When I was a kid, I begged God for a deeper voice. By the time I was in Grade 4, the voices of the other boys at my Catholic school were beginning to crackle with age. Their registers were sinking, lowering into something manly. It seemed to be happening to everybody except me. My S’s were serpentine and lispy into my tweens, and I sang soprano in boys’ choir long after everyone else had graduated into alto territory. I’d pick up the landline and people would call me by my mother’s name. 

It didn’t bother me until other kids started to notice how different I sounded. I have no illusions about what kind of kid I was—a limp-wristed, twinkle-toed fag-to-be—but it only became an issue once everyone noticed my squeaky voice. Kids started to call me gay at school. I didn’t know what it meant at the time, but it seemed derogatory. After a few days of being called gay, I went home and asked my mom what it meant.

She seemed taken aback, and took a beat to calculate how to delicately and in a God-fearing manner explain what it meant to be a homosexual to her only child. “Well,” she spat out eventually, “it’s when two boys live together.” The subject was then quickly changed. That definition seemed misaligned with the malice the other kids infused that word with at school. What could be so bad about two boys living together? Unsatisfied, I decided to expand my investigation.

Our next-door neighbours, Dan and Rick, were teachers who shared a home. Dan, who was perennially positive, would sometimes take me to walk their two golden retrievers down the nature trail by our street. Rick, the grouchier of the two, would occasionally let me water his magnificently kept garden as he smoked a cigarette on his porch. 

I remember thinking Dan and Rick seemed to have a nice life together, and that for a reason I couldn’t name, they seemed to embody a paradigm I wanted to emulate. They also seemed to fit neatly into my mother’s definition of “gay.” I thought that maybe they could help me understand why others used this word as a weapon, even though it struck me as something I might enjoy being. 

One afternoon, I peeked out my doorway and saw Rick smoking on his stoop. He had this gruff way of speaking that always left me cowed. But in that moment my thirst for knowledge superseded my fear, and so I approached him with my burning question. “Rick, are you gay?” I asked. 

He blinked hard at me and scowled. “No,” he said. He flicked his cigarette into the garden and went into his house. I shuffled home, baffled. Dan and Rick were my only lead. Years later, my mother confirmed that our neighbours were married and Rick, for his own reasons, had lied to me. But all I knew at the time was that my investigation had hit a dead end. It felt like I’d never come to understand why that word had been flung at me, or why it felt like something I might grow into. 

My mom and I spent a lot of time on the road together. She was a single mother, so she had to drive me to school, dance lessons, baseball and chess club. She’d also take me with her to do the groceries, to go to the bank, to follow her around Sears while she shopped for affordable clothes for me to wear to school. 

I loved the car rides because being in the car meant getting to pick out an album to listen to. My mom had this binder full of CDs that she kept in the glovebox. We were constantly listening to women: Céline Dion, Shania Twain, Anne Murray, Madonna. I was as obsessive then as I am now, and I memorized the lyrics to all of their songs so my mom and I could scream out the words together. These women seemed sublime to me, and the key to their perfection, I figured, was in their beautifully high voices. It pleased me to know I could hit their notes, and that the other boys at school probably couldn’t.

Shortly after Rick dismissed me on the porch, I was rifling through my mother’s binder and found myself drawn to a maroon disc. It was labelled “Queen: Greatest Hits,” and I insisted we throw it on. I thought I’d discovered a new diva. I couldn’t have known how right I was.

Boom. Boom. Clap.The opening percussion of “We Will Rock You” slammed through the speakers. Then, to my surprise, came a distinctly male voice. The man in the speakers sounded tough and masculine, two things I thought I could never be, but his macho vocals belied a beguiling expressiveness. He screamed out notes that seemed higher than any of those reached by the women I’d listened to before, but despite his theatricality and his upper register,Freddie Mercury sounded undeniably like a man’s man. By the time the song ended with Brian May’s cosmic guitar solo, I knew I’d found the paradigm I was looking for. 

All I listened to for the remainder of my childhood was Queen. I learned the names of all the members and memorized the lyrics to all their songs. At home and in the car and at school I would belt out “Somebody to Love” and “Killer Queen” without warning, to the delight of my mother and the chagrin of my teachers and fellow students. When I wasn’t singing, I was playing that dark red CD on my Walkman. My Webkinz and Club Penguin usernames contained the word “Queen.” I became obsessed with space and said I wanted to be a rocket scientist because Brian May has a doctorate in astrophysics. My entire little world began to revolve around the long-defunct band. 

I had one friend in elementary school, a boy named Walter, but in Grade 5, he found a new group of friends and left me behind. Nobody wanted to be friends with a fedora-wearing dandy, so I often spent recess alone with my headphones on, studying “Bohemian Rhapsody” while the other kids played. 

I did have a friend in my mother. She indulged my fixation, and seemed thrilled that I’d become so attached to something from her past. Once we were driving down a street in our Ottawa suburb, and I was in a happy mood because she’d let me sit up front with her. We were blasting “We Are the Champions” with the windows down. We came upon a red light and looked into each other’s eyes and shouted the lyrics at each other. Typically, the real world would winnow away in those kinds of moments, but this time a force from the outside punctured the bubble we’d built in that car. Applause began to filter into our window. We turned to face our left and two young men in a silver pickup truck were laughing and clapping at us. “You should try out forCanadian Idol,” one of them said. I felt embarrassed. By then I’d learned that my being loud was cause for punishment, especially from other boys. But my mom laughed and thanked them and the light turned green and she hit rewind and cranked up the volume.

In Grade 8, I was taught that AIDS is a deadly disease you get from being gay. Soon after, I learned that it had killed Freddie Mercury in the ’90s. It seemed to me he’d been killed by his sexuality, and that realization, misguided as it may have been, left me without somebody to emulate. I didn’t know what I was or who I could be, but I was certain of two things: I was definitely gay, and I would never be able to act on it.

I stopped listening to Queen and started listening to music with more contemporary social capital: Arctic Monkeys, Lorde, Drake. I started to make friends, but I was quieter than I’d ever been, and I didn’t wear colours. I was pubescent, but my voice hadn’t dropped as much as I’d hoped it would, nor had I escaped my lisp. I tamped myself down and held my breath, trying to seem as normal as possible. 

In the summer after Grade 9, my mom and I went on a trip to Quebec City. I was charmed by its cobblestone streets and francophone buskers and maple candy shops. In one of the old city’s yawning plazas there was a massive poster that read “QUEEN EXTRAVAGANZA.” Underneath the blaring words lay the ornate coat of arms that decorated my old redGreatest HitsCD. The poster was advertising a residency by a Queen tribute band in a nearby concert hall. We walked to the box office and my mom bought two tickets for that night’s show.

That evening, we settled into the theatre and the band came out. The drummer raised his sticks and began to smash out a familiar rhythm.Boom. Boom. Clap. From that moment on, I was transfixed. The singer sounded just like Mercury, and the guitarist deftly replicated May’s crunchy electric guitar. I felt like I was back in that front seat on that suburban road. 

They ended on “We Are the Champions.” My mom put her arm around me and we howled out the words. Though I couldn’t hit the notes like I used to, it was liberating to expel all that air from my lungs.