It was a sweaty summer afternoon in Toronto nine years
ago. July sunshine blazed through the open window of
Robert's fourth-floor room at the Wellesley Hospital, which
has since been shut down, along with dozens of others
across Ontario.guybabineau.com
home / about / channel surfing in the sea of happiness / contact
Four Funerals and a Wedding by Guy Babineau
"I've figured it out," he said. He leaned into me and whispered conspiratorially, "What it's all about."
The air was still. There was no air-conditioning, but intermittently, an oscillating fan delivered delicious waves of relief. Down on the street, pedestrians and traffic moved as if in a trance, fettered by humidity and anemic with heat. His eyes in a morphine daze, Robert wafted a scrawny arm across the view of downtown skyscrapers, most of them bank buildings.
“It's all a science-fiction novel!” he announced proudly, in the manner of a master spy who has just cracked a code.
I patted him gently on the back, humouring him with a smile. This was a few days before Robert died at the age of 30, two years before "cocktails" of protease inhibitors and antiretrovirals were unveiled at the 1996 11th International AIDS Conference in Vancouver, offering a lifeline to people in his condition, for a time. Sadly, lifelines have a way of snapping. I barely recognized my close friend. A PhD candidate in Russian literature, he was fluent in four languages. Usually, his gentle, soft-spoken manner belied an eviscerating wit and begrudging romanticism, but now his sharp intellect was tied to a stone and sinking fast. His always-thin body was thinner still, a cubist jumble of bony angles protruding from a blue hospital gown.
I was tired and pissed-off, but hid it. That morning at 5 a.m., I'd dragged my ass out of bed after he'd phoned asking me to bring him a Popsicle. When I got to the hospital, he'd asked what I was doing there and hadn't wanted it. Later, when I returned during a work break, he seemed to think that I was a prince entering the court and that he was a courtesan. Curtseying awkwardly--he could barely stand--he called me "sir" and "lord". My background in theatre came in handy, and I improvised.
Just days before, Robert's older brother, Victor, had died of AIDS. To say that their religious parents were not handling things well would be an understatement. I was part of a group of friends playing the role families do if they show up.
During the funeral service, the priest said words to the effect that God was with Robert when he passed away and didn't judge him for the choices he had made, which made sense. If you've created the universe, you're bound to be open-minded. Nonetheless, I held Robert's frightened hand a few minutes before he died, not God. I was watching over him with friends when his life ended. Don't you hate it when you do all the work and someone else takes all the credit? There ought to be a union.
AFTER ALL THOSE FUNERALS, a same-sex wedding or two might be nice. And such a cinch to plan. The chapel and caterer are on speed dial, and I'm almost positive I have a tape stashed away somewhere in a drawer, already cued to "The Wind Beneath My Wings". I can't wait for the stag party, but I myself have no desire to slip on a banana peel and go for a ride. For me, death, not marriage, has proved to be the ultimate test of commitment. AIDS informed my sexual politics more than desire ever did. I'm glad that the small number of gay men and lesbians in Canada who want to wed may now enjoy legal recognition. Their traditionalism may be just what the doctor ordered, a booster shot for the failing institution. But when the big toss comes, you won't see me lurching for the bouquet. I'm taken.
I'm not HIV-positive, yet 21 years since our first encounter, my relationship with AIDS continues. Nothing says fidelity like a complex virus. It's a model of compromise and adaptability. Lately, we've let down our guard, and its fatal attraction threatens to turn the clock back to 1983, when Canada's first official AIDS service organization (ASO), AIDS Vancouver, was founded during Gay Pride. British Columbians living with HIV/AIDS face renewed adversity. Lives are still at risk, while provincial funding for strained- to-the-max health service organizations is being "restructured", straining them even more.
Access to a range of crucial drugs, treatments, and alternative therapies has been cut. Thousands of unwell people with compromised immune systems, whom stress can kill, are forced to puzzle through paperwork mazes to attain substandard levels of food, clothing, and shelter. Others suffer the anxiety and ignominy of pounding the pavement for subsistence-level jobs, or part-time jobs without benefits, which they'll likely never get and probably couldn't maintain even if they did. Respite beds for people with AIDS at St. Paul's Hospital, and numerous other support programs once offered by other ASOs have been shut down. Funding for communications initiatives that promote health education, and development funding that helps raise money for additional resources, could be in jeopardy.
Volunteers are burned-out and dwindling in number. Underpaid, underappreciated, overworked, AIDS workers stay on out of a remarkable sense of commitment, even though they face daily the distress of newly diagnosed individuals who are usually shocked to find out how limited their resources really are.
Meanwhile, HIV and other STDs are once more on the rise, "cocktails" (which were only ever stopgaps at best) are starting to fail, and, according to new reports from Europe, drug-resistant strains of HIV are starting to show up among new cases.
"It's all a science-fiction novel!"
Thirty years since I came out in 1973, the summer I turned 15, I'm inclined to agree. If someone had given me a glimpse of the future back then, some things would have seemed comprehensible, even derivative, like a Liberal prime minister from Quebec at odds with a Republican White House pursuing a hotly debated military occupation in a foreign country, and people walking around talking into Star Trek Communicators. Others would have seemed incomprehensible, like the cultural obsession with talking about money, which, when I grew up, was considered vulgar, and a deadly disease transmitted by sex. At 15, you expect the world to make sense. Not at 45. These days, when I wake up in the morning, I'm never quite sure what to expect. Nineteen Eighty-Four, Brave New World, or Lord of the Flies? Fahrenheit 451, A Clockwork Orange, or The Handmaid's Tale? The Stand?
When I was a teenager, gay politics was white noise drowned out by disco. I just wanted to hold my first boyfriend's hand in public without being beaten up. Barry was cute, smart, and, at 20, an older man. We'd met at a ramshackle house on West 4th Avenue during the twilight of Kitsilano's hippie heyday. Mondo Homo, as it was nicknamed, was a hangout for drug dealers, rock musicians, queens, and gay teenagers who, unlike me, were runaways. I felt like a tourist in a Lou Reed song. No one had "lured" me there. I was not the victim of some sort of homosexual press gang (except in my fantasies). At 14, I'd known how I felt and, after reading some books from the school library, I'd sought out other gay people. Literature, not pedophilia, was my mentor. Like millions who swear by the Bible and Koran, I'm hardly unique in being swayed by the word.
I didn't have to travel far to find my kind. Well before New York's Stonewall riots in 1969 and Canada's decriminalization of homosexuality the same year, the West End was home to a sizable queer population, and by '73, half a dozen gay bars lined Granville and Seymour streets. Although the gay and lesbian community in Vancouver was--and still is--more social than ideological, political organizations began to form as early as 1964, when the Association for Social Knowledge published its first newsletter. However, gays here and across the country were typically Canadian, favouring negotiation over American- style, in-your-face marches and lobbying. For the most part, the gay community was a sanctuary from bigotry. We were safe in our bars, bathhouses, and bedrooms. Or so we thought.
In 1970, ASK was superseded by the Vancouver Gay Liberation Front, and in the mid '70s by the Gay Alliance Towards Equality, which attracted the involvement of Glen Hillson, a union activist. Years later, in 1998, Hillson became chair of the British Columbia Persons With Aids society, another grassroots organization formed, in 1986, to act independently of AIDS Vancouver as a specific voice for PWAs. Hillson, who died from AIDS-related complications on June 12, was a tireless advocate with an international reputation. I didn't know him, but I interviewed him once for an article and liked him. He had the same keen mind, passion, and no-bullshit attitude as so many other memorable gay and AIDS activists have had.
Mind you, these people rarely referred to Miss Manners. The late Harry Hay, who formed America's first gay-rights group in 1950, the Mattachine Society, and died last year at the age of 90, comes to mind. So does Larry Kramer, an American screenwriter (Women in Love), novelist (Faggots), and playwright (The Normal Heart). In 1981, he helped form the world's first community-based AIDS organization, New York City's Gay Men's Health Crisis. It marked the beginning of a historical grassroots health campaign, one that sprang from the gay-rights movement and set a precedent for average citizens to take control of the fate of their own bodies by becoming informed and self-sufficient. For the first time, citizens told governments and the medical establishment what needed doing, and persuaded them to do it by smashing through a wall of prejudice.
Early in 1983, a group of local gay men who were concerned about Vancouver's burgeoning AIDS cases invited a speaker from GMHC to attend one of their meetings, which led to the inception of AIDS Vancouver. A regular attendee at these formative meetings was Gaetan Dugas, an Air Canada flight attendant with AIDS who spent his last years in Vancouver. Dugas was demonized as so-called Patient Zero in Randy Shilts's And the Band Played On. Years later, after Shilts himself died, the book's editor confessed to me in an interview that the Dugas story had been a setup, a publicity gimmick. Blame sells and so do monsters. In truth, Patient Zero amounts to little more than an urban myth.
I didn't get involved in gay political circles until the late '80s, after my first HIV test. While much of the above was going on, I was pretty much oblivious. I was too busy being boy-crazy. Barry and I were together, on and off as we occasionally dated others, for a couple of years. He then started seeing a kid called Mark, with whom I became friends until he departed to study filmmaking in Montreal. I eventually lost touch with Barry, too. Years later, I found out that both Barry and Mark had died of AIDS. Mark, whose last name was Leslie, had apparently become an artist and writer. He left behind a book of photographs and text published exactly 10 years ago this month, entitled Dying With AIDS: Living With AIDS.
BESIDES ROBERT, Barry, and Mark, there are dozens of others I could mention, but it's my best friend, Allan, I miss most. We met when I was 17. An accomplished craftsperson and tailor, he worked as a costume cutter in professional theatres here and in Calgary. He was a bit of a screamer, with a line for every occasion. Once, when he was prancing through a downtown Calgary park on his way to a fitting with a dress slung over his shoulder, earrings and bangles jangling, someone among a group of gay sunbathers yelled, "We know what you are!" "That's right, darling," Allan shouted back, "dressmaker to the stars!"
Allan was my only gay friend so far to have a union ceremony, with his partner, John. I was a ring bearer, which beats the hell out of being a pallbearer, let me tell you.
After Allan died in Calgary in 1997, he was cremated. John and a close friend, Judith, brought his ashes to the coast. Joined by another close friend, Nettie, we travelled to the top of Mount Maxwell on Salt Spring Island to scatter them, as he had wished. We found a spot at the top of a sheer cliff overlooking the Gulf Islands. Unfortunately, there was a back draft. As each of us took a handful of Allan and tossed him to the wind, we ended up covered in his ashes. We lost it, and our eyes welled with tears of laughter.
"Isn't that just like Allan," said Nettie, grinning. "You could never get him to leave a party."
I'm not superstitious. I don't believe in ghosts and angels. But people do live on, in memory and imagination, giving us, sometimes, a sense of purpose. I will not allow my friends to have died in vain. I'm dusting off their legacy, and wearing it with pride on Pride Day.
Cover story published in The Georgia Straight, Canada's largest independent weekly © Guy Babineau 2003-2004
< home