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To Know It When You See It CASON SHARPE I was at a house party in High Park in a circle of girls on the lawn with a mickey of vodka when the public fact of my gayness tipped some critical mass. I was sixteen. It was spring, verging on summer. I had a crush that spring, the same one I’d had all year. He was a grade ahead of me, but we were in the same drama class, a grade eleven/twelve split. He was quiet, so quiet that it was his thing. The class was called Drama Production, or Drama Pro, and had students stage the school play. That year we put on Timberlake Wertenbaker’s The Ash Girl, a reimagined Cinderella story in which the eponymous heroine escapes her torturous family and battles manifestations of the seven deadly sins in order to attend the ball of the royal family, who had been inexplicably recast as South Asian. I was cast as the prince’s best friend and was happy to get a big part, even though I was convinced I only got it because the character was Brown and there were only a handful of Brown kids in the class to choose from. I told the director I was Black, but it didn’t seem to matter. The kid who played the prince was from Iran. The director dressed us in what we assumed was traditional Indian garb, sourced from the school’s costume room in the basement. They hired a local South Asian choreographer to teach us a Bollywood dance for the curtain call. They told me to ham up my performance, to play it for laughs, so that’s what I did. My crush was white and played the sin of sloth. I talked to him all night at the cast party, which was hosted by one of our classmates in the basement of a middle-class home in Riverdale. My crush was gay but didn’t
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CASON SHARPE 117 really like dicks; they were sort of ugly in real life, he said. I laughed. He was moving to Nova Scotia for university in the fall. I had never touched a dick that wasn’t mine before, never had one unveiled to me as an event. I got my first fake ID that spring, from a basement head shop on Yonge Street that sold the usual bric-a-brac for teenage stoners: bongs and glass pipes, Led Zeppelin T-shirts, Bob Marley posters. They advertised their fake IDs as souvenirs. Lesley took me one day after work. She had bought her fake ID from there the year before but had since lost it. The squat older man who ran the place took our pictures passport-style in front of a white backdrop. He disappeared into a back room, re-emerged ten minutes later with a health card and a student card for each of us. They could scan under a black light, he told us, which made them more authentic. I got my first job that spring too, working weekends at the warehouse of a wild-foods company owned by my brother-in-law’s dad. The warehouse was one of many along Geary Avenue. My job was to keep an eye on the place while the rest of the team worked different farmers’ markets across the city. My tasks were minimal: keep the place clean; package, label, and shelve any incoming product; answer the phone. They could’ve managed just fine without me, but my brother-in-law’s dad threw me a bone because he knew I could use the extra cash. When everybody had left for the markets, I played my music loud and danced around the warehouse like it was my very own nightclub. (Years later, rising rents squeezed out many of Geary’s commercial occupants, including my brother-in-law’s dad. This mass exodus created a vacuum for a clandestine nightlife scene to develop around these newly unoccupied warehouses, as if predicted by my teenage daydreams.) I wore whatever I wanted to work, mostly a pair of blue seersucker shorts or this pair of black skinny jeans I’d bought on sale from Exile in Kensington Market. I forget what the brand was, but the logo appeared on the inside hemline: a black-and-white drawing of a cigarette. They clung to me, made me feel leggy like a model, like the paparazzi shots I’d seen online of Agyness Deyn smoking during Paris Fashion Week. Over time, the jeans developed rips in the knee, thigh, and crotch. I tried to sew the rips shut or hold them closed with safety pins, but they would inevitably burst open, spreading farther each time until the jeans finally self-annihilated. Dad said I shouldn’t wear tight pants; people might get the wrong impression. Dad and I lived in the same one-bedroom apartment in Alexandra Park where we’d lived since I was in preschool. Dad slept in the living room on a futon that he’d stretch out at night and fold back into a couch shape come morning. We spent most of our time in the living room a few feet apart with our backs turned, him facing the TV in one direction and me facing the computer in the other. He came home to find me masturbating in front of the computer on several occasions. I’d hear his key in the lock and fumble to pull up my underwear and close the tab of whatever porn site I had going. When he opened the door, I’d sit there embarrassed but trying to keep my cool. We never acknowledged it. Anyway, what could be done? He attempted to broach the conversation a few times—the things

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To Know It When You See It

CASON SHARPE

I was at a house party in High Park in a circle of girls on the lawn with a mickey of vodka when the public fact of my gayness tipped some critical mass. I was sixteen. It was spring, verging on summer.

I had a crush that spring, the same one I’d had all year. He was a grade ahead of me, but we were in the same drama class, a grade eleven/twelve split. He was quiet, so quiet that it was his thing. The class was called Drama Production, or Drama Pro, and had students stage the school play. That year we put on Timberlake Wertenbaker’s The Ash Girl, a reimagined Cinderella story in which the eponymous heroine escapes her torturous family and battles manifestations of the seven deadly sins in order to attend the ball of the royal family, who had been inexplicably recast as South Asian. I was cast as the prince’s best friend and was happy to get a big part, even though I was convinced I only got it because the character was Brown and there were only a handful of Brown kids in the class to choose from. I told the director I was Black, but it didn’t seem to matter. The kid who played the prince was from Iran. The director dressed us in what we assumed was traditional Indian garb, sourced from the school’s costume room in the basement. They hired a local South Asian choreographer to teach us a Bollywood dance for the curtain call. They told me to ham up my performance, to play it for laughs, so that’s what I did. My crush was white and played the sin of sloth. I talked to him all night at the cast party, which was hosted by one of our classmates in the basement of a middle-class home in Riverdale. My crush was gay but didn’t

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