Metamorphosis is the process of transformation of a thing or person into a completely different one. Closeted caterpillars emerging as glittering butterflies.
Metamorphosis, held on the October Thanksgiving weekend in 1978, billed itself as a prairie celebration of lesbians and gay men. Good food, good company, good times. Women loving women. Men loving men. Sharing, growing, building, flaunting it, and much, much more. Join us, celebrate. Spread the word.
I have to admit that it was infatuation and ego that got me to Metamorphosis, the only woman attending from Vancouver.
Back in August, Natalie was taken with me as she sat in the control booth in Vancouver’s Co-op Radio as I read poems live on the Lesbian Show. This sparked a summer romance which took us in her van to Long Beach on wild Vancouver Island. The sparkling waves, the sun, the sand were healing for me as I was fighting inflammatory rheumatoid arthritis. I was so flattered that she found me attractive despite my limited mobility. I wrote a new poem that said,
Sometimes, love comes along at just the right time.
Sometimes love opens and closes me in rhythms as natural as a heartbeat.
When summer ended, Natalie returned to Toronto and I returned to my health issues in East Van. Then she invited me to meet her in the middle, in Saskatoon, for Metamorphosis on Thanksgiving weekend. Natalie knew the organizers and had already arranged for us to stay in a lesbian collective house for free. Even better, she signed me up to be one of two opening acts for the featured performer, Farron. In my little queer community at the time, opening for Farron was the equivalent to opening for Billie Eilish or Chappell Roan today. I could not say no to romance and poetry.
By the time we got there, Natalie had found a new love interest, and our romance had fizzled, but I didn’t mind. I was enjoying the adventure. The Saskatoon landscape was more lovely than I’d expected, and the October temperatures were mild. The dykes putting us up were ever so kind to me as I walked with my cane and asked to cook my own alkaline foods. I admired the strength they embodied in their pick-up trucks and jean jackets, and their courage in being out in a harsher environment than I faced at home. Wearing my cherry red velour pants, flowy Indian cotton shirt and vibrant coloured silk scarf, I was clearly an out-of-town west-coast hippie-femme among these tough prairie women.
I couldn’t go on the first ever lesbian and gay march through Saskatoon because of my disability. But a few of us waited at the end point to greet every brave soul who marched. There was a traditional wedding party trying to take photos at our destination. But they hightailed it right out of there when they saw the queer banners and queer folks approaching. We laughed at our power to scare off the straight people with our mere presence.
After the conference workshops and many warm conversations, we had the cultural performances – separate ones for the women and for the men. Lorna Boschman did a stand-up comedy routine. Our outsider’s perspective left so much room for satire of the world that ignored, excluded or reviled us. Shared laughter was such a great antidote to the fear. Then I went up. The feature piece I read was written just days previously. It was titled Burning Times. I learned that in the lead up to this ground breaking Lesbian and Gay Celebration, the queer centre in Saskatoon had been torched. Fortunately, no one was hurt but, of course, no one had been arrested. The arson was designed to stop us. But it did not.
The opening lines of my poem Burning Times read:
In Europe, they have burned us as witches.
In India, they have burned us as widows.
In Canada, they have burned us as dykes.
I continued on with many references to the warmth and light of our community and concluded with these lines:
We shall not be burned.
We shall not get burned.
We are the flame, sisters.
We are the fire.
On Thanksgiving Monday, we ate a sumptuous meal all together in the Saskatoon queer centre that had not burned down. We held hands in a large circle, danced and belted out We – Are – Fam-i-ly. I remember tears of joy.
