“What is remembered, lives“
I Came Out in 1978. Before I turned 25 what we now know as hiv/aids erupted in gay communities across North America- and elsewhere. Large swaths of my generation (and others) passed on no, were sacrificed. They died. Often horrible, painful, deaths. Too often unloved and rejected by their families of birth. I mourn them all- even as individual voices, faces and names fade from my memory. Every time I return to Toronto I stop, at least once, at the Aids Memorial pictured here.
There are no words to express the deep depression, fear, and righteous anger- at the disease, the official lack-of response, at whatever Creator allowed this. While PTSD may be over-used, too casually claimed, I have no doubt it is what we who survived came away with.
My life quickly became focused on serving, however I could, my dying community. Being a volunteer on GYT Gay Youth Toronto’s peer counseling phone line, work as a fully-professed member of the Toronto Order of Perpetual Indulgence, fundraising for various non-profits through the Mr Leather Toronto (MLT) competitions, sitting with patients at Casey Aids Hospice, living the message of sex positivity (safely) were all supported by retail jobs and time as staff at one of Toronto’s gay mens bath houses (a few years after the raids).
So, while a diagnosis of ‘HIV Positive’ today is (at least in much of the ‘first world’) far from the death sentence it was in the 1980s and ’90s, I can not let this day go by without stopping, remembering, and crying.
Most of the above text is from Living Past Sixty- Big Deal? from 2020.