I had planned to offer a Pride Month sale on subscriptions but I was so behind on my deadlines after dealing with my friend’s death that I’ve been in catchup mode so I’m announcing it now, 17 days into Pride Month. I always swore I’d never do a Pride Month sale because we are gay year-round here, but fuck it. If you purchase a paid subscription from now until the end of June, you’ll get a lifetime 20% discount on your subscription. You can upgrade here:

I am a full-time freelance sportswriter and your support allows me to continue doing this work. I use paid subscription money to hire an editor for my reporting, and I’ve recently acquired legal support through beehiiv. I am about 50 paid subscribers away from being able to reliably fund travel to report more stories for the newsletter, as well as purchase a media insurance policy to allow me to do more investigative journalism here.

A paid subscription also supports the community that we are building here, which includes events like the Out of Your League Book Club (this month we are reading BREAKOUT YEAR BY KD CASEY) and our (very active) paid subscriber Discord server.

CN: death, end of life care. I hope you’ll forgive this rough, stream-of-consciousness little essay.

Last month, I was wandering around Coca-Cola Coliseum asking Toronto Tempo fans if they were queer. I was on a work trip, in town for the North American Society for Sport History (NASSH) conference and reporting from a Tempo game while I was there.

It was a Saturday night, the arena was buzzing, and I was hanging out with media friends—some I’d known a long time but never met in person, others were new connections I had just met that night. The vibes were high and I should have been having a great time, but my head and my heart were across the city in a hospital room.

I’d arrived the day before and gone to visit my dear friend Justin, who was being treated for an aggressive form of bladder cancer at Toronto General Hospital—just a block away from the conference hotel where I was staying. Justin’s family had flown back home to Halifax Friday morning, a few hours before I arrived, and I assumed I would find Justin in stable condition when I got there.

I walked into the room and understood immediately that Justin was dying. Maybe it was the shock of not having seen him since he got sick, I thought. But my partner Will, Justin’s best friend of two decades, texted Justin’s dad to report that I didn’t think Justin looked well and Justin’s dad said, “Yes, they found more cancer this morning and he’s been given two weeks to live. We aren’t telling anyone yet.”

Justin was dying and he was alone.

I’d had this trip to Toronto planned since before Justin’s cancer was diagnosed and once he began treatment, I waited to fly up because I knew I’d be coming at the end of May. By the time I got there, I realized that if I had waited any longer to go see him, I would have missed him completely.

Saturday morning I went back to the hospital and pulled a nurse aside to tell me exactly what was going on. We spent the next three days trying to get Justin’s family to come back to Toronto. We had no idea who Justin’s local community was so we couldn’t contact people. For three days, I sat with my friend and watched him die, unable to make any medical decisions for him that would have made him more comfortable.

When nurses or doctors would ask who I was, I’d say a friend. “Ouch,” Justin would reply. I started saying, “Chosen family.”

I spent less than three hours over four days at the conference, including the panel I was part of. I attended the Tempo game that Saturday night but felt guilty for leaving Justin. He insisted I go to the game. He wasn’t totally lucid but he told the nurses how talented I was, which was rich coming from Justin, who had more talent in his entire pinky than I could ever hope to have in my lifetime.

Justin was a drag queen who performed as Fisher Price. He was a brilliant screenwriter who wrote the CBC series QUEENS. He was a costume designer and a seamstress. His pop culture references were low brow and in the best way, full of deep cuts and layered jokes. He could do anything.

He couldn’t remember the name of the Tempo, but he told everyone who came into his hospital room that I was covering the basketball game. He was so proud. Justin’s nurse spoke to me about the Tempo, what a big fan of the team his wife was. A friend came to visit and said they had season tickets, if I was still in town that weekend they’d take me to a game.

Sunday I sat with Justin for 14 hours and watched WNBA games on mute while he dozed on and off and nurses cycled in and out.

It all felt so silly, though. Watching basketball while my friend was dying.

I extended my trip through Wednesday night. By then we’d gotten his family to finally agree to palliative care, and we’d connected with his local community and set up a support tree of folks to come sit with Justin. We left the hospital at 2 PM to head to the airport, and Justin was finally on the comfort medications. I bought WiFi on the plane and texted with his friend who was sitting with him, talking her through how to care for him and when to ask for help from the nurses.

Twenty minutes after I walked into my house in Boston, his friend called to tell me that Justin had passed. The last thing he said to me was, “I’ll see you in Boston. I’m coming.”

How was I supposed to write a story about a basketball game? Justin was dead. He was 37. He was dead less than two months after being diagnosed with a cancer that his doctors had never seen in someone under the age of 65.

When I finally sat down to write, it turned out I’d lost my reporting notebook somewhere between Toronto and Boston. It had the notes for the story from the Tempo game, as well as two other features I’d reported in Dallas last month. I had to paste together those stories from hours upon hours of choppy audio

But this story, written for the Canadian queer publication Xtra, is part of my grieving process. It is a love letter to the community that loved and held Justin, the community he was such a big part of. I wrote this story uplifting LGBTQ+ Canadians and highlighting what having a WNBA means to them as a way to connect with Justin’s people. The story is a bridge.

I hope you’ll read it.