����I seldom write about serious things here. This is my place to play, to push all the serious, responsible stuff I have to do off to one side and take my inner jester off the leash.

����But you know, there are monsters roaming close to people I truly love. Monsters who can pick up oh, say, a baseball bat or a cue stick and beat another person to death with it simply because that person is gay.

����On Nov. 18, 2001 Aaron Webster was in Stanley Park in Vancouver, B.C. at the wrong time. He had every right to be there. Queerscribe has been in the same place for the same purpose. It could have been him left to die in a dim corner of a city park simply because he loves men.

����A hate crime, they call this murder. Such an antiseptic, tidy term. But how antiseptic, how tidy could it have been to smash someone so much that their friend of 15 years didn't recognize them at first?

����How is it possible to strip the wonderful complexity that makes us human down to just one fact, the fact of our sexuality, and kill one of us for that?

����How can someone walk away from a crime such as this and not be covered with the blood of the person they just killed?

����How can someone close to the killers not see this?

����How can they keep silent?

����Questions, nothing but questions.

����You know, I had so many reactions to this when I first heard this story.

����I am a straight woman, yet this event taps into one of my primal fears. It's been ingrained in me since I was a small child that large portions of the night are closed off to me, that there are places where I cannot go when the sun sets simply because of my gender. Just like Aaron Webster, I have been born a certain way and that makes me a target, a potential victim, in certain places at certain times.

����I am a mother. I was disbelieving of the fact that the authorities think this crime could have been the work of teenagers. I thought that we were working through this, that we as parents had educated our children, had stamped out the narrow prejudices that make this kind of hate possible.

����I am a Canadian. I was shocked that we, that here in our supposedly civilized, tolerant country, that we are capable of such darkness.

����There is so much sadness in the world that sometimes I feel overwhelmed by it. There are nights when I have to leave the room while the news is on the television because the pictures are just more than I can take.

����I try to keep that sadness out of here, out of this small corner of my life where I come shake out the sillies. But you know, to be silent about hate shelters it in a way, leaves it a dark place to fester.

����I refuse to let even this small corner be a dark place.