29 years old extreme speed/flight
citizen of Canada member of Alpha Flight
unmarried/unattached
Go back
I got a range of reactions from those I photographed in the course of this project. Interest, shyness, aggression, exhibitionism. I never met another person who was so completely indifferent to me as Jean-Paul was. He's spent an enormous proportion of his adult life (and more than a little of his adolescence) in the camera's eye, and not all of the cameras have been friendly. At some point in time he developed what I can only describe as photographic armour. If some people live on the outsides of their skins (thinking here of Logan, of Tabitha Smith), then Jean-Paul lives so far inside his that he's difficult to see.What I could see was a hard gloss: startlingly pale eyes, the infamous pointed ears, a lot of skin and unmistakable muscle. A defensiveness so powerful that it usually passes for arrogance. Around his eyes, up close, there are very thin lines. If you watch him long enough, he starts to blur; energy builds up and the effort of being still gets to be too much and sooner or later he snarled at me and I kicked him out so I could decide what I was going to do.
He came back two hours later and I got what might have been an apology. And a marvellous stone, a little bigger than my fingernail, that he'd retrieved from Baffin Island, above the Arctic Circle. And we tried again.
I shot this in-studio, finally, because we needed the neutral ground for both of us to feel safe. I borrowed a loft from a friend, strung up lights and a couple of hanging-cloth backdrops (this sense of "no place" you get in the picture) and came up with all my equipment in a half-dozen bags and Jean-Paul bouncing at my heels. Four tripods, open space, me in the middle with a couple of pillows, a cup of coffee, and plunger cables running to each camera. Jean-Paul paced while he talked, working out the worst of his nervous energy. And told me, in the course of an afternoon, about skiing at Lake Louise, the way coffee used to taste when he was a kid and could still drink it without risking days of no sleep, the tendency of certain of his team-mates to sing in the shower (loudly, parts of Wagner's Ring Cycle), dirty jokes in joual, sex, and what it's like to come up from underground into the old part of Quebec City, still strung out from the night and wanting to touch someone you know.
I shot this picture and he turned towards me and smiled. I checked later: there are no media-file pictures of him smiling. Only looking cool, or intense, or angry. I got to spend the next few days pretending that I wasn't nursing a massive (and pointless) crush on him. He was kind enough not to mention it, and I think we parted as friends.
Sinclair: This is going to sound incredibly pompous, but why didn't you come out before you did?
JP: That is incredibly pompous.
Sinclair: Humour me?
JP: [sighs, messes up his hair] I didn't used to think of myself as a public figure. I know we are on television a lot, but then so are many members of municipal police forces. Media interest in the private lives of Alpha Flight still strikes me as very invasive. And it was a matter of who knew, tiens? All the team members knew. I told them, individually, long before it became a public issue.
Sinclair: And when it did?
JP: I considered holding a press conference at which I could say, 'Yes, I am gay, and it's none of your business.' Except at that point it really was public business. Joanne [JP's adopted daughter, who died of AIDS at age four months] had died, and her death became the focus for AIDS-fundraising and organizing. But a great deal of that was terribly homophobic -- she was an acceptable object of pity because she was born with the disease rather than contracting it sexually. As though that made a difference. It would have been terribly irresponsible of me not to re-focus that attention.
Sinclair: Did you regret it?
JP: For a while. Most people deal with their friends, their family, their co-workers . . . I got to deal with being on the cover of Maclean's and the Gazette. But as scandals go, it ran its course fairly quickly. There isn't much you can say about it. One person in a TV conversation says, "So he's gay," and the other one says, "Yeah, I always kinda thought he was," and there isn't too much more to say. This isn't America. There were already gays in the military, and at least one in Parliament. Several Olympic athletes -- ones who got to keep their medals -- were already out. I was a little behind the times, really.
Sinclair: I know you've resigned from Alpha Flight a couple of times. Have you thought about leaving permanently? About maybe joining one of the teams in the States?
JP: I intended to leave permanently when I resigned. Aurora . . . Jeanne-Marie is all my remaining family. I came back because she wasn't holding together in my absence. And no, I haven't thought seriously about moving south. I think that like most Canadians, I'm too much of a snob to live in the States. And I make some members of the other teams nervous. Because I'm gay, and because I come from a government-funded team. Both those things are suspect. And I would rather live without being a superhero than adapt to the kind of closed life that mutants have to lead in the United States. At least on this side of the border I'm not an abomination under the law.