Queeruption Challenges Culture

To display tolerance toward alternative lifestyles, it's important to understand the substance of the lifestyles. A look at alternative lifestyle organizing conferences aids in understanding.

One such conference is Queeruption, held annually since 1998 and this year in British Columbia. Queeruption is a gathering of homosexual lifestyle proponents with the purpose of organizing efforts to agitate and inform "complacent homo-gentrified communities everywhere." Try to understand.

From XTRA West (CAUTION: Language alert!):

The stench of makeshift shitters and Port-o-Potties spreads across the camp.

An outdoor kitchen contains a metre-wide wood cook stove. For weeks leading up to the event, dumpster divers collected food from back alley bins. Others have either stolen or donated food.

Still, meals regularly run out before the last 100 people get to the front of the meal line. A second cooking shift prods the smoking fire, calling for more volunteers to collect fallen branches.

Activists arrive from Ireland, Israel, Germany, Finland and France. Young queers ride the rails from across America just to be here. By the weekend, the camp hemorrhages, numbering over 350, well beyond the land's capacity to sustain us.

Hygiene becomes a critical issue. Mossy glades reek like an after-hour nightclub urinal. At the next morning's all-camp meeting, we discuss the growing menace of dog shit.

One Seattle dyke walks onto the land and instantly gets overwhelmed. She becomes overwrought as others attempt to calm her. She drags her reluctant gay boyfriend back to the cement and crush of Vancouver's Pride parade.

Hanging out in this Punk Park is a disorienting rush. Naked, tattooed, multigendered bodies roam everywhere.

The highest percentage of gender-fluid folk I've ever seen at a mixed event, our trans kin are core to this 10th Queeruption. Here, we're living the new norm.

Gee, what fun!

This year's event was held from August 1st to August 7th in the natural surroundings of the Sunshine Coast. The hope was for participants to make a connection between "radical queer struggles and ecological ones." Remember, with understanding comes tolerance and with tolerance we can have a new norm.

There's much more at the link. Before proceeding, I'd suggest that readers prepare themselves with an extra measure of willingness to understand.