Free Underdog by Sue-Ann Levy Page A

spending less and less time at my ex’s cottage on weekends. When I ran my very first half marathon in Ottawa in May 2006 – after four long and arduous months of training – my ex didn’t come to Ottawa to cheer me on. That same month, I went to visit my ex’s mother in her assisted living apartment. Her mother was well into her nineties, gravely ill, and receiving twenty-four-hour care. She couldn’t understand why her daughter and I were apart on a weekend when I was supposed to be at the cottage. She told me in her by then frail voice that she was so happy her daughter had someone with whom to spend her life. That was the funny thing. Even though she couldn’t articulate the word
lesbian,
she accepted and was happy that we were a couple.
    Nevertheless, Audrey’s words were indeed prophetic. When my ex’s mother passed away a little more than a month later, things really took a turn for the worse. By then I was out enough at the
Toronto Sun
to take three days of compassionate leave to be with my ex for the funeral and the shiva. But when I sat with her and the rest of the family at the funeral home to make the arrangements and to write the obituary, mypartner of twenty years adamantly refused to have me listed with her as a couple in her mother’s obituary. Her brother and sister-in-law tried to convince her otherwise, but, no doubt again out of fear of being “outed,” she would not budge. To add insult to injury, she got very upset with her niece – who was delivering one of the final tributes at the funeral – for daring to suggest in it that we were a couple. Her niece was forced to mention me as a friend of the family. I was crushed beyond words, especially because I was by her side at the funeral and the shiva. I made it through another month of weekends at the cottage, but I knew I was just going through the motions. At that point, though, I didn’t realize how quickly the relationship would come crashing to an end.
    In the last week of July, I received a call from a lawyer telling me he had a great story for me – an issue symbolizing everything that was wrong with City Hall. He said his client, Denise Alexander, had just been to a meeting of the community council representing midtown Toronto, and her councillor, Michael Walker, was poised to pull a fast one by trying to yank her permit for a widened driveway. The city had approved the driveway three years earlier after she’d fulfilled thousands of dollars of landscaping requirements, and since then she’d been paying a permit fee to the city for the privilege of using it. As we later learned when I did a Freedom of Information search, the councillor had for almost a year been meeting behind the scenes with Denise’s neighbours on either side.
    Just a few months later, the neighbours sported Mr. Walker’s campaign signs on their property and we learned after the election that they’d donated to his re-election campaign. That, sadly, is how easily most councillors are swayedto action, whether for the positive or the negative. Denise’s lawyer was hoping a story could run before the vote on her driveway came to full council. I was reluctant to do it because my plate was full. But her lawyer persisted and without even knowing Denise, I found myself incensed at the idea of the system, yet again, abusing innocent taxpayers. So, on a Friday, as I was packing to go to my ex’s cottage, I did a pre-interview with Denise by phone. It was just one question that forever changed both of our lives. I asked her why she thought her neighbours would engage in such harassment – meaning, what was in it for them? Denise told me it was “off the record” but she thought it was because she’d been living with a woman. I responded that if it made her feel better, I was gay too and I’d also had issues with my neighbours in the condo where I lived. I could never prove it, but I suspected some of them changed the way they interacted with me after I came out.