Gay Canada Day

The Raphael Family Does It Again!

Some years ago, when Mitchel Raphael was the editor of Toronto’s gay party scene magazine Fab, he initiated a Pride party at his home. Over the years this party has evolved into a gay Canada Day party. Last night was a new edition of the party. Folks came dressed in a variety of fashions referencing the nation (I for one wore my gold lettered Immigrant T-shirt, but we particularly like the boys who came as Holt Renfrew shopping bags) and drinks and food all placed Canada front and center in their creations (maple syrup pancakes). The poutine was particularly pleasant, and along with the separatists balcony was a pleasant delight that went way beyond Quebec’s desires for national autonomy.




The drag queen’s performance of the national anthem by Celine Dion was a really moving moment, but I must tell the truth – when Celine met Babs things got really interesting. And in the final aftermath Canada held sway with the biggest flag!


As with all the previous editions of the Raphael family-gathering politicians made an appearance and this one was no different. Layton and Chow were there (as always); Jim Harris was there and the emerging Al-Farouk Khaki was there too.


The music was a crowd-pleasing mix of danceable gay tunes with appropriate projections of identifiable Canadiana to accompany it. Meeting up with friends and acquaintances not seen for a while has become one of the hallmarks of the Raphael party. Additionally, old, new and emerging writers, artists, fashionionistas and a plethora of interests co-mingle at this party sharing information and caution where appropriate across the genders, races, ages and more.




This year’s party was probably the best one in the series thus far. The wide and varied interpretations of the Canada day theme were fittingly intuned with the wide and varied interpretations of this land we call home.





Thanks for a great time Raphael Family!






All images and text is copyrighted by Abdi Osman and Rinaldo Walcott unless otherwise specified.

Seven Days of San Francisco

1. Visit the Deyoung Museum which is a very interesting piece of architecture and while there, in Golden Gate Park, stop by the beautiful Japanese Tea Garden for tea, cookies and serenity.
2. Make your way to the Valencia and 19th Street neighborhood. It is a mix of Latino/a and white hipsters. Small galleries, shops and amazing murals. Stop by the Women’s Building to see one of the best murals.
3. While in the Castro stop by Fuzio for a glass of wine. It is a tiny restaurant but the service is great and its window looks out on the street where all the action is happening.
4. A stop to the Ferry Building on a Saturday for the farmers market is a must do. Begin your morning with fresh chuck oysters and end it with a California wine tasting. You won’t be the only one in this activity.
5. The Museum of the African Diaspora seems to be still finding its curatorial legs. A visit is still an important stop for anyone interested in the ways in which black diasporic history gets retold and represented.
6. Take the Bart to Oakland or Berkeley for a day trip.
7. Visit the Palace of the Arts built in 1915 for an expo and while there cross the express way to the beach to see the Golden Gate Bridge and Alcatraz from a distance.

Many of the about sights can be seen together in one day. So while in San Francisco remember that Californian wines have truly come into their own. Thus while there end your day of sightseeing with good wine and good food. The chefs are creative and inspired. We recommend Postrio for a special meal. We particularly recommend a good bottle of Zinfandel to end the day.










All images and text is copyrighted by Abdi Osman and Rinaldo Walcott unless otherwise specified.

Afro-Asian Dialogue

David Khang performed his piece "Phalogocentrix" presented by Fado at at The Music Gallery/St.George-the-Martyr Anglican Church.

Intimate Distances
Dearly Beloved, we are gathered here tonight to bear witness…to share in the performative trace and impression of cross cultural and thus human and universal re-making. We are here to share in intimate distances. We are called to bear witness to a performative otherness that requires we think our encounter with such otherness differently every time. In this encounter the performing body transforms both us and itself to reveal or rather to provoke in us the scripting and sculpting of the body, its legibility, its intelligibility, in many languages. This body will perform for us tonight both its re-writing and its writing, its interpellation, its refusal and its re-statement. This body will offer up as sacrifice, sacrament and history of scaring the scripting of and thus the writing of modes of reading that disturb and disrupt but do not close down nor inhibit conversation. Rather conversational kinetic proliferation will be provoked. This body will….

The kinetic of the Brazilian martial arts and dance form caperaria has resonances with many Asian martial arts. The cross-resonances caperaria and Asians martial arts might at first glance act as an appetizer into a full menu of black and Asian cross-cultural resonances and historical sharing. But it would be as easy to pinpoint the martial art dances of both cultures as the ground of common and thus shared cultural understandings, histories and even meanings. The seduction of similarity, even familiarity makes cultural sharing a canard of cross-cultural identification. Instead we might look for something else. What that something else might be is a legibility, a scripting of cross-cultural resonances which collapse, indeed morph into secrete bodily effusions which in turn script and write narratives of togetherness and desire. Bodily excretions, which bind and unite. “Blood is thicker than water” but blood and water remain sources of immense cultural identification and disidentification. Blood and water are but tropes towards the ritual of life-everyday and fantastic, religious and profane.

David Khang offers us the body as script, his body as a script. A script that writes and unwrites the self in and on his writing body, his excreting body. His that makes intelligible the deep resonances of things that work to create intimate distances. These intimate distances are not the markers and signs of otherness but rather the mirrored reflections of self-merging into self. For the viewer the looking becomes a deformed mirror, cracked and piece together as yet another and different language. The fluid and liquid traces and impressions of blood, water, ink – marks left begging for language, for resaying and rewriting. These fluids do not offer the promise and the prospect of mimetic representation, but instead those fluids bind us in difference, yet uttering desire for coming together. The blood of this body…

Bodies, other bodies, can spectacularize histories in their performance. The spectacularized black phallus makes sense in light of the missing Asian penis. While phallus and penis are not always the same for other racialized bodies, the non-relation of their relation provokes conversation. It is in fact the space in-between, the space between the move and its pause, the break but not the separation in which the trace and the impression, the cross-cultural resonances, the production of language(s) and the communion of Afro-Asian dialogue begins. It begins not as antagonisms, as a looking over the shoulder but a s mutual desire to live beyond the too easy intelligibilities and legibilities of narrative being written - languages spoken and muted - bodies marked and unmarked and the too easy assertions of recognizable similarity and familiarity.

David Khang remakes and rewrites, Khang opens up the space of his body to allow for the utterance of common feeling, scripted or written as the intimate distance of human and cross-cultural resonances made unfamiliarly strangely familiar.

Blessed.




All images and text is copyrighted by Abdi Osman and Rinaldo Walcott unless otherwise specified.

At The LR (Laurentian Room)

The LR is one of Toronto’s best-kept secrets. Let’s keep it that way. So we ain’t giving the address. We have been frequenting the place now for a little over a year and each time there is a good time. The place is a queer positive, multicultural, multi-racial restaurant and cocktail lounge that has attitude to burn, but not the kind of attitude that makes you feel unwelcome! The place is hip because it is cool and relaxed.

The décor of the LR is one of the finest of any multipurpose restaurant-lounge in the city. A beautiful bar runs the length of the room; with ceilings that spew red lights and walls with embed fireplaces. The bar staff is excellent and their cocktail making is a dream. Think of the most obscure cocktail and they can make it. Champaign and sparkling wines by the glass make for a bubbly night out.

The LR clientele is an interesting mix of hipsters, middle-age open-minded folks who after 11pm dance up a storm as the restaurant transforms itself into a lounge of fun, friends and bacchanalia.

Most Saturday nights the LR has a neo-burlesque show. Tiger Lilies perform for an adoring audience of on-lookers who squeal, stare and swoon as the women and one man perform on both the bar and the floor and most impressively on the hula-hoop from the roof.

Over the last year the LR has become the place we take special friends, out of towners and where Abdi and I most often hang out with our friends Sheldon and Scott. Most recently we celebrated Abdi's birthday with Kasia and Fred at the LR.

Go check it out, but don’t take too many people. We want it to remain Toronto’s best-kept secret… a public secret if you dare.




All images and text is copyrighted by Abdi Osman and Rinaldo Walcott unless otherwise specified.

Staging The Polished Hoe

Last night was the gala presentation of Colin Taylor's adaption of Austin Clarke's awarding winning novel The Polished Hoe. Taylor's adaptation of the novel strips it down to a bare bones play. In the play, just like the novel the central drama is of Mary Matilda making her confession to the police. However, the play is not capable of demonstrating in any detailed manner the way Mary Matilda's story is the story of a people and a society. Despite the play's limitations to be detailed and nuance, Taylor does gets the uptight social and bodily aspect of Bajan society dead right. Alison Sealy-Smith's performance as Mary Matilda is excellent and it is clear that she will get even better in the role as time progress. Thus far the reviews of the play have been quite harsh. While the Toronto Star's critic and the Globe and Mail's critic concur on many of the same points, I must confess that the play is not as bad as their reviews suggest. Staging remains a problem like both critics state and the attempts to deal with memory or flashbacks is not very completing given the different devices being used, but overall the play offers a really interesting slice of Clarke's masterpiece. The language of the characters is bang on and the aspects of Barbadian society with its Victorian manners and nuance class practices are well acted. The cast is able to bring to light the disturbing mix of race, class and sex that remains a difficult topic still for many Barbadians and further still many black diasporic people in the Americas.




After the play last night tributes were paid to Austin Clarke. The retiring Chief Justice of the Ontario Supreme Court, The Honorable Roy McMurtry; Publisher and Editor Patrick Crean; a TD Canada Trust representative and Professor Rinaldo Walcott, all spoke. Below is Walcott's tribute. Clarke thanked the community and dreamed out loud about what he would do with the Walnut Hall heritage site on Shuter Street if TD Canada Trust brought it and turned it over to him.

Walcott's Tribute to Clarke.

Few of us will ever become a national treasure in ONE nation -- furthermore TWO! Austin "Tom" Clarke is a national treasure here in Canada and in his ancestral and birth home, Barbados. i have known Austin personally for about a decade, but I have known Tom Clarke much longer. In my relationship with him, Austin and Tom come together and in that coming together his uniqueness shines through. Generous, thoughtful, committed, luscious -- always a gentleman -- if not a dandy. Definitely an artist and an intellectual, Austin Tom Clarke is singular -- one of a kind.

I am extremely pleased to share in the experience of his art; his ideas; and his environment -- always carefully created. I want to say that because Clarke is a friend that he is special, but that would be not the whole truth and probably arrogant of me -- a Clarke phrase if there ever was one. Austin Tom Clarke, Clarkie, Tom, Austin is unique because HE is one of those RARE individuals who is capable of reflecting back to all of us our interconnectedness not by looking in from outside but by being a central part of the everyday banal drama of ordinary life in its pain and pleasure.

I am honored to be here to celebrate the adaptation of "Tom's" masterpiece The Polished Hoe, set in Barbados but conditioned by Canada. I, We love you man!

All images and text is copyrighted by Abdi Osman and Rinaldo Walcott unless otherwise specified.