The Military

Name: Caitlin Hartlen

Origin: Greenwood, Nova Scotia, Canada

Interview Location: Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada

I met Caitlin while working at a grocery store in Halifax, where she shamelessly managed to work her life’s story into our first ever conversation. She told me that her father served with the military, so she grew up in a couple different places. She was born in Greenwood, Nova Scotia, Canada, but moved to Germany at the age of one. When she was five, her father was relocated back to Canada, this time to Cold Lake, Alberta. She was also quick to let me know that she’s gay. I can’t quote her word for word, but I remember her mentioning that Cold Lake was not a fun place for a gay teen to grow up.

Today, we’re sitting in the living room of her twelfth story apartment in Halifax. She says that the military is what brought her to Nova Scotia, but we mostly talked about sexuality after that. As it turns out, for Caitlin, being gay in Halifax is a lot better than being gay in Cold Lake.

“My experience is probably unique compared to a lot of other people’s, cause I know gay people who are still living in Alberta and they didn’t go through the same things that I did. I just, I don’t know. I was an easy target I guess, because I’ve never been one to stand up for myself,” she says. “The way it all unfolded was that I had just started at a new high school, and I had come out of a pretty deep depression and I’d decided that it was time to stop pretending to be someone I wasn’t and get a fresh start. I cut all my hair off and I was just like ‘okay, I’m gonna be a new, happy, great person and I’m gonna make lots of new friends and put the past behind me and it’s gonna be great. And so, I made a few friends and I chose to confide in the wrong one when I had a crush on one of her friends, and she ended up telling like, basically everyone in our circle and several other circles of friends. Then the bullying and teasing started. I would get yelled at in the hallways and had strange people adding me to MSN and saying hateful things and e-mailing me. I couldn’t even walk to class without someone yelling ‘there goes the dyke!’ I hadn’t even fully come to terms with it myself yet, so it was really hard, me being shoved into this box by people who barely knew me.”

At the end of tenth grade, Caitlin’s father received a promotion within the military. He got posted back to Greenwood, so Caitlin and her family returned to Nova Scotia.

“It was a real mixture of feelings, because on the one hand, it was a great relief that I was gonna be escaping my tormentors and I wouldn’t have to deal with that anymore and I could start fresh somewhere else where no one knew me. But then, on the other hand, I was also losing the place where I’d grown up and still had a lot of happy memories, because most of the people I had known growing up weren’t the ones that I went to high school with, so like, I still kind of held onto them in my memory as being part of the good stuff about Cold Lake,” she says.

In Greenwood, Caitlin befriended an openly gay student who went on to start their school’s first gay-straight alliance. Wanting to support the movement, Caitlin became involved with some of the more minor roles of the alliance, and chose to do so without disclosing her sexuality. Gradually, as she gained trust in those around her, she began coming out to her peers. She says that the alliance gave her the support that she needed to help her gain confidence in herself.

“[The alliance] wasn’t anything really earth shattering, but it was nice to feel like I was involved in something. And especially after the experience that I’d had in Alberta. It was refreshing to see that there were people who not only acknowledged it, but embraced it.”

Even though her experiences in Cold Lake were negative, she is quick to defend Alberta, and did so on more than one occasion.

“I don’t intend to badmouth Alberta as a whole. It’s just that was my experience there, and I know it’s probably different for other people.”

Five years ago, Caitlin moved from Greenwood to Halifax, where she says she feels even more accepted.

“It was always nice to journey up here when I lived in Greenwood, because this was an even more open-minded place,” she says. “It’s nice that ‘gay’ is something to be celebrated for the most part in Halifax, not something to be afraid of or to make fun of.”

Marine Biology

Name: Becs Borchert

Origin: Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada

Interview Location: Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada

Rebecca Borchert will introduce herself as Rebecca, but immediately lets you know that she prefers Becs.

“I don’t like my name, there’s too many Rebecca’s,” she says. “I think Becs sounds way cooler.”

Becs is my roommate. I met her by chance one night when she came trotting down the steps of my friend’s basement apartment (conveniently located directly below the apartment we live in now) about two years ago. Having lived with her for three months, I can tell you some pretty random things about Becs. I can tell you that her birthday is in March, or that she likes to blend fresh smoothies at six in the morning every so often. Most people who know her could tell you the following: Becs is a girl who loves traveling and water. These are the things that brought her to the east coast of Canada three years ago.

“I spent a year traveling and then I just decided that I was done with Winnipeg and I was gonna go to school for Marine Bio, and I could go here or the west coast, but I was too lazy to do two school applications, so I just applied to Dal and I got in thankfully, and now I’m here!” she says, sitting at our kitchen table and laughing about how weird it is that I’m interviewing her.

Becs is about to go into her fourth year of Marine Biology at Dalhousie University, where she’s currently taking a summer course called “Conservation of Sharks, Skates, and Rays.” Last weekend, she and her class went down to Yarmouth, a small town about three hours south of Halifax. Every summer, Yarmouth hosts an annual shark derby. Becs and her class were there to raise awareness about the ethical issues surrounding the event.

“The shark derby was really…it was a really good experience to have under my belt. At times I was really queasy. It was really hard to see. They brought in 31 sharks yesterday. I think the derby runs for five days, so that’s a lot just like, numerically, to wrap your head around. And it was hard to see the way the fishermen treated the sharks. They were so cruel for no reason,” she says. “They should be the ones telling us how beautiful these creatures are, not the other way around. And it was really hard to see the lack of respect there, but on the other hand, it was cool to see all the people who came out. Like, some people were from Yarmouth and some people were from like all over and they were there to see the derby, so, it’s like a glimmer of hope that maybe people are actually looking at these animals and finding some respect for them just in like, maybe their size and magnitude alone.”

According to Becs, most of the fishermen involved in the derby were not using ethical techniques to catch their sharks. People participating in the derby need to capture their sharks by the traditional bait hook method. Once the shark has been reeled in to the side of the boat, which can take up to 45 minutes, the fishermen are supposed to remove it from the water in the most ethical way possible.

“So you’ve got it attached to your fishing rod, and on the side of the boat, and then other fishermen come over and they put this like, loop in the water and you have to get the shark to swim through the loop and then you tighten it. And then what you should do is pull the shark in. One person grabs the head and one person grabs the tail, and you should lift him horizontally, but most people don’t, most people just pull with the hook and it…it rips and tears and it hurts, and it stresses the shark out,” says Becs.

Another reason the class was at the shark derby was to try and gain support for the implementation of a catch and release method, a ethical and sustainable alternative to the current baited hook technique.

“Derby officials are thinking about switching to mandatory catch and release. So we handed out some surveys and talked to the public to try and gain insight onto whether we’d have public support if we tried to push forward with that. It seems that we won’t, which is upsetting,” she says. “It was really bad, I had a lot of people yell at me, which was really tough. I hate the public, I’m not good at talking to the public, cause I think they’re all stupid. I think my prof wanted me to be nice, and I just couldn’t muster it.”

The course attends the shark derby each year in an effort to raise awareness about sharks and the impact of the derby, which kills 3% of that species of shark annually.

Coming out east to study Marine Biology was never something that intimidated Becs.

“I was pretty excited,” she says. “I’d never been to the east coast before, I’d never been east of Toronto before I came out here. I didn’t know a single person and I was like ‘I’m just gonna go fuckin start all over again’.”