Ha! Bad news sends me on an upward spiral of words, good news sometimes leave me numb. Obama has lifted the HIV ban to HIV+ persons entering the US. Five months after my ‘accident’ ordeal at the Vancouver airport, it is now gone – however, who knows what bureaucratic hoops I will have to jump through to clear my name. My emotional reaction: numb. And the words of Dixie Chicks twirling in my head: “Forgive, sounds good; Forget, I’m not sure I could. They say time heals everything…but I’m still waiting”. I am still waiting for that cloud to be lifted from my shoulders, some wait for years.
Yes, I can see the big picture, and I am joyous, but I am a queer city rat with a good memory and the banality of what one resolute immigration officer saw it his duty to do to me will forever remind me of the ‘banality of evil’, unnecessary, unemotional, and catastrophic. I will get over it…I have so many good friends in the US and professionally, Canada is ball and chain with the US, sigh. I feel for Obama, this pop star president, so clamored, and yet, I think, when the going gets tough, the fall of the stars tends to be as meteoric as the rise. The public craves tragedy in a prurient way. In Canada we have a Teflon Prime Minister with a strange mop of hair – neither a savior, not a father – simply a high rank bureaucrat – take him or leave him, there is little sentimentalism towards Stephen Harper.
So now what? Living in Toronto will shape what comes next. Well, so much is coming at me already in the form of learning about the city and about work, which consumes me at times. However – all the wiser – I will not write about my new job here. There will always be time in the future. I recall a close friend telling me about monitoring her staff Facebook – she was alerted to it by another young person in the staff – to see the staff person making foolish direct comments about work to friends in social media, silly. The staff person was ‘walked out’ of the job. So I have to write more fiction, good way of not being liable for telling the truth, he, he.
General things that I notice living here, in my fourth month, although the professional fog in which I was has been lifted, this new climate is hectic – in life it is always a trade off, right? In Toronto, ‘busy’ is law and mantra. ‘Idle’ is a sin. Do Torontonians produce more? Not so sure but they/we produce a collective mystique of being the largest Anglo city in Canada, a centre for the empire as it were, and at the lead. No wonder the provinces look at Toronto with a mix of envy and disdain. Like inhabitants of any other big city, we tend to look inward and be self-possessed, cliquey city, and hard to crack. I am fortunate I have close friends and many professional friends.
And yet, I have not felt this lonely and lost at times in years, not good for one’s health overall. My guts reacted and I had three back-to-back celulitis. I remind everyone that HIV positive folks are ‘sacred cows’ not because we are specially good, but because we are vulnerable – a long time activist from Montreal defined it better for me, “we’re hothouse tomatoes” we look good inside but as soon as we’re taken off the hothouse, we tend to wither fast. I know one’s capacity to make friends might diminish as one gets on, but I trust I will make new friends. Gay friends? Not so sure. I see gay men living together in The Village (around Church and Wellesley) very self-possessed. I thought that an accumulation of such diverse income/race/age in gay men would make us humble and a bit less self-conscious, but it might not be the case – I will keep you posted. Would I make friends with Latinos? Not really, there isn’t a sense of Latino community for gay men that I have noticed – nothing new. And Latinos in Vancouver as a whole and I did not have much to do with each other, homophobia reigns nicely still. I will find friends in people in general and with a special mention to lesbians, they always tend to be gregarious and engaged – is it me? I am a bit of Lesbian at heart, I hope. I find there is less lesbian presence, Toronto is such a macho city, I saw more lesbians in Commercial Drive in Vancouver. I wonder, is it harder for gay men than heteros to move from city to city? Probably not. Not sure. In times of liberation to ‘normalization’, there is little uniqueness we’re allowed to claim for queers. Overall, I can’t complain, I know I didn’t come at the bottom of the heap, having an intense and thrilling job to fill a great deal of the life while John and I reconstruct our life in common here in the future.
In sum, may things have been lifted from law books and from my shoulders in odd rapture. I miss my friends in Vancouver but I do not miss the city where I struggled so hard for 24 years, I breathed and nearly stopped breathing. It was only after being here that I saw the necessity that many of us have to take a “geographical healing”.
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