Many congratulations to Nicholas Hrynyk, the most recent recipient of the Gary Sealey Friends of Lambda Award, from Carleton University.
Nick is a PhD Candidate at Carleton, where he is examining the ways in which The Body Politic (TBP, Canada’s largest LGBT newspaper from 1971 until 1987) mediated understandings of masculinity as something that was both stylized and continually refashioned within Toronto’s budding gay male culture and community. Drawing on Vickie Karaminas’ and Adam Geczy’s book, Queer Style, his research focuses on how discourses of masculinity in TBP simultaneously fueled and challenged the creation of a hypersexualized “macho clone,” the inscription of colonial values of effeminacy or hypermasculinity on racialized bodies, and the marginalization of disabled bodies and bodies debilitated by AIDS that did not “perform” a sexualized ideal of masculinity. Furthermore, Nick is interested in the ways in which the body—dressed and undressed—can be read as a cultural artifact.