FREEBIE GAY NEWS: A ONCE-VITAL LINK

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.

DRIFTING AWAY FROM DOCTOR DREAD

I am the squeamish sort. I have fainted twice at doctors’ offices. I also passed out watching a film about the heart in high school biology. I have had to lie on the cold tiled floor of the bathroom outside a medical office after having a couple of moles removed. I have had ear and eye exams interrupted as the light-headed, cold, clammy symptoms surfaced. Yes, I am not just squeamish. I am a medical anomaly.

Any doctor’s visit brings uncertainty and anxiety. When I had my wisdom teeth removed, the specialist refused to put me under because I didn’t have anyone to drive me home. (I felt a cab would be fine.) He had barely begun when my semi-controlled moaning noises became too much for him. He screamed at me and then said, “I don’t care. You’re going under!” Fine by me.

Another doctor who seemed homophobic in the first place did not take kindly to my skittishness and went out of his way to make the examination unpleasant. In the end, he stated that he did not want to see me again. Again, fine by me.

I carefully selected my current doctor, putting out feelers among friends. Wanted: doctor with amazing patience for nervous patients. Thankfully, I found just the right person. He is a gay doctor who matter-of-factly asks the relevant questions about sexual health and seems genuinely amused by my nervous, fast-paced banter and by the bottle of O.J. that I bring along in case I feel faint. He takes his time. I get the impression that he extends the chat during the examination, viewing my behaviours as a quirky change of pace. At the very least, it must provide for interesting banter in the break room.

Today was my first appointment in three years. Yes, even though I have found the right doctor, I don’t go out of my way to visit. The office is one of my few exposures to the gay world as the other doctors are also gay and the waiting room is always filled with gay patients who intently eye the entrance door every time a new person walks in. Never thought of going to the doctor as an opportunity for cruising.

Beside the coat rack was a stack of the local gay newspaper, Xtra West, which I haven’t come across since moving out of Vancouver’s West End in June. As I waited forty-five minutes—okay, it seems my doctor dawdles with all his patients—I noticed a couple of assistants retrieving files and calling patients’ names. The assistants were both hunky, buff eye candy in tight shirts. My gosh, my doctor’s office is the gay equivalent to Hooters!

It’s all a bit surreal, but I suppose the übergay atmosphere provides enough distraction to take the edge off. I passed my physical by not fainting. The doctor did have to say, “Just relax” nine times—yes, I counted as a way to amuse myself. Still, I didn’t even reach for the orange juice and this is the first time that I can recall that the tin paper sheet on the examining table wasn’t soaked through when I got up. Progress! A phone number might have been a nice bonus, but that would have been pushing it.

Medical breakthrough? Sure. Medical miracle? Forget about it.

COYOTE SIGHTING

Things have been quiet lately. Okay, it’s always quiet. But this is the kind of quiet where the tree falls in the woods and no one’s there—and I still manage to hear it! Yes, it happened! Now can that expression be done away with? Permanently?

When I was at the cottage an hour outside of Ottawa, the newness of Gay Ottawa got me in the car and my Just Visiting status made me more of a risk taker. Not risky as in crazy sex, but risky as in show up to gay events solo. Yeah, radical, isn’t it?

Now I’m back home and feeling complacent about my remoteness. There was a Halloween party last weekend that I skipped. I don’t do costumes. It’s always terribly stress inducing. I have no idea how to put together a getup from scratch and I’m not motivated (or rich enough, at the moment) to hop on the ferry to buy a ready-made Spiderman costume in Vancouver. (I’m also not one of those gays who looks forward to October 31 as a time to dress in a Speedo and spraypaint my body gold, shirtless firefighter costume—with darling suspenders!—retired after three years running. I’ve been working out with results to show for it; I just choose not to show. Yeah, push me off the Pride float. I don’t belong.) Coming up with a costume is work for me and knowing that there was a good chance I’d be the only single guy present was the thought that put the final nail in the vampire’s coffin.

Last night offered another opportunity to follow my gayness. Ivan E. Coyote, a homo author and storyteller, was performing at a small town half an hour from home. I marked the event on my calendar weeks ago so there was no backing out. Calendars must not mislead! Still, as the afternoon rolled into evening, I felt content at home with the dogs and my library copy of Eat, Pray, Love. If Julia Roberts is going to be in the movie, I’d better damn well read the book. She had me at “My Best Friend’s Wedding” (if not “Mystic Pizza”).

The tug-and-pull continued as the time when I’d have to leave neared. Must stay--look at those pleading dog eyes! A lesbian author in your environs—must go! As a writer, I knew I could use some inspiration and, to my astonishment, I couldn’t recall ever going to an homo author event. I ironed, I dressed and then the climactic moment arrived. Something brown—and smelly!—was smudged on my pants. Oh, beloved dogs, what have you done?! Was it a desperate ploy to keep me home for yet another evening of idle tummy rubs and ice cube treats?

Almost worked. I’d sworn I wouldn’t wear jeans, but I had no time (or desire) for more ironing. Jeans on—and snappy little 70s jingle bopping in my head—I made my first drive in months to the town so near, yet so far.

The place was packed. I knew it would be. The crowd almost all female. Knew that, too. A few dutiful husbands tagged along with their wives. It was Saturday night, but the Canucks had a rare weekend off.

There was a long introduction of the honored guest, one of those rambling speeches read directly from an earnestly written script. Verbal diarrhea, really. We want Ivan! At last, she stepped to the podium. It took less than sixty seconds for me—and the crowd—to be hooked. Ivan E. Coyote, a proud, butch lesbian who does not mind being mistaken for a man—relishes it, I think—proceeded to share story after story for two hours, breaking only for a brief intermission/book signing.

Was I inspired? More than that. Awed. She had notes, but glanced at them only occasionally without interrupting the flow of her narrative. Ivan was in full command throughout.

Could I ever do that? Not likely. If it were a room of kids and no adults, sure. I can work the room, feeding off the reactions of the audience. But it’s different with adults. The sweat stain quickly begins under my arms, the heat of the spotlight moistens my forehead, my mouth dries, the voice wobbles and my breathing becomes as desperate as when I try to pick up the pace swimming freestyle at the local pool.

Ivan Coyote is a master storyteller. I haven’t read any of her short stories. Sometimes I even skip her column in Xtra West, the Vancouver gay news rag. And now I’m a fan.

Glad I went. During the many quiet times ahead of me, I have a little more to think about—and read.

All the Gays Are Waiting

I look forward to my jaunts to the city. While I regularly remind myself that Vancouver is only a ferry ride away, I don't go every week. Ferry costs, wait times, chores at home make trips less frequent.

Last week I headed over for a doctor's appointment. Of course, there are family doctors in my area, but I'm a nervous dweeb around all things medical and, having established a rapport with one doctor, I'm not about to change. He is also gay and that helps, should I need to discuss anything sensitive. (If only!) It doesn't hurt that I have a big ol' crush on the guy. Sure, he's got a partner he's been with for years--as the framed photo of the loving couple reminds me each time I enter the examination room--and I know about the boundaries of doctor-patient relationships, but it feels good to have a few flirty butterflies mixed in with the nervousness that overtakes my body when I have a medical appointment.

My doctor shares an office with a group of doctors who are also gay. When I enter the waiting room, it's like any other medical waiting room: dull paintings, scattered publications, cushioned chairs in outdated colors with clunky armrests. Except all the clients are gay.

As I waited, one gay couple reconnected with an acquaintance, loudly carrying on a conversation while seated at opposite ends of the room. Marv and Ben moved in together in December. They love being together. They held hands and kidded about laundry duties. Cam was heading to Mexico the next day, anxious to escape the cold weather and the possibility of more snow. He was a little worried that he hadn't fit in enough gym workouts before throwing on (and off) a swimsuit, but c'est la vie--only in Spanish.

Had I still lived in the West End of Vancouver--the gay ghetto--I would have tuned out the conversation immediately. Yeah, yeah, gay, gay, happy, happy. Now that I live in the sticks, I soaked in every word while staring blankly at an open newspaper. I am not alone, I am not alone. Damn ferry!

As Cam was summoned by an attendant, Marv and Ben locked into some goo-goo-eyed messaging and I looked for something different to read. Another big difference! Pretty-faced men adorned every magazine cover--except for the sole issue of Cosmo. I hadn't heard of any of the magazines, but they were are clearly gay or gayish. I decided to flip through the latest issue of the local gay newspaper, Xtra West, instead. At least I recognized something.

Continuing to wait--my doctor is notorious for running extremely late--I found comfort and amusement in the waiting room. More gays came and went. It was all perfectly normal by Vancouver standards. I was less nervous than ever. And I hadn't even caught a glimpse of my own version of Dr. McDreamy yet.