Last year, The Albertan Queer Affirmation Review identified the importance of empowering Queer story tellers. Through its ways, Treaty guarantees that Two Spirit folks & others should be able to line in our cities and schools. Queer people have the grand joy that, in being true to ourselves, we make room for & affirm Treaty. The same Treaty that allows us to be our own true selves lets others do the same. Through this, Queer spaces become magic spaces, and stories maintain that magic. By grace and good fortune, we've raised enough to gather Queer writers and promote their stories. Today's story does that in its own way; what follows comes from being Queer in Treaty 7.
The First Time I Kissed a Girl - A story by KSC Hatch
I will never forget the first time I kissed a girl. It was the perfect first kiss — like something out of a coming-of-age Hollywood movie. But before we go there, we’re going to go to the undeveloped East side of downtown Calgary, before high rises went up and hipster cafes opened. Before the bike path was redesigned, garden beds went in, and the streets were cobbled. Back to 2000, when most people still had dial-up, no one I knew had a mobile phone, and the Multi still stood.
The Multi, short for The Multicultural Centre, was a large cinderblock building painted nicotine-stain yellow. It was a few blocks from the river, on the dodgy edge of downtown, near well-known seedy establishments like the Cecil and St. Louis Hotels.
By “dodgy” I mean this part of the city embodied how we fail to care for our most vulnerable. It was here that the homeless population collected. It smelled of urine and spilled alcohol. Sex workers were dropped off by pimps and picked up by Johns just across the street.
I don’t know what purpose or function the building had during the day, but on weekends throughout the summer and into the autumn, it was taken over by punks and metalheads, goths and freaks. We gathered at the entrance, toonies or five dollar bills in hand to pay our cover. Inside was a long hallway, the loos on the left, the door into the main hall on the right. The hall wasn’t a large space, but it had a stage and it worked well for local bands to perform and local kids to mosh and thrash and hang out.
When the weather was good we’d spill out an emergency exit into a fenced off area dubbed the Smoke Pit. It wasn’t just for smoking, of course. It was the social space for when we wanted to carry on a conversation. Inside was all noise and moshing. The Smoke Pit was where friendships were made and solidified.
The Multi was a haven for my junior high social group, the Freak Clique. Here our circle of four, Damon, Andrea, Thomas and me, expanded, growing to include kids from other schools across the city. We didn’t meet all of them at the Multi, but this was where we saw them regularly. There were several Sarahs, A couple Daves, Rachel, Luna... and Chloe.
Chloe, who Damon had met first through ICQ and invited to hang out with us at the Multi. Chloe, in her soft plaid flannel shirts and baggy jeans. Chloe, with her purple dyed short-cropped hair and pierced eyebrow.
To my mind, Chloe was impossibly cool.
While the rest of us said we gave no fucks, it was basically a front. Chloe seemed to genuinely not care what anyone thought. She didn’t worry about stuff the way I did.
I was a good kid. Painfully so. I cared so much about...everything. I worried about grades and being liked, disappointing my dad and incurring my mum’s wrath. And I knew my friends worried too — about being seen as cool, about their parents, about whatever was going on at school. We were all painfully awkward, but to me, Chloe wasn’t.
She seemed so comfortable in her own skin and I wished I could feel that comfortable too.
As a group we thought we were pretty rebellious and ‘out there’—defying social norms and all that jazz. Only Thomas and Andrea identified as straight. Everyone else was bisexual, except for Luna, who boldly called herself a lesbian.
But even here, Chloe had the extra edge because she’d actually dated a girl. For the rest of us, it was just talk, and I weirdly believed that until I dated a woman, maybe I wasn’t really as bisexual as I thought. I don’t know how I worked that one out, but I genuinely felt I had to “prove” my other than straight identity through having a relationship. I even took it so far as to fret about the fact that here I was, in a circle of friends with mostly bisexual girls (and even a lesbian!) and I wasn’t attracted to any of them.
Although, that wasn’t strictly true.
Like I said, Chloe was really, really cool. Something about her having properly dated another girl made her seem like an authority. She didn’t just talk the talk, she walked the walk.
But then, she and I weren’t really close. Not like I was with others in the Freak Clique.
Until Valentine’s day.
There was a Valentine’s day show at the Multi, but because this was Spring in Calgary, it was so cold hardly anyone came. It was boring and the bands weren’t great, so Damon, Andrea, Chloe and I decided to go elsewhere. Our options were limited as fifteen-year-olds. Downtown Calgary is pretty much dead after 6:00 pm, as all the malls shut after the nine to five crowd is gone, and it was too cold to hang out at Olympic Plaza or along Stephen Ave. This left us with going to Damon’s house (as it was the closest) or riding the C-train.
Damon and Andrea were a bit drunk and Chloe was stoned, so the prospect of going to someone’s house, even if their parents were pretty cool, wasn’t high on anyone’s list. The C-train it was.
This may sound like the dullest, weirdest thing for teenagers to do, except, it really wasn’t. The thing about taking the C-train when you have no where to go is that you get to enjoy the ride. We might meet an interesting person, or we’d use the time to share music, and we would almost always get into intense conversations about politics and social action. Very teenage ones, of course, the righteous indignity of youth and all.
So we got on the train, claiming a set of four seats — two benches facing each other — Andrea and Damon on one side, me and Chloe on the other. At first the four of us were all talking, but after a few stops Andrea and Damon got snuggly and started making out.
This was the first time I’d ever hung out with Chloe without a huge group of people with us. Any exchanges we’d had before had been brief and surface level. She started asking me questions, about my writing, my artwork, school. She thought it was cool that I didn’t drink or do drugs
“Like, you don’t care what other people think,” she said. “You don’t wanna get drunk or high, so you don’t.”
I was astounded that she thought of me the same way I thought of her.
And gawd did she smell nice. Because she smoked I figured she would stink of cigarettes, but Chloe had this soft laundry scent, warm and comforting. And her eyes were so intense—silvery grey blue with a darker indigo ring around the iris.
We were deep in conversation when Andrea leaned forward and declared that she had to pee and suggested we get off at the next stop. “There’s a bathroom there.”
“It’s usually locked this late at night,” I pointed out.
“Whatever. We’ll piss outside the door if we have to,” Chloe smirked.
So we got off at the next stop, stepping out into the frosty night air. The sky was totally dark, the platform lit with the intense white light of overhead lamps. We ran along the platform to the stairs, hollering and taking up all the space we felt like in the way of teenagers all over the world.
The bathroom was indeed locked. Andrea and Chloe took turns squatting in the doorway while Damon left the station for the bike path, where he could pee in a bush. I stood guard, not needing to pee badly enough to willingly do it in such a public space. I eyeballed the security camera just around the corner from the bathroom door.
Damon joined us again, just as another train pulled into the station. With a whoop he took off down the stairs back to the platform, Andrea, Chloe and I on his tail. He caught Andrea’s hand at the bottom of the stairs and the two of them sprinted ahead and slipped through the train doors just as they were closing. Chloe and I stopped in front of the now closed doors, panting to catch our breath, my lungs burning in the cold air
Andrea shouted through the glass for us to wait there.
“We’ll catch the next train back,” Damon yelled, and they both waved as the train pulled away.
I turned to Chloe, a smile on my face, shivering slightly, but not displeased to be alone with her at last. She smiled back, crooked and cute. “Now what?”
I scuffed the platform with my shoe, a slightly too big pair of skate shoes my aunt had given me. “Dunno. I guess we just wait.”
“Well, obviously that. But I was thinking, I’d really like to kiss you.”
And then her fingers found mine and she was standing right in front of me. Her eyes were bright and her face so close. My heart was pounding but it was in anticipation, not fear or worry or nerves like I’d felt anytime I’d been about to kiss a boy. I leaned in and her lips touched mine — soft and warm and like nothing I’d ever experienced before. There was no clanking of teeth, no sweaty palms or awkward fumbling. No wanting it to be over or wondering what the big deal was.
It was “oh yes.”
It was “This makes so much sense.”
It was: “I get it now.”
I tingled from head to toe and as I pulled away big fat flakes of snow began drifting down around us.
See? Hollywood stuff.
And then a C-train pulled up on the other side of the platform and Andrea and Damon were yelling at us to get on. Chloe took my hand and pulled me after her. The four of us took a seat, two benches facing each other, just like before, but this time the space between me and Chloe was gone. She pressed her thigh to mine and I asked her if we could kiss again and she responded by leaning in, meeting my mouth with hers, gently sucking in my bottom lip and letting it go.
Damon grinned and Andrea raised an eyebrow and said it was about time. That the two of us had been making moony eyes at each other since we’d got on the train and she totally wasn’t surprised.
I blushed, threading my fingers with Chloe’s, and riding a feeling I could barely express. I was comfortable in my own skin, in a way I never had been before. This girl holding my hand was amazing. I didn’t even think, I just turned to her and asked, “Will you be my girlfriend?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Sure.”
And then she kissed me again.
Find more from KSC Hatch through their substack; by getting your hands on From the QILT2BAG+, a collaborative community ‘zine aiming to uplift and celebrating Queer and trans writers and artists; and by checking out their mixed-media embroidery art project uplifting trans, Queer, and disabled lives, Sacred Love/Sacred Lives.
The Queer in Treaty 7 Podcast is produced here in Treaty 7 territory, and is a call to action from The Albertan Queer Affirmation Review; an ongoing work by community curated by Cupola Policy & Strategy. You can find more, read more, and hear more through this substack, and more on the policy science behind it all at CupolaStrategy.com
Thank you for sharing your time, and for entrenching the Treaty Queer.
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