Feeling like a welcomed part of your community rarely comes with fanfare and conspicuous celebration — more often than not, it’s the little things that create a sense of belonging.
In Niagara-on-the-Lake, Steve McGuinness says that acceptance, for him, has looked like a seat at a pancake supper table.
It has looked like nights at the Shaw, garden tours, wine country dinners, the candlelight march, the Icewine Festival, taking part in the holiday house tour and bringing his grandchildren to the Virgil Stampede.
For McGuinness, who is running for NOTL council, and his husband, Gary Guthrie, belonging in town has not come through a single grand gesture.
It has come through ordinary town life.
“Never encountered any difficulties around identity since relocating to NOTL,” McGuinness said in a written statement.
The couple moved to town in 2018 after years in Toronto, where they worked in careers in large public corporations. They had visited NOTL often before retiring and, McGuinness said, “fell in love with” the town, and decided to move here, looking for a slower pace of life.
Not only did they find it, they also found a community where, as a gay couple, they could live openly.
“We often go out socially together as a couple and have never confronted any hostility or negative pressures to hide our relationship or to be less than our full genuine selves,” he said.
McGuinness and Guthrie met in 2000, began living together in 2004 and were legally married in 2013.
They have two grown children: a son in Waterloo and a daughter who married last month in Calgary. They also have two grandchildren in Waterloo.
McGuinness was born in the United Kingdom and came to Canada by ship in 1966, when he was five, with his two younger sisters.
Today, he and Guthrie share a two-bedroom bungalow in NOTL with their seven-year-old lab, Lucy.
Their life in town is rooted in the rhythms of NOTL.
They enjoy the Shaw Festival, local dining and wine country. Guthrie is an “avid gardener,” so the town’s garden tours have become part of their life here.
McGuinness said the couple is also lucky to have two other same-sex couples as close neighbours in their immediate area.
But their sense of belonging, he said, reaches beyond one street or circle.
“We are lucky to count two other same-sex couples as close neighbours in our immediate area, but feel broadly integrated with all of the community,” he said.
Asked whether they have experienced discrimination, hostility or exclusion in town, McGuinness described their experience as “Generally positive.”
One moment that stayed with him happened at the St Marks Pancake Tuesday supper, where the couple joined a group of strangers at a large table and felt completely welcomed.
Another happened through conversation.
McGuinness said he and Guthrie had a “great conversation” with pastors Matthew Unruh and Kevin Bayne at Cornerstone Community Church about “the historic and evolving relationship between the large Mennonite community here and LGBTQ persons.”
He said Cornerstone does not marry same-sex couples in its sanctuary, something McGuinness called “a nationally imposed rule.”
But he said Cornerstone is “an otherwise welcoming faith community at a local level.”
Asked where NOTL still needs to grow, he pointed to public policy.
“The diversity, equity and inclusion committee needs to resume meeting actively again under the next lord mayor to solicit broader inputs to understand how public policy may uniquely impact minority communities,” he said.
