the protest showed up on a social media page under the name of Graeme Flannigan with the title "URGENT: Protest All Ages Drag Show for Children." Nowhere was it billed as being an event for children.  The battle cry of this group is that these types of performances sexualize children. It is some of the same people and the same storyline used by those who organized to support Parents Voice BC school trustee candidates as they sought to end SOGI 123 in schools, a set of resources to help create safe and inclu...

Laura-Lynn Tyler Thompson (r) and Jenn Smith at the anti-SOGI protest in Victoria, BC which they organized on September 29, 2018, where dozens of counter-protesters also gathered. Photo - Black Press Media To quote Laura Lynn Tyler Thompson who names herself as CEO of Laura Lynn Tyler Thompson Ministries "Disagreement with an ideology is not hate." Thompson has been in the cross-hairs of furious parents of LGBTQ kids, their allies, and many groups related to K-12 education across British Columbia because of her crusade to have SOGI 123, which she calls an ideology, removed from schools. Some of Thompson's critics have labeled her social media posts as hate speech. SOGI 123 is a set of resources for teachers to help create safe schools for all students regardless of their sexual orientation or gender identity. This was implemented two years ago by BC's Ministry of Education and has been adopted by all 60 school districts across the province. Thompson has also bee...

Photo by  Peter Hershey  on  Unsplash I'm on the phone with a very dear friend.  They are struggling with one very fundamental life question.  "Am I fulfilling my life purpose?"  This person is despondent and talking about giving up on life, thinking they had wasted so much of their life and it seemed to them futile to carry on.  My heart is aching listening to this conversation. How will it be possible to say anything that would make a difference?  What coaching would be possible?  What popped into my mind was something Dr. Wayne Dyer said.  "Look at every person as the unfolding of God."   This question burned to be asked, "When did you decide to give up on yourself?"  The answer "When I was seventeen I made a very stupid decision and since then I have wasted so much time.  Now I'm in my fifties.  What a waste." I responded with "You did something when you were seventeen that was the right thing for you...

It started with orange seeds.  I could feel them hitting the back of my neck and head, some of them going inside my shirt collar and sticking to my back.  I shrunk down in my seat, working very hard at pretending it didn't bother me, trying to be invisible.  Any attention would only have all the kids on the school bus laughing and staring at me.  The seeds were being spit at me by the girl in the seat behind me.  I could hear her snickering with the kid beside her.  When I ignored her she leaned forward and whispered "Retard, retard, you're such a retard you should be dead."  "Retard" was the worst word to use on someone back in 1967.  Then she started kicking the back of my seat.  I was frozen in my seat, afraid to fight back, afraid to say anything.  It was drummed into me, I was a wimp, a sissy, a freak.  It was said to me so many times by the kids on the bus, the kids at school.  I was a discard, an outcast, a boy who no on...

I bobbed up and down on the yellow vinyl seat as the 820 John Deere tractor labored across the summer fallow field pulling the cultivator with field harrows dragging behind.  The musty smell of freshly turned earth combined with crushed weeds filled the air.  Gulls squawked as they followed along overhead watching for mice.  Going up the next hill the tractor began to lose power and even as I shifted the gears down I had to push the hydraulic lever up to raise the cultivator shovels, easing the load on the tractor to be able to make it up the hill.  The loss of power was a slipping clutch.  It was a hot July day in 1971.  I was fourteen years old - a skinny farm kid with nerdy glasses.  Always curious about how things worked I often watched as Dad fixed the machinery on the family farm.  I remembered him describing a time before when the clutch was slipping on the tractor and he did what he called "setting the clutch" to fix it....

What I'm grateful for, what I want more of in life, and what I'm willing to release and let go of... that is what one of my friends shared with me today in connection with the fall equinox. One of her practices is to make a list of these three areas at the time of the equinox.  What I heard was it is an opportunity to hit life's reset button.  The equinox is when the sun is lined up with the equator and is a metaphor for balance.  Pause for a moment, take a breath, take inventory, see what it is that I have to be grateful for, look at what would make a difference if it were present in my life, and look at what would make a difference if it weren't present in my life. I'm grateful for my beautiful children and grandson.  I'm grateful for loving friends.  I'm grateful to be living in one of the most beautiful cities in the world - and we're going to have a full moon tonight, the first time on the equinox since 1991.  It's a beautiful clear day so I...

Adversity = Opportunity.  Pffft!  Really?  I don't know if my grandmother would have used those words.  She was though a very clever woman whose resourcefulness as a single mother provided for a big family during the great depression.  She once told me the story of chasing down a rooster in the farm yard to catch and cook because two strangers walked in from the road who hadn't eaten for a few days.  In her later years she lived in a small cottage in our home town.  It was a very old building, poorly insulated and drafty in the winter.  She was very proud of her quaint little place and took care in making it warm and inviting.  Her unique style of decorating included painting over the old linoleum floor with a solid color and then painting a repeating pattern over it using a potato that she had cut into a star shape.  Grandma loved having her grand kids stay over night.  She delighted in serving us treats and one of he...