Prologue

As Toronto writer Ian Young implies in an interview he gave recently to Tony Leuzzi entitled Something Wicked This Way Has Come: Ian Young talks about the psychic origin of AIDS, this constellation of dis-eases that we call AIDS has not united the gay community. Rather it has deeply, and perhaps irrevocably, divided that community into two distinct factions. Those who are HIV+ and those who are not HIV+. [This theme is expanded on and embellished in a soon-to-be-released book, edited by Ian Young and America's John Lauritson, called The AIDS Cult]

The divide runs deep, very deep, and the psychological warfare being waged by those who are HIV+ against those who are not is staggering in its long-term implications for the ultimate survival of men who are not HIV+ and are struggling to remain healthy. The pressure to sero-convert, to become HIV+, is everywhere -- in the media, in our bars and baths, in the consulting rooms of our physicians, even within our own families. And the pressure is un-relenting, often leaving healthy men with little or no choice but to isolate themselves completely from both the un-well and from their happy families.

The media offers up a near-constant flow of homo-hating rhetoric emanating from politicians, religious leaders of all stripes, news commentators and talk-show hosts, and deliberately designed to lower the self-esteem of gay men and, thus, to create a mind-set of carelessness with our own well-being.

In our bars and baths, the ambiance encourages us to drink ourselves into a state of near oblivion, and thoughtlessness, that feeds directly into the deadly triad of alcoholism, drug addiction and sexual promiscuity. The necessary vectors for an epidemic of Sexually Transmitted Dis-eases.

We visit our doctors, expecting encouragement to remain healthy and are told instead that they haven't time for us, they have people with AIDS waiting to see them, people who are really sick. The implication is difficult to miss. If we sero-convert, if we become HIV+, we'll receive a higher standard of care, more of our doctor's albeit precious time. The bond of trust, so necessary a part of the doctor-patient relationship, has been well and truly broken.

Within our own families, the better dead than gay mind-set continues to flourish. Family members may see AIDS as an escape hatch, a way of resolving, once and for all, the embarrassment they feel around the issue of having a gay son, a gay brother, a gay nephew, a gay cousin, or even, heaven forbid, a gay father. "Well, dear, isn't it better this way? The poor thing couldn't have been happy after all."

These postcards from the edge that follow are, in my not so humble opinion, a kind of road map to understanding the origin, and the continuing onslaught, of AIDS in affluent North America.

CHAT

I'm still able to visualize those stairs, steep, poorly lit, and incredibly dingy, leading up and up to the offices of CHAT -- The Community Homophile Association of Toronto. In 1973 this was it. The gay organization in Toronto. The public face of homosexuality. With fear of the unknown holding my heart in its grip, I stepped across the threshold and, obeying the flapping hand of the woman sitting behind the desk, who was chatting on the telephone, sat down on the indicated chair.

The one, and the only, redeeming thing about CHAT was Nancy Walker. Nancy was, and is, the lesbian iconoclast, exuberant, opinionated and very, very verbal. She was also my introduction to what being out was all about. She's loud, she's brassy and she knows what she's talking about. She certainly set me straight, in a manner of speaking. Her partner-in-life, Penny, is a coin of a different metal. Where Nancy is brass, Penny is solid 24k gold and she doesn't screech. Ever. What Nancy lacks in sophistication she more than makes up for in kindness, a quality hughly undervalued by the gay community. As a result Nancy herself has been, and continues to be, undervalued by that same community and its our loss.

From Nancy I learned that it was okay to be my own person. From Penny I learned an equally valuable lesson. It was okay to be nicely mannered while being my own person.

I'd just lost my second job in a row. I'd been unceremoniously dismissed from the first job as the result of a security sweep that caught up everyone in the company even remotely suspected of being homosexual, the second one because the first company felt that they had a moral obligation to tell the second company that I was one of them. Somehow I don't think that things have changed all that much in the intervening years. Going after homophobic employers, and most employers are homophobic, takes cash and lots of it and cash is one thing mosts folks are perennially short of, and employers understand this fact of life and depend on it to protect themselves from the consequences of their continuing violence toward minorities.

Nancy's response? "So? Stop feeling sorry for yourself and get on with your life," she shot back at me across the desk. Harsh words but excellent advice all the same. Tough love á la Nancy Walker.

It was through CHAT that I began to make contact with other young men, some still in their teens, from my own home town who'd been cast out by their loving families when the homosexuality of these young men was discovered. Battered and bruised, both physically and psychologically, they began to drift through my life. Young men both abandoned and abandoning. The theme of abandonment is part of the warp and woof of the gay mythos.

"So? Stop feeling sorry for yourselves and get on with your lives," I urged them. I also suggested a go-slow attitude towards relationships. Fat chance. They under-valued themselves to such an extent, these wonderful young men, that they were easy prey for the older men who picked them up and, just as quickly, threw them away after they had grown bored with them.

Some, like David, I provided with a place to live while they looked for work and eventually a small place of their own. In those days there was still lots of quality work out there and most found gainful employment quite quickly.

Some, like Richard, living on welfare and alone in a one-up cold water flat, tried in a desperate kind of way to integrate finishing their education with exploring their newly discovered sexuality.

Others, like Alec, just seemed to drift in and out of relationships, to drift from one lover to the next, to drift from one dead-end job to the next dead-end job and, ultimately, to die, lonely, in despair and poverty-stricken, too full of shame to ask for help or even to acknowledge that they might need help.

I remember my first gay pride parade down Church Street, past the CHAT offices. Just a tiny handful of men and women. Now there's over 500,000 of us. Times do change. We do make progress of a sort.

I remember too my first gay pride picnic at Wasaga Beach, catered by the queen-in-the-tower. You know who your are! Linen table clothes and silver candelabra. Superb cuisine too! Even a waiter.

Those were heady days but there was trouble waiting in the wings.

The Body Politic

The Body Politic. A magazine for gay liberation? What is one able to say about an icon? Almost twenty years later.

The politics of sexuality. The sexuality of politics. Sexually political. Politically sexual.

The Body Politic Collective was an interesting, and occasionally entertaining, group of people. There were two rather distinct but overlapping collectives really. The so-called kitchen-table collective that set policy and made operating decisions and the on-display-to-the-public collective that rubber-stamped said policy and operating decisions and did the dog work involved in getting the paper out.

I belonged to the latter and, for a long time, was completely unaware of the existence of the former. The whole setup was a patently dis-honest arrangement but no one really seemed to mind very much. As it turned out, the kitchen-table collective itself was being deftly and cynically manipulated by a cabal, Michael Lynch's word, of the oh-so-safely-closeted politically left-of-left neo-Marxists who seemed to quietly people much of the 1970's out-and-about gay socio-political landscape in Toronto.

I took care of the classified advertising. A status-less job at best but, much to the collective dismay, the one department of The Body Politic that generated cold, hard cash. Display ads were a very hard sell in those early days.

The newspaper itself? Trendy, vacuous, out-of-touch, more than a trifle self-satisfied perhaps. The literary pull-out, excellent though it was, was jokingly refered to as the literary throw-away by many in the larger gay community. It did, however, struggle to present a positive image of what it was to be gay to a gay community long in need of such mentoring. This was its abiding sin in the eyes of those who hate us.

The one important article that did get written and published was Gerald Hannon's provocative Men Loving Boys Loving Men. Designed to stir debate within the gay community on the ever-controversial and omni-present issue of paedophilia, it became rather the hook on which the Metropolitan Toronto Police establishment chose to hang their officially-sanctioned homophobia.

The office of The Body Politic was duly raided and the officers of the corporation were duly charged with publishing obscene materials. The courts found the defendents not guilty as charged. The politico-police establishment appealed. The courts again found the defendents not guilty. The establishment again appealed and again the courts declined to be the instrument of this attempted oppression | suppression of an increasingly visible and vocal minority.

As is usual in such cases, those who railed the loudest against the article had never even condescended to read it and their shrill voiced tirades echo still throughout the more backward parts of Ontario.

Lesbian author Jane Rule, a staunch friend of, and on-going contributor to, The Body Politic throughout the period of troubles, in cooperation with Rick Bébout, has made a very sensitive and enlightened documentary about this totally tasteless episode in our province's, indeed our nation's, socio-political history.

I'd departed the on-display-to-the-public collective prior to this debacle, in the main because, as a member of the kitchen-table collective acknowledged, I'd been let down, my social needs had not been met. This was not surprising in a community where genuine friendship was, and is, always under siege from the constant competition for sex partners.

In the event, The Body Politic has since re-incarnated as XTRA! -- a true lifestyle magazine with no pretensions whatsoever.

the Baths

Turkish baths. Not. For centuries the bathhouse served an honourable function in almost every city and town, of any size, in North America. They were primal places, communal sanctuaries for relaxation, conversation and male bonding with only the occasional bit of hanky panky with the towel attendants. In the early years of this century male homosexuals found these male only bastions convenient and relatively safe places to meet other men of a similar inclination. By mid-century, bathhouses were becoming the place for gay men to meet and mingle. As it were.

In Canada, bathhouses are temples to our fascination with the bottom-line. They continue to thrive in the age of AIDS for one very simple reason. They are hughly profitable for their owners.

When cities in the United States were closing bathhouses on the grounds that they were contributing to the spread of AIDS, bathhouses in Canada were permitted to remain open to be used as distribution points for safer sex information. A public relations coup. Indeed Toronto, Ottawa, Montréal and Vancouver today have more bathhouses than ever before and in some cities in Ontario and Québéc, at least, these establishments are now permitted to serve alcohol and in Montréal a few even have dance floors.

Although most bathhouses make condoms available to their clients free-of-charge, condom usage continues to be luke-warm at best, playing safe just a catchy phrase on a poster featuring two attractive men simulating sex. We continue to refuse to take responsibility for our own sexual health. Sexually Transmitted Dis-eases of all sorts continue to devastate our lives.

In the perpetual gloom of a typical bathhouse, the physical-self is laid bare with the genitals, only, concealed behind the ubiquitous white towel. Thousands of men are consantly prowling the halls of Canada's bathhouses desperately seeking their next fix, seemingly oblivious to the inherent and consequential risks.

In February 1981, the Metropolitan Toronto Police plotted and carried out an all-out war on the gay community of that city. Although raids on bathhouses had been taking place sporadically for many years, in just one night the police executed a massive, well-coordinated and ultimately futile raid on every major bathhouse in Toronto. The self-righteous anger of the police officers taking part seemed to know no bounds. The physical violence with which these guardians of law-and-order assaulted the bathhouse workers left permanent psychological scars on some of the most economically dis-advantaged members of our community. The property damage to the bathhouses themselves, well-documented on video tape by professional photographers, ran into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Were it not for the spiteful ferocity with which these raids had been conducted, they might indeed have succeeded in forcing the permanent closure of most of Toronto's bathhouses. As it was, the obvious homophobia behind and around the raids, united the gay community as never before and increasingly vocal support from liberal minded Ontarians, both men and women, emerged as a potent force in this province's social and political life.

The trials of the patrons, the staff and the owners continued for years at vast public expense. Several promising careers, on both sides, were destroyed in the process and a few men committed suicide rather than face the public scandal. Otherwise, life went on much as usual.

The bathhouse raids played their own unique part in setting the stage for the AIDS pandemic then lurking stage left. They served to reinforce and further incite the seige mentality that exists in the gay community. We were beginning to live life constantly looking over our shoulder to see exactly where our enemies were and what they were up to.

Club Dance

The gay bar. Not. Quite often the young gay man's point of first contact with the gay community en masse, the gay bar can be a genuinely liberating experience. A few beers and nothing seems impossible. Especially if you're young, attractive and eager for IT. What's missing from this picture? An almost complete lack of knowledge of the likely consequences of IT.

As more and more gay bars make backrooms available to their patrons, the ever-fine line between the gay bathhouse and the gay bar continues to blur and fade. Business people in a few Canadian cities -- Toronto, Hamilton, London, Vancouver and Montréal -- are currently developing sizeable complexes that include a hotel, a bath, a bar, a dance club and even a restaurant. This sort of circus-circus used to be the prerogative of resorts like Fort Lauderdale in Florida and San Juan in Puerto Rico. Canadian entrepreneurs have discovered the gay community and how profitable it is to serve that community.

The bars, like the baths, are playgrounds for the young. Older men drift through them like invisible spirits noticed only by the ubiquitous prostitutes. Prostitution is to the gay bar or bathhouse like mustard is to ham 'n cheese on rye and the prostitutes themselves come in all shapes, sizes, colours and ages and, while some few try to practice safer sex, most do not even bother. Caveat emptor holds true here as in most other aspects of our lives and, make no mistake, buying | selling sexual favours is illegal in Canada and gay men do get prosecuted for it. And, if the prostitute is under the age of 18, it gets very messy.

Hand in glove, as it were, with the prostitutes are the drug pushers, the lowest of the low life to be found hanging around gay bars and bathhouses. These merchants of death ought to be a constant source of embarassment to the gay community but, because of the high level of denial around the problem of alcohol, drug and sex addiction, are not and anyone who is courageous enough to challenge the status quo may very quickly find himself, at the very least, on the outside looking in. Indeed, acts of violent retribution perpetrated by drug dealers, pimps and those who profit indirectly from their activities are not unknown.

Surely we're able, if we are reasonably honest with ourselves, to at least comprehend, if not applaud, the jaundiced eye with which the average police officer, who is in his/her own way an expert on the under-belly of life, views the average gay man. Personally, I have more than a little empathy for these guardians of the law. Their job is a tough one, at the best of times, and made even more difficult by our turning a blind eye to the illegalities that take place around and within our own places of amusement. The responsibilites of citizenship have always balanced the rights of citizenship. We cannot possess the latter without exercising the former.

This is not, in any way, to excuse the often officially sanctioned police harassment of gay men. Unfortunately though, our all too casual acceptance of things like prostitution and drug dealing, feeds into police homophobia and visa-versa. Some cities, like Ottawa, Toronto and Vancouver, have succeeded in creating a more enlightened attitude on both sides. Other cities, like London and Montréal, seem to be still mired in the muck of mutual intolerance, name-calling and recrimination.

the plague cometh

I remember, always will remember, sitting across the desk from one of the counsellors at Toronto's Hassle Free Clinic, and having my kindly Asian friend look at me very directly and say, with tears in his eyes, "Some of our brothers are getting very sick and some are even dying." Just that. At this point I heaved a sigh of relief and poured out my story about a young man from San Francisco I'd observed the previous year whose whole genital region had been covered with purple lesions, each about the size of a Canadian dime.

This occured in the early spring of 1982. The death knell was sounding, still is sounding, for just about every gay man I knew and know.

I'd been in Women's College Hospital in February of 1982 for an exploratory and still could not comprehend why I had been kept in isolation for the whole of my three week stay. Now I began to suspect the reason might have been fear of this terrible life-destroying dis-ease that was then just beginning to envelop the gay community in its deadly grip. My doctor and the other hospital staff had simply been taking necessary precautions against a possibility they little understood but felt the need to guard against.

I'd seen the preview, I'd spoken to someone who'd been virtually a walking corpse, a bizarre kind of talisman. It was time to re-evaluate the gay lifestyle. I could not understand why so many other gay men failed to do the same. Why is it that some few of us chose to live while others, the vast majority, chose not to die and died anyway?

Perhaps a year later, time tends to telescope with the passing of the years, I attended the first public forum on AIDS at Toronto's Jarvis Collegiate Institute. It was a soul darkening experience and, for me, a defining moment in my life's journey. The suppressed anger was tangible. The defensive posturing on the part of those already dying was sadness-making. Those who, at that point, perceived themselves to be just concerned friends of the sick and dying, rather than frightened victims, were cajoled and manipulated into a virtually silent acceptance of the script being set out that night by one of our American cousins who'd obviously been parachuted into Canada to ensure that all of North America's gay communities indoctrinated both other gay men and the rest of society with an identical, politically-correct, quasi-believeable but utterly ambiguous, and always deliberately mis-leading, flow of AIDS-related propaganda. The message was | is always the same. Promiscuity is ok just so long as you're careful.

As the years passed it became increasingly apparent that there were to be no leaks in this already sinking ship and that the so-called 'loose cannons' among us, those who dared to see things from an alternate point-of-view, would be jettisoned as required and, if necessary, trashed into silence and invisibility. This was warfare, not against the dis-ease, we now refer to as AIDS, but against the politically-INcorrect, the ultimate victims being gay youth. Victims of a callous and cynical agenda perpetrated on them by older gay men in a final and desperate attempt to preserve intact the least life-enhancing aspects of the gay lifestyle. Alcoholism, drug addiction and compulsive patterns of sexual behaviour, the root causes of the dis-ease called AIDS.

I was left feeling resentful of the arrogance, and ignorance, of these men. They behaved as if they had all the answers when they had none at all. It was up to the rest of us to fall into line and do what we were told. The vast majority of those present obviously chose to do so and died. The same weapons that society had been using against gays for centuries, we were now using against one another. The results would be just as scarifying and, ultimately, just as destructive.

I never attended another public meeting on the issue of AIDS. Nor will I ever.

The one aspect of this sad affair that puzzles me still is why gay men continue to stubbornly resist doing what's necessary to halt the progress of this deadly dis-ease. Rather this love affair with death continues to plague our community, literally and figuratively, and I see no light at the end of this tunnel of self-inflicted misery.

Quilt fragments

A patchwork of pain. Naming | owning the dis-ease. Debunking the AIDS Quilt.

B from St. Thomas, Ontario (d. 1992)

Abandoned by his happy family to the tender mercies of a private boys boarding school, B reported being raped constantly after lights-out by the other boys.

R from Puerto Rico (d. 1987)

R reported that, whenever his mother was away from home, his father expected him to take his mother's place in his parent's bed. He insisted that this was the done thing in his culture. R also reported that many Puerto Rican families knowingly send their sons, some as young as nine or ten, to work naked in the bars of San Juan that cater to Canadian, American and European paedophiles.

G from Northbay, Ontario (d. 1990)

G reported being often grabbed and drug into the woods on his way home from school by older boys who then forced to satisfy their sexual needs.

B from Montréal, Québéc (d. 1992)

As B lay dying, the final hour of his life ticking away, he attempted to place a telephone call to his parents. They not only hung up but took their phone off the hook.

D from Newfoundland (d. 1990)

D, a very quiet and unassuming boy, reported being frequently gang-raped by his classmates in the shower room of his high school.

H from Mexico (d. 1989)

H reported that, when a new priest arrived in his village, the priest was permitted to select one of the young boys in the village to take care of his sexual needs. The families considered it an honour to have a son so chosen.

E from Amiens, France (d. 1988)

Born into a comfortably-off French family, E reported being often entrapped, beaten and then sexually assaulted by a gang of older boys living in his neighbourhood.

D from Ottawa, Ontario (d. 1996)

D, demented by his dis-ease, found it quite acceptable to sexually assault another patient in their doctor's waiting room.

D from Peterborough, Ontario (d. 1991)

D reported being introduced at a very tender age to the dubious pleasure of sodomy by an older cousin. When D told his parents about his cousins sexually abusive treatment of him, they just smiled and told him that boys will be boys.

T from Athens, Greece (d. 1985)

T reported that, in his neighbourhood in Athens, a boy was sexually initiated at the age of fourteen. The older men drew straws for the privilege of breaking a boy in.

H from Hull, Québéc (d. 1992)

H was found lying in his hospital room in Hull dying not from an AIDS related dis-ease but from de-hydration and starvation. The professional care givers working at the hospital refused to enter his room and perform their duties.

A patchwork of pain. Naming | owning the dis-ease. Debunking the AIDS Quilt.

the lord giveth

The Metropolitan Community Church of Toronto...the mother church in Canada. As one of the original twelve people who signed the document requesting that MCC Toronto be recognized by the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches, I've taken a special interest in MCC since its inception in Canada.

I first became involved with MCC Toronto through their first pastor, the Reverend Bob Wolfe. Bob was parachuted into Toronto in the mid-1970s and set up office in the basement of the old Eaton's store at Young and Queen Streets. Phase 1 of the Eaton Center development was just commencing and several different social service agencies were taking advantage of the inexpensive rents on offer in the area.

What I really remember that first winter was the mud. Everywhere. And later Bob's raw courage as he crawled out onto the ledge atop Toronto's new City Hall and talked-in a young teen by the name of Steven Sherman who was threatening suicide. [A few years later Steven did indeed jump from the balcony of a downtown hi-rise apartment building.] At this point the Toronto newspapers discovered the gay church and its gutsy pastor.

Although I didn't maintain my membership in MCC Toronto, over the years, I've watched them grow as they moved first to an old and soon-to-be-demolished house at 29 Granby Street and then to an old church | synagogue on Bathurst Street just below Bloor Street in Toronto's west end, and I've visited several MCC congregations both here and in California. I attended several services in both Edmonton and Vancouver. I'd met the Edmonton pastor, the Reverend Phil Speranza, through Nancy Walker at CHAT, when he was still an Orothdox priest and struggling to come out of the closet. As a boy, I'd grown up with the Vancouver pastor, the Reverend David Gunton.

MCC has always had a difficult time of it. Some wit once said that attempting to organize gays and lesbians is like attempting to herd cats! A very apt comparison. Gays and lesbians always seem to be ON sexually and this makes an atmosphere of prayerful devotion difficult, but not impossible, to create, let alone maintain.

I recall meeting the Reverend Brent Hawkes shortly after he arrived in Toronto from his home down east and before Bob Wolfe had moved on to new responsibilities. My first impression was of a very sound young man and we've not been disappointed. He's gone from being a very sound young man to being a competent and dedicated churchperson of national stature. He's been able to provide MCC Toronto with the stability and discipline it required to grow and prosper as a center of spirituality within the wider gay and lesbian community.

Brent has provided the only real leadership available to the Ontario gay community. Well I remember watching him courageously, and sometimes tearfully, defend the Ontario government's ill-fated, and perhaps ill-advised, Bill 167 on not one but two editions of Anne Petrie's ever-popular television phone-in program Petrie in Prime on the CBC. He was subjected to blisteringly vicious verbal assaults from religious bigots calling in to the program. Brent did not blink.

In any event Bill 167 was subjected to a free vote in the provincial legislature and went down to defeat as did the NDP party and its leader, Bob Rae, who had never really supported his party's bill, in the next provincial election. The Liberal party was also soundly trounced and its leader, Lyn McLeod, who initially supported Bill 167 but later retreated with her tail between her legs, was forced to resign.

Sadly the NDP in particular, and the left in general, have gone on to use the gay community as a convenient scape goat to rationalize their well-deserved and devastating defeat at the polls. Both Bob Rae and Lyn McLeod have disappeared from Ontario's political landscape. No great loss. Interestingly, like Barbra Streisand, Brent Hawkes can say, "I'm still here!"

Brent now does an every-other-Tuesday-evening stint on Vision TV's Skylight. This kind of outreach is highly significant for our growth as a community. A Christian who just happens to be gay is publically visible on a regular basis on a national, very popular TV program and is sharing authentic Christian insights with regular Skylight viewers like myself.

It's very important to the growth of our collective, and individual, self-esteem that we see gays and lesbians performing these rites in a public way. With every appearance on Skylight Brent helps to further legitimize our right to be. This will ultimately have an impact on how some of our youth, especially spiritual youth, view themselves and perhaps contribute to a delcline in the rate of both attempted and successful suicides amoung gay and lesbian teens.

Brent's advice to the lonely. Create a circle of friends and hang out together. A lot. Perhaps, just perhaps, you'll also make a special friend within this circle. Someone with whom you'll want to share the rest of your live. Simple, really. Just do it!

In an age when many gay men have done more than their share to turn the dis-ease of anorexia into an art form and true spirituality and intellectual attainment have been usurped by worship of the body beautiful and elevation of the male phallus, it's comforting to know that there's a place in our community where just pain folk can go and feel comfortable and be accepted just as they are.

MCC has also chosen to make a strong and unequivocal statement on the subject of paedophilia. The statement says that sex with children is always wrong -- because of the power imbalance inherent in sexual relationships between adults and children. A strong statement indeed to a wider community that prefers to view paedophilia as a mere sexual peccadillo and not the crime against our children that in reality it is.

raising the PFLAG

PFLAG. Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays. An international organization of parents and friends dedicated to improving the lot of gays and lesbians in general and gay and lesbian youth and their peers in particular.

It's vital for the health -- physical, psychological, emotional, sexual and spiritual -- of gay youth that their parents, families and friends not only accept with some degree of grace and equanimity these children's sexual orientation but take a measure of responsibility for their on-going safety and well-being as they progress from childhood, through their teen years and into young adulthood.

The most effective way to do this, of course, and the more challenging and ultimately more satisfying, is to create an enlightened and supportive atmosphere, both at home and in the community, that is conducive to these children's healthy over-all development rather than cruelly driving them away to live lonely lives as sexual nomads in urban gay ghettoes.

The disgusting and all-too-prevalent solution of abandoning a gay or lesbian child, teen or young adult and then making them the scape goat for everything that goes wrong in a family and the butt of family humour is a sad commentary on the state of North American family values. Sadder still is that this state of affairs is encouraged, and justified, by our more self-righteous and pious clergy -- priests, ministers, rabbis -- and vacuous politicians.

Still sadder is that so many of our families lack the backbone to stand up to these loud-mouthed, ignorant and un-caring destroyers of family unity and to tell them to back off. Too many of our families place a higher value on the approval of their extended families, and their communities, than on the sanctity of their own nuclear family.

PFLAG is, in part, an effort to regain the initiative in defining true family values.

One area where family participation is, perhaps, crucial is in the de-construction of The Big Lie of Safer Sex. There is no such thing as Safer Sex. The prevalence of all sorts of Sexually Transmitted Diseases (STDs) makes the phrase Safer Sex an ugly mockery of a devastating reality.

Just ask someone who suffers from genital herpes. There is no way to protect yourself from contracting this dis-ease if a sexual partner has it. Genital herpes is akin to a living death. The same is true of syphilis and having had syphilis once and been cured is no guarantee of any kind of immunity in the future. Syphilis is truly the gift that keeps on giving and giving and giving. The same is true of type-C hepatitis.

Feeding the increasing prevalence of STDs is the creeping acceptance by our society of the use | abuse of alcohol and hard and soft drugs. The use of these substances brings about a more casual, some would say relaxed, state of mind that often leads to increased risk of sexual promiscuity and the concomitant risk of further exposure to many and various STDs and, ultimately, of AIDS.

Informed, open and communicative parents are the first line of defense as far as the issues of alcohol, drugs, promiscuity, STDs and AIDS are concerned. The failure of parents to be so informed, open and communicative leave all of our children increasingly vulnerable and at risk. Being gay or lesbian is not a matter of choice. Living the drug and alcohol saturated gay lifestyle is a choice. Parents of gay teens have the same responsibility as parents of other teens to guide and to help their children in the making of safe, appropriate and healthy life choices.

Gay and lesbian children and teens must also be shielded from sexual predators within their own family circles and amoung their playmates and, later, their teen-aged friends. Children must to be taught, very early in life, that it is never acceptable for one to use coercion in order to satisfy one's sexual needs.

While some teens are ready for sex, others won't be ready until they are in their early to mid-twenties. This just reflects a natural diversity in our species. Being a gay or lesbian teen and a virgin is something to take genuine pride in. It implies a person capable of self-restraint, a person of good character, a young man or woman who respects both themselves and others, who values life and is determined to live it to the full.

Another area in which parents and friends of lesbian and gay youth have an important role to play is in that of making themselves aware of, and actively discouraging, the sexual exploitation of these teens and young adults by that readily identifiable, albeit small, segment of the adult gay and lesbian community who view gay youth groups not as the safe spaces they were designed to be but as as their own private hunting grounds.

They see gay and lesbian youth as just so much fodder for their own sexual gratification. Perhaps in part because they were not nurtured themselves, they seem unable, or unwilling, to nurture the young in our midst. To them gay youth are merely sex objects to be used and then casually ditched when either boredom sets in or something perceived of as being better comes along.

There is always a power imbalance in such shallow relationships and, even when they are of some duration, they are seldom, if ever, satisfactory experiences for the young people involved. Their most basic needs -- for food and shelter -- may be being met but their emotional needs are not. They frequently exist in a wasteland of pain and anxiety. They project an aura of deep unhappiness, a fatalistic mistrust, burning anger and a dangerous paranoia.

I once heard a youth counsellor state categorically that a gay youth group should be treated exactly like a boy scout or girl guide gathering. If there are adults hanging around with no valid reason for being there, then the police ought to be summoned and the offending adults charged.

the AIDS CULTure

While some would have us believe that AIDS has united the gay community as never before, others would suggest, more reasonably and with equal fervor, that AIDS has created within the gay and lesbian community a rather mindless AIDS culture that is little different from any other modern-day cult, a culture rather desperately committed to the perpetuation of the gay life-style at any cost.

Even in the very early days, those who refused to buy into the safer sex propaganda being put about by the AIDS committees, found themselves on the outside not just of the AIDS culture but of the gay community itself. While painful at the time, this pushing away of the more moderate and rational amoung us, will ultimately provide a pool of men and women who will go on to re-define what it is to be gay in a more life-enhancing, a more genuinely compassionate and responsible, way.

As it becomes more and more difficult, even perhaps un-ethical, to sit silently on the side-lines as yet another generation of young men are sucked into the vortex of the AIDS cult, little pockets of resistance are developing across North America. Big trees from little acorns grow. Trite sounding but true. Stalwart men like Toronto's Ian Young and John Lauritsen of the United States are writing books and actually getting published. Their latest opus The AIDS Cult will be on the shelves of bookstores across North America come February of 1997.

Men like David Island and Patrick Letellier, co-authors of Men Who Beat the Men Who Love Them, are daring to shed the light of reason on other important issues within the gay and lesbian communities, issues like the terrible prevalence of domestic violence in gay and lesbian relationships. They dare to challenge the prevailing wisdom of our self-appointed leaders that such issues ought not to be discussed openly lest they become fodder for the guns of our enemies. This is a specious argument at best. Just another in a long string of excuses for not dealing with the numerous social ills that continue to beset and bedevil our community.

Men like MCC Toronto's pastor, the Reverend Brent Hawkes, are struggling to re-establish the concepts of responsibility and friendship both within the gay community as a whole, and within individual gay and lesbian relationships. As a member of Vision TV's Skylight team, Brent Hawkes is actively pursuing a wider ministry that reaches into the homes and families of isolated gays and lesbians clear across Canada.

Lesbians like Urvashi Vaid, in her book Divided We Stand: Virtual Equality, are addressing the issues of racism, classism, sexism, and homophobia within gay organizations. Nowhere in our country are these problems more apparent, and more devastating, than in the gay and lesbian community.

Lesbian author and self-help workshop leader Laura Davis has given us two major works, The Courage to Heal [from Childhood Sexual Abuse] and Allies in Healing: When the Person You Love was Sexually Abused as a Child. Although written with a female audience in mind, both books are very useful reads for men as well.

Our situation is far from hopeless but many young men will still die in the intervening years before a new vision of what it is to be gay takes hold in the minds, in the imaginations, of gay and lesbian youth. As older gays continue their struggle to stiffle, if not silence, any and all dissenting voices within our community, youth will set their own agenda for the future. Indeed, they're already doing so. They'll come to grips in their own unique way with the eternal truth that dis-eases like AIDS are essentially social dis-eases and not merely the result of a viral infection.

As we approach the new millenium, all kinds of new opportunities present themselves, all kinds of new possibilities become apparent. We are able to learn from, and benefit from, the mistakes of the past if we have the courage and the will. The courage to admit that we've made mistakes and the will not to stubbornly keep on making them.

Epilogue

And so we come full circle at last. When I first began to think about this project I had absolutely no idea where it would go, what paths I'd be tempted to think about and explore. The operative word, of course, is think. So many folk just follow along and gay and lesbian leaders, like other so-called leaders in our society, understand this phenomenon and depend upon it to accompolish their questionable goals.

On the whole I'm pretty sanguine. I believe that in Canada both provincial and federal Governments, and the justices of our Supreme Court, have gone about as far as they're prepared to go in granting gays and lesbians equality with other Canadians. Sexual orientation has been effectively read into the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and this will likely be re-affirmed in future rulings but the justices, I believe, will go no further until they perceive a realization on our part that rights are accompanied by responsibilites, most especially in the areas of sexual health, relationship recognition and child rearing.

It's time to say NO. To the demons within ourselves and begin to assert our right to live where we choose to live, rather than allowing ourselves to be warehoused in city ghettoes. To return to our roots. To be survivors rather than victims. We can seldom go home again but, with a shift in attitude, we can re-create home for ourselves, and our loved ones, in the villages, towns and cities where we were born and raised. We have the ability to be pioneers opening up a new frontier, a frontier of the mind and of the soul. Post-modern day shamans.

It's time to say NO. To homo-hating talking heads -- on TV, on radio, in newspapers and in magazines. To homo-hating politicians who continue to use our lives as a political football whenever their popularity begins to sag. To homo-hating clergy who encourage and justify the villification and abandonment of gays and lesbians by our communities, families and friends. To physicians who have lost touch with their hypocratic oath to at least do no harm to us. To our families when they use us as scapegoats for their own problems or when they cave into public pressure and abandon us.

It's time to say NO. To those within our own gay and lesbian communities who refuse to recognize the value of diverse points of view to our long-term survival. To those who have attempted to dis-enfranchise AIDS survivors by re-defining what it is to be gay so as to exclude us. To those who mindlessly repeat the mantra of safer sex without any concern whatsoever for gay youth who are continuing to die at an alarming rate.

Addendum from January 1, 1998

AIDS ... what's the real cause?

We live in a culture that values sameness, to a pathological degree. Gay and lesbian children are not the same as other children. They are fundamentally different in their sexual orientation. As such, these children learn very early in life that they don't fit in and that the cost of not fitting in, the cost of being different, is abandonment by family and community. At first this abandonment is purely emotional in nature, the child being too young to just throw out into the street, but eventually, as soon as it can be decently done, the abandonment becomes a physical one. The child is driven from the family home.

In pre-Christian native American cultures, indeed in many tribal cultures around the world, this differentness of a gay or lesbian child, was highly valued and thoroughly integrated into the spiritual and social life of their tribe. These two-spirited individuals were perceived of as being able to see life's problems from both the male and the female perspective and thus often played an invaluable role in settling disputes...both within families and within the tribe itself.

The initial emotional abandonment of gay and lesbian children by their families and communities leads to all sorts of child abuse scenarios -- physical, psychological, emotional, sexual -- both within the family and without. While it's generally considered wrong to abuse a child in any way, if that child happens to be gay or lesbian, acts of abuse perpetrated on the child become acceptable. Society chooses to look the other way, to turn a blind eye. Historically, even child care workers have been reluctant to intervene on behalf of a child, perceived of as being gay or lesbian, who is being abused by their family or other members of their community; the attitude being that the child, by simply being different, somehow deserves the abuse.

Their is nothing more devastating for a child, or young adult, than to be abandoned in any sense of that term. They immediately become the most vulnerable members in our society. When they feel that they are no longer able to turn to their families or communties for support, they turn to strangers, to others who, like themselves, have been abandoned. One has only to look at the extended families of abandoned children that populate our cities. Left without any visible means of support these children often turn to crime and prostitition in order to just exist. One has only to look at the gay ghettoes in these same cities. Ghettoes that are inhabited by gay and lesbian adult-children, many of whom have psychologically substituted a sexually promiscuous life-style for those loving family oriented relationships that have been denied them, not because they want to but because their abandonment by family and society leaves them with very few other more healthy, more viable alternatives; and this sexually promiscuous life-style, constructed on this foundation of abandonment, is itself the root cause of AIDS in North America. Indeed, Promiscuity = Death!

It's an unfortunate fact of life that being part of a natural family, even if that family is itself somewhat dysfunctional, seems to be a necessary pre-condition for a reasonable level of psychological and emotional health and well-being. Extended familes, although they help to ease the pain of abandonment, are not a completely satisfactory solution. They are a stop-gap only in a culture that places a higher value on sameness than on acceptance of those who are born different, who are unable to fit in.

Is there a cure for AIDS?

Yes. There is.

Accept gay and lesbian children as the different people that they are. Stop abandoning them. Stop driving them out of their families. If they're already gone, find them. Bring them home. Make peace with them; make peace with yourselves. By saving them you save yourselves.