Queer Life: September 2005

The Murder of That Pesky Roger Akroyd

January 2003

Pierre Bayard takes mindless fun so seriously he once wrote an entire book trashing Hercule Poirot's solution to a murder mystery.

The great fictional detective was delusional, Bayard wrote in his mo' modern "Who Killed Roger Akroyd?", going on to expose the intricate details of Poirot's momentary madness. Bayard goes through every scene of Agatha Christie's 1926 classic, "The Murder of Roger Akroyd."

At the end, psychoanalyst Bayard reveals that true killer is... Hercule Poirot himself.

Bayard reminds us that we need never believe what we read. Not even the solution to a mystery, whose very existence serves to present us with the head of a murderer upon a silver platter, reducing the many possible explanations offered down to the official truth.

Honey, ain't no reason to take the author's word for the whodunnit. We can always dissent.

It's a very gay way of seeing the world.

In "The Celluloid Closet," Vito Russo read homoerotica into Hollywood. At the Tintin-is-gay website, the childhood comic book hero is reborn as gay hero. We write slash fiction with Spock and Captain Kirk doing the nasty. Fox Mulder and Xena get their hubba hubba due, too.

There are so many ways in which we remake our world as gay and lesbian people.

We have a hard time as children and young adults, analyzing and eventually rejecting heterosexuality. As we become more self-assured, irony and camp allow us to survive.

We drop clues for each other.

Sometimes the communique is unintended. I’m thinking of the signs at the Kinko's photocopy palaces, adorned with a pink triangle -- the symbol worn by the thousands of gay men killed during the Holocaust in concentration camps.

I’m assuming this was an accident. But who knows? Pink triangles are the new hip, worn on coats and shirts by a cornucopia of pleasantly ignorant straights.

At other times the inserted codes are the sly machinations of homos with a sense of humour and a flair for mischief.

On an airporter bus to Montreal's Dorval travel hub recently, I watched a tourism video. Some terribly important explorer -- Frontenac or de Maisonneuve or some such -- was shown meeting the Indians who lived here on Turtle Island. Behind the grand old man, held aloft with elan by another Frenchman, was a rainbow flag.

While watching a repeat during the holidays of the sixth Star Trek movie, the Undiscovered Country, I noticed a Rainbow Flag hanging on the back wall during a multi-alien peace conference.

These are signs lovingly placed -- by us, for us.

Straights don't notice these codes which have built our secret society. As we emerge more and more into the mainstream, it is these lovely in-jokes, these markers of difference, that I appreciate more and more. We are still a community, still a tribe with our own culture and canon.

Let's ensure that this culture survives, and is passed on to each new generation. Gay men and lesbians are not born into our rituals; they seek out them and us when they reach the age of discovery.

Remember the courage you needed to come out?

Remember to mentor the young; greet newcomers with open arms; teach our customs and share our chosen families. And a very happy new school year to all.