The Beavers That Lived in the Sky

| Chris Chang-Yen Phillips

This weekend I went to a farm in central Alberta for a gathering of Next Uppers from all over the province. I learned that the cattle farm was a bit of an Albertan punk rock institution not too many years ago, but more of the conversations drifted towards humans and our place in nature. Whether we have any place in it at all, in fact.

It inspired a little story I’d like to share with you, called The Beavers That Lived in the Sky.

A tower made out of sticks stands out in front of a bright blue sky
Photo credit: arvster

Once upon a time, deep in the forest there lived a colony of beavers. They loved to chomp down on trembling aspen trees, and build dams with them of course. Their dams created swampy reservoirs that lots of fish loved to swim in. The herons loved the dams too, because of all the delicious fish.

Gradually they spread into many colonies all throughout the forest, each with their own specialization: some built wider dams, some added tiny towers, some liked to decorate them with leaf sculptures, and some liked to carve famous beaver faces into them, like little Mt. Beavermores.

Then one day a beaver in one of these colonies said, Why should we stay in these little dams when we could build grand towers all the way up to the sky, high enough to see over the treetops? The other beavers in her colonies discussed this, and said it sounded like a very promising idea. So the chopped down some trees to build a magnificent tower, and lo and behold she was right, they had amazing views of the forest that no beaver had before.

The colony decided to become tower-makers and map-makers, creating exquisite maps of the forest from their new vantage point. And their maps were so splendid and renowned throughout the forest that they knew they’d struck upon the true destiny that all beavers were meant to fulfill.

With all these new trees they were chopping down, they could feed more beavers, and soon their first tower filled up and they had to build more to house everybody. The other colonies thought they were a bit strange with all their talk about the sky, but they said, “That’s all well and good for them, let them enjoy their big towers and we’ll keep doing what we’re doing.”

And they would have.

But the tower-makers started running out of trees. They pondered what to do. Then they looked at all the other places in the forest and said, “Look at those silly beavers mucking about on the ground. They’re letting all of their trees go to waste, and not using them to build towers at all.”

So they tried to convince the other colonies of the error of their ways. The other beavers said no thanks, but the tower-makers were adamant they knew best. So they started moving into the other beavers’ areas to launch mandatory tower-building masterclasses, workshops and conferences.

Where they found the others difficult to re-educate, the tower-makers were regrettably compelled to use force. With their huge numbers, the battles were short, and before long most of the other colonies had become tower-makers too. After a few generations, most forgot they’d ever made dams.

Unfortunately, within a few generations the forest also started to look a little bare. Actually it looked like a disaster zone. With so many mouths to feed, they were forced to build more and more towers, and chop down  more and more trees. Eventually most of the forest became barren clearcuts dotted with towers.

Some beavers started getting very concerned about the disappearance of the forest, and tried to tell others they were headed down a self-destructive path. They warned that unless things changed, there’d be no forest left at all.

The rest of the tower-makers looked around, and agreed they needed to harvest trees more sustainably. Some even agreed that a disaster was going on.

“But what can we do?” they said. “Would you rather live without maps and towers?”

“There’s not much we can do, to be honest,” they sighed. “This is just how beavers are.”

The key to life is on a treadmill

| Chris Chang-Yen Phillips

I have this weird thing where I always run for at least 32 minutes. It took me a while to realise that running is more important for my brain than for my body. Every time I go to the gym, I think of this quote from Will Smith:

“In one of my songs, I write, ‘The key to life is on a treadmill. I’ll just watch and learn while your chest burns. Because if you say you are going to run three miles and you only run two, I don’t ever have to worry about losing something to you.’ I started running about five years ago. Running introduces you to your worst enemy, to that person who tells you, ‘Ooh, our ankles hurt and we should stop. Why do we need to run five miles? Let us run three miles.’ That is the same person who says to the man, ‘Hey, your wife will never find out if you sleep with her,’ and the same person who tells the 16-year-old, ‘You are not going to be cool if you do not smoke it.’ If you start giving in to that person, you will never get to your goals.”

Everybody’s family is going to change

| Chris Chang-Yen Phillips

Poster for The Coming Out MonologuesLast week I had the pleasure of seeing The Coming Out Monologues at the U of A. Riffing off pieces like The Vagina Monologues and The Laramie Project, it was a play based entirely on the true stories of the people onstage coming out of the closet. I never get enough of these stories, and I loved their sincerity and vulnerability. Some of the performers were young, some were old, some had relatively painless transitions, and others ended decades-long relationships with straight partners. Most ended on something like a happy ending.

Except… a lot also ended saying something like, ‘It was tough getting people to accept who I really am, but things got better once they saw how normal I am too.” Which made me squirm. Is this the world we really want to make for ourselves?

I can attest that folks in the queer community spend a lot of time trying to be “normal” — as in, act straight. I do it all the time, often without even thinking about it. Is this underwear too gay to wear to the gym? Which part of the ceiling should I look at to avoid telling this group of guys I don’t like golf?

I remember bumping into an old drama teacher and her husband at a coffee shop when the Canadian government legalized same-sex marriage. They were telling me they couldn’t understand why it had taken so long for legal recognition, because it was so silly to think that two men being able to get married would affect everybody else’s relationship. Your marriage has no impact on ours, they reassured me.

But why shouldn’t it?

This kind of “normalizing” is a way of convincing ourselves that the Home Improvement, King of Queens, Everybody Loves Raymond-style straight, monogamous relationships in the mainstream essentially have it perfect, and that we can and should emulate them. More insidiously, it also implies that they have nothing to learn from us.

Claire holds her hand out daintily for a butch and wonderful Meagh to kiss.
My friends Claire and Meagh are irrepressibly cute. (Photo credit: Holly Norris)

I learn a lot from glances into my friends Meagh and Claire‘s relationship. I think they model a lot of things queer partners negotiate that most straight couples I know rarely think about. For an average hetero couple, how often do serious conversations come up about what it means that the man almost always drives? Not often, right?

But Meagh and Claire have had ongoing, loving talks about how they feel about their gender and their roles together. Is it okay to be a queer girl and wear lipstick and heels? Do my body parts match the way I feel inside? Do we want to use “she” all the time when we talk about each other? I don’t think Claire would mind me telling you she calls herself the feelings-top of the relationship.

It’s not fair to say that this happens in every queer relationship, because there are a near-infinite variety and queer folks are like the queens of experimentation. But because we don’t have many models of how they’re supposed to work, I think it’s fair to say it’s way more common to actively negotiate these things. Would it be the worst thing in the world for straight couples to learn something from this?

I’ve had second dates spent getting slurpees and analyzing the merits of monogamy and polygamy. For me, monogamy seems to offer more warmth and safety. But because so many gay couples try other things, the conversation comes up.

You may have seen those videos last year of a young man defending how well he was raised by his lesbian moms, and of a couple’s life through the eyes of one partner who’s only revealed to be a man too when he proposes at the very end. My friend Rosa did a brilliant dissection of the message those videos send. They’re both beautiful (and I’ve cried watching them for sure). She says, though…

The contradictory emotional state that each of them left me in was similar to that of an amateur drag show: delight, horror, inability to look away. But these videos were actually nothing like an amateur drag show; they were totally un-glittery; totally un-queer.

The young man is talking about his two moms to challenge the Iowa Senate’s bid to outlaw same-sex marriage by arguing that the sexual orientation of his parents “has had zero effect on the content of [his] character.” He seems like an upstanding and accomplished guy, for sure. But Rosa imagines writing him this in a letter:

Actually, it probably had a massive effect on the content of your character; you probably are smarter, stronger and more critical because of the sexual orientation of your parents. Because you realized that your moms and your family had to deal with a lot of discrimination, you probably have a greater sense of justice, a more open mind, a deeper political engagement. The audience should be applauding you for this, but not for a statement that perpetuates an idea that homosexuality is okay only if it is, well, just like heterosexuality.

I couldn’t agree with her more.

I want to learn from the people around me. I want to learn from the young parents across my street who just adopted. I want to learn from the family friends who’ve divorced and still take an active role in their kids’ lives. I want to learn from the people who try having two partners at once, even if it ends in tears. This is what we do. We learn from each other.

If you’re ready for an extremely not-safe-for-work blog, HOMO Online offers some brilliant tidbits about “seek[ing] communion with men like ourselves who reject heteronorms, queer-puritanism, airy-fairyism, consumerist-faggotry and the like.” They want to reclaim the closet, as an idea that queer men should carve out some spaces just for ourselves (including theirs online, which unapologetically features copious amounts of porn mixed with art and social commentary).

If you like Tim Taylor’s style of nuclear family, that’s okay, too. But can we agree that it’s a better thing to arrive at those decisions intentionally — and that straight folks might actually have something to learn from the pantheon of queer models too?