HIV PTSD



In late 1985 I got an ear infection that would not go away. I was working every summer in the Muskoka’s cleaning up cabins for campers that were coming. That was Spring. In the summer months I would lead short canoe trips for a couple of camps in the area around Huntsville and Ravenscliffe – cottage country. I tanned deeply and ate a lot of bannock. All guys. Some of the camp counselors who went with me were quite cute.

One of them, a very good post punk and rockabilly guitarist named Andrew was also from London Ontario. He insisted that I sleep with him under two canoes. Hesitantly I did.

In the morning I was up and he called me name. I looked back and he was showing me his (rather huge) morning wood. No idea why he waited until the morning but I was too nervous the next night to sleep under the canoes again.

A few months later I used to crash in his dorm on the same large double bed as he at WIlfred Laurier. Nothing happened except long talks into the night.Well that canoe trip was a memorable disaster. Simply because I followed Andrew’s sense of adventure. No, we were not supposed to canoe ANYwhere near the five finger rapids. At his urging we did. My lead canoe, loaded with pots and cooking, overturned in the sudden strong side current. The cooking packs were not tied down and sunk to the bottom of the small lake there.We weren’t supposed to leave the counselor in training with the teen guys alone. We did, because Andy wanted to canoe with me to find a cottage so we could phone the camp and get new posts delivered so that the girls trip could have them.

We were NOT supposed to let the teen guys jump off the cliff above the waterfall. But Andy convinced me – I was pretty mad at his manipulation – to let the guys jump to “relieve the stress of the pots catastrophe. When I got back to the camp out-trip centre I started to feel dizzy. I spent the next two weeks lying in the counselor cabin with ear drops provided from the local clinic a few kilometers away.For the next two years I was off balance.

When I was doing my fourth year university I underwent a series of tests to see if I had something serious. Cat Scans, MRIs, water in the ear. They found nothing and the doctor said it was stress and prescribed me Ativan. Which I stayed on for three years.

My mom said to me. “You are a young man in college with dizzyness they cannot explain. So they are giving you every test in the book. Including to monitor your immune system.” She arched her eyebrow at me. I was pretty shocked. But it made sense, there was no reliable HIV test in 1984. I am not ever sure they called it HIV by then. I think so though. But no reliable test in Southern Ontario at the time.I learned to live with it. I found I could drive and ride my bike very well. I wasn’t falling down dizzy. Just “off tilt”.

I have had other months long episodes in my life. At Saint Paul’s hospital in the year 2011, I was finally diagnosed with a mild form of Meniere’s disease. My mothers grandmother was prone to days in bed spinning from it so...not far from the tree. Luckily for me I respond very well to a medicine called SERC which reduces the amount of fluid in my inner left ear.

Interestingly, most of the years from 1983 to 1988 are a jumbled blur to me. Though I can tell you these few events about my coming out, as I am now; much of everything else, after three years being pretty addicted or dependent on the Ativan, has been well, jumbled up. I don’t remember which year I did what in university. I don’t remember much of the courses and lectures I attended. I can’t remember year to year what I did for work in the summers. Apparently, I slug coffee at the Faculty coffee shop: I vaguely remember it. My first two years of teaching in a small Ontario town. Just a blur what I did at work. My summer trip to SanFrancisco in the summer of 1988 is crystal clear. What I did at the government camp I taught at for the other weeks of that summer. I don’t remember except vaguely having to time out because of dizzy spells. Why I remember these coming out issues and events so much better, I don’t know. Probably because they are connected to my later years when I was still coming out yet off the meds? Not sure. But moving on...

Somehow, along with sleep overs in Andy’s dorm, I managed to finally let Marie, from choir, “catch me” and lose my viriginity. I didn’t tell her it was to find out if after that, my desire to watch guys sleeping and talk long into the night would disippate. I felt awesome and all. Even using a condom as a “good boy scout” as Marie told me. But emotional connection: absolutely NONE. Basically the same as for many girls I knew (I was only a virgin in the technical sense, I had done “everything else” and apparently was good at certain forms of tongue action that the other lads just would not do). This magic loss of virginity turned out to be a real let down. I went to visit the horse back riding camp that I was a counselor at in my teens – where some of those sexual bases were covered on late summer nights with girl counselors – and I met one of my former campers.

Now 20 and working in the winter cross country ski shop. Another sleep over – now with Greg at his Fanshawe College dorm in London Ontario. The city I went to high school in. We talked late into the night in the same single bed which he completely invited me into. He was just the cutest blonde with the same baby fat, just a touch, he had at age 12. But now his voice was low and sultry.

So I brought up the subject with something like, “so what about all this gay lifestyle stuff and them saying they are getting the AIDS thing.” Well, he had the mildest way of being homophobic:

“I’m against gay really. Not only is it not for me, but I don’t agree with the ‘lifestyle’“.

So that was it. We fell asleep and hung out the next day. Just as “bros”.

However, I knew after really liking spending time in bed with him that I was for sure “emotionally alternative.” Virginity did not “cure” this.

Marie would try for a repeat performance but I think I made myself too busy to see her for a couple of months. In that time she hooked up with this trucker guy from Stratford Ontario. Shortly after that she visited me and told me that she had gotten pregnant. He had left her high and try. I was suddenly ready to “take responsibility”, get a job after graduation and take care of the baby because the chances of it being mine were probably as high as with this guy. (Well actually not, he wasn’t a good boy scout).

Another visit after that Marie confided with me that she had “lost the baby” in a miscarriage. I think she was ready to raise it, being an otherwise devout Catholic lady who didn’t believe in abortion as far as I knew. But I didn’t ask. This event was a closure for me. I wanted to move on. I let myself fall out of touch with her for a few years. She did say on one of those visits, somewhat ruefully, upon finding out she was my “first”, “well I think you used me a bit but I can forgive that.”Well, there was no way at that point I was going to tell her that part of that night was me subconsciously testing if I was gay or not.

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Vancouver in 1986 blew me away. I had just graduated from Waterloo University and my parents gave me a train trip present “out West” to see the land of my birth. They flew me to Calgary where I visited my young aunt who is now a 70 year old kind of recluse lesbian. Very compassionate and gentle but one who kind of disappears from extended family for months at a time. At the time she was only one year married to her husband. Both of them stationed at Canadian Forces Base Calgary.

A year later she would up and leave him to live with an older woman in Montreal in what my mom called a “dependency relationship.”

Now, my mom knew lesbian women. In fact my mother’s close priest friend’s (she had many priest friends in the 70s) sister was living with a woman on Kipp’s lane – an infamous apartment block in North London Ontario. They would take care of me when both my mom and dad were away. I have liked and hung out with lesbian women ever since.

So when she said “dependency” she was not being euphemistic or homophobic. She explained actually, “I think we would rather have her be in a romantic relationship, as it would be more equal, but this one sounds like an emotional dependency where your aunt does all the child care and gets some sort of emotional satisfaction out of it.”

I thought, “sounds like me sleeping over with straight men, seemingly, to get emotional satisfaction out of it.”

In the early days, my aunt was fairly troubled and had many episodes of running down the street in winter nights in only a night dress. Finally, she sort of stabilized and came out as the first Queer person in my extended family. Brought her wonderful girlfriend to a family reunion where I came out to her in the early 90s. They broke up a few months later. There were still “issues”. One year she had her double mastectomy photographed in the Toronto Star. She has been a breast cancer survivor for decades now and is quite an activist about it. Let’s just say there was a lot of “drama” with her in my large extended family that pretty much paved the way for myself and my dad’s cousin who is just a year older than me. (I crushed on that cousin hard when we were 13, but that is another story).

So after that Calgary visit I flew on a small prop plane to Vancouver to stay for a week with my friend Bob. Another week of lying in the same room with a very gentle, handsome, light talking guy from my Faculty. His legs were so thick from his summer job Rickshaw running. He had black curly hair and very peaceful smile, sparkling black eyes, and a raspy soft voice. It was April and the magnolias were in full bloom. Canada Place was open as a pre-world Expo 86 so we toured that. I felt like I was touring the city with my new boyfriend. I was dressed in pastel greens and yellow pants with my Ocean pacific shirts that were Miami Vice trendy at the time. The sea air would puff up my hair. I was some trendy kid. The skid row guys who had just been massively displaced to make room for the Expo lands used to curse us out on the bus and call me “such a faggot.” I didn’t care because I felt like I owned this new shiny city. We did the Vancouver Peace March across the Cambie Bridge and watched the mayor of Nagasaki at the time do a speech in the brand new BC Place Stadium after the march. I never forgot how he just phonetically read the script and we could barely understand what he was saying. But very cool, Vancouver was designated a “nuclear free zone”. I liked that a lot after four years of imagining mushroom clouds to the East of Waterloo on a winter morning walking to class. I was sure the world was going to end at any time for most of the early 80s.

During part of my Vancouver stay I visited two days with my great uncle Pete and his very eccentric cousin Rob. They lived in a large “Vancouver Special” on Granville Street. My great uncle was a well-known doctor in town. His wife, my grandfather’s sister, had died of cancer a year before so I never got to see her as an adult. She used to take care of me as a toddler Pete foondly told me. (I was born in Chilliwack). Pete and Rob talked to me late into the night after a huge steak dinner about their small boat adventures up Howe Sound and the Inside Passage.

I was hooked. I just knew I would be moving back here to live. Eight years later I would.I was sure Bob was as “gay” as they come. He took me on this very long and winding drive, alone, but in a big car so I was fine, no internal homophobia there, and showed me almost every Christian church of every denomination in the area. I will never forget the huge crucifix he wore around his neck. So maybe not so gay? I never found out.

A year later, my great uncle came home to find some thugs robbing his house. They beat him up badly, Pete died. Devastated, Rob moved to the interior. He passed away in a home a few years ago. Anyway, when I told Bob late the next day when I got back to his place about these two old relatives, the alcohol, the stories, the crucifix, and the drive; Bob was flabbergasted. He acted as if I had been abducted and molested.

He was very disapproving of the whole scene. He told me not to go back and visit them, ever. I sensed too a bit of overprotection on his part. Me, I just told Bob, ”naw typical Irish Catholic family drinking with dinner.”

Bob was a self declared Bhuddist; he didn’t get that.One night, Bob had gone to bed in our group living house. Exhausted after a night of rickshaw driving. The place had fishnets on the ceiling. Owned by an abolsute hippy who told me she and her now departed husband had feld the USA draft to Vancouver Island before moving to the city. This place was right along Granville street as well. I sat in front of the TV at around 11pm and was captivated by this TV movie that was re-airing: An Early Frost

Now, An Early Frost had come out a year before in 1995 and for some odd reason; my mother suggested, strongly, that she would rather I not watch it. But this was a year later and I did. It was about a young man, a new lawyer, Michael (Aiden Quinn) not much older than me, who was sick with early onset AIDS. He comes home to parents to “come out” as gay. His boyfriend comes home to support him.

In one scene, the lead Michael, now at home, suddenly falls ill while shaking with night sweats. The ambulance people come to get him and his mother tells the attendants he has “that new disease”. The ambulance attendants promptly pack up and leave Michael there in his bedroom. His mother is at a complete loss, begging them to help her son get to the hospital. I was so angry. I stayed in that chair until three AM, furious. Thinking of why my mom, a health care supervisor, didn’t want me to see it a year ago: I mean which part: the coming out, the homophobia, the absolute health care neglect? Not sure to this day. Michael didn’t die at the end. It ended ambiguously for me. But I could relate to this guy like nothing else. In fact I had read in the Waterloo paper, the Imprint, one of the first articles about one of our fellow students have a close friend with AIDS and how there were “a lot of hugs”. I had dismissed it at the time as one of those “Toronto issues” in a “subculture”.

I thought about this film for days, weeks. I was devastated. I thought about all these friends I had in college and how I stayed silent when they made their “fag” jokes or some very ill informed comments about the “alternative lifestyle.” I thought about my own internal homophobia and how one night driving a very out Asian man who wrote the Differences column in Imprint that I almost shook like a leaf the whole time he chatted with me; trying to be cool. I thought about my high school outcast friend Scott, who I would let sit beside me because I had been friends with him since grade 3. Didn’t matter if by grade 10 he was erratically attending and had become a punker, complete with shave head, and pins all over his jean jacket. I was a musician too and nobody could say anything if he sat beside me. I thought about Andy and Bob and all the others and how I knew I wanted more from them than they could give. I thought to myself. “Good thing I used a condom with Marie. Just keep doing the sleepovers with cool guys but let NOTHING happen”.

Yet, it still felt far away, as if this was only happening to young men far away in the cities. Though, I also knew deep down. Like the title of my favourite, beautifully prosaic Rad Bradbury novel...something wicked this way... is coming.

"You’re the nearest to dead you’ll ever be save dying. Sleep is a patch of death, but three in the morn, full wide-eyed staring, is living death! You dream with your eyes open. God, if you had strength to rouse up, you’d slaughter your half-dreams with buckshot! But no, you lie pinned to a deep well-bottom that’s burned dry. The moon rolls by to look at you down there, with its idiot face. It’s a long way back to sunset, a far way on to dawn, so you summon all the fool things of your life, the stupid lovely things done with people known so very well who are now so very dead – And wasn’t it true, had he read somewhere, more people in hospitals die at 3 A.M. than at any other time..." Ray Bradbury - Something Wicked This Way Comes