A Minor Chorus: A Novel

by Billy-Ray Belcourt

Earlier I’d spotted her boy among a group of preteens. He did indeed have an air of femininity to him, though it was subtle, as mine was when I was his age. Sexuality was something other people had, a place others visited, though many thrust the label onto me all the same. This drive to identify my non-normativity always confused me. Because I was consumed by hobbies and school, I wasn’t thinking about whom or what I desired. For a while, I was squished inside an identity others imagined for me based on fear and stereotypes. As an adult, I had to dig myself out of myself, had to make myself into a ruin from which something new could grow. I hoped Lena’s boy wouldn’t have to go through the same existential struggle. Perhaps instead he would come of age fully grounded in his queerness, wouldn’t feel the urgency to repress it the way I did. Times were changing, however slowly. After all, Lena was the kind of mother who, like Donna, like Mary, would architect a world with whatever materials were available in which their children’s joy could be infinite.