queer

While working on their latest album, Sainthood, Tegan and Sara spent a month at Sound City Studios in Van Nuys, California, where Tom Petty, Pat Benatar, Fleetwood Mac and Nirvana have recorded. One day, Sara Quin found herself in the midst of a truly memorable moment.

Ani DiFranco’s commitment to being a free agent is inspiring.

While the indie musician is definitely concerned about the state of her country, she’s not particularly worried about the impact George W. Bush’s administration has had on civil liberties—not on hers, anyway.

“As Utah Phillips would say, ‘The amount you resist is the amount you are free.' And I think I will always resist this basic encroachment on my human rights, so I will always feel free. “

Ever since Ellen was cancelled, we have been starving for a TV show featuring a loud, proud, leaping lesbian. While Ellen Morgan the character didn’t survive, Ellen Degeneres has.

“Less evil and more glamour for daytime,” is what she promised of her new television talk show. Dressed in tailored suits, open collar and white runners, Degeneres exudes lesbian on her talk show. But it doesn’t deal with queer issues.

nah-ee-lah and d’bi young are creating sparks with their word sounds. These second- generation dub poets—who are also noteworthy playwrights and actors—rhythmically fan those sparks into flames of resistance against injustice as they burn new pathways toward social liberation.

It’s a typical muggy July afternoon in Vancouver. Inside the Commodore Ballroom—a relic from the ’20s restored to its art deco splendour five years ago—the Indigo Girls’ sound check is dragging.

Amy Ray, the dark-haired Indigo Girl known for her gravelly vocals and edgier songwriting style, is a little frustrated as she runs through the evening’s set list and corrects the levels for the duo’s plethora of stringed instruments.

Ann-Marie MacDonald's second novel, The Way the Crow Flies (Random House of Canada, 2003), follows her award-winning Fall On Your Knees, a first novel that sold more than 300,000 copies in Canada and was selected for the Oprah Book-of-the-Month Club.

MacDonald is also a playwright and actor, and the current host of CBC-TV's Life and Times. She spoke with Sara Cassidy in September, over the phone from her "roundy Edwardian" home in Toronto, which she shares with her spouse, Alisa Palmer, and their infant daughter.

We 'd barely sat down, Elvira Kurt and I, for double moch-a-cinno lattes (don 't laugh-this is Vancouver, after all and there 's an espresso bar on every corner) at a funky Yaletown cafe, when we were hounded (or rather, she was) by a small group of fans wanting autographs.