LGBTQ+ People Are Not Going Back: a 46th-anniversary message to politicians
No one is going to drag us back to pseudo-moral uniformity, frightened silence, stigmatizing hate and cultural monotony.
As the world waits like a Yezidi woman stopped at an ISIS roadblock to see what Donald Trump is going to do when he gets into office, Dec. 1 has come around. A significant day — my anniversary. This marks the day my boyfriend (a term we still use in preference to ‘partner,’ which gets trotted out for official purposes) and I got together at a lesbian/gay university students’ dance in 1978, and he called a cab to take us on the 30-minute drive back to his apartment so that we wouldn’t have to spend an hour on the city bus. Life doesn’t get more romantic than that. Goes without saying that since then we’ve stuck together “like glue on glue,” to borrow a line from Kim Mitchell’s song ‘Patio Lanterns.’
If you did the math there, or read the subtitle, you’d see it’s been 46 years. I just realized that that’s longer than my parents got to be together, since my dad died in an untimely motorbike mishap at age 62. Mom and dad always seemed to be a forever thing, but now we’re apparently more forever, at least here below. Irresistible forces and immovable objects at the same time.
We celebrated by going out to our local Japanese restaurant for 350 ml of hot sake and a panoply of kappa maki, karaage, miso soup, and sea urchin bibimbap — yes, Toronto is so diverse that the Japanese restaurants feature some Japanized Korean dishes.
At one point I said to Ross, “if you’d told me at age 16 that in 52 years, I’d be celebrating my 46th anniversary with my boyfriend over bibimbap and sake in Toronto, I’d be looking at you like you were an alien! But the word ‘boyfriend’ would sound encouraging.”
Somehow, in my early life as a completely closeted young gay boy in a small town in western Canada, I’d always maintained an eerie optimism that I could somehow pull things together and make a life. But I didn’t know how to meet someone of my own sexual orientation, except perhaps by writing to a stranger’s post office box far off in the big city (there were classified ads in a widely distributed entertainment rag), and my cultural experience was pretty white-bread. I was a xenophile, though, and a rock-and-roller in my spare time, so I was always outward bound. I wouldn’t know what bibimbap was until I went to Korea decades later, but I’d made it as far as eating lychees imported by a local department store. Even sushi was completely unknown in my home town at the time; probably our local Japanese families, all highly anglicized after their WWII internment histories, had as little experience of it as we did. The World Book encyclopedia did mention that the Japanese ate raw fish, so avid readers like me knew that much.
Decades have rolled along since then like the mighty Fraser River in full swell. And I’ve done my bit to roll them along, braving the hate to post gay dance posters at the University of British Columbia in 1976, and later writing some comedy in LGBT magazines to keep our revolution/evolution merry and in good perspective. On the other side of my life, I’ve dug right in to a series of scientific problems, and have been at the forefront of ensuring that people who contracted fungal diseases got a proper and speedy diagnosis. For a long decade, many of the people who needed that service were people with AIDS, before modern antivirals were discovered. I also helped keep our community healthy by writing some comedy pieces in community newspapers plugging condom use.
The half century I’ve gone through in adult life has had its share of grief, but at the same time, there’s been a vast accumulation of reasons to celebrate.
We all know that there are many people moving into power in the Trump administration who oppose every bit of the diversity my lifespan has exalted. There are people who hate the love of lovers, unless they adhere to a uniform template that specifies reproduction, and who hate the love of all the elements that make life rich even for the not-so-rich: the mix of cultures, the prosperity of wildlife and wilderness, the sanctity of well verified science, the cooperation and judiciously given trust of people who help one another, sometimes at their own expense. The healing largesse of a state-sponsored health care system, the beneficence of a religious institution, like the Metropolitan Community Church of Toronto that I belong to, that blesses same-sex partnerships knowing that to love “your neighbour as yourself is all the law and the prophets.” The precious ability to be authentic even when you’re different, as different as our transgendered, banjo-playing North Carolinian associate pastor, now successfully serving as an alternate mom to her two teenaged kids.
No one, no matter how thugly or ideologically flint-faced, is going to drag us back to pseudo-moral uniformity, frightened silence, stigmatizing hate and cultural monotony. As many sociologists have pointed out, it’s easy to keep people repressed when they have nothing and when they lack hope, but people who’ve seen the bright lights of a proper life are tigers. Remember that well. My dad headed up a Canadian reserve militia unit whose motto is ‘kloshe nannitch,’ ‘always prepared’ in the Chinook lingua franca of the Pacific Northwest. That motto comes to mind now, as I sense that I’ve become a reservist. Kloshe nannitch.
If you find yourself in conflict as you try to implement your theoretically powerful repressions, remember one more thing. Though it will sound weak to you: we’d rather share than fight.
