I.I figured that I was gay when I was eight. I stayed up late after everyone went to bed and watched Queer as Folk on my kokum''s TV. She had a satellite and all the channels, pirated of course. At the time, my mom and I were living with my kokum because my dad had left us thinking he was Dolly Parton or Garth Brooks or something. Queer as Folk aired at midnight on Showcase; I muted the channel, added subtitles, and watched as four gay men lived their lives in Pittsburgh. I wanted to be like them, I wanted to have lofts and go to gay bars and dance with cute boys and blow and get blown in a Philly gloryhole. I wanted to work in comic shops and universities, be sexy and rich.

I wanted that. I often jacked off to Brian Kinney''s junk and paused on Justin Taylor''s bare white ass to finish. I was meticulous about the whole endeavor: I''d turn down the brightness so as not to wake anyone with the glaring light from the television shining under their doors like Poltergeist . To keep my kokum''s brown floral couch clean and to hide myself in the event someone caught me, I brought my blanket and wiped myself with a tube sock. I had to hush my breath and curl my toes tightly to avoid gasping whenever I was about to come. When I finally did, and gushed over my chest, I thought, this must be what beauty feels like: my skin tight and burning and the body morphing into a hole that wants to morph into another. When I got a little older, I think I was fifteen, I remember seeing Dan Savage and Terry Miller telling me that it all gets better on the internet. They told me that they knew what I was going through, that they knew me.

How, I thought? You don''t know me. You know lattes and condominiums--you don''t know what it''s like being a brown gay boy on the rez. Hell, I''d never even seen a Starbucks and I sure as hell couldn''t tell you why a size small is called ''tall''--that''s also around the time when I began to collect clients like matryoshka dolls so I suppose at least my income got better. This was of course before the photo sharing apps that I like to use to conduct my business now, but at that time, the Internet was vibrant with people wanting to connect with other people, especially there in Peguis. We had Facebook and cellphones to keep us in the loop. I used to sext with people in this gaming website''s chatrooms. I went by the name Lucia and pretended to be a girl to flirt with other boys. Often we''d play virtual pool or checkers and begin with small talk.

Then, once I became Lucia, I''d put ideas of sex into their minds by playing naïve and directing the conversation towards dirty questions. I always liked to let them think they were the ones in control. I''m a sadist like that, I guess. I may be the fantasy but I''m also the shackle. Once the image of breasts and pubic hair was in their minds there was no going back. Sex does strange things to people--it''s like blacking out or going on cruise control. Your body knows what it wants and goes for it. This can be dangerous, as I''d learn later, but if you can manipulate the urge, you can almost control a person.

I felt like Professor Xavier--like I was telepathic.That was how my webcam career began, with virtual pool and cybersex. That was how I met Tias. He was my first cybernetic boyfriend--I was the Russian princess Lucia and he was the five-years-older-than-he-really-is Native boy who dreamed of losing his virginity. We were quite the digital couple. At the time I wasn''t out, but the school knew I was different in some sense. They called me fag, homo, queer--all the fun stuff. But I never let it bother me.

I sometimes caught girls and boys peeking a glance at my body. I went by a hundred different names; no one called me by my real name, Jonny. Everyone knew me as The Vacuum outside of my family. If you''d ever known me between the ages of twelve and today, you have probably come across me as The Vacuum. See, my only friend through school Shane, gave me that nickname when I shotgunned a can of Lucky in less than eight seconds. Apparently that''s the world record for Indians shot gunning beers on the rez--so, from there on out I became known as The Vacuum and the name stuck. Throughout school I used to go by different vacuum brands as my name, I''ve been Hoover, Kirby, Makita, DD (short for DirtDevil), and sometimes, after my mom brought me home a new shirt from her trip to Giant Tiger in the city, I would go by Dyson--when I was feeling extra fancy. You see, I''ve never liked my birth name, Jonny.

My parents named me after my dad who was this residential school survivor/alcoholic who left us, like I told you earlier. Some of the elders around here say he died in a rez fire. Who knows, I really don''t care. People don''t forget those stories, you know? "Oh you''re so-and-so''s boy, the drunk?" random people ask me. And, to top the name-shame off, when I was a kid I went to this Christian day camp called Camp Arnes. There, our counselor, Stephen, made us sing this song before eating a meal. It was called Jonny Appleseed and it went like this:"Oh the lord is good to me and so I thank the lord for giving me the things I need like the sun and the love and the family I need. Oh, the lord is good to me, Jonny Appleseed, amen.

" Sounds dandy, right? Well when I was at Camp Arnes I kissed my first boyfriend, Louis--he was a silver fox and was a camp counselor like Stephen--any who, as we made out in my bunk (in Red Fox Bay) one of Louis'' coworkers walked in on us. Turns out Louis had this girlfriend in Quinzhee Bay and when caught, he got all up in arms and blamed me for coming onto him. A few hours later the whole camp knew about the incident and called me Jonny Rottenseed. Lo and behold while we prayed, no one closed their eyes and bent their heads, instead the prayer was full of shifting glares, whispers, disgust and fear. Even at age ten, an Indian can become a predatory gay. And what does that even mean? Can''t a boy have a sex-drive? Is it such a crime if I want to touch my body and let it be touched? It''s mine, annit? When I got back to the rez I did some research at our shoddy little make-shift library--Dewey Decimal doesn''t really apply on the rez, our books were scattered in piles which were usually either in Pile A, the Cosmos, Pile B, Peguis Fishermen yearbooks, and Pile C, random shit--so it made being a Nancy Drew especially difficult. It turns out that Johnny Appleseed is some American folk legend that became famous by planting apple trees in West Virginia. I never understood why we sang about him in Manitoba--I wanted to talk about Louis Riel, Chief Peguis, and Buffy St.

Marie but instead we sang about a white man throwing apple seeds in frontier America. Apparently he was this moral martyr figure who remained a virgin in exchange for two wives in heaven. Oh, and he loved animals and saved some horse by hand feeding him spears of grass, Walt Whitman style. I would bet my left nut that he was a slave owner too and planted his apple seeds on Treaty territory. All I know is this: apples are crazy expensive on the rez and they had now become bad things in my head. My stepdad Roger used to call me an apple when I told him I wanted to leave the rez. "You''re red on the outside," he''d say, "and white on the inside." II.

When I first moved to Winnipeg I frequented Grindr and Rez Fox to find friends--with benefits of course. My apartment was flooded with whiteness--light, walls, ceiling. And I always wondered about everyone''s obsession with toilets and cleanliness--the pristine shine of a toilet seat since cleaned. The toilet we had on the rez was so old it became a mocha-ombre and the lid, which broke when I was a kid, was replaced with my cousin''s after he died in a snowmobile accident. It was this bannock coloured yellow lid that my mom spruced up by adding a red fluffy cover she bought from Wal-Mart. "I saw it in the Marlborough once," she''d say, "thought it looked right fancy." An Indian bathroom is a star-blanket of colours collected from garage sales, hand-me-downs, and good wills. Back when I was a kid I ate my kokum''s rainbow peanut butter marshmallow squares at a family BBQ.

My older cousins snuck me a few shots of Bacardi 151--it burned all the way down. Eleven years old and drunk in the early afternoon I ran to my kokum''s bathroom and threw up a confetti of colours into her toilet. Half eaten marshmallows floated in the water and the wine-copper metal peeked out from where the helter-skelter shoddy paint job peeled back. The bowl was full of rum and peanut butter. When I tried to recompose myself I flushed the toilet but found that the damn thing didn''t flush. In a panic, I opened the back of the toilet and scooped the throw-up with my hands and deposited it into the tank. A few days later my Uncle told us over tea and bannock that "Some drunk jackass puked in the tank and god damn mold started growing back there." I felt a little proud that I had been ordained into that type of world--but my face reddened at the same time.

An Indian bathroom is such a weird space of waste and life. I don''t think whiteness really holds much worth there. I had nothing to do save for staring at my walls--which too were all white. I logged onto my Grindr and found a pool of men in my general area all with funny names like "fotohomo" and "nudedude" and I thought, really? these queers are Dr. Seuss wannabes. There were shirtless dudes left and right and within minutes I had collected a storybook of dick-pics. Pfft these boys could learn a thing or two from my artistic selfies, they''re a hell of a lot more than peach emojis and eggplants. All their profiles said, "looking to chat" and "please be respectable" and I wondered what respect had to do with hooking up? The first time I ever hooked up a guy we were at my friend''s house party on the rez.

He was a tall white kid who came with his Indian friend--his friend ac.