One of the hardest things to learn is that the world continues.
When John died the physical sensation was all the air leaving the world. I’ve said it every time since, every time I talk about that moment. Because I cannot forget the genuine physical sensation of not being able to breathe.
And I learned he’d died, fifteen minutes from going to visit him in the hospital, in the middle of a store. I still shop there and every time I’m in that aisle I can feel the spot when I walk through it, where I froze and stood and consumed the loss of him.
And the world continued. I was so offended. There were people laughing, still. Talking, still. Moving, still. Breathing, still.
History does this, time does this to us. It continues.
What bothers me is when the new bodies, the new lives, the next things to come along not only doesn’t know what came before but also wants to place that into a small box of unimportant things. I don’t expect them to have memories of John, for instance, and to mourn him.
But I would wish he wouldn’t just vanish as if never having happened.
When I came out to myself, the first step, I was in Dublin Ireland in 1994. At the time Ireland’s community was pretty much analogous to any North American community from say the 1970s.
I once waited for Peter, my very first boyfriend, at the train station. Desperately wishing I could grab and hug him like brothers were doing. Like fathers were doing with sons. But knowing we couldn’t because our hugs were the uncanny valley of hugs. Close to straight but not quite. And we knew someone might notice.
So in the dark ride home in a cab, careful to hide it, we held hands and pretended like we were just friends.
It was a place and time and I was a person that didn’t know what Pride was. I didn’t know what pride was, honestly. I’d been completely wrecked the first time I’d entered a gay pub because a crowded room turned to look at who came into the space. And some, for the very first time in my life, didn’t look away. They showed interest. In me. No one had ever wanted me. Found me interesting. For anything.
I craved that pub like it was the only place my bones were real, the only place in the world my blood would pump. It was home to someone who didn’t realize they’d never had one.
When I came back to Canada my first Pride was in a minivan of a friend and his “husband”. Watching through the rain a straggling, scraggly crew of people wander past. I say “husband” because it wasn’t legal to get married and we were sick of calling our relationships something other. Something less permanent. And it made people flinch.
Good people. People who were friends. The best people. They’d flinch at our husbands. Our relationships. Our not hiding.
I couldn’t understand what I was watching. There were few floats. Not many people. And certainly no screaming crowds. Even when I came back and there was sunlight and no rain, later. That parade, the one people see today, came later.
Between the two, crouched over our story like an apex predator, was AIDS.
This was a time when men would be out one weekend. The next, less so. Then they’d look different. At first you couldn’t tell why. Until you’d seen it so many times that that “I don’t know” became certainty of experience. But it was a shift. A change. And as I said eventually it would be The Sign.
They had It. The It at the edge of every shadow and doorway and empty room.
Their faces would change. Weight would shed like water. They’d transform. I remember thinking that. This was a disease that treated my people like clay and left it’s fingerprints on all of us. Physically first and emotionally later.
But they’d come out less. Then slower. Moving like their bones were broken, their spines cracked and they were just waiting for the pieces to fall apart. That overly cautious awareness that they broadcast. The unspoken don’t stand close, don’t come close, don’t touch.
We knew. Maybe. Certain, kind of. That it wasn’t touch.
But who, whispered fear, wanted to take the chance. And because there was a Them and there was an Us divided by whether or not you had It… they had travelled from an Us to a new one. And that whisper now was coming from inside their skins.
Of course it wasn’t always that way. Some came out and intentionally set fire to all their last days. Burning bright and loud and glorious.
The fingerprints of this disease, left on and in us, also was filled with bright glitter.
The world on one side didn’t want us to be. On the other a disease that wanted us to die. In the middle… we danced.
Gods how we danced. We laughed louder, harder. Quicker. We raced the inevitable. We raced through hours like they were cheap and precious at once. We were awake every hour we could. We loved harder, louder, more often.
I fell in love with every man I had sex with. In some way. We were racing in and out of each other’s lives, for a minute or a day or … sometimes we carried them, like I do John and Michael and Arn and so many others, forward into our version of forever.
Tears, sure. But smiles.
Oh and the fights. Nothing like the drama that was our drama.
In between those two points of drag queens picnicking on the city hall lawn to the crowds and crowds and colours was us.
The floats of men in leather that hung fifty sizes too large because either they had shrunk to skeletons and tendon. Or because they were DPC.
Yeah. We had an acronym for it. Dead People’s Clothes. For my corner of the world DPL. Dead People’s Leather.
When John died his family threw out anything to do with leather. To them, even in 2005, it was still a sign of his being gay. Synonymous. Don’t ever tell the rest of the community that, of course. But for those few in his family it couldn’t stand. Only for some, not all, but the ones who filled dumpsters outside his house. While John’s 1992 Pacific Northwest Drummer Boy winner’s leather vest was snuck to me. It sits in my apartment.
As does other leather. The chaps and the vests and the belts and the hats. The gloves and the jackets and the boots of people who died. The leather they either had stitched or stitched themselves. So we would remember and so they wouldn’t thrown away. They were our monuments and tombstones.
Our photo albums handed down to children we never had.
Families would abandon their dead children to us. Leaving us bones and nothing more. Taking the things they wanted, laws and society supporting them. Destroying anything they didn’t understand or like or both.
Pride was filled with that. The boys near naked with sly grins that promised the rest were available. The women with motorbikes that roared and rattled the neighbourhood. At first. Later they would gather in numbers to rattled the city. But then they roared with breasts out and cigars in some fists and they DARED anyone to try to stop them. To tell them how to be. This was THEIR parade.
We’d literally died for it.
We partied. We’d come in from all corners, shifting the landscape from straight with our enclave in the middle to Our Town with a few straights. For a night or two. For a week.
I remember talking with two men, on dark streets, about men we’d found hot. In loud drunken voices. We didn’t look around or check. We didn’t lower our voices. EVERYONE on the streets were talking about boys and parties and likes and dislikes. We weren’t lowering our voices.
And I stood on a street corner and cried in absolute joy because it was so different. It was ours. A world for a fleeting second with us in it perfectly normal.
I then went and slept with those two men. Laughing at the chaos of it all.
Our community was everyone. We’re human so that means that yes there were fucking assholes. People who didn’t like anyone not their race. People who misgendered people. We weren’t paragons.
I think, in those days, the idea of that perfection would’ve been laughed at. Dismissed. We were messes and we lived our mess. Striving for better didn’t mean perfection.
In a world that felt like it did about us the first time someone very clearly pandered to our dollars by throwing together a group of people to put on a float in the middle of our parade? We had no illusions. They weren’t any more brave than a person that discovers any other untapped market just gagging to spend money. We knew it. They knew it.
But.
It meant this tradeoff. That they were willing to treat us like any other market. Poorly and only for their own benefit. But it was being seen. It was being treated as a real group. And it often meant other people and groups and companies now had to see us. Maybe never market to us, or sell to us, or even like us. But we now were real enough to be… Customers.
Real live people. People that were courted. Marketed to. Noticed.
It’s always made me laugh when people talk about it in our community as if straight customers are treated fairly and equitably and well. They’re pillaged and degraded too, it’s not new when they come to us. It was and is not worse when the customer is gay. It’s just still so new that we keep expecting it to be different.
I’ve watched the parades. From the rain to the radicals that would eventually reveal themselves to be my specific tribe. To the crowds where we became the leather clad thumbs sticking out. As we pushed the queue toward marriage more and more people vocally wanted cleancut. White. Analogs of straight relationships. To throw at cameras and crowds. We caved to someone else’s value for respectability.
We have always fought about drag queens and leathermen and nakedness at our parades. Because those issues are never new.
Just the faces. Always the new faces.
Around those parades the drag queens AND the leathermen threw parties. Raised money. Started activist groups. Founded them. Funded them. We weren’t natural enemies.
As a proud leatherman I can tell you that I was essentially raised as a new gay man by drag queens. My very first memory of Vancouver’s gay ghetto was a man at a table by the side of the street getting attacked by what looked like a random stranger. And a six foot, if an inch, tall black drag queen calmly slipping off a high heel and then beating the ever living daylights out of the attacker while growling “You. Do. Not. Hit. My. People.”
We were targets. And we knew we were targets. Drag queens and leathermen stand out. The words, the rocks, the bottles, the fists came flying at us first. We weren’t taken by surprise. We weren’t shocked to discover this.
We knew.
And still here we were.
And still here we are.
Pride is commercial. It’s not about activism.
But here’s the thing.
25 year old me standing alone with the first two gay people I’d met in Vancouver, in the rain? Wasn’t aware of what activism was. I didn’t have a placard. I didn’t see any. I wouldn’t have know what to do or think with activism.
But I benefitted from that activism.
Because standing in the rain, soaking wet, I cried. At the time I couldn’t have told you, I asked myself over and over why I was. What was happening.
Pride was about this one thing. And it didn’t matter if it was served up with a side of Pepsi and Home Depot or with floats falling apart from being slapped together by hung over queens ten minutes before.
It was not being alone. There were so many different kinds of people to be. It was your birthday and Christmas and all the holidays with gifts. You didn’t know what you’d get. You didn’t know what you wanted. But…
You had choices. And there were other people.
Some years I don’t go. Some years I do. But I can tell you. Every time? Today, tomorrow, always. I can guarantee you I will see what I have always seen.
That one face. That one face in the crowd.
Finding home.
dededos
prguitarman
2087
vaporwave
titsay
