As if I didn't have enough nerdy habits already (knitting, recycling, picking my nose, computer programming, correcting people's grammar), I've started to get really excited about stamps. In the centre of my new stamp collectors' catalogue, there is a page of millenium coins, "each with a unique themed design with proof finish (frosted relief on brilliant background)", celebrating one of our national "hopes and aspirations for the year 2000". The first hope and aspiration is none other than "Pride / Fierté" which just goes to show: Canadians are so gay.

faux-finishes anyone?

Many months ago, someone told me that someone told her that Don McKellar is the founding member of an organization called something like Gays Against Pride Extremism. This was a "fact" that I had a hard time reconciling with my fandom of McKellar. Luckily the rumour turned out to be false: John McKellar is the guilty party, not Don McKellar. But there's something distinctly gay about Don McKellar too.

In the recent roles he has written for himself, he plays men involved in apparently typical love stories. In the last scene of the first season of Twitch City, McKellar finally beds Molly Parker; in the last scene of Last Night, McKellar finally gets over the long ago death of his girlfriend and kisses Sandra Oh as the world ends. Callum Keith Rennie plays McKellar's best friend in both; in Last Night he's a man trying to fulfill all of his (hetero)sexual fantasies before the world ends. Daniel MacIvor (a confirmed fag) plays Molly Parker's spurned former boyfriend, tidy, neurotic Nathan, jailed for killing Al Waxman with a shopping bag full of cat food.

Although all these characters are straight, moments of sexual ambiguity abound. In Last Night, Rennie tells McKellar that he still has one unfulfilled sexual fantasy: to have sex with a man, and asks McKellar to help him out. A very cute kissing scene between them follows. McKellar seems to be trying to act as though his character feels awkward about the kiss, but he doesn't quite pull it off, or perhaps doesn't quite intend to pull it off. His coy grin seems suspiciously disingenuous. It almost looks as if they've done this sort of thing before.

In Twitch City, MacIvor is let out of jail one afternoon to be a guest on a talk show (within the show) hosted by Bruce McCullough. MacIvor is surprised to find himself accused of having killed Al Waxman "because he was gay". A huge picture of Waxman is projected beside the guests. MacIvor pathetically scrambles to deny the charge, only succeeding in incriminating himself further. He insists that he didn't know that Waxman was gay, that he didn't look gay, that it was an accident. The audience (of the real show, not the talk show) is reminded that MacIvor really is gay and that Waxman really isn't, so the scene oozes irony. In the second season's first episode, the joke continues as MacIvor's character parades around in his neatly tucked-in prison uniform, missing obvious references to all the bum-fucking going on around him.

The issue of looking gay comes up again in the second season when Parker recruits as roommates a couple of men she met at the paint store. They're so nice and clean cut, and they buy so much paint that she's sure they're gay, so after they've gone out to eat salads, she and McKellar sneak into their room to "poke around for gay things". Their secret codes and secret language turn out not to be a gay thing, but they still kiss and discuss McKellar's penis.

Even the sex scenes are a little queer. The first intimate scene between McKellar and Parker has them talking on the balcony about the unlikeliness of her boyfriend getting out of jail any time soon. McKellar admits that there is something that he has "always wanted to do". He then reaches out and grabs Parker's tit. Tit grabbing is ludicrously funny as a romantic gesture. This is confirmed by Parker's huge smirk. Maybe what McKellar means is not that he has "always wanted to" grab Parker's tit, but that he has "always wanted to" grab any tit, never having done so before. Their next intimate scene has McKellar straddled over Parker on the carpet, furiously trying to remove his pants. She blurts out "Sock it to me", and this time allows more than just a smirk. This manages to be even more absurd than a lifetime goal of tit grabbing. I think we're meant to infer that sex between McKellar and Parker is a ludicrous proposition.

These reminders of the possibility of homosexuality occur over and over again in McKellar's work. Rennie is sure there's more of a market for lesbian wedding cakes than Parker might think. Jennifer Jason Leigh makes a cameo appearance with dyke-short hair and vinyl pants. McKellar scares away undesirable roommates by pretending to be a rapacious homo after their flesh. We're told that the characters are all straight, but in so many ways, we're led to believe that they're actually gay.

It is difficult to tell a story about someone who is gay without their sexuality rooting its way into the centre of the story. It's such a potent a symbol that, for some audiences, it may infect everything, even when the intention is to represent homosexuals doing regular, everyday things, demonstrating the common circumstances that mediate everyone's lives. By making his gay characters straight, then hinting that they're actually gay, McKellar may have found a way of getting around this difficulty.