Hello, gorgeous.

Barbra Streisand’s iconic line, as Fanny Brice, captured during the filming of Funny Girl in late 1967, has all sorts of uses.

Unbidden, the line came to me as I pored over the remarkable opening chapters of I Remember Lights, the debut novel by Ben Ladouceur. (He is the author of two collections of poetry, including Otter, and won the Dayne Ogilvie Prize in 2018.) Immediately appealing and carefully wrought, not to mention enticing, assured, and elegant, I Remember Lights is also somehow instantly canonical – an accomplished, necessary novel that should always have been written is now, at last, in print.

Set in Montreal shortly before, during, and right after Expo 67, with its futuristic internationalism amidst Canada’s watershed centennial, the bulk of the novel captures a euphoria of national pride while it empathetically studies a subset of the nation’s population – so-called deviant men. For them, very real socio-legal categories such as “criminal sexual psychopath,” “dangerous sexual offender,” and “gross indecency” were weightier than mere words.

Ladouceur, however, introduces his unnamed narrator in the first of a series of short interstitial chapters that run the course of the novel. Titled “XX,” they take place over one long, difficult night and morning in 1977.

Mild-mannered, seemingly easy to overlook, and the owner of a dachshund named Dorothy (of course), the narrator has a gay Everyman quality. Only traces of his former self – wonderstruck, if naive – persist. While full of life – desires, intelligence, capabilities – he’s strangely withdrawn too. A bullying, vindictive world has taught him, perhaps, to be cautious and discreet, to take up less space and be less outspoken than other men.

Plus, he’s dressed in a towel because he’s at a bathhouse and has just met John, a younger – “simply young—truly young” – man possessed of beauty and ease in equal measure.

Discounting a few other cities he’s briefly called home, he has resided in Montreal for about a decade.

As the men flirt, the lights switch off and on – coded warning about a police raid. They head to Truxx, a bar, gambling unsuccessfully about the probability of a (historically accurate) police raid there. The narrator’s ordeal that evening, a shock to most readers in 2025, reveals an utter helplessness before the police, and the jailed men’s hour by hour inability to formulate an effective collective response or defence.

In the United States and Canada, gay liberation might have “happened” circa 1971, but in Ladouceur’s account, when the narrator says, “I moved obediently because I didn’t want to die,” he understands that news of liberation hasn’t exactly reached every corner of the province. He’s at the mercy of social forces that care little for the well-being of him and his kind. (With a literary merit that brings to mind canonical gaylit like Isherwood’s Christopher and His Kind, Baldwin’s Another Country, and Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library, I Remember Lights suggests an author well-versed in and appreciative of his literary tradition and entirely capable of contributing meaningfully to it.)

Aside from the “XX” chapters, much of the novel is a coming-of-age story that’s touching as it captures youth – exuberance and unboundedness as well as lessons learned and missteps (and LSD) taken. Innocence, in Ladouceur’s handling, has a beguiling complexity: in 1967 and for a gay man, it cannot last. The knowledge that flourishes with self-awareness and exposure to widespread societal biases ensures survival, true, but that same consciousness burdens the men with a demoralizing eureka: that they’re unwanted, unappreciated, and, basically, despised.

I Remember Lights isn’t a treatise, though, and Ladouceur embeds that harsh reality in an affecting, sweet-tempered story about an even-keeled 19-year-old who leaves rural New Brunswick with a young woman whom everyone at home (himself included) imagines will become his wife, and then remains in Montreal once she returns home. Tellingly, family disappears from the novel entirely, and with that absence Ladouceur signals another price paid for queer visibility.

He takes odd jobs (diaper pick up and delivery, room service bartender), finds cheap lodging, eats poorly, drinks a lot. Along the way, he learns the limits of tolerance and the assorted consequences of being “found out.”

He makes friends from across the world, falls in and out of love, finds community and enduring mentors, and spends many wondrous hours at the Expo site.

As Expo closes, he’s given a choice – to start over in a new town and live in safety by passing as heterosexual. Despite being largely apolitical and averse to conflict, he makes another choice and impulsively follows his heart. That takes him across the Atlantic and far from Brandon, Manitoba (the alternative choice), and toward an unknown that may not amount to much. If the future isn’t wholly bright, it’s at least unwritten.

In another author’s hands a final page that includes a dog named Dorothy and “a thick and unmistakable rainbow” might seem, well, a bit much. As I Remember Lights winds down, though – in the last of the “XX” chapters – it’s perfect. Sentimental, yet warily optimistic, and a touch battle-worn, the scene conveys a hope and a relief in its depiction of a time and a place where, for some, everyday life presented challenges that lessened year by year but never, ever went away.