I went to my first political convention last weekend. The NDP Leadership Convention, to be exact. I felt a bit like an imposter: I didn't wear a partisan t-shirt or wave a sign. Instead, I scribbled in my little notebook, took loads of photos and eavesdropped incessantly. I could have been Lois Lane.

It's a time of darkness and light. A time of possibility, of community and generosity, and a time, for many queers, of unease and alienation.

“Mic check”…”Mic check”…”Mic check”…

The Occupy Toronto-ers have received their eviction notice. Reporters have swarmed the park. An Emergency General Assembly has been called. Random supporters like myself stand around, shy guests at a proletariat cocktail party, conspicuous with our leather gloves or our digital cameras.

There is a kind of hysteria brewing in Canadian media these days. The Occupy movement has been going on for three weeks in Toronto, for several months in New York, and it's driving some conservative Canadian media pundits -- like Andrew Coyne of Maclean's magazine -- crazy. In a recent article, he declares that the Occupy movement is a "phony class war." He quotes statistics on dishwashers and microwaves, proudly declaring that 90 per cent of Canadian homes have the ability to nuke their food.

I was in my mother's kitchen when I heard the news on the radio: Jack Layton has lost his battle with cancer.

I was juicing watermelon and pineapple for my mother. She is a survivor of laryngeal cancer who can eat no solid foods. I was shocked, but I wasn't surprised: I'd seen Layton's July press conference, his face already a death mask. I stopped what I was doing, steadied myself against the kitchen counter and just felt terribly, terribly sad.

The other night, I went to a screening of Who Took the Bompf, a fabulous doc about the feminist/queer/electroclash band Le Tigre and its demise in 2005, which in some ways marks the end of the feminist-queer-rriot girl era. It was an archive of sorts, of third wave feminism, of rage channelled into poetry, sampling, performance art, music and great costumes.

It seems like feminists, scholars and queers are turning to history these days, to help make sense of the present.