On a cool summer night in July, dozens of people bathed in red neon light filled rows of chairs and perched on benches along the wall and listened, rapt, to six people talk about sex and death. They’d piled into It’s Ok* Studios in the heart of Queen St. W. for the free performance series Little Deaths salon.
Toronto can feel a bit cold sometimes, and frank discussions about sex can feel fraught in our increasingly Puritan era, but there, in that room, everyone burned the same shade of crimson, faces aglow not just from the neon, but with laughter, with desire. Performers and listeners alike experienced the rush of release: taboo transformed into triumph, shame into sacred bliss.
Writer and therapist Kaleigh Trace was the ringmaster. She has a terminal cancer diagnosis and, given that she is dying, wants to live it up. So, last summer, she skipped the traditional book launch for the 10th anniversary re-release of her memoir about sex and disability, “Hot, Wet and Shaking: How I Learned to Talk About Sex,” and instead called on writer, singer and TV host pal Christa Couture to host a rowdy, horny event that included Trace trying her hand at standup, interactive games and short-story readings.
On a bench outside the studio, Couture tells me that she cried and laughed at that event — and it wasn’t just her. “Everyone cried and laughed!” Now, she and Trace want to keep the party and the “irreverent conversations” going as long as possible, and plan to make the salon an ongoing affair. “When you get to have conversations about things that feel a bit taboo, and you get to do that with other people, there’s something very freeing about it.”
In an era when many LGBTQ+ and BIPOC folks feel more and more shut out, the Little Deaths lineup was blessedly packed with queer and trans performers of colour, each bringing something completely different to the stage. Seán Carson Kinsella shared saucy poems entitled “Petit mort,” “Beaver, bowls, and summer peaches” and “Gush and gulp.”
Kristyn Dunnion read a lesbian ghost love story, while Furqan Mohamed’s first-person piece manifested a mouth-watering romance. Kai Cheng Thom read a piece from her book about hooking up with Jesus.
Many of the performers wrote a piece specifically for the show. Sarah (SC) Dillon struggled for weeks to write theirs, in the end cranking it out in the 24 hours beforehand, covering ground from their dead dad (he used his dying words to urge Dillon to remember the names of two classmates who pissed themselves in high school) and fleeing an abusive relationship to fornicating in the forest and finding true love.
Dillon thought they’d be nervous, but being in that space, “it’s a magical moment when you feel a room of strangers and loved ones reaching for you just as lovingly as you’re reaching for them,” they told me afterwards. “It felt so galvanizing.” Their passion was electrifying; I wept.
There were many guffaws, too; Daina Tavenier flew out for the event from Nova Scotia with armfuls of trauma from her religious upbringing, and turned her parents’ confiscation of her makeshift vibrator and nocturnal teen antics in cybersex chat rooms into biting comedy. “I spent my childhood attending an evangelical, fundamentalist church camp and was always hyperaware of the promise of eternal damnation,” Tavenier told me afterwards. “Death and choosing to go to either heaven or hell were part of the daily conversation but positive conversations about sex absolutely were not. Shame thrives in secret, it breeds and multiplies in the dark. The shame I built around sex, pleasure and my queerness was so deep that it took me years, decades even, to work through it.”
“The more I talk about my experience, the less shame can keep its grasp on me,” Tavenier continued. “I hope it also offered this same opportunity to the audience.” It did, for me: Her honesty chipped away at my own childhood secrets like a sharp tool, shame falling away like pesky plaque dislodged at last.
Words can be wielded like any other weapon. And up there on that stage, all six speakers brandished them bravely, like an act of resistance. “It offers us a space to speak the truths we carry in our bodies, about desire and pleasure, grief and pain,” Dillon told me. “It is daring, gritty, a little perverse, and deeply dignifying to be cracked open like that…And it is absolutely what we need right now.”
The next Little Deaths will likely be in October. Follow @littledeathsalon on Instagram for details.
