HIV-PTSD

We all wore the long black woollen winter coats on campus in those days. It was our only defence. The damn vertical wind blew right off Lake Huron, across hundreds of miles of frozen prime Southern Ontario farmland, right into the University of Waterloo campus. A late Xmas gift for the start of Term 2 second year in 1984.

That year wasn’t quite as draconian as the novel, but then, there were calls from the Southern Ladies with their Nancy Regan pompadours and their strident preacher crony TV evangelists:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_Say_No

“We should put them ALL on an island before they infect us!” I changed the channel of the large TV in my Village 2 Residence dorm room to Much Music; our Canadian clone of MTV. Watched an old Rush video of Tom Sawyer play out its weird Lydian Dominant strains.

Then the AIDS commercial:

Grim Repeat. Frightening voice over. Graphics.AIDS the Silent Killer. Protect Yourself.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJ9f378T49E

How?I thought.Abstain? Remain a virgin for life?

Except for a blow job from this cool “chick” from Lucas Secondary in a high school field one summer night when I was 16. Or that time I reached down into Lynda’s pants after we fed the horses at Circle R Ranch at age 17. Both times exciting physically. Awkward with bodily fluid discovery and subsequent clean up. But completely emotionally detached.

I was doing pretty well on the virgin front. Thoughtthis is a gay disease anyway.

In fact, in senior secondary I had a well established rep as a “consummate gentleman”. Probably because I had gotten naked with the very cool Libby and asked her to “suck”, to which she shut it down saying “I’m not ready for you yet”. After which she completely shut me off from her upper middle class (ie. Rich to my just middle class) London Ontario (the forest city) life.

Such a shame; her awesome guitarist older brother, Douggie, looked very hawt as we watched him play Aerosmith note for note. His muscles would flex as he fretted those leads and barre chords. Anyway, I never made a move on a girl again. But I guess I was skinny cute enough for some of the “bad girls” to make moves on me.

That was years ago. 1979. Now it’s ’84. Aerosmith was out; Talking Heads and abstinence were in. As First Lady Nancy Regan preached “Just Say No”. https://www.history.com/topics/1980s/just-say-no

As for Ronnie Regan. He didn’t mention AIDS or HIV until about 1987. A guy named Randy Schilts wrote a bitter, angry book about the neglect of the AIDS crisis in the early years called And the Band Played on.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_the_Band_Played_On

I had just come home from choir at the campus Catholic Chapel that winter morning. Adding my five years of honed guitar drills to the glorious mix of voices at folk mass. Man these people weren’t just leading the congregation: it was a studio show; repleat with freshly married men in their narrow ties and trendy shirts right outta Miami Vice’s Ocean Pacific outlet. Clothes and Swatch brands I almost modelled the next summer with my trendy brown Bowiesque blow wave hair.

A look which Marie, a Stratford town woman of 24 years, made sure I knew she liked. For three years; until she took away my virginity in fourth year; when I finally relented. As a test. To prove that my crushes on Jeremy, Ricky, and Hugh were only that; just bromantic crushes. Only that didn’t work. By 1998 I was out on Church Wellesley cruising and dancing the bars with the rest of the boyz.

So I had, as we all do, left my cubicle single dorm room open. It was right beside the TV room afterall. I walked in my room to get hair gel or something. Time to go to the library and study.

Laughter from my bed. Three dorm mates lying under my bed sheets! Fully clothed. Hooting with that good old Waterloo Engineer raucous laughter.

“Hey Catholic boy. Come and get us”.

I don’t know why. They had been talking sexy to me for a while. Noish was the first Muslim Pakistani man I had ever met who was a total horn dog who said “I like vagina so much; ever since I spent nine months in my mother’s, I’ve been spending my life trying to get back in.” I assumed, unsuccessfully, because he was lazy. I would rouse him out of bed at 1PPm before I went to class with the U2 album War.

So he lay there giggling. Little Tommy beside him and Scott beside him.

“So I’m fucking goldilocks now?” I said. A bit annoyed that I was the butt of a homo prank. (Why me exactly?) I jumped on top of them (of course) seeing if they would bolt (or not?). Tommy and Niosh scattered when I said “out”. Laughing down the hallway back to their engineering books.

Good thing for Tommy. During December exams I spent an entire night looking into his hollow eyes, massaging his back as he kept repeating, open text in lap, “I’m going to fail”. Our exams were next morning. Mine Biology. His Chemical Engineering. We both passed. Barely. But this was an all-nighter. Me quizzing Tommy about some weird Physics and he asking me about the asexual reproduction of Helminth worms. As I stared into those deep raccoon eyes under that fringe of whisky powder blonde hair, I thought “I’m going to stay with this stressed out boy all night and save him”. Ten years later, when I saw McCauley Kulkin in Party Monster as Michael Olig (?), butt naked save for an apron, I thought of Tommy. Though in 84 Kulkin was 10 and Tommy was well 21 then, very stressed, and I, very Catholicoholically repressed.

Scott remained in my bed that day. He wasn’t moving. So I slid in beside him. Pretty brave because he teased my the hardest in that TV room. Slowly, in front of the guys, reaching out his hand across the chair, slowly toward my crotch - as we watched Star Trek reruns- until at the last minute I grabbed his hand and pushed away. All the guys there chuckling and me saying the obligatory “you’re such a fag Scott”.

Of course Scott had his heterosexual cred. Every weekend his very cool girlfriend Claire would spend the night. He would first don on his ruby red leather pants to match her red leather skirt and they’d go out to dinner. Sometimes we joined them later at one of those trendy Waterloo clubs playing all of the newest New Wave. Scott and Claire were avid Pretenders fans. From the days when Chrissy would sing

“I shot my mouth off and you showed me what that hole was for”.

So this was a very Protestant liberated couple. {I later figured out they were probably my first kinky friends} Scott was also a very hardcore studier. A Math major. I followed him like a puppy to the Library cube to study one carol from him for hours. He basically saved my grades. I went from B- to A+ in that term alone. As long as he stayed in the library. So would I. {years later I learned from some site called hookup.com or something that a lot of young men studied in the library, and spent a lot of time in those washrooms; for much different reasons than books}

“The secret Charlie, is work hard; party hard: but get yer work done first” East for him to say as he got laid every Saturday night by a very trendy Arts major girlfriend. (She became one of Southern Ontarios prominent psychologists - yes they married eventually; not necessarily monogamously).

Studying soon turned to me lounging on his bed listening to the guitar strains of James Honeyman Scott melding New York punk with British New Wave. One time I tried to coyly ask him “how is it with Claire”. He grinned ear to ear saying “you want to know that badly you perv; then come and join us”. I’m sure I blushed. “Of course you’d only be fucked by myself - she’s all mine”. That endedthatdiscussion. But not a lot of subsequent fantasy - of only his face - for the rest of the year. Did I put a glass up to the wall between us. Probably, but it was cinder block thick. My matress. Cut open and destroyed. A trick I learned at age 13.

This afternoon, Scott’s in my bed. I move in. He cuddles right up to me. I flinch. Breathing quickened. Afraid of giving away that I was totally in love with this man who looked like Brian Adams did back then; facial acne scars and all - they both wore it proud and hot.

Scott cuddled me for almost a half hour. He said to me at one point, “just go with it.” I had no idea what that actually meant. He had a trendy dominatrix girlfriend afterall.

Understand. I was essentially an only child. My sister, Andrea, institutionalized when I was 11 for degenerative San Filipo Syndrome, a degenerative monoglucosacharride deficiency, genetically inherited (I’m a carrier). She died in an institution called Cedar Springs when I was 18. Right during secondary final exams. I cried hard to the folk mass Jesuit Gospel tune Bathe Her in Your Love sang by a late family friend who’s kids I used to baby sit. One of them is now a prominent trans FtoM activist in Toronto. Fuck you Dave Chapel.

Scott had a cool little bro. They cuddled every time little bro visited campus from Toronto. Scotty didn’t care. Little bro was model cute. And very effeminate. But Ben wouldn’t late Jakey be teased about it. Pain of a nipple twist to any of us who said anything. And those hurt from Scott, and more from Jakey, who seemed to really enjoy dishing out pain more than Scotty teased.

So here Scott was stroking my shoulders, in my bed, and he said:

“I know this party for guys who live an alternative lifestyle, going down tonight at my buddies’ place”

“What the holy fuck is ‘an alternative lifestyle,’” I laughed.

“You won’t find out if you don’t go”, Scott quipped.

“Come with?..”

“He’ll no, Claire’s coming over!”

He then actually started to grind on me. “I’m busy tonight baby”.

I tried to wrestle away. Scott wrestled me back. Grinded anew. Laughing delightedly at my discomfort. Little fucker was strong - all that bro wresting I guessed. I started to get, ah, physically “uncomfortable”. Think of Jakey and Scott wrestling was getting weirdly erotic. Scott just met that with his wickedly knowing, scarily dominating, eyes. Such a tease. (And too much big bro for me to handle)

I pushed out; good old internal homophobia rising up.

“Go study, you faggot,” I quipped.

I walked out leaving him gawking at me in mock shock. Though, he wasn’t at as fooled by my displays of overt heterosexuality as I was.

I went to that party later. With Marie from choir. A mock date. All kinds of guys there in long black coats. I made a note to buy one. In three years from then, rock band Glass Tiger (Don’t Forget Me when You’re Gone) would make them famous - and far more expensive.

Of course these lads knew that “little dom tease” Scott. But he was considered “conventional”. They on the other hand were “alternative”. I think I figured it out.

One of them was Jamie. Oh my god he was the brother of my first year (platonic) girl friend Madeline from my Environmental Studies major. Marie was ignored as Jamie and I cuddled. In our black goth clothes on the hosts’ bed. Marie was miffed. Jamie had a blonde blow wave hair style. I was enthralled. He let me run my slightly wine drunk hand through it. Marie was annoyed, and concerned. I thought I was looking into the eyes of my hero David Bowie.

I found out that night that many of the guys there were “alternative lifestyle”. (They didn’t say gay in Waterloo in ’84, even at a uni with 75% male population) . They were affectionate but there was this weird tension there that night where they didn’t show too much affection.Part of some “alternative lifestyle secret”I thought. They gathered around Jamie and I sensing our immediate bro bonding, they kinda dismissed as trivial because I was his older sister’s ex boyfriend. But they were veryinterestedin it.

I saw Jamie just occasionally over the next couple of years. Polite, elusive as a cat. He had a sardonic wit to him. His favourite expression was “life’s a bitch and then you die”. In fact, I think I remember all the “alternative boys” laughing out that expression at that house party when I first heard it.

The weekend after the alt party, I drove across the winter white out barren, dead farm land from Waterloo, via Stratford, to London Ontario to see my folks.

My mom sat me down at the kitchen table. For years when I was in elementary and junior high she would drive in her red pinto as a Victorian Order Nurse (VON) to administer dressings to farmers and biker gang members who lived on farms north of London. By 84, she was the manager of the London/Middlesex Country Health Unit. She managed five unions. All without having finished her Masters degree. She had taken two years as an adult learner at UofT when I was in grade 9 and 10. She lived in a dorm with all these “baby nursing girls.” Mom had graduated from Hotel Dieu in Kingston. Taught by the nuns, these nursing grads were the pragmatic salt of the earth. When my mom took care of the toughest teens in the neighborhood - for her bridge friends on vacay - she would look at them and say “nowlook" and lay down “the law”. For example. Arrive home 10 minutes after curfew, she has locked you out and called the cops. She told me once, “you don’t like my rules, go live downtown with the druggies on Dundas Street.” I followed her pretty reasonable rules. Tough Irish, Catholic love was still fiercely devoted love. Or else.

After my sister died, and I moved away to University. It was a different relationship. She got me this yellow Honda jalopy. I drove it all over Southern Ontario, rattling in any strong wind in the summer when I worked in the Muskokas as a painter/camp counselor. I visited them every other weekend. Like clock work. During the school year. Sparking two wired together under the hood if it froze up in the harsh winter cold. And she worried. She had lost one child. She wasn’t going to damn well lose another. But she couldn’t control or protect me anymore either.

“Have you heard off this AIDS thing going around,” she asked, abruptly, after Saturday dinner. {My Dad was off getting annoyed with the Parish council. He was the moderate liberal chair. The rest were ultra orthodox right wing Northern Europeans of some sort that he hated. My dad, an ex Canadian Armed Forces military peace-keeping veteran- has been hating President Donald Trump for years now, as the “next Hitler” and currently hates Pierre Polliviere}

“Yeah I’ve seen the terror commercials, mom. Some disease killing gay guys in America?.” I wondered where she was going with this.

“No Charles, not just gays or blacks in Haiti or hemophilia patients. That’s just prejudice garbage. The health folks in Toronto think it’s a virus. Sexually transmitted.”

“Especially with multiple partners,” she continued ominously, “Not strictly monogamous. I hear from my Toronto colleagues about young men with a constant cough and nasal drip in the Toronto subways. Young working office guys commuting to work. But half sick. Not healthy at all. Very,verythin.”

“Holy Jeez...in Toronto even?” She knew that I wasn’t as naive as I sounded.

I gave her some validation. “I saw an article from a guy at Waterloo Imprint,” which I wrote for occasionally, “talking about how he has a swollen neck for months and think he has this new GRID thing”.

“GRID, gay related... is bullshit. We knowanybody can get it, through body fluid, intimately. Spread by anyone, um, sexually active.” She said sexually like a pious nun but I knew that, having a surgical procedure to prevent “another Andrea” along with my dad; my mother was not a pre-Vatican II conservative Catholic. Even though she used to vote red Tory.

“ANYone...damn,” I was getting my reality dose in spades here.

“And, reports from Western campus of ‘ordinary’ {her tone indicated the quotes as someone else’s bias from the office talk} heterosexual but ‘promiscuous’ kids getting sick... but anyone can get sick.”

“UWO...in our London!?” I breathed. My mind reeling that a New York City / Toronto thing could actually travel two hours West, for some stupid, naive reason.

She glared with concern at me. Not knowing how “active” I was save for being a Catholic boy with a couple of girlfriends.

I had told my father once how my Jamie’s sister, Madeline, my “girlfriend’ now buddy, from first year seemed frigid. He explained to me how some women (turned out his own sister, my aunt) “preferred other women and you might be just a beard”. He had to explain the old-school beard concept to me - assuming, ironically, that I was the bearded foil, and not Madeline. He had also warned me once to tell Marie from choir that we are Catholic and not have intercourse until marriage. I didn’t tell him that Marie was like most modern catholic young women and used condoms. He would just wouldn’t have it back then. Though going against Catholic doctrine to prevent another mentally retarded child and advocating for recently divorced friends new marriages to be allowed by the RC churchwasa crusade he was fully on.

With my mom’s warning firmly in mind, I went back to my Waterloo dorm, then called Village 2. found Scott lounging in the TV room with Claire. Both of their leather garb looking tired and worn from a night of hard clubbing.

I said, “you guys know my mom’s a health manager right...she told me ANYbody can get this AIDS thing. Fuck me.”

They sat there silent for a moment. Then Claire said. “Mostly a gay disease though. If you are in a solid couple. You’re mostly fine.” She shrugged. Scott didn’t. His face was a stone.

She left. Scott came by later. Threw a couple of condoms on my bed. Black packaging that I had never seen in London Ontario drug stores. Trojan Black Horses that Prince dared sing about on Much;Little Red Corvette.

Another tune with one of his lyrics about a “disease with a little name...” (sign o’ the Times) came to me. “It’s June,” I thought.

“We use these...” Ben said wistfully. Point at them. Shiny and new.

“Sorry I don’t mean to pry...”

Ben’s face broke into a mischievous smile. He pointed at the condoms. “Better learn how to use these Catholic boy! Life is risky!”

I had no idea then whether he was talking about evading pregnancy or AIDS. It didn’t occur to me as protection from HIV, we didn’t know that name until 1995. We were probably thinking about routine STDs. But now I was wondering if these things could protect against a killer like “GRID” if it wasn’t as my mom insisted “not gay related anything”.

“Yeah” I said “life’s a bitch...”

“...then you die.” Scott’s knowing eyes again. He had been informed of my party cuddling at his friends place, obviously. Just bros connecting at a deeper level at a campus berefit of girls. Very unlike Western. Where AIDS was starting to stalk very actively heterosexual “normal” students? I couldn’t wrap my mind around it emotionally. My Ecology/ Biology major mind was already doing the dire statistics on this. ”Fucking everyone is going to get this thing; except the nuns...”

A month later, the student union Bent Entertainment put on an “alternative wave” dance at Federation Hall. The DJ played all of these new incredible euro electronica bands like Joy Division and OMD; Talk Talk.. .The bands and DJs that made the new Fed Hall the most trendy concert dance space in all of Ontario at the time. I saw Blue Peter and a very young Brian Adams there live. Adams was only about 24 when he played there and brought the house down. He was also very hawt. In an esthetic way of course!

I saw Jamie on the floor dancing suave and cool to a track by a new band called Frankie Goes to Hollywood. He was dressed long in a black trench coat. His blond Bowie locks shimmered in the lazer light.

“Relax Don’t do it; when you want to suck to it”, Frankie (actually Holly Johnson, one of the longest AIDS survivors on Earth as I write this) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holly_Johnson

I looked around the swirling dark disco lights of Fed Hall. Reflecting Waterloo shades of goth black, slashed by red lazer light. Bent Entertainment knew how to throw Toronto attitude. This wasn’t the staid jockish white walled lettermen preppy town of U of Western. This was UWO. Where according to mom Nurse Pat: Nobody sexually active was safe anymore. But it seemed like the ’alternative boys” judging from their distance at the party - were NOT sexually active. Except,that guy who talked to Imprint was probably know to my new “alt friends”my fledgling journalist mind went on as I danced my weird post punk strides.

As I danced in the laser light, I remembered listing on my red shag carpet to a Pink Floyd song, tuned in from Fanshawe College radio on one of these new FM radio stations in 1979. The Wall album was dark and unnerving. So in the typical artsy, soothing FM DJ tones of the day the DJ wistfully said as Mother faded:

“There’s some weird news out of New York. This strange virus called cytomegla virus.., or something...they just call it CMV for short. It’s like a herpes but it’s totally incurable and it causes this kind of fatal pneumonia. People are dying from it. Folks; the age of get your penicillin and get it cured seems to be gone”.

The DJ then went and played the very weird song “Did you Steal My Money” by the Who from the Face Dances album.

The track in Fed hall now was called Two Tribes by Frankie again. I was quite the opposite from relaxed by this flash back. (...Then You Die)

Then another band came on with “you spin me round” and Jamie turned, flowed to the beat. He was like the Jetson’s future cume erotic synthwave real live life.. His thin Bowie face just that bit unattainable as he slowly twirled, his hips gyrating with a subtle invitation to something I could barely admit to thinking about; when I let myself, late late at night as I listened to Remember by the Mississauga post punk band the Kinetic Ideals.

I saw a future world so far from Aerosmith jocks and timid sexual fumblings. I was in a new Andromeda. Jamie was a Saturn god of glittering glass tower urban new wave dance exotica. I was like a newer Rush song image of a teen firefly drawn into the urban skyline (Subdivisions). He was in his own independent... alternative world. And I could just taste it...but not touch it.

“Life is... fantastic... then you fly.” I shouted, kinda shyly, at him over the din.

Jamie slyly smirked. He nodded his head ecstatically to the synth drum, his words came clearly to me, almost telepathic. I probably read his lips.

....“then you die...”

One summer after university graduation, three years later, I was visiting his sister, Madeline at her parent’s house. There was Jamie stretched out on a small kitchenette couch. Even then I couldn’t tell Madeline that her brother’s sleeping face looked “angelic”. I had just gotten a job at a Catholic elementary school that Fall after all.

Her face turned to a worried disdain. “Let him sleep. He’s been partying in Toronto way too much - he lives downtown there now. Always tired.... We think he’s in the queer scene maybe.”

I watched him breathe, shallowly, for a minute.

“Yeah, he looks really beat”.

“Smokes way too much now. Sheesh.”

Years later in a Toronto gay club a very thin Jamie danced a few feet away from me in a club called Celebrities. The song was something called “Together Forever” by this really popular Brit idol named Rick Astley. All of us were wearing whitey T’s and denim jeans. Minus sailor hats but with all that ocean sea of men vibe. Hundreds of us.

Jamie was wisened and kinda buff but somehow way too thin in the arms to be buff. His eyes were years older; well we were both almost thirty by then. But there was this “tossed around the block” (an expression I had learned on Church Street). His cig just hung from his leathery hand. He was still fairly cute but now in this pseudo California Beach queen trending look that was going around the aging twinks (late twenty something’s).

Jamie’s recognition was instant. His crinkled eyes were almost saying “so you finally arrived in my scene.” He nodded “hello” and drifted away before I could approach to reminisce, or explain how I had come out. Just beyond the light. He wouldn’t care about all that.

I saw Jamie’s name in the Toronto AIDS memorial five years after that in 1992. (1964-1989).

I taped a white carnation to his name hours later after seeing it on the shiny new metallic surface. Not sure if the flower stuck there. My eyes were too blurry.

Jamie was my first friend lost to the AIDS plague, I think. That I know of. I’ve met many of the Alt guys since at Waterloo Gay Alumni brunches. They were coupled up and thriving. So I was thinking our generation just missed the worst of it.

I would beverywrong. Jamie was the first of about 60 of my friends that I would lose. Not nearly as bad as thehundredsmy ten years older friends had lost; but still very significant.

The AIDS Bitch would be back as a second gen outbreak. And this time it wasmycrew who would suffer and fight.