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Is It Safe to be Queer in Nova Scotia?

A reaction to the vicious stabbing of Scott Jones, a gay man who lives in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia who was recently left paralysed by his attacker.

A handmade sign in Halifax following Raymond Taavel's death in April 2012. Photo by Simon Thibault 

This Thanksgiving weekend, it was a question I knew I would get asked again, when I read about Scott Jones. Jones is a gay man who lives in New Glasgow, a town about an hour and a half away from Halifax, with a population of roughly 9,500. The story reported that Jones had been stabbed in the back, and his throat was slashed. The wounds to his neck were superficial, but his spine was severed, and he will probably never walk again. As of yet, it is unknown whether or not Jones’ attack is a hate crime, at least in the prosecutorial sense. Jones’ friends and family believe that he was targeted because he was gay. The accused reportedly said something in Jones’ ear right before he stabbed him, but Jones does not recall what he said.  The motives of the accused, Shane Edward Matheson, remain as of yet, unclear.

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These days, a lot of people receive news through social media platforms. A lot of people I know shared Jones’ story on their Facebook wall, one even going so far as saying that it’s because of stories like this that they had left Nova Scotia.

I grew up in rural Nova Scotia, in a small village that is home to the largest wooden church in North America. Fishing and logging are the major occupations. It’s tiny. It’s cute. It’s quaint. It’s where I grew up. It’s where I grew up gay. Like, really gay.

I once was told by the mother of a friend, “I knew you were gay when you were three.” Yeah, I can see that. I was like a proto-Kurt Hummel in my high school: fey, sassy, and unapologetically gay. When I came out at seventeen, I gained respect from a lot of my peers for sheer audacity. I got props for being brave enough to stand up for myself. “You mean he admits it?” was the prevalent statement. If someone called me a cocksucker, I’d simply reply, “Keen grasp of the totally obvious,” and sashay away. This is not to say I didn’t get bullied, or threatened with violence. I did. On my 19th birthday, I narrowly escaped getting gay bashed. My best friend, who also identifies as gay, was not as lucky.

So is Halifax - and by extension, Nova Scotia - a violent place? Government statistics from 2011 place Halifax just below Winnipeg when it comes to homicides. There have been high and low profile cases of violent murders in the city, and people’s memories are long when it comes to violent crime. During the mid-2000‘s there was a flurry of swarmings happening in the city, and although the numbers have gone down, people still ask me if swarmings are still happening. And although it is debated whether or not Winnipeg, or Halifax for that matter, really are violent cities, the reputation is somewhat as such. The concept of Halifax as a violent city was reinforced when a local gay man, Raymond Taavel, was murdered.

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When I heard about Jones, my mind immediately went to Taavel. Not because the cases are similar, but because I knew their sexuality would come to play a large part in the media attention that would follow. Raymond was a gay activist and prominent member of Halifax’s LGBTQ community, and he was murdered on Gottingen Street in front of a local gay bar in April of 2012. I covered the story for the Canadian gay newspaper Xtra, and while I had already been covering the queer scene in Halifax and Nova Scotia, it was my first major crime story.  I knew people in the community, and so I had to make calls to people, including close friends, to talk about and during a difficult moment in their lives. Every time I made a call, I explained that I was calling as a reporter, and that I knew this was a tough time, but that I had to ask questions.  People wanted to know what was happening, and what they were feeling.

The people I talked to opened up. They opened up because they wanted people to know that Taavel was a good man, and that the street where he was killed was filled with people who loved and respected him. They wanted people to know that the residents of the street where he was killed loved the area in which they lived. The man accused of Taavel’s death, Andre Denny, was not well-known to members of the local community. He was not one of them, and the members of those communities affected - the LGBTQ community, the residents of Gottingen Street and the North End of Halifax - wanted people to know that these things don't always happen here, that the person who commited the crime was not one of their own. They wanted people to know that they were shocked, and saddened by the death.

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And they were angry, not just at the senselessness of the crime but that their neighbourhood – which hosts two gay-owned and operated bars, as well as numerous other businesses and homes –  would be seen on national scale as the scene of a grisly death. They didn’t want others to think of Halifax as a bad place. What they wanted people to see was the outpouring of emotion and support that was happening, right there, steps away from where he had died.  They wanted them to know that less than 24 hours after Raymond Taavel was killed, hundreds of people filled Gottingen Street for a community memorial. People talked, sang, cried and prayed.  And people supported each other.

That’s the key to this area, this province. The outpouring of support, almost immediate, when situations like this arise. Not long after Jones was attacked, a website was created to help foster financial support for him. As of October 18th, the site has received nearly 54,000 visits and over $30,000 has been raised.  This does not include the local drives, charities and fundraisers that have come to be, and will come to be in the near future. That is the character of this place.

When Taavel died, I wrote and talked about the case in local and national media. It was nerve-wracking. As a journalist, I wanted to tell the actual, factual truth of the matter. But as a gay man, I also held a sense of responsibility to the queer community that I belong to, to say what mattered: we will not be frightened. We will not have our city or our community painted as a dangerous place to live. We will not be targets. We will support each other, in as many ways as possible.

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That is why we live here.

Follow Simon on Twitter: @simonathibault

More on calling out homophobia:

The Bill and Ted Show is Super Homophobic (and Also Racist and Terrible)

Meet the Gay Russian Teenager Using Twitter to Combat Homophobia

The Ten Hottest Homophobes on the Internet (by a Boy)