Sackville’s pride week kicked off last week with a flag raising at the Mount Allison chapel. Though the arrival of Hurricane Lee caused organizers to postpone a parade through town and flag raising at town hall, events will continue this week with events like Queer Prom, a Queer Art Showcase at Struts Gallery, and an event originally scheduled for last year’s Pride Week which was preempted by Hurricane Fiona: the Sackville launch of Len & Cub: A Queer History by Meredith J. Batt and Dusty Green.
Before their planned event in 2022, Batt and Green spoke with CHMA about their remarkable book, based on the lives of Leonard “Len” Keith and Joseph “Cub” Coates, two men who grew up in the rural New Brunswick village of Havelock in the early 20th century.
Green and Batt came across the story of Len and Cub thanks to a local history buff who brought a collection of family photos mostly shot by Len Keith to the New Brunswick Archives, where Green eventually found them. The images show life in Havelock and the region in the early 1900s, and also document the relationship between Len and Cub, by all appearances a happy though covert romantic bond that lasted roughly 15 years. Batt and Green think Len and Cub’s story may be one of the oldest photographic records of a same-sex couple in the Maritimes.
“There weren’t a lot of references to queer people in any of my previous work,” said Green in 2022. “So when I found this… There are photographic records. Some of them are glass negatives, like incredibly fragile images… It was really, really remarkable.”
Green says the discovery, “shook my understanding of New Brunswick history and queer people’s place in our history… I still get emotional looking at the photos of them together, because some of them are really spectacular.”
The impact of the discovery of the photos, and the piecing together of Len and Cub’s story was also significant for archivist and author Meredith Batt, who was born and lived in Sackville until the age of 10. Batt says as a queer person going to university in Moncton, she often “felt very out of place, like I didn’t quite fit in.”
“I wasn’t really sure what the queer history of the province had been, and that it wasn’t just unique to me. That other people have gone through similar things.”
Batt and Green had to do a lot of additional research in putting together the story of Len and Cub for their book published by Goose Lane. Len was a prolific amateur photographer, documenting life at his garage and pool hall in Havelock, on hunting and road trips around the region. Those photos provided the clues and structure to piece together the story. “We really had to build a web out from the photos by poring over and looking in multiple places, whether it was car records, or newspapers or, military history records,” said Batt.
Both Len and Cub served in the engineering corps in the First World War, and the collection includes photos from their training period, adding to the uniqueness of the collection.
Green says the interest in Len & Cub: A Queer History has been notable, with people from across the country and the world reaching out to the authors. It’s “kind of blown me away just because it’s a niche piece of history from rural New Brunswick,” says Green. “We tried our best to paint a good picture of what life was like at the time and contextualize how it would have happened,” says Green. “I couldn’t be happier with how things turned out.”
Dusty Green and Meredith Batt will be at the Sackville United Church on Friday, September 22 to talk about Len & Cub: A Queer History.
