Northern Lights

I Remember Lights

by Ben Ladouceur

2025 (Book*hug Press)

At the opening of Ben Ladouceur´s powerful debut novel I Remember Lights, two men are picking each other up in a bathhouse. Before going home together to have sex, the younger one suggests grabbing a drink first at Truxx. Unfortunately, before they can even finish their drinks, the music stops and the harsh lights turn on as the place is overrun with police. All of the customers are arrested and then thrown into paddy wagons to put them into crowded cells overnight.

This event and details of its aftermath are based on the actual raid of Truxx. In October 1977, fifty police officers wielding automatic weapons and cameras arrested more than 140 men from the gay bar, sparking outrage among the local community of Montréal. Many Canadians point to this night as the birth of the country´s gay liberation movement, not that dissimilar to New York´s Stonewall riots in the summer of1969.

After depicting the arrests, Ladouceur turns the clock back a decade. Our narrator--the older man from the opening chapter--is now in his late teens, spending a summer in Quebec with a girl everyone expects him to marry. But he quickly discovers that his interests lie with other men, and gives himself permission to explore his homosexuality and his nascent gay identity.

I Remember Lights alternates between these two time-periods masterfully, creating contrast and tension between the two eras, as well as how the book´s unnamed narrator went from naive idealist to his more cynical older self. Throughout much of the chapters set in the late sixties, we see him with a variety of men. Some are openly gay, while others keep their same-sex desires furtive or anonymous. The backdrop of Canada´s World Expo that year serves as a kind of geographic metaphor: the construction of the different pavillions mirror the narrator´s efforts to forge a new and open sexual identity. But not all of the exhibitions are sturdy or built to last; some are forgotten or rejected before the summer is out, just like some of the lovers and relationships we see our narrator experience in the book.

As the chapters circle back to the arrests in 1977, and begin to delve more into the horrendous and humiliating treatment of these queer men by the Canadian law enforcement, the narrator has an opportunity for redemption. Jaded by past heartbreak in his early days of coming out, he realizes that he has an opportunity to reclaim some of his past idealism and hope through community activism. When finally able to leave the police station, he is surprised and moved to discover that the arrests of him and the others from Truxx has sparked a revolution for freedom and openness. In a way, the utopian vision of Canada´s 1967 Expo is glimpsed, and his earlier values are recollected and rekindled.

I Remember Lights is a beautiful and moving novel that Ladouceur writes with elegance and insight. Highly recommend.

This book is available for purchase at the Bureau for General Services - Queer Division, the volunteer-run bookstore at the LGBT Community Center in Greenwich Village, New York. You may also order the book online by going here.