Jonny Appleseed

Content Warning: This section contains an anti-gay biased slur that appears in the quoted source material.

“I remember watching Dan Savage and Terry Miller on the internet telling me that it gets better. They told me that they knew what I was going through, that they knew me. How so, 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.”

This passage illustrates the conflict that Jonny feels between his queer and Cree identities and mainstream, white, middle-class queer culture. Even though white cis gay men claim that life will improve for young gay men after they age and come out, Jonny feels that their experiences are so alien as to have no bearing on his own life. This passage shows the complex relationship between class, culture, and sexuality.

“I didn’t understand why we’d sung about him at camp—I wanted to know about Louis Riel, Chief Peguis, and Buffy St. Marie, but instead we were honouring some white man throwing apple seeds in frontier America.”

At a Christian summer day camp, the other campers sing a song about Johnny Appleseed, whose name is the basis for the titular character in the novel. Changing the name subtly from Johnny to Jonny represents the protagonist’s desire to remain apart from the symbols he encounters in white culture, even as he embodies them. At the camp, he is puzzled why they are learning about an irrelevant historical important historical figure like Johnny Appleseed and not Indigenous figures that directly impacted First Nations and Canada.

“I always wondered how he performed that magic, how he shapeshifted his body in the dark, how his edges poked me but never cut me, how he fit into me like a nipple fits into a baby’s mouth, how I could read him upside down. His transforming body wrapped around me, blanketed me, made me sweat ceremonially.”

Jonny's first sexual encounter is with a white boy at a reservation party. Throughout the novel, the narrator uses ceremonial and religious imagery to describe sexual experience; the case is no different here, where shapeshifting is described as happening in the dark, and how the sweat of sex becomes ceremonial, as in a sweat lodge.