Dreaming across distances and enacting solidarity – for at least two decades before the early internet, 2SLGBTQIA+ people in Newfoundland and Labrador would find each other and communicate through personals ads, news/letters, the arts, volunteer-run phone lines, nightlife, cruising grounds, the student movement, and more. Integral to many of these connections between the early 70s and mid 90s were grassroots organizations like the Community Homophile Association of Newfoundland (CHAN), Gay Association in Newfoundland (GAIN), Newfoundland Amazon Network (NAN), and Newfoundland Gays and Lesbians for Equality (NGALE). Practices of care, resistance, and advocacy would shape personal and political community building in the second half of the twentieth century.

A technological sea change in the 90s began to help countering realities of geographical and social isolation experienced by many trans folks on the east coast of so-called Canada. The early internet became a zone of possibility: providing access to peer support, community resources, and political discourse on an international scale. Forums, blogs, chatrooms, and email chains (often linked together by queer and transgender webrings) offered people the ability to both communicate with one another and to explore realities of gender transition in ways attentive to complex needs for privacy, safety, and connection. Among these was Atlantic TransGender (ATG), a peer support group across the easternmost provinces that operated from 1995 to the early aughts.

dream zones hormones undertones fish bones imagines backward to the late 90s in Atlantic Canada, recollecting a time of transfeminine community building and organizing emergent on the early internet (what I encounter as a form of communicaring). A fictionalized correspondence between two trans women in Newfoundland and Nova Scotia contextualizes life-affirming relationships across the Atlantic region at a time of new beginnings and precarious survival. Emplacing poetics of sea-touched tenderness within an intergenerational imagination, I hope to honour fluidness and kinship between transfeminine forebears. Could it be a dream?

Further Reading

Growing up trans in ‘Don’t Say Gay’ Newfoundland by Rhea Rollmann

An Oral History of the Early Trans Internet by Henry Giardina

Love, Acceptance, and Screeching Modems by Avery Dame-Griff

Halifax Rainbow Encyclopedia: Atlantic Transgender

Gendertrash from Hell (volume 1, issue 1) via the Digital Transgender Archive