Goodbye, Queeries: After 7 years, Peter Knegt writes the last edition of his award-winning column

Queeries is a weekly column by CBC Arts producer Peter Knegt that queries LGBTQ art, culture and/or identity through a personal lens. It won the 2019 Digital Publishing Award for best column in Canada, and was nominated again in 2022 and 2024. This is its final edition.

This month marks seven years since this column, Queeries, began with a love letter to a Tegan and Sara album. And some 300 editions later, this month will also mark this column’s end. This, in fact, will be the very last Queeries.

The decision to end the column was entirely mine. In part, seven years just seemed like the right amount of time to hold this particular space. I got a lot out — roughly 500,000 words worth — and feel pretty fulfilled by what those words accomplished. They let me count down the 200 most iconic queers in cultural history. They let me serenade Céline Dion and Carly Rae Jepsen. They let me trash Bohemian Rhapsody. They gave me the honour of paying tribute to many of my late heroes, like Derek Jarman, Will Munro and Howard Ashman. And they allowed me to share the stories of this country’s extraordinary range and abundance of queer artists. Artists like Vivek Shraya, Jeremy Dutcher, Jordan Tannahill and Gay Jesus, to name but a few. And I’m incredibly grateful for all of that.

I’m also very grateful for the opportunity this column offered to centre queer experiences within the CBC, something I’ll be continuing to do in other ways. I’ll still be hosting and producing the talk series Here & Queer (which just premiered the first episode of its fourth season today), and I’ll still be writing my other column, which is about an extremely gay thing: the Oscars (the latest edition of which was published last week). And I’ll also be working to continue the more specific spirit of Queeries, just not in my own words.

In January 2025, CBC Arts will be launching Emerging Queer Voices, a new monthly column that will feature a different up-and-coming LGBTQ writer with each edition. Like Queeries, the column will focus on covering LGBTQ arts and culture “through a personal lens,” though this time, through a multitude of perspectives. CBC Arts will be releasing more information in the coming weeks about the column and how to apply to write for it, though I want to make one thing clear: the term “emerging” will be inclusive of people of all ages.

It was important for me to launch Emerging Queer Voices for a few reasons. For one, I know what a challenging landscape it has become in this country for writers, especially if you’re just starting out. And it gets even harder if you want to write pieces that offer an uncompromising queer viewpoint without catering to “mainstream readers” (which we will not be asking you to do). But also, more selfishly, I want to learn from the many talented queer writers in this country that I haven’t had the opportunity to become aware of yet. I want them to help me (and CBC Arts readers, of course) make sense of an increasingly complex culture.

I would be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge, particularly for the uninitiated, that it isn’t always easy trying to create a nuanced dialogue these days. When I started writing Queeries in 2017, the digital world was certainly already not for the faint of heart (when was it, really?). But it had yet to descend into the aggressively toxic space it often is today — a place where any discussion of drag queens doing a nice thing automatically brings forth an army of right-wing trolls with no limits in terms of the hate that they’ll spew. Or where — just this past weekend — Bowen Yang was subjected to dramatically unfair online vilification, largely from Chappell Roan’s LGBTQ fanbase, for defending Roan against her own online vilifiers (many of whom were gay men) through satire in a Saturday Night Live sketch. If I were writing a regular edition of this column this week, it would have probably been about this, and let’s be honest: I’m extremely happy to not be participating in this discourse (although I suppose, in a way, I just did).

Despite this warning, what I don’t want is Emerging Queer Voices to be a place for cynicism. Over the past seven years, one of my main goals with this column (and with my general world view, for that matter) has been to avoid spiralling in this direction. Because as one of the OG queer voices Oscar Wilde once wrote, a cynic is someone who “knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.” I hope that Emerging Queer Voices will be a space where writers can take their time to reflect on and to celebrate what is most inspiring, meaningful and important; a space to amplify vital voices, spotlight talents, make connections and build community. I, for one, am excited to see what the future holds, and I hope you are too.

Read some of Peter Knegt’s favourite editions of Queeries in the “related stories” section below.