Winter holidays. As someone who celebrates the secular version of Christmas, it’s a time of figuring out what to buy people and when to mail it so they get it on time. It’s also a time to focus on the things I like about the various winter holidays, and leave the rest.

My spiritual holiday is Winter Solstice, which is a nice thing to celebrate, since you can make it whatever you want to be. Lesbians are like that, taking what we like about popular culture and hopefully leaving the rest. Yule evergreens decorated with blessings, decking the halls, candles and blessing people with gifts belong to Solstice/Yule as much as Christmas, and that makes me happy.  

About 20 years ago, young, broke and unwilling to go to my parents place for Christmas, I chose to gather my chosen family around me and start some new traditions. That year, my Solstice / birthday candlemaking celebration was born. Each year since then, the people I’m closest to, and some others that just seem nice, are invited to my home to sit around, drink mulled apple juice and dip candle wicks in tall jars of hot coloured wax. It’s nice, homey and peaceful, the kind of thing I’d want my children to remember fondly, if I was going to have children.  

This quarter in LQ we have some resources for making lesbian and gay friendly purchases from companies with positive practices towards people like us. We also have a book review by guest contributor Jeanette Nelson, about a first novel written by a Canadian lesbian, published by a Canadian publishing company. As well, a new opportunity to recommend your favourite lesbian-owned businesses and artisans.

In This Issue

• The Skin Beneath
• Human Rights Campaign Holiday Shopping Guide
• Recommend Lesbian-Owned Businesses
• More Lesbian Book Reviews
• Lesbian Musician Blog Feature
• LQ Supporting Businesses
• Lesbian Resources
• Lesbian Agenda Calendar
• Recurring Lesbian Events
• Site Contents
• Lesbian Owned Businesses
• Editorial Information

 What’s your favourite lesbian-owned business in BC or lesbian-run event? Who is your favourite lesbian artisan?

Tell all in the comments below…

For more on lesbian-owned busineses, please see this link to our archives.

Recently, I also came across a social evaluation of these products that I found helpful. The Human Rights Campaign, a non-profit in the US, has evaluated a large number of US companies on their level of respect for gay and lesbian people’s human rights in the workplace. They classify the companies in three groups, basically ones that are doing a good job, ones that are getting better and ones that are awful. Here’s a link to their technology section. You can click on other categories from that page to see the ratings of other items, including cars, food, hotels and more. If you click on a company’s scores you will see why they scored as they did.  There’s also a printable pdf version you can take shopping with you.

I was pleased to see that my old standby recommendations (HP and Dell) had a 100 pt rating.  However, other products I’ve purchased such from Polaroid, McAfee and Nokia were rated a lot lower. McAfee wouldn’t be my first choice to recommend in antivirus software anyhow. Only Norton has been worse in my experience in conflicts with other software. Lexmark also has 100 pts, but I can’t recommend their printers, whose driver software I’ve found to be buggy and intrusive, and whose ink is quite expensive. 

Reviewed by Jeanette Nelson.

The Skin beneath is like Agatha Christie gone conspiracy theorist. We are all searching for the answers in life. The answers to the question; why we are here? Who will notice if we are gone?

Sam’s sister dies. Five years after her death Sam receives an anonymous postcard that sets in motion a journey into the answers to her sister’s questions. Sam in turn finds answers to her own questions, questions she didn’t even know she had. Would Chloe have loved her if she knew her sister was gay?

Sam had never come out to her sister Chloe, but when she starts following the threads of Chloe’s life she  meets and falls in love with Chloe’s ex-roomate it changes her perspective on being lesbian. Sam goes from one night stands to wanting the dream - a real relationship; someone to come home to every night.

Set for the most part in Montreal, Sam tries to unravel the conspiracy theory that her sister was working on. It takes her to the fringes, where exist some hard core conspiracy theorists and into a world she knows nothing about how to survive in. Is this what killed her sister?

The author webs a stream of mystery and colorful characters that tell her story and answers her questions. While technically a murder mystery, the book focusses a lot on Sam’s personal journey and history with her sister, which makes for a slower pace that might appeal less to mystery genre readers looking for a more action focussed book.

The Skin Beneath by Nairne Holze, Insomniac Press 2007. Insomniac Press is a Canadian independent book publisher.

Nairne Holze is a fiction writer who lives in Montreal with her lover and miniature dogs. She co-edited No Margins: writing canadian fiction in lesbian (Insomniac, 2006), which has been nominated for a Lambda Literary Award. This is her first novel.