Illustration by Maia Grecco
Growing up Greek and queer in suburbia
I vividly remember looking outside the living room window and watching a man walk an elephant down the street when I was a child. I thought this was all a dream at first, but it became a regular occurrence. The Bowmanville Zoo, which was once the oldest private zoo in Canada, allowed their staff to walk the elephants on public streets.
Bowmanville is a small Ontario town off of the 401, about an hour away from Toronto. It is the definition of stereotypical suburbia, and a static void for anyone who does not adhere to a white, straight, cis-male identity. It used to be a factory town and is home to one of Canada’s prisoner of war camps from World War II, Camp 30. Camp 30 is now a decrepit and lifeless structure that is littered with graffiti and completely desolate. It was where kids went when they were doing things they didn’t want their parents to know about.
My three siblings and I grew up on the corner of town where suburbia met farmland. We woke up to the rooster’s call or the train’s whistle. My parents chose Bowmanville because it was financially impossible for them to raise four children in Toronto. Unfortunately, one of the many things Bowmanville lacked was diversity in every sense, being predominantly white and cis-heteronormative. We grew up privileged because we’re white, but in the community we were constantly perplexing everyone. They didn’t know where to place us categorically. Ethnic ambiguity became challenging when we sought our first jobs as early teens; we never got any calls back because we thwarted hiring managers with our last name. There were no other Greek families there, at least that I knew of.
To this day, I still cannot speak Greek and am often called “fake Greek” by members of my family. My parents were preoccupied with working hard to make ends meet and none of my siblings thought we needed the language. There were no Greek schools in Bowmanville, no Greek Orthodox churches, nothing that resembled a Greek space of belonging and tradition, except our home.
We had to drive through two other townships to reach a Greek Orthodox church so we could attend Sunday mass. A man donning sparkly robes would command us to stand up, sit, stand up again, and sit again, and stand up. He drew crosses in the air as he blessed everyone in the church and groaned incomprehensibly. I didn’t know what myrrh was then, but I was raised on the smell. My grandmother continues to use it ceremonially during holy times throughout the year, and it always reminds me of sitting in a space of physical belonging, but feeling complete mental separation. I was a key to a locked door that had no key hole.
In Bowmanville, I always had to elaborate exorbitantly about my family’s traditions, how to pronounce my name, why I have a shadow over my upper lip, what a name day is, and why our Easter is on a different day. For Greek Easter, my massive family congregates in one of our backyards where we feast on an incredible amount of food, roast lamb on a spit, and play religious games with boiled eggs. Yet, my favourite aspect of the Greek Easter celebration is midnight mass. On the night before Easter, we stand outside a church with a group of other families all grasping candles. The priest and the altar boys stand opposite the crowd and orchestrate the choir performance. Men carry a massive gold crucifix through the crowd and onto a pedestal, and thus everyone joins in a simple song with a hauntingly beautiful tune. The words of the song translate to “Christ has risen…” and it is essentially about the resurrection. Although I cannot understand the words or the specific meaning of this celebration, I love the feeling of belonging and comfort. It looks like everyone is holding their own small star in their hands, and the glow of the candle lights everyone’s faces, making them visible in the darkness. To finish the night, we take a flame home, attempting to keep it lit through the long car ride, and use the flame to burn a cross into the wood above our doorway. Tradition and family have always been some of my core values, and I try to attend midnight mass every year I can.
I couldn’t exist easily in Bowmanville because I cared about what others thought and how every one of my actions would be percieved
I was an extremely outgoing kid. I remember being enrolled in competitive dance classes and finding them liberating—combining my love of music, art, and movement. But this passion led to bullying that influenced my mental health throughout my teens. Whether it was because I had fast-growing body hair, was not thin, had “bug eyes,” or because I treated one act of kindness from a classmate as an invitation to friendship. I remember my high school teachers grading me lower when I dyed my hair bright red, as if that was a signifier of my intellect.
I couldn’t exist easily in Bowmanville because I cared about what others thought and how every single one of my actions would be perceived. It would take me hours to prepare for school. I would have daily panic attacks because I couldn’t inhabit an idealized self I’d created in my mind and wanted desperately to look like someone else. My mental health declined to levels that I struggle to think about, and sometimes I find myself in that place again. I couldn’t recognize the privilege of my situation because I was in a constant mental battle against myself.
Growing up, my siblings and I treated visiting my grandparents in Toronto as a vacation. I still feel most in tune with the Greek in me when I’m visiting them in the Danforth area. Surrounded by Greek music, people shouting “Opa!” through open windows, the scent of tzatziki hitting you in waves—surrounded by the familiar. White and blue flags cover the streets and shop windows, people sell evil eye amulets, and a bright archway welcomes us back. I’m never tired of seeing Greek men flaunting their fabulous moustaches, accompanied by their wives flaunting similarly fabulous moustaches.
On my father’s side, my grandparents’ backyard stretched for what felt like miles. They grew every single fruit and vegetable I had ever heard of. I remember picking dill and mint and crushing it in my palm before covering my mouth and nose with my hands and just inhaling the incredible scent. My grandmother would never let us leave without stuffing us with food; we’d nearly be sick every time we left. My siblings and I would sit on these lavish antique gold-embroidered sofas and watch Greek remakes of Disney movies. Our father attempted to translate, but grew easily tired from the task. So, using subtext and visual cues, we created the stories ourselves.
On my mother’s side, both of her parents speak fluent English, so I have gotten to know them much better than I have my father’s side. We knew that they didn’t want us to know something if they spoke Greek in front of us; it became a language of secrets. On my father’s side, I still cannot understand my grandfather when he talks to me. He has an incredibly thick Greek accent which is an unwavering impediment to translation. I am the smallest person in my family, who looks the most in stature and features like my late grandmother who died of cancer a few years ago. I think he deliberately refuses to try to speak English to me because he misses her. He visits my work and my co-workers tell me he speaks English to them, but to me it is all Greek. I nod and smile as he slips me grocery money and kisses my cheeks, but I never know what he’s telling me. I feel like a fraud to my own family, because I pretend to be something I’m not. I must enact the façade of “normalcy” by continuing to pretend to understand Greek and by keeping a part of my life hidden from my grandparents.
My family was on vacation in Cape Cod when I was ten years old, and I vividly remember us walking through the gay village while we were on our way to go whale watching. My mother attempted to cover my eyes so that I couldn’t see the people around us, same-sex couples, and individuals who were queer, different, diverse, and incredible. I couldn’t see them; there was no representation of someone even remotely queer in my childhood. I didn’t know that it was a possibility.
I’ll never be able to tell my grandparents that I’m queer, and have accepted this only because I must. I’m not willing to sacrifice their perception of me as their grandchild because of something that they never necessarily need to know.
In my life now, as an openly queer individual, I don’t think my sexual orientation is the only thing that influences my queerness. I was never able to identify with the phrases “I am Greek” or “I am Canadian,” because I am an outsider to both. There was a time in my life when I deliberately orchestrated scenarios so that I seemed convincingly heterosexual, so that I would never be questioned about it. I personally didn’t recognize my queerness at first; my brother is the one who questioned me about it, and seeing him come out to my parents long before I did allowed me to recognize that I can be authentically myself without direct familial repercussions, which I recognize is incredibly fortunate.
Queerness, I’ve learned, doesn’t necessarily only encompass sexuality. Other aspects of people’s identity influence their queerness, which creates room for an intersectional approach to queerness. Queer activists, theorists, and professors Kimberlé Crenshaw and Cathy Cohen discuss how intersectionality is essential when discussing identities such as race, class, ability, gender, and ethnicity. In my own sense, it is lacking a place of belonging and being neither Greek nor normatively Canadian, and because of my temporary disability. I had a surgery go wrong in my first year of university that left me in a two-year-long fever-dream I am only beginning to emerge from. I struggle with chronic pain and healing is a day-to-day process.
I mostly remember the negative aspects of Bowmanville. A lot of people who told me I was something I’m not, or that they didn’t want to be my friend because they thought I was going to hell, or people I admired telling me to not follow my dreams. There was never anything to do in Bowmanville, and it was full of mind-numbing stasis, people who will never know what exists beyond its borders. Reflecting on my life now, the places I’ve been, my family, friends, accidents, bullies, teachers and professors, have all influenced how I have come to personally know myself. I feel completely comfortable existing in a space between.
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