Introducing Rainbow Country Podcast & Untouchable Queer Story Archive
I remember the first time I knew I was different. I was eight or nine. That strange age where you start noticing things about yourself that you don’t yet have words for.
There was a girl in my karate class. She smiled at me in a way that made my chest feel warm and tight. I didn’t understand it; I just knew I wanted to be near her, to make her laugh, to sit beside her every chance I got.
She liked the boys, but not me. And I so longed to be one of them. The boy who made her laugh, the boy she might hold hands with. But when I looked in the mirror, I saw someone the world called a girl, and I hated it. Not because being a girl was bad, but because it wasn’t me. It felt like wearing someone else’s skin, pretending every day, and never being allowed to stop.
But even without anyone saying it, I knew I wasn’t supposed to feel that way.
I grew up in a world where girls liked boys and boys liked girls. That was the script, and everyone around me seemed to know their lines except me. So, I tried to act “normal.” I thought if I hid the feeling well enough, maybe it would go away.
That’s when I first learned what shame feels like. It’s quiet. It sits in your stomach and whispers, don’t let anyone find out. It tells you to cut and hide away parts of yourself just to survive.
Looking back, that was the first time I realized I was born in a closet. I wasn’t keeping my truth hidden in the dark. Quite the opposite: I was born in the dark to keep the truth of who I was away from me.
I was born Queer. Trans. Neurodivergent.
This is who I am, naturally. Biologically. Hard-wired.
But I grew up in a world that assumed everyone was the same: cisgender, straight, neurotypical. And because of that, I didn’t know who I was or how to be me.
I didn’t know that expressing myself differently was okay.
I thought I was “broken” and needed to be “cured”. Sound familiar?
The closet was my safe haven and my torture chamber.
Safely inside, I could hide away from the pain of being different. Of not belonging. Safely inside, I could cope with my own pain in private and not be a burden on anyone.
“Coming out” only exists because heteronormativity exists.
That’s what “coming out” really is. It’s coming out of assumptions. Out of the box you were hidden in. A box never made for you. A box meant to confine you. Mold you. Shape you into something the world wants you to be. A pretty package tied up with strings. Easy to manage.
It’s not an act of confession. It’s an act of correction.
It’s having to say, “I’m not who you assumed I was.”
And reminding people, over and over again.
Every time we do it, we’re not just revealing our truth; we’re also confronting the social conditioning that decided everyone is straight and cis by default.
As trans activist and swimmer Schuyler Bailar puts it, coming out is not about changing yourself, it’s about letting the world see the truth that was always there, and seeing yourself for who you’ve always been.
When people hear “coming out,” they think of one big moment.
A confession, a brave announcement, a door swinging, and staying, open.
But for queer, trans, neurodivergent, and disabled people, coming out is never just one moment. It’s a lifetime of reminding the world who we are, because the world keeps defaulting to what it can easily see, and forgetting everything it can’t.
That’s why visibility matters so deeply.
That’s why we fight to be seen in classrooms, on screens, in leadership, in love, and in our own communities. Because when we’re erased from stories and media, it becomes easier for people to pretend queerness doesn’t exist. Easier to dehumanize queer people. Easier to cast us as villains or scapegoats. Easier to forget that we are real human beings, that we matter, and that we belong.
And at its core, coming out isn’t just about identity.
It’s about dismantling the rules that suppress all of us.
The rules that tell you what to wear and how to speak.
The ones that pressure you to be skinny, or buff, or beautiful in one very specific way.
The ones that decide who should be a life-giver, who should be a provider, who should carry the emotional labour, who should stay quiet.
The old stories that turn us against each other, man versus woman, Venus versus Mars, as if those were the only roles we were ever allowed to play.
Coming out pushes against every one of those expectations.
It widens the path for everyone else to breathe a little deeper.
And yet, no one talks about the work of it.
The constant calculations.
The small internal debates before every introduction, every conversation, every new room.
The quiet fear that if you tell the truth of who you are, you might lose someone you care about.
And the deeper fear that if you stop telling the truth, if you stop saying who you are out loud, you might start to disappear.
This is why I must be radically authentic.
Because hiding almost cost me my life more than once. Shame. Loneliness. Silence.
And because being seen saved me.
Radical authenticity is how I protect myself, but it’s also how I protect the kid I used to be. The one who never saw himself anywhere and therefore never knew or loved himself. It’s how I honour every queer, trans, ND, disabled, or questioning person who is still searching for their place in a world that keeps narrowing the borders of what’s “normal.”
It’s also why I’m launching Rainbow Country, my new podcast.
I want to create the thing I needed growing up. A place where our stories aren’t hidden, softened, or translated. A place where queer and trans people across so-called Canada can be heard in their own voices, on their own terms. A living archive of who we are and what we survived.
Because when we tell our stories, we don’t just come out. We come home.
And my hope is that Rainbow Country becomes a home for anyone who has ever felt erased, misunderstood, or unseen. A place where they can hear themselves reflected back with love, honesty, and pride.
This is why I must be radically authentic.
And this is why I’m building a space where all of us can be, too.
Rainbow Country is an untouchable archive of queer life in so-called Canada.
The first 4 episodes have been launched on Patreon.
The Invention of “the Closet”
The phrase “coming out of the closet” has a complicated history.
It first appeared in the early 1900s, when debutantes were “coming out” to society as women ready for marriage.
Queer communities repurposed it to describe entering queer community life. Not intended to be a confession, but an initiation into belonging.
Over time, as society criminalized and pathologized queerness, “coming out” took on a new weight: it became the act of declaring oneself against the assumption of straightness and cisness.
That assumption is called heteronormativity and is the invisible architecture of most of our lives.
It’s what makes a teacher assume your parents are “mom and dad.”
It’s what makes a stranger call you “sir” or “ma’am” before they even know you.
It’s what makes every registration form, every locker room, every conversation a minefield.
The world starts by assuming you’re straight, cis, able-bodied, neurotypical, and you have to correct it, over and over again, until your tongue and heart is raw.
The Shape of Hiding
When I say I’m a transgender man, it’s not just a line in my biography. It’s the end of a long war with silence.
I grew up in a Canada that still treated people like me as a threat. I was born in 1987, at the tail end of the “gay purge” when the federal government fired thousands of queer employees. I entered adolescence at a time when “that’s gay” was the most common insult in classrooms.
The internet, dangerous and unregulated, became the first place I could try on the name “boy” and not be doubted or corrected.
But every attempt to be myself came with shame attached. There was no language for me at school, no safety net, no adults who said, “You’re not broken,” just ones who looked away and let the silence slowly destroy me and my peers.
So I learned to hide.
I learned to scan every room, every conversation, for cues about who was safe to be me around and who I would lose if I dared be. I learned the painful dance of masking, and I forgot the joy of what it was like being my true self.
When you spend years hiding, the world doesn’t just forget who you are… you start to forget, too.
The Cost of Being Seen
Being “out” doesn’t erase the closet, it just removes the door.
Even now, as one of the first openly transgender men to be elected to public office in Canada, I still feel the weight of that door in every introduction, every handshake, every room I enter.
I still wonder: Will they see me, or will I have to explain myself again? Will they respect me, or reduce me to a headline or a token?
That vigilance comes with a cost.
For many of us, it shows up as anxiety, hyper-awareness, people-pleasing: what therapists call anxious attachment.
When you’ve spent your life fearing rejection, you learn to anticipate it.
You start to believe love and belonging are things you have to earn, again and again, by telling your story well enough, clearly enough, gently enough to be let in.
That’s the hidden labour of being “seen.”
It’s not just about pride. It’s about survival.
It’s about managing how much of yourself to show in a world that still defaults to seeing you as “other,” if it sees you at all.
Coming Out, Over and Over
For queer and neurodivergent people, and for anyone with a hidden disability or invisible difference, coming out never ends.
You come out to your doctor, your coworker, your boss, your date, your child’s teacher, your dentist.
You come out every time someone says “ladies and gentlemen.”
You come out every time someone tells a joke that lands like a bruise.
And each time, you make a choice: Do I tell them the truth and risk their reaction, or do I stay quiet and disappear for a while? Swallow my pain for their comfort? For my comfort?
This is why visibility matters so much.
Because when we are seen, we don’t have to explain.
When we are represented, we don’t have to justify our existence.
When our stories are told, we don’t have to start from scratch every time someone looks at us.
And the next generation can grow up with a much better outlook on who they are and see success in their lives.
The Power of Telling
That’s what my new podcast, Rainbow Country, is about.
It’s a living archive of what it means to be queer in so-called Canada. Raw, untouchable, and without translation.
I started it because I wanted to collect and protect our stories, the ones we’re tired of explaining, the ones that live in the cracks between pride and pain.
Growing up, I never saw myself reflected anywhere.
Not in classrooms, not in leadership, not on TV.
Now I want to make sure that no kid, no adult, no elder, ever feels that kind of isolation again.
Rainbow Country isn’t just a podcast. It’s a reclamation of space. It’s the sound of our community saying, we are here. It’s proof that we’ve always been here, and we always will be.
Because you cannot erase what is human.
Coming Home
“Coming out” will always be part of my story, but it’s not the whole story.
Because what we’re really doing when we come out isn’t leaving the closet.
We’re coming home.
Home to ourselves, to our communities, to the truth that we were never the problem.
I still carry that anxious kid inside me. The one who worries that being himself, being honest, being “out”.. would mean being alone forever.
But today, I tell him: you’re not alone anymore. You never were.
And maybe, if we keep telling the truth, through our art, our politics, our stories, our zines, and our podcasts, then maybe.. just maybe.. the next generation won’t have to “come out” at all.
They’ll just get to be.
