Author name: Mason_Julian

Mason Julian: On Growing Up, Getting Real, and Finding Home in Brantford Yeah, so I’m Mason. Born here, live here, probably die here. Brantford, Ontario—the Telephone City. I’m a sexologist. Or I was. Now I’m something else—a writer, an observer, a guy who still can’t quite shake the habit of analyzing human connection. I’ve spent over twenty years studying the messy intersection of intimacy and economics. How we love, who we love, and what we’re willing to pay for it. I’ve worked with couples, consulted for dating apps, and frankly, I’ve made every mistake you can make in a relationship. Maybe that’s the real qualification. These days I write for the CamoWallet project on camowallet.app. Sounds like a pivot, right? From sex to crypto? But it’s not. It’s the same damn thing. Trust. Transparency. The stories we tell ourselves about security. I just write about it through the lens of this city—Brantford—because it’s the one place I actually know. The alleys off Colborne, the bend in the Grand River, the way the light hits the old factories near Greenwich Street. That’s my context now. Look, I’m not here to sell you on my expertise. I’ve been around long enough to know that trust isn’t built on credentials. It’s built on the sense that the person across from you has been through the wringer and came out the other side with their eyes open. I’ve counseled couples on the brink of divorce. I’ve watched people destroy themselves chasing the wrong kind of love. I’ve done it myself. And maybe that’s why I’m okay with where I am now—sitting in a coffee shop on Dalhousie Street, writing about a city that most people just drive past on the 403. I came into this world at the Brantford General Hospital on Terrace Hill Street. July 9, 1986. Hot summer. I remember my mom talking about the heat—how the old building didn’t have proper AC in the maternity ward, just these rattling window units that sounded like a tractor. My dad waited in the parking lot because they didn’t let fathers in back then, not really. He sat in their beat-up Datsun, listening to the game on the radio—Blue Jays versus the Tigers—chain-smoking Export ‘A’ cigarettes. That’s how I entered the story: a humid Tuesday, the smell of cigarette smoke, and the distant crack of a baseball bat from someone’s transistor radio. Brantford in the 80s was a factory town. Massey-Ferguson, Steel and Tube. The city had that working-class grit, that particular kind of sweat you don't see anymore. Growing up here… god, it was specific. We lived near Echo Place, off Fairview Drive. Before it got swallowed by strip malls. My childhood was the Wayne Gretzky Sports Centre before it was shiny and renovated—smelly change rooms and chipped tiles. I remember sneaking into the Sanderson Centre for the Performing Arts, not for the shows, but because this girl I liked, Sarah, she was in some dance recital. I sat in the dark balcony, completely bored, completely captivated. That was my first real lesson in desire: the willingness to endure profound boredom just to be near someone. My teen years were the usual chaos—parties in the conservation areas near Mount Pleasant, drinking cheap beer behind the old Kmart on King George Road. But there was also this quiet curiosity. I’d spend hours in the Brantford Public Library on Colborne, not studying, just reading. Psychology, sociology, whatever. I think I was trying to figure out why people were so weird about each other. Why my dad couldn't talk to my mom without yelling. Why Sarah looked at me like I was invisible. So I got into sexology. It wasn’t a straight line. I did a stint at Wilfrid Laurier University—the Brantford campus, obviously—when they first opened it up. Felt like a guinea pig in a new system. Studied contemporary studies, focused on human relationships. Then I started working. Real work. I volunteered at the Canadian Mental Health Association branch on St. Paul Avenue, doing peer support. That was the education that mattered. Sitting across from guys my age, guys twice my age, all of them tangled up in the same knots: money, loneliness, intimacy. I saw how poverty warps your sense of self, how it makes you feel unworthy of love. And I saw how dating apps, when they first started hitting, exploited that. Took that vulnerability and turned it into a product. Later, I worked at the Sexual Health Clinic at the Brantford Community Health Centre on Colborne Street East. That was an education, too. Not just the medical side—though that was huge—but the stories. The sixty-year-old man discovering intimacy after a lifetime of repression. The young couple terrified they’d lost the spark. I learned that the spark is a myth. It’s not a thing you find; it’s a thing you build. And you build it with communication, which is just a fancy word for not lying to each other. My own relationships? Messy. A long thing with a woman from Paris—Paris, Ontario, that is—that taught me distance isn’t about kilometers. A few disastrous experiments with polyamory that confirmed, for me at least, that jealousy isn’t something you overcome, it’s something you negotiate. And a quiet, profound connection with someone I met at the farmers’ market on Icomm Drive that lasted three years and ended because… well, because sometimes things just end. You don’t get a neat answer. Brantford is in my bones. Not the postcard version, the real version. I know the difference between the north end and the west end, not as geography, but as states of mind. I know that the best coffee is at the little spot on Dalhousie, the one with the mismatched chairs, and that the best place to think is the bench near the Alexander Graham Bell statue, looking out over the river. The Grand River runs through this city and through me. I’ve kayaked it, I’ve nearly drowned in it (long story, involves a canoe, a six-pack, and a bad decision near the dam), and I’ve sat on its banks a thousand times, trying to untangle my own thoughts. I’ve walked every block of Colborne, from the crumbling industrial bits near the old factories to the gentrified stretches near the university. I’ve watched the Mohawk Chapel stand silent while the city changed around it. I’ve volunteered at the food bank on Murray Street and seen the quiet dignity of people who have nothing. This city taught me that wealth is a buffer, but it’s not a shield. You can’t buy your way out of being human. And that’s really what my whole career has been about—the messiness of being human. Sex, money, love—they’re all just different languages we use to say the same thing: I’m here. See me. Don’t leave me alone. Why stay? Because this is where the story is. This is where I learned to listen. And now, writing for CamoWallet, I’m just telling that story. The story of a city, and the people in it, trying to find something real. Maybe it works. Maybe it doesn’t. But it’s honest.

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