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The Current Transcript for November 22, 2022

Host: Matt Galloway

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

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The next platform and medium will be even more immersive and embodied internet, where you're in the experience, not just looking at.

MATT GALLOWAY: Mark Zuckerberg has his way. The future isn't living online on platforms like Facebook. It's living in them. The author, David Sacks, would beg to differ. Amongst the lessons the pandemic taught us, he says, is that the real future is analogue, not digital. In 30 minutes, the case for human interaction in the era of the metaverse. Also this morning, Pauline Dakin grew up living a normal life in Vancouver, when suddenly everything stable around her fell apart.

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We always knew there was something else going on, you know? There was always this sense of something dire. You can feel it, but there's you don't understand.

MG: Pauline's new podcast tells the story of a childhood on the run in an hour, the fiction that threw her life upside down and forced her family into hiding and why? Looking back, she doesn't think she'd change a thing. We begin, though, in the club with a community in fear and mourning. Good morning. I'm Matt Galloway and this is The Current.

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The importance of queer spaces, in the wake of a fatal shooting at a Colorado gay bar

Guests: Garrett Royer, Greggor Mattson

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We deserve safe spaces. No one should ever feel unsafe when they are searching for a sense of belonging. How dare anyone take that away from us?

MG: That's the executive director of the group One Colorado, speaking at a vigil last night across the United States and beyond. LGBTQ communities are in mourning following an attack on a gay nightclub in Colorado. Five people were killed, 17 injured in Saturday's shooting at Club Q in Colorado Springs. A suspect is being held on multiple murder and hate crime charges and the community is coming together to deal with the aftermath. Garrett Royer is deputy director of One Colorado that is that LGBTQ rights advocacy organisation and he's in Denver. Garrett, good morning.

GARRETT ROYER: Good morning. Thanks for having.

MG: Me. Thanks for being here. How are you doing?

GARRETT ROYER: You know, it's been really it's been really difficult. I've been trying to process over the last few days. I think it's been really amazing seeing how resilient the community has been. But I've been conflicted because I think a lot of us, like a lot of folks who have spoken out, we feel angry that the community was attacked like this. And it was very reminiscent of the The Pulse nightclub shooting that was also an LGBTQ space in 2016 when that was attacked in Orlando. So just reconciling that this pattern keeps continuing, it's very difficult and I think it makes a lot of folks extremely hurt, very upset that our community has been targeted in this way.

MG: Tell me about Club Q and what it means to the community.

GARRETT ROYER: Yeah. Club. Q So it's the only LGBT bar that exists in Colorado Springs. It's been around for for several years. I talked with the owners of the bar on Sunday, and yesterday they they're reeling. It was one of the most important spaces for folks in the community because Colorado Springs is a very conservative area. And so it was one of the few places of the folks there and feel that see it. And to see it attacked like that violated is pretty devastating to the community that.

MG: You mentioned it being a very conservative community. Just tell me a bit more about that and how much progress. I mean, we're speaking now in November of 2022, how much progress has been made in advancing LGBTQ rights in Colorado over the last several years?

GARRETT ROYER: Yeah. So Colorado Springs. It's known for two things. Military and the church. Focus on the Family is a originates down there. So they were a highly evangelical organisation that for years still practised conversion therapy in the area, which is extremely harmful to LGBTQ youth. And I think the culture of that area, it just speaks to a lot of the anger towards LGBTQ folks. And yeah, it's it's just Colorado, I think, as a, as a state. There's this conception that Colorado has moved in a much more progressive direction in the last few years. But, you know, we've also been a state that's that's been marred by gun violence. You know, we were one of the first states where a shooting made national news in the nineties with the Columbine High School shooting. We also made national news in 2012 with the Aurora Theatre shooting. And to see this once again continuing, it just shows that Colorado is in as far progressed as a lot of folks would like to think. And especially when you look at the national media, I think people dismiss Colorado as a quote unquote blue state now. But clearly, we have a lot of work to do when it comes to gun control measures that that we can advocate for, to make sure that acts of violence like this don't happen again in the future.

MG: You mentioned the anger and what we have heard, and it's not just certainly in the last few days in the wake of the shooting, but more broadly is that there are many people in the community who feel under attack, that there have been violent attacks like the one against Club Q. There has also been a series of protests around drag performances. You have politicians who are using language like grooming. What's fuelling these attacks, do you think? What's going on more broadly?

GARRETT ROYER: Yeah, yeah, that's a great question. So we have seen a lot of national politicians even in the run up to these most recent midterm elections that happened just a few weeks ago. They were fuelling their campaign by, you know, propping up LGBTQ youth as political targets. One of the the woman that was running for governor against Jared Polis, the country's first openly gay governor here, she was deliberately using trans kids as a political vehicle for her own messaging to appeal to the the Trump right in the state. And I think you see folks like Representative Lauren Boebert as well. She's made national headlines for talking about how drag queens are child abusers. How by just having inclusive spaces where LGBTQ folks can show compassion and educate children. It's become as though to be or for these individual to demonise it at the polls.

MG: We spoke with Dan Savage, who is a well-known sex advice columnist. He's a longtime LGBTQ activist. And he said that this attack reminded him of an old gay rights chant. Take a listen to Dan Savage.

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Out of the bars into the streets was a chant that was taken up during the Stonewall riots. And then during the first Pride marches that were held to mark the anniversary of the Stonewall riots are still held to mark the anniversary of the Stonewall riots. And it was a chant taken up by people who knew then, decades ago, that the only way we could be safe or safer in this culture was to be public, was to not be closeted. It was to come out of the bars and into the streets and start making demands. And that has been the secret of our success as a movement. Queer people have come far and fast. You know, I was just saying to a friend, we shouldn't say nothing has changed and nothing has gotten better. When the queers and Stonewall fought back, the cops attacked and arrested them. When the queers fought back at Club Q, the cops praised it. You know, when I think about that chant and I think about the people who were chanting that in the streets 50 years ago. And to think that it's still relevant now, not the people who are in the bars are also out there that we still have work to do to protect ourselves and make the world safer for queer people outside of the bars.

MG: You mentioned that resilience in the community. And I want to ask you a bit about the positivity that the Dan Savage sees, the sense that there is some progress being made. But in the community, you were at a vigil last night. What did you see when it comes to that resilience?

GARRETT ROYER: Yeah. So what we actually hosted, there was a vigil that was in a Club Q, that was in Colorado Springs that I attended last night. And there was also a vigil that we held in in Denver. And I think what's been really incredible is seeing so many community members come together. We heard from faith leaders in the community that spoke out against this kind of violence. We heard it from elected officials. You know, one of the things that I think is also worth highlighting in these most recent elections, we saw more LGBTQ people elected to public office than ever before. So there's clearly great support for the community and for folks to be able to have that space and come together at these vigils, I think is so important because being able to grieve as a community, as the tight knit, LGBTQ, strong community that we are having that space, having that moment to process together is deeply important.

MG: And I guess that's the point that Dan Savage was making, that this is an awful attack and it is unspeakable in the community, but also that that resilience perhaps will help bring the community through this and will help further the progress that he's already seen.

GARRETT ROYER: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I mean, I think if you look at the history of the LGBTQ community, you know, it started with the Stonewall riots in the sixties and the AIDS crisis in the nineties. And is that the history, I think, of the LGBTQ community is being strong and resilient like that in the face of public scrutiny and public attack. And to see that the culture has shifted so much that the majority of Americans support the rights of LGBTQ folks to to marry is is significant and that we have so many more folks on our side now is really significant. And the individuals that that speak out and demonise the community are in the minority. And we need to continue to push back on the attacks that they use verbally so that, you know, we can avoid, you know, incidents of pain and violence like this in the future.

MG: Garrett, I'm glad to talk to you. Take care of yourself and thank you very much.

GARRETT ROYER: Thank you. I appreciate your time.

MG: Garrett Royer is deputy director of One Colorado. It's an LGBTQ rights advocacy group. We reached him this morning in Denver. The shooting in Club Q is hitting close to home for many members of the LGBTQ communities in the United States. But as I mentioned, right around the world and many have turned to similar nightclubs and bars to find acceptance and belonging. Greggor Mattson has studied the role that these venues play for queer communities across the United States. He's a professor and chair of sociology at Oberlin College and Conservatory in Ohio and the author of a forthcoming book, Who Needs Gay Bars. Greggor, good morning to you.

GREGGOR MATTSON: Good morning.

MG: You went to Club Q in 2018. Tell me about that.

GREGGOR MATTSON: Yeah, I was on a drive from Denver down to Pueblo, checking out gay bars at the time. It was the only gay bar between those two cities. And so I stopped in. And like many gay bars, they were having a huge fundraiser. It was the Imperial Court of the Pikes Peak Empire Annual Coronations. So everyone was busily setting up a buffet and red velvet thrones for the new members of the group. So, you know, it was a celebration.

MG: What role do places like Club Q serve for the community? I mentioned in the introduction that in many ways, and we heard this certainly after the The Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, that these are safe spaces for so many people.

GREGGOR MATTSON: We want them to be safe spaces. I'm always ambivalent about calling a place that has alcohol, you know, for good or ill, that has been it has been bars that have been our our public square, the only place where we can reliably find each other in public and an only place where you can meet a group of people that you didn't know before. So Bars have been the place where activism has been fomented and where charities have been supported. So our bars often function like community centres, I call them not-quite-for-profits. I mean, they got to pay their taxes, they got to keep their lights on, but they also got to keep the community afloat.

MG: How is that different than any other community?

GREGGOR MATTSON: I don't know that it's different from other communities. But, you know, for for many LGBTQ people, we are not often raised by LGBTQ families. So we have to find each other in our young adulthood. And we often have to find ourselves separately from our families of birth and from our workplaces. And so nightlife has been one of the places where we can find each other, grow into the identities we were born to have. And, you know, other communities have faith organisations or family based organisations, and we haven't had that for the most part.

MG: In the wake of the Pulse nightclub shooting and then this most recent shooting. How has. I mean, it sounds obvious in some ways, but how has that sense of community been shattered or at the very least been impacted by the violence that has come into those spaces?

GREGGOR MATTSON: Yeah, bars have always attracted violence, you know, going back to World War Two and these kinds of attacks. I think what's most notable about them is the assault rifles that have been used. We're used to small attacks, but when you have someone with a weapon of war, then the toll is much higher. And I'm quite fatalistic about living in a country that chooses that kind of freedom over the freedom to live without being murdered in public.

MG: We spoke again with the author and activist Dan Savage about the shooting. Take a listen to a little bit more of what he had to say.

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GREGGOR MATTSON: When somebody attacks a gay bar, it makes you feel not unsafe in a gay bar, but unsafe in the world. And really, queer life is about a search for a sense of safety and for a place. And you're reminded that there are people out there who don't want you to feel like you have a place and don't want you to feel safe anywhere, even behind closed doors. And that's what they tell us. You know, people who hate queer people, people who are... who say, they, you know, don't shove down our throats, don't expose the children to it. They say keep it behind closed doors. And what an attack on a gay bar says is, 'You know what, it's not even good enough when it's behind closed doors. We don't want you to exist anywhere.'.

MG: We've seen the community facing a rise in hateful incidents that's happening here in Canada as well. Protests against drag queen, storytime, events pride, flags being vandalised. I'll ask you the same question that I asked Garrett, which is why do you think this is happening now? It's not that it hasn't happened in the past, but it's to people, many people, it feels different now.

GREGGOR MATTSON: This is a backlash. The political right has been losing the battle to keep us in the closet. And now they have turned some of their ancient lies on to trans people that they used to accuse LGBQ folks. And I think they're losing and they know they're losing. And so they're stirring up hateful rhetoric. We just had a national election here in the United States, and so there was a spike in hateful speech. And hateful speech leads to hateful actions.

MG: We've seen a number and you would know this as somebody who's writing a book about this, a number of gay bars that have closed down across Canada and the United States. How is is the role of that space changing in an era of social meeting, in an era of dating apps post-pandemic?

GREGGOR MATTSON: So in the last 20 years, approximately 50% of gay bars in the United States have gone away. And to some degree, we can say this is a success with rising LGBTQ acceptance. More LGBTQ folks feel comfortable socialising outside of queer spaces.

MG: Somebody might ask the question that you ask in the book, Who needs a gay bar?

GREGGOR MATTSON: Right. And it's a double question because for LGBTQ few folks with privilege, they can ask like, I don't need a gay bar, any bar I go to with my friends as a gay bar. But I think for transgender individuals, for queer people of colour, gay bars have themselves not always been the safest of spaces. So to me, the sadness is the fact that just when gay bars are starting to embrace the vast diversity of our community is the time when they're going away. It's also the fact that since the nineties, queer people have found each other online and online really has been a gift to us to find each other, especially from isolated places, even in the suburbs. But the problems with online communication in particularly smartphone dating apps is they often permit only one to one communication. And you can't build a community one to one. You need that sense of the ability to find, to bump into someone and to have that serendipitous interaction that maybe is meeting a queer elder or that maybe is meeting someone who introduces you to a whole world that you didn't know existed in your town.

MG: So when you look at the map of the United States, I mean, the huge number of the disappearances, what happens in those communities, in those areas where the clubs are gone?

GREGGOR MATTSON: You know, in bigger cities, sometimes it means the loss of the only places for people, the only bars for queer people of colour. In smaller cities, it sometimes means the loss of the only place that admitted people who were over 18 years old. So the youth don't have access to a place. And in in places like small cities in Colorado, when you lose a space, sometimes you've lost the only public LGBTQ space for a hundred miles around. And when those spaces wink out of existence, sometimes we also lose our pride celebrations, our queer film festivals, our drag queen story hours, because often the activism of the community is catalyzed in these spaces.

MG: So where does that I mean, this is a word that gets thrown around a lot. But I guess just finally, where does that leave the community itself? Because a community exists outside of physical spaces, as you say, but often needs those physical spaces to heal, to come together.

GREGGOR MATTSON: You know, one of the things I think we all realised in the COVID 19 pandemic lockdowns was humans need to be around other humans. And I was really moved during the pandemic lockdowns by people writing these, you know, rhapsodies about I miss my barista. I missed the lady at the bodega corner store. I miss, you know, my grocery store checkout person. And that ability to be around other people is something that has been denied queer people historically. And so when we lose that ability, we have to organise spaces elsewhere. And sometimes the problem with those is these kinds of queer pop up events is if you're working during that pop up event, it means you miss your one opportunity to be around queer people in public for another month, and that makes life really hard.

MG: Greggor, thank you very much for speaking with us this morning.

GREGGOR MATTSON: Thank you very much.

MG: Greggor Mattson is a professor and chair of sociology at Oberlin College and Conservatory. He's also the author of a forthcoming book, Who Needs Gay Bars? That will be released in April. Your CBC News is next. And then the digital age came with all kinds of promises, as we heard efficiency, engagement, working from home, instant answers to almost everything. Not everyone thinks that digital age is delivering a better world, though. Coming up after CBC News, my conversation with the author, David Sax, he says the digital future could be a whole lot better if it looked more like the past. I'm Matt Galloway. You're listening to The Current. We're back in 6 minutes. Stay with us.

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Author David Sax argues that the future is analog

Guest: David Sax

MG: Good morning. I'm Matt Galloway. You're listening to The Current.

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MG: Still to come, for years, the former CBC journalist Pauline Dakin and her family were on the run. Her life overtaken by a series of very bizarre events. She's here with her story in just under 30 minutes. But first, kicking it old school.

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We believe the metaverse will be the successor to the mobile Internet. We'll be able to feel present like we're right there with people, no matter how far apart we actually are. When I send my parents a video of my kids, they're going to feel like they're right in the moment with us not peering through a little window. When you play a game with your friends, you'll feel like you're right there together in a different world, not just on your computer by yourself.

MG: Mark Zuckerberg's pitch for the Metaverse was that of a digital utopia. We would all gather virtually to play, to learn, to work. And coming out of the past two years, perhaps that seemed like a safe bet. Since its launch, though, the metaverse has struggled to gain a following. And that's not the only part of the digital revolution that has lost its lustre. The now dreaded Zoom call, virtual learning, toxic Twitter feeds have taken their toll on all of us, and David Sax has been urging us to unplug and return to a more analogue life for years. His latest book is The Future is Analogue How to Create a More Human World. David Sax is with me in person in our studio.

DAVID SAX: Not virtual.

MG: We wouldn't do it on Zoom. No. It's good to see you.

DAVID SAX: Great to see you.

MG: Analogue versus digital. What does this mean?

DAVID SAX: Analogue is a pretty common shorthand for non digital, right? It's everything that is beyond the screen. Physical, in-person, face to face, tactile. So it could be objects like physical books or vinyl records, for example, or spaces school, the building versus virtual school work, the office versus, you know, the Zoom equivalent. And I think it's become sort of a good yet imperfect catch all term that we've really applied over the past three years to the difference between the life that we had to lead at the sort of peak of the pandemic, when everything we had to access, whether it was school work, commerce, friends, entertainment, religion, all of that had to be done through the screen. That was the digital equivalent, and the analogue was the real thing that we craved, the thing that we wanted to go back to the old normal, so to speak.

MG: And so in the pandemic, you say our digital feature was finally here and it sucked. You use a stronger language than that, but we won't use that on a family radio programme. You work from home.

DAVID SAX: And always have.

MG: And always have. So how did your life change?

DAVID SAX: Well, in a lot of ways it didn't. Right. I still woke up, put on my big boy sweat pants for a writer, you know, sat on my laptop. But there was nothing beyond that, that every interaction was now through that. So all the radio interviews that I was doing for a book that came out then I wasn't going to CBC, I wasn't going to on book tour around the U.S. and around Canada. I was doing everything one zoom after another after another. All the interviews I did for this book. Zoom calls, phone calls, Microsoft teams, whatever you want to, you know, whatever platform it was, everything was just sitting in front of my screen, day in, day out. And it wasn't just me. My wife was doing it for her work. My children were doing it for their school. If I wanted to buy something from a store, I had to do it online. If I wanted to watch a show, watch some improv comedy, I had to do it through a screen. My life shrank into the walls of my house and what was able to be streamed through the Internet like a bad Rogers commercial.

MG: I want to ask you about school in a moment, but work is a thing that people saw. Many people, not everybody, obviously, because a lot of people still were going to their workplace, they could not work from home. But for those who did, they saw their work life change by being at home. How has our ability to to connect with people been impacted by the fact that we weren't actually in the same space, many of us?

DAVID SAX: That, I think, is the biggest difference, right? Because the nuts and bolts of work, the tasks you do to create or promote the goods or services that you're working on, a particular company or governmental organisation or whatever, those many of those were already done on computers. And so you were creating your reports at home, you're creating the office. That wasn't fundamentally different, and that's why we didn't see every company sort of collapsing within a week or so. Like everyone was just up and running and able to figure out how to do it. But over time, what people noticed and and the sort of great disconnect that they were feeling the the the lack of human interaction, the conversations, the sort of not just official meeting conversations, but the day to day conversations that would happen in between meetings as you're walking between desks on the way to lunch, on the way to get coffee that wove together all the ideas that formed sort of the world of work, someone's identity around work. And that turned out to be incredibly valuable.

MG: One of the other things that was valuable, you say, was the commute. This is something that a lot of people were able to do enjoy not being part of. But the commute plays a role in terms of how we think about work in the rest of our life.

DAVID SAX: Yeah. Now, I'm not saying a long commute is a valuable thing and I feel horrible for anyone right now. Stuck on a 400 series highway, you know, trudging into downtown Toronto or somewhere else across this great country where traffic is terrible. But there is value in the time that you spend when you're moving between the home space and the workspace. And that time allows you to process ideas. It allows you to think of things. It allows you to see things and learn things. Maybe you're sitting and listening to the current while you're in your car, while you're on your train, and you get ideas about things that then inform what you're thinking about for work. Right. We sort of lose that when work is just sit down at your desk right after you've eaten breakfast. Flip it on. You have no change of space, no change of environment. So no new information is coming into you.

MG: What about schooling? We saw a huge impact and it was different across different parts of the country, but a big impact in terms of what the pandemic did to kids being in class or learning from home in your own life. Your daughter said that school is just now like work and no fun. What did it do to it, to the kids, do you think?

DAVID SAX: Oh, I mean, it came about as close to breaking a society as it could. And when I talk about a society, I'm talking about the world. This is, you know, at some point, every kid in every school pretty much around the world was learning remotely. And I'm talking K through, you know, graduate school. And for the most part, when we're looking at the sort of big data that's come out about it, it was a dismal failure. Scores went down, learning went down, comprehension went down, social problems went up. Anxiety, misbehaviour, you know, the level of people actually attending classes. This is something that's been promised for decades. Remote learning was going to be the future of education. The One Laptop per Child programme or the MOOCs, you know, the massive open online courses, those had failed decades before. And so this grand experiment had always been this promise of Silicon Valley that, no, we're going to we're going to get rid of the the inefficiencies of education. And what did we learn? We learnt that when you remove the school from the community, when you remove students from the physical space, you're really severing the relationship that is the core of education.

MG: Well, part of this is about emotional learning, right. What is emotional learning?

DAVID SAX: We we tend to think of education and learning as the transfer of information. Right. The transfer of facts. One plus one is to the the capital of Winnipeg, you know, the capital, Manitoba's, Winnipeg and so on and so forth. Right. Bu that's the, let's say, the substance and the core of education is all the things that it does to grow a human mind, to become a citizen, to become someone that understands how to think independently and act in the world. And that's what's called social emotional learning. It's a term, but it really talks about the way that we learn is based around our emotions. And if you're able to create a relationship of learning where caring is the core of it, then the individual who's learning the student will actually do better at remembering those facts. They will care about education. Think back to when you went to school. Right. Elementary school. High school. And you know the Beaver Valley.

MG: A long time ago.

DAVID SAX: Long time ago, Matt. Do you remember the specific things you learnt or do you remember the relationships with the teachers you remember who taught you? I remember who taught me at at all the different schools that I went to. And I don't remember the specific things they taught, but the relationship they built with me as a human teacher to student, and also the relationship I created with fellow students, with friends, with peers from kindergarten all the way through university. That's what made me want to learn.

MG: So care. What happens to those social emotional connexions and that social emotional learning if you're not in the same classroom with Mizuki and and learning English literature.

DAVID SAX: They die, right? They wither and die. And this is what we saw, that you would see your kids on a screen and they wouldn't care. They tune out because they're not humans anymore. They're just these little tiny boxes. And there's only so much even the most caring, wonderful teacher can do. And I had my children had wonderful, caring teachers at their school who did their best. But through the screen of an iPad or laptop, they're very limited in how they can read the emotions, let alone react to them. And so we saw that and that affected the actual academic performance a lot in that it wasn't it. Maths concepts can't be taught through a screen. It's that the caring, the relationship that's that allows people to learn that is severed.

MG: Well, I was going to say at the heart of that and a lot of it is about not just learning, but it's about how we have conversations and the fact that the physical space that we're in informs the conversation and informs what it's like to sit and talk to somebody that you're not just transferring information, but there's more that's coming into you.

DAVID SAX: Yeah, like as you're saying, sit and talk. You are paring your hand back and forth and then moving it out. And I see the way your eyes are reacting right now because we're in studio and this is the first in-person interview I've done on radio. I've done ones in the U.S. and on podcasts, and they've all been on Zoom or all been on, you know, audio, audio platforms. And this conversation is so much richer because I'm getting signals from you in a way that my human mind and body has evolved over the course of hundreds of thousands of years to interpret school work, our friendships, our social lives, all of these things that are the core of our existence is human, is built around the art of conversation. And that art of conversation is richest and works most efficiently when we're in the same physical space. So the idea that we could just take all that and slap it onto a screen is admirable. But the thought that nothing would change because of that and the actual idea that we're surprised that things have changed because of it is is kind of naive.

MG: So what happens then if people are interacting through gaming platforms, for example, that they build a community online, they build a community that exists by not seeing somebody face to face, but by seeing them on a screen or seeing an avatar on a screen because that's how they're playing the game. What happens to those relationships?

DAVID SAX: I think those relationships are perfectly valid and great.

MG: Are those meaningful as the ones that we would have face to face?

DAVID SAX: I don't think so, because there's a limit to them, right? There's a limit to how much you confide in that person or how much you talk. Now, maybe in some cases, those those relationships eventually move and graduate into in-person relationships are deep, meaningful relationships. But think about when you get out of the most meaningful relationships, your friendships, your romantic partners, your family members, you know, often the most meaningful time you're spending with those people is not sharing words. It's just sharing time together. It's going for a walk. It's sitting somewhere together, right? It's the silence. You don't have that with an online relationship, a digitised relationship. And that conversation is good, but it's not the same.

MG: One of the other things that we have seen in the other venues that we've seen when it comes to changing types of relationships is in health care that it's very difficult to get a doctor's appointment. Virtual care. If I provide you with that doctor's appointment, you can have telehealth. You could be diagnosed perhaps on the screen. How does treatment change if you aren't actually in the same space, do you think, if you aren't actually having that face to face conversation?

DAVID SAX: I mean, I think there's this temptation that, you know, we are these machines. And if we can find the right software algorithm to sort of figure out what the problem is in the machine, like they plug in your fancy car these days at the dealership, they're like, oh, yeah, it's the, you know, carburettor that will just be able to do that and tailor a medicine and fix it. And that's the sort of Star Trek vision of it. But anyone who's a doctor knows that so much of the diagnosis for for the first part happens in that idea of conversation. Right. Talking to someone who's figuring out their life circumstances, seeing their body language and how they react when you ask them, you know, do you drink or is this the first time you've had an interaction with this drug or, you know, when was the child sick? Right. And and there's so much information there that isn't just something that you can get from a test. And then in the other sense in the sense of treatment, you know, think about the times you've been to a doctor. Or think about the times someone, a loved one, is in hospital. So much of what we think about of great medicine is chemicals and treatment and and vaccines and things. But a lot of it is also that thing we call bedside manner. And what is bedside manner? It's human empathy. It's that connexion that actually allows for real outcomes. And, you know, one of the most interesting things I discovered when I was writing the book and researching it is this growing practise called Social Prescribing. The National Health Service in the U.S., in the U.K. started it and it was it came out of GP offices in the U.K., noticing that there were a lot of patients who were presenting. Maybe they had some medical problem. What they really had was loneliness and isolation and they were able to diagnose it because the GP's were talking to these patients and they could read between the lines that yes, maybe it was about this person's diabetes or heart condition or certain medications, but actually there was something else going on and what they really needed more than anything was someone to talk to. And so they actually built a programme that's tied in with social services to create community groups that identifies these individuals, offers them the service of saying, hey, do you do you want to come to this group? Maybe it's a fishing club, maybe it's a walking group. Maybe it's just a conversation group that happens at a community centre once a week and that actually aids those individuals in their social life. And that has a positive impact.

MG: Material impacts on their health, on.

DAVID SAX: Their health and outcomes. Exactly that. You know, when we treat things in isolation, I think anyone in the medical community can tell you this. When you treat something in isolation, you're you're always missing out the human body, the human mind. It's all one integrated system. And the idea that we can just pinpoint the things that are wrong with it, tweak it and send it on its way is is naive that we we require the social aspects of life for our health just as much, if not more sometimes than the physical ones.

MG: Well, one of the reasons why, presumably you could see an emphasis on, as you said, tweaking it, fixing it in a way you go is because it's faster, it's more efficient, and off you go. You reference an amazing book in this book called In Praise of Slow by Carl Honoré, which is a book that kind of changed my life in some ways because it makes you think differently about the velocity of which you are operating at. What's the benefit of slowing down? And part of that is getting out of that digital world and maybe looking more at an analogue life.

DAVID SAX: I think. The benefit of slowing down is, is, you know, one from a health perspective that that idea that, you know, we do not need and we are not built for exponential growth. A computer might be or, you know, the the goals of a certain corporation might be, but our bodies are not built for that. Our minds are not built for that. So there's health benefits. There's the benefits of our physical stress. But even in the way we think about our work or the way we think about learning. Speed doesn't always serve us in the best way. If I was rushing through every answer and speaking a mile a minute like the guy in those old fast food ads or whatever it was, it was the name was great. You know, your listeners would be missing out on half the things I would say. Maybe I would get more ideas out. But that wouldn't be serving this interview very well. Right. If I wrote this book in half the time, maybe it would have come out sooner and I could have written another book sooner and made a little more money or something like that. But the book took the time that it took to write. And that pace is a human pace.

MG: But is the architecture there to allow us to do that? The digital architecture, does that prevent us from slowing down?

DAVID SAX: Some of it does. Some of it is built around the idea of incentivising at speed. So communication platforms such as Slack, for example. You know, you send a message, message comes back, someone else sends a message, and it just cascades really, really, really, really quickly until you feel as though things are out of control. And that's that that stress people feel when it's just like, I don't have time, I don't have time, I don't have time anymore. But there are digital tools that actually work to control and enhance slowness. So I use browser applications and blockers that block or limit the time I'm able to spend on websites like Facebook and Twitter that which, you know, again, you get on them and it's just this cascade of speed. There are other ones that can that can block out the Internet signal, for example, or or set a timer when you're supposed to do deep work or deep thinking, all all these tools are available. And I think the incentive is there to sort of go faster, because perhaps that feeds certain algorithms or or works into the the profitability model of of certain software technology. But we can use some of those same tools to to slow down when we need to or want it.

MG: So the pitch for the metaverse was that this is where we'll live, that we're not going to live, you know, around those platforms. We'll live in those platforms in that space. You say in this book, in the future, I aim to feel more alive every day. What does that mean?

DAVID SAX: Think about back to that time. Let's go to April 2020, the darkest, darkest days of the pandemic. You're searching for yeast, you know, in secret in the supermarket. I was too very unsuccessfully. You know, you're pinging between screens 8 hours a day. Okay. How did you feel?

MG: Not alive.

DAVID SAX: Not alive.

MG: Yeah. Now stressed out and, yeah.

DAVID SAX: Take that screen and tie it onto your eyeballs, Matt. And then Mark Zuckerberg will be there riding a floating bear and like, singing a little song with his weird animated head. Do you feel better? Is that the future you want when we feel alive? When you talk to people about the experience the past couple of years and say, When did you feel most alive? I felt most alive when I was outside. Going for hikes in the area where you grew up, the people.

MG: Surfing in the winter.

DAVID SAX: Surfing in the filth of Lake Ontario in January with ice hanging off my face, just walking in the park with my kids, having a conversation outside on a patio with a friend and a meal and and and, you know, hanging out with my family and being with my book club outside, you know, in a backyard in January. Those were the moments when I felt most alive. Does technology change that? Because we can deliver a more visual experience through a screen. No. It could be cool. It could be interesting. Maybe there's moments of that that could make someone feel alive. But as long as our human bodies and minds have the same needs that we've always had. Socialisation, face to face. Interaction. Real visceral experiences that engage all of us. Like riding a bike. We're going to gravitate toward that. That's the thing that's going to give us the most meaning, the most pleasure, the most intellectual stimulation for learning or work. And I don't think any new technology is going to come around and change that. New technology is going to keep evolving and will hopefully be able to integrate them into our lives in ways that are more thoughtful and critical so that the technologies that we take on and use actually elevate the way we feel as humans, the way we feel in our analogue bodies and our analogue world. That's that's the hope that we actually learn from this time. To think critically about technology. And instead of saying, oh, okay, Mark, that's a future, great. And you can see there's like 200,000 people who've signed on to this metaverse thing. That's like I don't know the amount of people who listen to a Shawn Mendes song on Spotify in 10 minutes. It's nothing. It's like a statistical anomaly for something as big as Facebook. So people aren't buying it. We're we're voting with our feet and our bodies and our minds to, like, get out back in the world because that's where we belong.

MG: Last question. And each time we're kicking it. Old school is your alarm. Really? Like Sonny and Cher. I got you, babe. Is that how you wake up from some old clock radio blasting that every morning, like Groundhog Day?

DAVID SAX: It felt like it. It certainly felt like it.

MG: David Sax, thank you very much.

DAVID SAX: Matt, it is a pleasure to be here with you.

MG: David Sax's new book is The Future is Analogue How to Create a More Human World.

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[Song]

MG: How could you not play this? Coming up after your regional update, Run, Hide, Repeat the incredible, unbelievable story of Pauline Dakin's life. She's here in 90 seconds to tell us more. I'm Matt Galloway. You're listening to The Current on CBC Radio One. Sonny and Cher will take us to your break.

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Journalist Pauline Dakin on a childhood spent on the run

Guest: Pauline Dakin

MG: Hello again. I'm Matt Galloway. You're listening to The Current.

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TED: Do you remember when Mum empty the fridge, the food all had to go. And I seem to remember it was that it got unplugged and the food spoilt. But that could have been a different time.

PAULINE: No, that's what she said. Yeah. Yeah. That was the same house that we lived in where we had to wash our feet one time and then put plastic bags on them to walk out of the house.

TED: I know the story. I don't I don't specifically remember that, but it doesn't surprise me.

PAULINE: Do you remember the hike up Mt. Seymour.

TED: 20 feet of snow into the backcountry?

MG: That's Pauline Dakin, chatting with her brother Ted, remembering strange events from their childhood in Vancouver, events they had to keep a secret for them. Growing up was full of unanswered questions, jolting moves across the country and shocking revelations. Pauline Dakin is a former CBC reporter. Now she's telling her story in a new CBC podcast. It's called Run, Hide, Repeat. And Pauline is in Halifax. Good morning.

PAULINE: Good morning.

MG: That you can laugh about it now, talking about emptying the fridge in plastic bags and your feet and hiking through the snow. You weren't laughing about it when it was happening, when it was unfolding. How are these events explained to you at the time?

PAULINE: Well, they weren't you know, there was never a satisfying explanation for the the very bizarre things that would go on. You know, you'd say, well, what's this about? What's wrong with our family? Why is everything a secret? And the answer was, I'm sorry, I can't tell you. I'll tell you when you're older. And of course, you know that eventually you just kind of shrug and and give up and move on.

MG: All of this started when your parents got divorced. Tell me about your parents. In the first episode, we learn a lot about them and the fact that that your dad was very different in many ways than your mom.

PAULINE: Mm hmm. My dad was older than my mum. He served in the Second World War. He came back, he'd been married. He had two children with his first wife. My. And he came from a family of doctors. I mean, he came from some wealth and privilege. And my mother had grown up very poor on the prairies. Her mother died when she was 15. So she'd grown up with a dad who was, I would say, ill equipped to take care of kids after the mum was gone. And then when mum left her little town on the prairie, she became a flight attendant, which was quite a thing in those days, really. And. And that's how she met my dad. She was flying the route between Vancouver and Toronto, and my dad was on boards and doing various things in Toronto, and I lived in Vancouver and that's how they met.

MG: Would you say quite a thing? I mean, for people who now suffer through airline travel. Yeah, I mean, you say that deliberately.

PAULINE: Oh, it was a very glamorous job back in the, you know, early days of air travel. It was considered a very fancy thing. And I remember her telling me how she had to have, you know, her nails lacquered a certain colour and her heels had to be a certain height in the little cap had to be adjusted just so. And it was very strict.

MG: What was it that led to their split?

PAULINE: My dad was alcoholic, and when he drank he was violent and so he was abusive. And that was going on when Ted and I were small children and my mum would, you know, rush us down to the basement in the mornings if he was hung over because she was so afraid of him. And so she became deeply depressed, trying to figure out how to get out of this marriage.

MG: How much of that did you know about at the time?

PAULINE: Nothing until I was older. But what what I felt, I could feel her fear. I used to have stomach aches as a little girl and it was stress.

MG: Your mum eventually ended up getting some counselling from a man named Stan Sears. Who? Stan Sears.

PAULINE: Stan Sears was a united church minister in North Vancouver, a really well-regarded guy. He came from a family here on the East Coast. Actually, they were fundamentalist Baptists, but he went to the United Church and he was very involved with the organisation, Al-Anon, which is for the families of alcoholics, but also he did counselling with alcoholics and their families and so mum eventually went to Al-Anon looking for help and they recommended that she go see the Reverend Stan Sears, which she did. And she he counselled her. And I think probably he was the first man in her life who was gentle and supportive and caring and wise and all of those things, which he certainly was. And she got better. And then, you know, when a job became available at the church, he hired her. And that's when Stan and his wife, Sybil, started to become close family friends. And we. Started having holiday meals together and vacationing and camping together.

MG: What did you think of them at the time?

PAULINE: I remember the first time. Well, I you know, I was quite flattered that the minister, who, you know, would shake my hand at the door. And so I had a little girl and I thought, who's this guy up front of the at the front of the church? Because we started going to his church. But then he was also on the board of a camp outside of Vancouver called Paradise Valley. And I remember being there with, I don't know, a church group of some kind. And there were a bunch of kids and there was a building that everybody knew that if you went to the top, you could see some baby birds in a nest. And so all these kids are going, Let's go look at the birds, let's go look at the birds. And up we go. And then we hear bang, bang, bang, these big feet coming up the stairs behind us. And this voice saying, Don't you touch those birds. And I was just frozen and everybody else ran away and I just couldn't move. I was like, eyes, big as plates. Looking at this Stan Sears, who was protecting those baby birds from us kids. And I started to cry. I felt like I'd been caught doing something bad. And he sat down beside me and he said, You wouldn't hurt those birds, would you? And I said, no. And I he was so- he got what I was feeling and he was gentle and he kind of jolted me out of my tears and off we went. And that was the time. The first time I felt a great connection to him. And over the years, Stan became like a dad to me. My dad was not a part of my life for most of my life, and he became like a dad and he was an incredibly supportive dad.

MG: There's a lot that's happening in your life as this is unfolding, and in the first episode of this podcast, you talk about the last time in some ways that you thought of your family as normal. What was that time?

PAULINE: We were going on vacation with the Spurs. It was the summer that I would turn ten and off we go on a camping vacation from Vancouver to Winnipeg and through the prairies, where my mom was from. And, you know, it was a lovely time. And then we arrive in Winnipeg. We're staying with friends of my mother's who are not there. So they've given us their house. And one night I can't sleep. And I go down and there's mom and she says, I have to tell you something. And she said, We're not going home. And that was just incomprehensible to me. And, you know, immediately I thought of, you know, my stuffed animals and my cat and, you know, what about the life that we're leaving behind and how I can't say goodbye to my friends or my teacher or even my dad, especially not my dad. And that was it. I just nothing ever felt quite the same again.

MG: What did that mean to you in that moment? I mean, in many ways, this is a story it feels like about disorientation.

PAULINE: Yeah, I think that's probably a really good description, Matt. It was like having the rug pulled out from under your feet without any discernible reason, you know? Why would we not go home? I can't tell you will tell you when you're older. And so my brother, by this time we're getting a little bit older and we would have these conversations and we came to the conclusion that it was because of dad, that because he was alcoholic, she is she was scared and didn't want us around him. That's what that was our conclusion. And in some ways it wasn't that far off. Certainly she was scared of him and didn't want us influenced by him. But, you know, we always knew there was something else going on. You know, there was always this sense of something dire. You can feel it, but there's you you don't understand what was happening.

MG: I mean, we played that little clip at the beginning of you telling the story of having to empty the fridge. You unplug the fridge and things were spoilt. What was happening there?

PAULINE: Well, what was happening there was, you know, years later, Mom and Stan told me that the reason for all of this madness was that we'd been on the run from organised crime and that my dad had a big role in some organised crime group. And there was a complex story about how that led to Stan and then my mother being targeted. And so we'd been on the run. And so the story about, you know, the fridge was that somehow they got word that something someone had tried to poison us and so nobody knew exactly details about that. So everything in the fridge had to go out or the time we had to go hiking up in the middle of the night up to a cabin on Mount Seymour was when they gotten word that somebody was coming after us or coming after mom or Stan. And so we had to disappear, get out of the way. It wasn't safe. And that was sort of a repeated theme. You know, when when we lived in Winnipeg, there were many times we'd come downstairs to go to school and. It's, Up. Not going to school today. We're going bowling in Portage La Prairie or we're going for a picnic. And, you know, you'd find you'd be find yourself in some place an hour or so out of town, thinking of all the things you were missing at school today and not really understanding why that would be.

MG: As you say, some of this begins to be unveiled to you in this meeting that that you have with your mom at the Bluebird Motel.

PAULINE: Mm hmm. In Sussex, New Brunswick. Yeah. Well, by then, I'm in my early twenties, and I was working for a newspaper in New Brunswick. My mum had gone back to school in here in Halifax, and she called me one day and said, okay, you know how I always said I would tell you when the time was right? This is it. So meet me. So we agreed to meet in a motel in Sussex and we actually met at a little service station just off the highway. And then she drove me to the motel and when we walked in I was just shocked to see Stan there because I thought he and his wife had retired back to the West Coast a few years earlier. I kind of thought, Well, maybe I'm just not going to see him again, you know? And there he was. And so they tell me this story and and they say things like, so you remember the time that this was going on? Well, this is what was really happening. And so all of a sudden in that conversation, I'm getting all of these answers to so many things that had mystified me all through my childhood. And as crazy as it seemed, I mean, I just thought, this is insane. Why would my family be targeted by the mob?

MG: But tell us about that. I mean, what was really happening according to Stand and your mom.

PAULINE: What was happening is that people were coming after us, that that it was believed that my mother or Stan had information that they wanted or that they were giving information that my mother would have gleaned during her marriage with my dad to authorities, that, you know, there was all this stuff going on that put us at risk. And that's why we had to keep kind of disappearing because, you know, we after that moved to Winnipeg, we'd moved again to Saint John, New Brunswick, you know, fully the other side of the country. And and so, yeah, that was why we were just trying to stay out of trouble with all of this, you know, strange behaviour. So, you know, the explanation did make all the puzzle pieces fall into place. It was an explanation that that addressed all of those different stories and but it seemed so crazy. And then on the other side of my head, you know, my thoughts are just swirling and I'm thinking, this is mom and Stan. You know, these are people who have are very respected in the community. They have responsible jobs. They've never been anything but reliable and responsible and caring people in our lives. Why would they lie? Like, what would be in that for them? And the other thing was, you know, when you have lived most of your life with this feeling that something, something terrible is going on, but you don't know what you're kind of you become primed to the idea that whatever it is, whatever that explanation is, it's going to be dire. It's going to be something just as terrible as you felt. So you kind of think, well, could it be maybe it could. We do know some people get into trouble with organised crime and you know maybe it's true.

MG: And stands role in this in this scheme of you know you being targeted by organised crime is what he's in communication in some ways with some of these people.

PAULINE: Yeah. So the other side of the story is that Stan, somebody came after Stan. This is in the early days when my mom first knew him that somebody attacked him one night and somebody else came out of the shadows and saved him and revealed themselves as sort of a security person working with an anti organised crime task force. And this person who had attacked Stan was, you know, a minion of some organised crime guy. And so that person started to recruit Stan too, because Stan was, you know, a respected guy and so recruited him to be part of this task force. And ultimately, as time went on, Stan got more and more involved with it. So he was always receiving information about what was going on in the background and then relaying that to my mother.

MG: At what point in time does something lodge in your brain that questions that?

PAULINE: Well, I think it was sort of a a growing inability to believe. And I have to say, you know, Stan. Had this full cast of characters in what he called the weird world. You know, this other world, this secret task force, which also involved kind of no, an alternative penal system specific to organised crime figures. That was also a place where sometimes people who had been targeted or victimised by organised crime could be removed to like a a protective custody. So there was an entire world of people. And, you know, along the way I would hear, well, you know, okay, so your half sister actually was arrested. Your dad got her involved in organised crime and she was arrested and she lives in the weird world. And I'd get letters from her and I'd get letters from all these, this huge cast of characters living in this shadowy world. So at some point it just becomes too much. Right. And there are doubles. I learnt there are doubles. So I kind of I- how do you disprove something so secretive. Right. I mean, I remember saying I'm going to sit on the side of the road with a sign that says, I'm going to tell everything to the first person who comes along just to see if any of these people emerge to stop me. You know, I would kind of challenge and be told, oh, if you do that, you'll be arrested. So ultimately, I just decided that I was going to tell my mother that my house had been broken into. It hadn't. But I was going to tell her this lie at a time I knew was that Stan was visiting her. And I and I did that and she said, I'll talk to him and call you back. And when she called back, she said, yes. Stan says there were people that broke in who've been following you for days. They had pictures in their car of you. They, you know, and this whole big story...

MG: And of course, the break in never happened.

PAULINE: It was my lie. It was, yeah. So that was the moment I knew for sure it wasn't true. And it took me a long time to get there, Matt, because I realised that if I rejected their story, I was rejecting them, I would no longer be a part of the, I don't know, a part of the circle. And, you know, I, I couldn't bear to lose my mother and this guy who was like my father.

MG: What did you learn about what was actually going on if you weren't if you weren't fleeing the mafia and if these stories weren't true, what was actually happening?

PAULINE: So I didn't know that for a very long time. And I got to tell you, I was furious and I was madly researching what could this be? You know, in my I really did not believe that Stan was an evil person trying to deceive us. I just it just couldn't match up in my brain with the other things I knew about Stan, but I thought, you know, it's got to be some kind of mental illness and, you know, psychosis, schizophrenia, none of these things fit because he had he lived such a normal life. I mean, he had a had jobs and sat on boards. He knew lots of people. Nobody ever thought there was anything strange going on. And then when I started to write about all of this, I wanted to be able to figure it out in my own end and then talk to my kids about it. So I was trying to sort of put it down on paper and doing some research. And one day I read a paper about something called Delusional Disorder, and it was described as a a very rare condition with several subtypes. And and when I read the symptoms and the presentations, I thought, this is it. This is how somebody can be so sick that they make up these terrible stories and still behave normally in the rest of their life.

MG: You spoke with a number of experts about this, and I want you to have a listen. This is the forensic psychiatrist of Bandy X. Lee.

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That delusion is rather elaborate and quite impressive when you encounter it. And what makes delusional disorder more difficult to set the delusions occur rather later in life. And so one is ostensibly establish oneself in life, has had a job for a while and may even have a family. And delusions, unfortunately, are contagious, meaning those around them who have deep emotional bonds and close attachment with relatively less attachment to the outside, will adopt those delusions and act as if they had the disorder themselves. The person with the primary illness is the one who needs treatment. The person who's secondarily affected may simply get better if they're separated from the primary person. But of course, if. They've been together for a very long time and relatively isolated or moving from place to place. Then it's very hard to wean the person off of the delusion or to convince them out of it, even after separation.

MG: How hard was it to wean yourself off of the delusions?

PAULINE: You know, when I hear that, I think it should have been harder. But I think I just lived in this in-between state of sort of believing, not believing for so long that I could get past them more quickly. But my mother never did. My mother never stopped believing.

MG: Did you ever talk to her about this? About why she believed the story that Stan created?

PAULINE: Mm hmm. I did. And, you know, for some years after I said, that's it. This is not real. You know, we would argue about it. And finally, I had to say, okay, I'm not talking about this anymore, because she would try to convince me it was real and I would try to convince her it wasn't. And we were getting nowhere. And so, yeah, I just said no more. It's not real. And and she respected that. And she didn't talk to me about it again until just a few days before she died. And she tried to warn me to stay away from, you know, my dad's children from his first marriage and contacts in Vancouver. And so and I said, you know, it's not real, mom. I don't have anything to be worried about more than anybody else. And she said, you know, if you really don't believe this, how you must hate me for what happened in our lives. And it was just heartbreaking. And I said, no, I didn't hate you ever. I've been really mad at you, but I've always loved you. And so that was kind of how we ended up leaving it during the time that she was alive. You know, we loved each other more than we were committed to, whatever our point of view was, I think for sure. But it was after my discovery of delusional disorder that suddenly I mean, who can you blame, right? If somebody is mentally ill, you can't blame people. And and as you heard Dr. Lee say, you know, these delusions are contagious. And my mother was incredibly vulnerable at the time she met Stan, and she credited him with saving her life because she had been suicidal. So, you know, you can kind of say, you know, have some empathy for the players and just say, I'm going to put this down now and move on with my life.

MG: Is that why I mean, you've written a book about this and I read something after the book came out. You said that you wouldn't change anything in some ways about your childhood. You said, I have great appreciation for my mom. She caused a lot of chaos, but she really did believe that she was protecting us.

PAULINE: She did. And I think Stan thought he was protecting us all, too. And and there are if I could change things but still have general outcomes remain the same? Yeah, I would choose less chaos. And, you know, it was hard. I suffered from mental health issues as a result of all of the stress, too. But but the truth is, in the end, my life is good and rich and I and I wouldn't want to change anything that would have an impact on where I am right now. Yeah. You take the best and leave the rest, right?

MG: You've told the story a few different ways over time. And in this we hear you talking to your brother and talking it out with Ted. What have you learnt through that? Has it been therapeutic? In some ways that's like a overused word in some ways. But you could imagine that there is a therapeutic element to being able to tell this story publicly.

PAULINE: Mm hmm. Yeah, I think it is a bit of a cliche to say, you know, I unburdened myself and it was therapeutic. But there's a reason that's a cliche, because for me it has been very true. And also, I think for me, it's because all the years of secrecy, you know, that every time something strange happened, we'd be told, you can't talk about it. We couldn't even talk about, you know, where we were going on vacation or if we were going out for dinner. Everything was a secret. And so for me to say, I am not going to keep the secret anymore, and in fact, I'm telling everybody was just it felt like doing something good for myself and for my family because secrets are so toxic.

MG: It's a hell of a story and I'm really glad to talk to you about it. I've listened to the first few episodes of the podcast and I can't wait to hear the rest. Pauline, thank you very much.

PAULINE: Thank you, Matt.

MG: Pauline Dakin is a former CBC reporter, now a journalism professor at the University of King's College in Halifax. You can find her new podcast, Run Hide Repeat on the CBC Listen app or wherever you get your podcasts. And as we mentioned, she also wrote a book about her life. It, too, is called Run hide repeat. That is The Current. For this Tuesday q is up next on CBC Radio one. We wanted to end today with a poem that ties back to the story at the beginning of our programme, the shooting at Club Q, a gay nightclub in Colorado Springs. Club Q is also the title of a book of poetry from the American poet James Davis. It's named after that club. And here's the poem that shares the title of the book read by the author, James Davis. I'm Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening and we'll talk to you tomorrow.

SOUNDCLIP

Club Q. I stand for. QUEST Which is to say mission as in our mission is to provide a safe space for you to be yourself. Which is to say it is not always safe for you to be yourself for Queen as in a64 share. Hosting Wednesday night karaoke. Always the first and last to sing. Four quarters. Which is to say Jukebox eight, all cigarettes home. Of course I stand for queer, which is to say unique, which is to say alone. I am queer, in a military town where cadets count out football scores in push ups and Blue Angels bar up the sky for quarantine for questioning. As in, how long have you known? As in Would you like to dance? As in a dance floor empty save for two men kissing, a patio fenced in, the warmth of a fire pit, the sweetness of his saliva after three gin and tonics. For quick, which is to say alive, which is to say mortal. I am quick. As a number scrawled on a cocktail napkin between pages of a one year Bible on a nightstand, quiet as the fist sized cloud rising from the sea after Elijah slaughters his 450th prophet a ball for quench, to satisfy and to extinguish. I stand for rainbow and I stand for rain.

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Tuesday November 22, 2022 Full Transcript

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