I’m sure some still exist in Vancouver, free little newspapers that offer news headlines with a paragraph or two of elaboration. Mostly, they’re a space for printing a slew of banking, real estate and car ads. I don’t notice them anymore. The freebies that mattered to me are long gone and I cheer myself up with the thought that less newsprint must mean we’ve saved a hypothetical tree, perhaps even a whole forest. Alas, at present, we lose them to out of control fires. That’s dark but it’s real. I almost understand why deniers double down. Maybe they just can’t cope.
There was a time when The Vancouver Courier got dropped off at my house or in my apartment building lobby twice a week. I’d skim through the grocery ads—Score! Häagen-Dazs on sale!—and read about a dog park on the rooftop of a downtown parking garage. A stop on my next bike ride, not because I had a dog anymore but, hey, it sounded quirky and perhaps I could snap a photo to post on Twitter.
There was also a time when my eyes were trained to spot purple news boxes. That’s where I could grab a copy of Xtra West, the free gay paper that came out every two weeks. When my daily life was consumed with slogging through seventh graders’ stories and planning an archaeological unit to teach them about Ancient Egypt, Xtra West was often the link to all I was missing in terms of being a gay man.
I first stumbled upon a free gay publication in the mid-’80s when I lived in Irving, Texas, a suburb of Dallas. I taught at a special ed school operated by the Catholic Diocese of Dallas. Many of my colleagues were nuns and, since the campus also included a convent, my social life involved people like Sister Herman Marie and Sister Joan of Arc and no one who identified as gay. I didn’t dare step out of the closet. The fear was too great, partly due to AIDS, mixed with worries about being gay-bashed and, more than anything, a concern that I’d be fired if someone outed me. (As a Canadian citizen, I wasn’t allowed to teach in public schools so it felt essential that I keep the private school gig.)
During my second year of teaching, I got a roommate to help pay the rent. My salary had risen to a whopping $12,300—half what public schools offered—but I needed breathing room in my budget, a chance to splurge on a meal at Chili’s instead of another dinner of peanut butter sandwiches made with Wonder bread and no-name PB. My roommate was Carla, a teaching assistant from where I worked. The nuns thought we were living in sin and I was informed they were praying for us, but their sheltered world contributed to the fact they weren’t imaginative enough in considering us sinners. Neither was I.
Carla and I got along great, connecting through humor and a willingness to step on tennis courts to retrieve balls more often than actually hitting them. We burned plenty of calories, modifying any dreams of playing at Wimbledon to competing against black labs in some pick-up game of Fetch at a local park. We also lingered at Friday happy hours in Las Colinas, ordering extra rounds of frozen margaritas after the nuns had gotten tipsy, smoked a final cigarette and left.
I didn’t see Carla much at home. She was often spending time with Nancy, a best bud. She often stayed over at Nancy’s for the entire weekend. She and Nancy had some sort of falling out, but then my roomie became best buds with Maureen.
Anyone else would have known where this was going, but I was as clueless and as experienced in the real world as the nuns.
I missed Nancy. I tried to give Mo a chance even if Mo seemed gruffer. Why was I comparing? It wasn’t like Mo was replacing Nancy, right?
Then one day I noticed a compact little guide on the kitchen counter, neatly tucked under the telephone. The cover was a photo of some guy in a baseball cap and a sleeveless t-shirt. Lots of pink, which was unconventional for menswear in the ’80s. It was enough to make me pick up the free magazine, the same width and length of a paperback novel, but probably only sixty-four pages. The title was This Week in Texas. I browsed while my roommate was apparently hanging out again at Mo’s.
The magazine was chock full of ads. Different ads. Nothing for Dr. Pepper or Jeep Cherokee or Skoal dipping tobacco, the standard Texan stuff. The full-page ones touted a military ball in Dallas and an Austin bar’s happy hour called “Muscles in Action.” Another ad was titled PLAY IT SAFE! and offered mail order delivery for Trojan condoms. I wasn’t one to ever jump to conclusions so I investigated further, flipping pages.
A news blurb from Houston announced, “There’s a big…billboard—the first of its kind—over Tila’s Restaurant…which lists the local hotline phone number…to call for information about AIDS.” Other blurbs provided information about HIV testing programs in Houston and San Antonio. A headline stated, “FORT WORTH GAY PRIDE WEEK HAS BUDGET CONCERNS, ” the lead sentence explaining, “Our people are hurting, both from AIDS and from the poor economy.” Other headlines: “The Big Race to Find an AIDS Vaccine,” “CRAB LICE STUDY,” and “TOGA TEA” with “20% of proceeds going to AIDS Resource Center of the Dallas Gay Alliance.”
Processing….processing…
Forget the drumroll. There is no suspense here. But the drama was huge in my mind. This Week in Texas was totally gay!
I’d never seen it in the magazine racks at a checkout aisle in Albertsons. Where did it come from? Since it only covered a week’s time, presumably there were more. One for the week before, for instance. And for the next week. While this seemed obvious, it baffled me. TWiT could be a link to all things gay in Texas which was wrapped up in all things AIDS, as my archival issue attests. It affirms the sense I’ve had that my coming out years weren’t a joyous time of gay bliss, but shrouded in AIDS awareness and, for me at least, a pervasive fear of death.
Based on my browse of TWiT, being gay was also about being shirtless and going to bars. Really, there didn’t seem to be anything else. I was certain that shirtlessness would not be in my future. I was much keener about free refills of iced tea at Chili’s than sipping Bud Light and pretending I liked it. Why was everything bar-based? Why wasn’t gay Uno big? Or gay croquet? Maybe a gay vegetarian picnic with a mixtape soundtrack of Madonna, Miami Sound Machine and The Style Council? Maybe I wasn’t fit to be gay. Or maybe I was trying to justify a life in the closet.
Still, my roommate’s paper pickup provided my first link to any sense of a gay network during my years in Texas. It’s true that I had been to a gay club a few times already during my last year of college, but only as part of a group of waiters, hostesses and busboys from The Spaghetti Warehouse in Fort Worth’s Cowtown. We’d occasionally go after a Saturday night shift, one or two gay waiters chaperoning the straight contingent which I hoped everyone thought included me. I clung closely to the group. I wasn’t ready to be gay. If copies of TWiT had been at the entrance, I wouldn’t have noticed as I didn’t want anyone seeing my eyes divert up, down, left or right. Even if I’d spied a copy, I wouldn’t have picked it up. “What are you doing with that?” Miguel or Teena might have asked. My red cheeks, obvious even in the dimly lit dance club, would have outed me and then what? It seems inexplicable to have been so fearful even amongst a seemingly pro-gay group who had chosen to spend Saturday night in a gay realm, but fear often isn’t rational. If it had been, I might have talked myself through it…eventually.
That wouldn’t come until I flee Texas and moved to Malibu.
Incidentally, Carla did come out as a lesbian during a heads-down conversation at a pizza joint we went to on Sunday evenings. She feared rejection; I offered solid support. It would have been the perfect time for me to say, “Me, too. Not lesbian but, you know, the other thing. For guys. Like, um, ho—…homo—…okay…gay.” I did have this painfully stilted conversation with her over pizza, but it was six months later. I think she smacked me in the shoulder. Perhaps that’s revisionist but I deserved it. As for that freebie gay publication, while the advertised events didn’t make me feel connected to the Texas gay scene, the magazine’s acronym—TWiT—should have made me feel like there would someday be a place for me.
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