Barbara Goslawski: With your new book, Eating Fire, as with your previous book, Out Our Way, you travelled extensively to speak with people across the country. Besides enabling you to create an oral history, why do you favour this approach?

Michael Riordon: The way I came to this kind of work is crucial. My formation was such that I was lead to believe that all doors should be open to me in the world. What I discovered was that most were not, simply because of my sexuality. At the same time I'd swallowed the whole story that said that homosexuals were sick, perverted and so on. When I began to fight off or shed that story in my own life, it occurred to me that a great many people laboured under similar stories, which restricted who we could be and what we could become in life. I moved from the sense that my own story was worth reinvestigating to the sense that I'd like to hear more about other people's stories, which were also largely unheard in the world, in the mass media.

BG: Eating Fire looks at a broad range of issues. Why was this important for the project?

MR: For me there are two reasons. One is wanting to acknowledge the breadth of experience. The other is that being a writer can be a somewhat isolating experience. Going out into the larger world is a way of expanding my own world in a way that I then can convey to readers and allow them, if they want it, a similar kind of experience.

There end up being all kinds of compromises in the process of doing it which I often regret in retrospect but the broadness has to do with trying to at least give a sense that human experience is much broader than we often consider it to be. I think it's very easy for us to see the world first through the lens of our own experience, but then there's the lens of the experience of the people who are around us. It can be very local: people around here where I live for example - the world, although complete to them, is actually quite small. For a lot of them it doesn't extend much beyond Prince Edward County, and there can be a very rich sense of what's in that world but it is quite small.

BG: When you were travelling did you notice any geographic differences? Any differences between rural and urban inhabitants, for example?

MR: It is true that people in large cities particularly, have a lot more opportunity for forming relationships of a greater variety. The numbers of queer folk in Toronto or Vancouver, for example, mean that people can specialize in terms of relationships, so you can be a vegan, SM, lesbian of colour, and find other people who share your perspective, your formation, your interests and so on. Whereas, in rural areas people have to generalize a lot more. There's less opportunity for meeting people, and this is true of anybody of any orientation, there are just fewer people out here.

On the other hand I think it's also true that relationships are more sustainable in the country because, well, you sort of have to. For example, if you have a fight, I think it's probably easier in the city to say "Ah, this is not worth the bother, I'm just going to get out of this relationship." Whereas, when you have fewer options, you may think that for a moment but then think "Well, so how do we make this work". The differences are most likely in the urban/rural dichotomy, more than in any particular part of the country over another.

BG: You cover a wide variety of topics, including the more contentious ones like marriage and adoption. In what ways do you feel the book is timely?

MR: I think that when you live at Church and Wellesley in Toronto or the West side in Vancouver, you can be lulled into thinking that the general public has changed a lot more in its receptivity to us than the impression I would get outside the city. The polls probably still find higher percentages of people in urban areas saying they support gay marriage than you would find in rural areas. I guess this is an old question in terms of politics, but it seems to me that what the world embraces most easily are people who look most like themselves. So couples for example, male/male couples or female/female couples, who are nice people with good jobs, and cars, and houses and so on, are becoming increasingly acceptable because they're not threatening. What I think is more difficult, is to embrace people who are less recognizably like ourselves. That's the challenge of this book - to invite people to both broaden their horizons and their embrace of what is normal. I think everybody in this book is normal, but I know from people who have read it already that there are some startling things here. Given, for example, the defence of marriage ammendment that was tacked on to the Federal legislation a couple of years ago, there are still some very narrow perceptions out there. That's worth challenging.

BG: Parenting is also a major issue throughout the book - queer or straight, do you feel that the pressures and difficulties are the same?

MR: Well they're the same and they're not. I think the pressures of parenting are gigantic, inconceivable to me. I don't know if people really have any idea of what a long, intense, complex commitment it's going to be. Lesbian and gay and transgendered people face some unique and complex obstacles to parenting. If you have defined yourself in some way as queer then you face some considerable obstacles, biologically - in the absence of a conveniently available marriage partner - but also socially. It struck me again and again talking to people with children that the kinds of choices and decisions and thought processes they had to go through were in addition to some of the intricacies that heterosexuals face. I think that if heterosexuals also had to go through some more complex processes of self-examination - "Why do I want to have children? What would they mean in my life? What is involved in being responsible for another being's life for twenty years or a lifetime?" - there might be less unwanted children around and the process of bringing children up also might be more enlightened.

BG: Why is PFLAG (Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays) an important organization?

MR: PFLAG is important in two ways. It provides support to us in the challenging business of coming to terms with our own sexuality, to ourselves and then to the world. Another way it's important I didn't know about until I spoke at the debut meeting of an organization just forming in Saint John, New Brunswick. I was a little sceptical at first thinking, "Why do these people need support, it's us who need support." At that meeting, there were a few gay and lesbian people present, but mostly it was either parents, relatives, or friends of us, and I was very surprised at the emotional turmoil that they faced in doing an equivalent of 'coming out' to themselves and to the world. Some of them had been labelled by association, "Well you as a mother, what did you do wrong if your kid is queer?" Or they had to face some of the prejudice that we all do in the world and work that through - "Do I accept what the world says or do I accept the reality of my child?" They were wrestling with all these things, and people were in tears, overwhelmed, and confused, and so on. I came to understand a lot more about the complexities for them.

I think too, especially in smaller places, the PFLAG organization is often the only place where we can go for comfort, safety, security, a place where we won't be judged and can talk about the things that are troubling and frightening us.

BG: Are you hoping that Eating Fire will change laws as well as attitudes?

MR: I'm not sure they're that separable. In Canada we're doing pretty well, particularly compared to the United States. Legally, a lot of things have changed in the last decade, strikingly so. Adoption is changing, province by province, and spousal benefits are becoming less strange to legislators. In a historical sense, I don't have great faith in laws, I think they can be changed. There's a pattern through history of legislative gains, which have then been lost when governments have changed, when revolutions have happened. Homosexuality was legal in the Soviet Union after the 1917 Revolution and within a decade not only had it become illegal again but, in fact, more illegal than it had been before the revolution.

So it seems to me that the attitudes are the more crucial things to change. Increasing numbers of people simply tolerate us - hopefully we can move from that toward people accepting a greater range of human experience, to acknowledge that our different ways of being are actually an enhancement to life. I'm interested in gardening so I know the difference between monoculture and ecological growing. In nature, things grow in great diversity, and that's their wonder and it's why they survive. Monocultures don't do very well.

BG: Your personal experiences with your partner are woven throughout the book, counter-pointing and informing your interviews with others. What is the strength of this approach?

MR: For one thing, that's the easiest part because our relationship is the closest thing for me to observe. Brian's near at hand to let me know his boundaries. When I'm travelling to meet people who are mostly strangers, I spend a relatively short amount of time with them. I'm aware of the complex responsibility that I bear since they've been generous enough and courageous enough to share some very intimate aspects of their lives with me. I have a significant responsibility to try and represent that fairly, so I'm a little more inhibited about how I write about other people's lives than I write about mine. Brian has influence because he's here and involved in what I say or don't say about him, but generally people are trusting enough.

The other thing, and it's almost a matter of principle, is that if I'm asking this degree of depth and candour from people it would be pretty outrageous not to expect that of myself. I think what it does too is it makes me less of an external journalist, who bops into people's lives, rummages around, and then tells the public what I saw, than a collaborator, somebody who shares this range of experience or aspects of it that we're investigating. I want the book to convey a kind of shared experience rather than a top down, 'looking in on specimens' kind of approach.

BG: The book's sense of intimacy comes from your style of re-creating dialogue. Why did you choose to present the profiles in this way?

MR: For me the challenge has been to try to find a balance between what I see, what I hear, how this person come across to me, and to represent how they tell their own story. What comes out is a collaboration in which we're co-telling the story. Compared to Out Our Way, I'm more present and there are fewer passages of entirely quoted dialogue. There's more of a weave of my impressions and what the person actually said.

BG: You asked a lot of difficult questions of each person or couple - often you were quite blunt. Were you surprised by people's willingness to open up to you?

MR: I'm always very moved by people's willingness to be candid about their lives, even about things which could be sensitive. After they agree, there's the question of how you actually build trust. One of the ways is by being open yourself, and not just about yourself. It's an interesting experience, travelling around by bus and parachuting into people's lives. I had maybe five hours to do what for some people could take years to do: getting to know each other. Essentially you need to establish in the other person's eyes that you're trustworthy enough that they can actually open up to some extent about themselves. That's partly because this isn't a study, this is an attempt on my part to grapple with the range of our experience. People aren't specimens to me or statistics - I'm genuinely interested in their particular story.

BG: Eating Fire explores the dynamics at work within all kinds of close relationships. Your observations are both incisive and universal. Would you think it fair to call this a book for anyone - queer or straight - who is interested in these dynamics?

MR: Oh I hope so. There's a strange human tendency to want to categorize - it's highly established and evolved. We ever more minutely specialize our categories and to me that's not very useful. I do understand why we need to name ourselves in some ways, particularly when our experience has been denied. When I came to call myself gay or queer then I was saying there are certain things that I am not, which you have assumed I was, and there are certain things about me that no longer fit. Once I've done that, going back to the ecological model, the movement is back towards "So in what fundamental ways am I actually different?" I want a sense of meaning in the world, I want to love and be loved, I want to connect as well as I can with other beings - and that doesn't seem to me to be particularly gay.

I guess that's why I chose the subtitle "Family Life on the Queer Side" - to reclaim the word 'family' which has been so badly used by fundamentalists, to open it up, and to show that it means a great many different things, all of which are equally legitimate. On the 'queer' side, the point is not to exclude us - it's one of the things I like about the word queer, it's that it's not nearly as exclusive as gay or lesbian or bisexual or transgendered -those are categories as well.

The more we turn our faces to the rest of humanity and struggle with the differences that we perceive among ourselves, the more chance there is of co-existing and of ourselves being powerful. I think it's the only way we (in the larger sense of the word) are going to survive - by focusing on what unites rather than what divides.