How did two HIV+ writers, decades apart, each end up writing stories called Hockey Night in Canada?

A few months ago, I uncovered a CanLit mystery. Two writers, both queer, living long term with HIV, wrote short stories set in Vancover in the early 1990s that explore HIV, community, and intimate connection.

Don't worry, this is not a Canadian version of Bad Art Friend. The stories (which are very different once you read them) were written decades apart, and neither author had prior knowledge of the other person or their writing. The real mystery lay in how these two writers gave their literary output the same title: Hockey Night in Canada.

The tale of the two stories starts with Berend McKenzie. He and I have been friends since I interviewed him for his groundbreaking one-person show Nggrfg in 2008. Fast forward 13 years: I was looking for some of his work online, specifically Hockey Night in Canada, which I had read an early draft of. In the story, McKenzie recalls June 14, 1994, the start of the Vancouver Stanley Cup riots and the night that he and his friend Billy-Boy, who was dying with HIV, as well as a group of gay friends and Billy-Boy's family, were squeezed into a tiny Vancouver apartment.

It is a heart-wrenching piece that I wanted to share with my friends who do end-of-life care. Looking online, I thought I had found a link — but I hadn't. Instead, what I had landed on was an e-publication version of the iconic AIDS zine, Diseased Pariah News, linked to a spread from 1993 that was so zoomed out I could only read the title: Hockey Night in Canada.

As I zoomed in to get a better look, I saw that the story was written by Francisco Ibáñez-Carrasco, a Toronto-based writer from Chile whose name I recognized, most recently for his juicy 2015 memoir, Giving It Raw: Nearly 30 Years with AIDS. His version of Hockey Night in Canada is about a night of intimacy between a red-haired hockey player and an older immigrant man living with HIV, both feeling like outsiders in the dive bar they had found themselves in. Like much of his work, Ibáñez-Carrasco's story is insightful, sweet, and sexy, encouraging a broader idea of sex, pleasure, and belonging.

After I finished reading it, I shared the link with McKenzie, who currently lives in Edmonton. He was as floored as I was by the story and the overlap of subject matter and title. But it was also intense for him. Being a writer and living with HIV can be isolating. To then encounter familiarity on the page, across time, can be overwhelming.

Eventually, I connected the three of us over email. Ibáñez-Carrasco was excited by the uncanny connections, and as we got comfortable with each other, the two stories started to serve as a reminder that as devastating as the virus is, HIV also brings people together. So we came up with a plan: an online event where both writers would read story excerpts and then have a talk. It would be hosted by Edmonton-based writer and educator Kristy Harcourt and take place around World AIDS Day/Day With(out) Art, a movement created to highlight the power of people living with the virus.

With the event planned and the two writers in communication, it was then that the mystery presented itself to me. As much literature as there is about HIV, not a lot of it is Canadian, and even less of it in this country is from Black and Brown writers. Most importantly, with the exception of these two stories, none others that I know of are called Hockey Night in Canada. Was it a fluke? Or was something deeper at play?

I decided to ask McKenzie, Harcourt and Ibáñez-Carrasco about the role that the game and TV program Hockey Night in Canada has played in their lives. What emerged was not only a queer play-by-play on the hockey's ongoing influence in our culture, but also a clue to the CanLit mystery!

Ibáñez-Carrasco's story begins with the familiar scene of the pre-digital era, mics in the locker room, shoved in hockey players' faces, as the grainy lines of video aligned with the sweat collecting in their clavicles. Ibáñez-Carrasco does not stop at looking. Almost as if an extension of the camera, he zooms in: "I'm transfixed by their features, the pouty, succulent mouth that articulates insolently all that nonsense." What happens next is intimate.

For McKenzie, as a Black queer kid adopted into a heteronormative white family, the weekly program became an ongoing test of assimilation he knew he would always fail. He couldn't remember what a power play was and wasn't interested in tracking the teams' progress. For him, Hockey Night in Canada "represents the moment I knew my gayness was a danger to me and a threat to others." This dynamic plays out in his story: even though the "Gaggle of Gays" are the ones caring for Billy-Boy as he dies, his family edges them out, ignoring the mortal drama happening behind them and focusing instead on the flickering light of the riot-inducing game.

For Harcourt, hockey is all-encompassing, whether she was teaching anti-violence workshops to WHL players because of the historic abuse of players by league coaches, supporting butch dates and friends over the years who find comfort in playing and watching the game, or now, as a supportive adult, sitting on bleachers cheering on young family members and friends' kids playing early morning games. As she explains it, even with hockey being a benign and uninteresting presence in her life, it is also a constant. She cannot escape the game.

That's when it clicked. I had approached the mystery of the twined titles as if it were some coincidence. That was a Jessica Fletcher-sized misdirection on my part.

Hockey Night in Canada is as quintessential in the great white north as maple leafs, Timbits, and genocide. And for LGBTQ+ Canadians, the associations can be even more fraught, running the gambit from the erotic to the triggering to the banal. In the face of dominance, it makes sense that two talented literary queers would get creative with the culture around them. Rather than existing in a world where Hockey Night in Canada hovers over us, untouched with an almost singularly understood meaning, McKenzie and Ibáñez-Carrasco claim the title on their own terms, queering the association by connecting the title to their own stories.

In the end, two queer BIPOC HIV-related CanLit short stories both titled Hockey Night in Canada is not a fluke. It was inevitable.

The Hockey Night in Canada double reading, hosted by Kristy Harcourt, featuring Berend McKenzie and Francisco Ibáñez-Carrasco, will take place online this Friday, December 3rd. RSVP here.

McKenzie's story is part of the collection Between Certain Death and a Possible Future: Queer Writing on Growing Up with the AIDS Crisis. Ibanez-Carrasco's story appeared in the underground publication Diseased Pariah News, Issue 11.