Missed Connections

by Brian Francis

  BOOKS by the AUTHOR

  Missed Connections (2021)

  Break in Case of Emergency (2019)

  Natural Order (2011)

  Fruit (2004)

  Copyright © 2021 by Brian Francis

  Trade paperback original edition published 2021

  McClelland & Stewart and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House Canada Limited.

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher—or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication data is available upon request.

  ISBN 9780771038143

  Ebook ISBN 9780771038150

  Book design by Lisa Jager, adapted for ebook

  Cover images by Lisa Jager

  Typeset in Charter ITC Pro by M&S, Toronto

  McClelland & Stewart,

  a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited,

  a Penguin Random House Company

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  a_prh_5.7.0_c0_r0

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  Letter 1

  Letter 2

  Letter 3

  Letter 4

  Letter 5

  Letter 6

  Letter 7

  Letter 8

  Letter 9

  Letter 10

  Letter 11

  Letter 12

  Letter 13

  Letter 14

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  LGBTQ2S+ RESOURCES

  INTRODUCTION

  In 1992, I placed a personal ad in the newspaper.

  I was twenty-one years old and had just started my third year of university. For any Generation Z readers, 1992 was important historically as it was the year that fire was invented.

  It was also a year of pushing boundaries and challenging the establishment. Madonna came out with her book Sex. Sinéad O’Connor caused a maelstrom when she ripped up a photo of Pope John Paul II on Saturday Night Live. Charles and Diana officially announced their separation after years of scrutiny. And the tribute concert for Freddie Mercury, who had died from AIDS the previous year, was broadcast to a billion people worldwide. In addition, the World Health Organization declassified homosexuality as a mental illness.

  In my corner of the world, in a mid-sized city in Southwestern Ontario, some other significant changes were taking place. I had just started the process of coming out. Not that the closet doors had flung wide open or anything. It was more of a gradual squeak, as these sorts of things tend to go. One of my sisters knew, as well as some of my high school friends. And the people I’d met via the local gay scene knew. But my parents didn’t know. And the straight guys I shared a house with didn’t know. So I was in a state of precarious balancing, one foot planted in secrecy and the other foot in honesty, straddling two worlds, not unlike many queer people in their early days of emergence.

  My classified ad ran for three issues and cost sixty-five dollars, which was a lot of money for me, especially in those student days. I was perpetually broke. I ate sardine sandwiches. I smoked my cigarettes only halfway to make them last longer. I bought clothes on Friday, wore them to the bar on Saturday, and returned them on Monday. I was constantly on the phone to my parents asking for loans. The money I’d saved during the summer while working in Chemical Valley, in my hometown of Sarnia, Ontario, and which was to last me throughout the school year, had suddenly, and inexplicably, run low.

  “But, Brian,” my dad would say. “It’s October.”

  As to why I would’ve sunk that kind of cash into a personal ad rather than spend the money on something more practical, like a new pirate shirt—this was the early nineties, after all—I can only explain my actions by saying that I was desperate for love. It was something I had never experienced. Lust, absolutely. Hurt—are you kidding me? But romantic love, and everything I imagined it would feel like, had eluded me. What I craved more than anything was security and reassurance, of being accepted. A connection. I wanted to see someone looking back at me and know that I was loved for who I was, not for whatever I’d been masquerading as up until that point in time.

  In retrospect, I don’t think I would have recognized Prince Charming even if he had come galloping along on a white horse with a box of Pot of Gold assorted chocolates tucked under his arm. What did I know about love at twenty- one? What could I have known, after having to grapple with the shame, fear, and suffocating isolation that came with growing up gay in a small city? I was surrounded by a brick wall, one that I’d been constructing since my childhood, although I didn’t realize it. Nor did I realize how thick and high the wall was.

  In spite of my feelings of wrongness, of never being good enough, or valued or equal, I still, somehow, believed in love. Specifically, gay love. “This desperation is raging,” I wrote in my journal. “I’m clinging to scraps of hope.”

  But the ad was also about excitement. And adventure—I placed it to see what was possible. For so long, I’d kept gay men at a distance. It was a guilt-by-association thing. Now that I was coming into my own, now that I was starting to feel comfortable in my own skin, I became increasingly curious: Who was out there?

  Before the advent of smart phones and dating apps, even before the internet, personal classified ads were one of the only outlets available for queer people to meet one another. Sure, there were bars, and bathhouses. And the grocery store, if you were expert at casting longing glances across the potatoes. But for many, particularly those who were closeted, personal ads were one of the few ways for queer people to connect. I had responded to a classified ad the year before I placed my own. I’d been a bundle of nerves, waiting to see if I’d get a response. (I never did.)

  Knowing that I’d likely be in competition with other ads appearing in the same issue, I didn’t approach the wording of my ad lightly. I’d need to stand out if I was going to snare the attention of Mr. Right. And sixty-five dollars was a fortune, after all. I could have used that money to pay off some of my debt (university students should never be allowed to register for a Petro-Canada credit card) or make a payment on the car I’d purchased a few months earlier. Or spend it on alcohol. So I had to ensure I got a return on my investment. Rather than write something predictable, like “Single gay male, brown hair and eyes, seeks same for special times and quiet nights,” I opted to showcase my sparkling personality.

  Gorgeous blond hunk, 6′2″, 200 lb of solid muscle—not! Real cute university student, 21, seeks same. Tired of narcissists and tired of being alone. Princess Di and Rambo wannabes need not apply.

  I remember sitting at my large wooden desk in the basement of the student house where I lived, waiting for the moment when I’d be alone so I could call to place the ad without being overheard. It was impossible at times to keep anything private in that house, and the threat of exposure was constant. The receptionist on the other end remarked, “Oh, that’s a good ad!” and I thought, “Yes, yes it is.” If I could charm the newspaper’s classifieds receptionist—someone who no doubt wrote down the wailings of the heartsick and lonely day in and day out—then the sky really was the limit.

  A couple of days after my ad ran, I called the newspaper to inquire about the mountain of letters that were likely overtaking their office by that point.
<
br />   “You’ve got four,” I was told.

  Four?!? How was that even possible? Had there been a Canada Post strike? Was there a typo in the box number? I had paid sixty-five dollars for four replies? But I reminded myself that all it would take was one letter from the right person. So I hopped into my 1982 shit-brown Mazda 626 (which I’d christened Mr. Feces) and booted it to the newspaper’s office to collect my sparse offerings.

  As I drove to the office, I wondered: What if this reaching out had been for nothing? I had finally tried to connect with someone, but I had never considered that no one might want to connect with me. What if I was more alone than I realized? What if I walked away from this experiment even lonelier than I had been going into it?

  What if there truly was no one for me?

  When I called the newspaper again a few days later, I was relieved to hear there were more envelopes, and a few more the next time. When all was said and done, I received around twenty-five responses. Maybe not the landslide I had hoped for, but it was twenty-five more chances at love than I’d had before I placed the ad.

  I’d resist the urge to open the letters right then and there in the newspaper office parking lot and instead race home in Mr. Feces, a trail of exhaust following me as I tore through the streets, to barricade myself in my locked room and pore over the letters, as if each one were a sacred text. So much hope riding on a couple of paragraphs written by a stranger.

  While it was fun to read the letters, to decode their subtexts and to imagine what the person looked like (only a few had included a photo), I was, admittedly, a little underwhelmed by the responses. There were some that I marked with a circle in the top left-hand corner of the envelope—an opening, a point of entry, of possibility. Others were given an x in the same spot and set aside. Too old, too boring, too humourless, too delusional.

  I met with a handful of respondents. One for lunch. Another for drinks in a town thirty minutes away. I met one in a building on the university campus. And, with each encounter, I felt the same disappointment when I arrived on the scene. Not that any were unattractive or had sold themselves inauthentically, but I had very specific ideas as to what I was looking for, and I knew immediately if someone fit the bill or not. Or was it something else? Maybe it was easier to reject people before they could reject me.

  So, no love connections. Not even any lacklustre sex. Sixty-five dollars down the drain, and the adventure, though a much-needed distraction for a couple of weeks, had got me nowhere. I was still single, semi-closeted, and just like my ad said, still “tired of being alone.”

  For some reason, I saved the letters I had dismissed, those envelopes with their tiny x’s. I might have felt that throwing them out was a further rejection. These men had taken a chance, after all, a greater chance than I’d taken. They’d made themselves vulnerable to a stranger. They’d written into the void with the same hopes as me. And the void had answered with a resounding silence.

  But I have a habit of hanging on to weird bits and pieces of my life—birthday cards, buttons, unflattering photos. I’ve always believed that the random and unfiltered souvenirs of our lives, rather than the curated and polished, are the most revealing.

  I kept the letters in a cardboard box with other miscellaneous things: my high school yearbooks, elementary school Valentine cut-out cards, photo albums I made as a child that contained carefully peeled shreds of my sunburned skin. (Yes, I was a weird kid.) The boxes travelled with me over the years, and I didn’t think much about the letters. But one winter day, a few years back, I rediscovered them. I tend to avoid digging through the boxes, mainly because it’s a pain to haul everything out, but also because I have a habit of sinking into the past, sometimes giving it more weight than the present. It’s such an easy trap, to take all your past experiences and package them up in a way that provides a tidy frame of perspective and structure, of narrative, in ways that the present can’t. The past is always there, waiting. Even as I write this, each word I type on my screen immediately moves into the past.

  On that particular winter day, I decided to indulge myself. I read those thirteen letters again, now more than a quarter-century old, the paper and envelopes yellowing, the handwritten and typed words fading. The letters seemed finite in a way they hadn’t before. I seemed finite, too. I realized how much time had passed since these letters were written. These men had no idea who I was or that I still had their letters—letters that had been deposited into a mailbox almost thirty years ago, but could have blown away instead, floated through the air like tiny white sails.

  These letters never even got the courtesy of a response.

  Where were these thirteen men now? I wondered. No doubt some were dead, or elderly. But others, closer to my age, would still be alive, wouldn’t they? Did they remember writing these letters? Where had their paths taken them? And had they ever found love?

  Revisiting the letters at a much different stage in my life revealed their unique and awkward charms. I found myself asking, How might I reply to them now, writing not from the perspective of a wide-eyed youth but from the decidedly more wrinkled perspective of a man firmly at the midpoint of his life?

  I considered my twenty-one-year-old self, someone who has become a little blurrier, less tangible, with each passing year. As I gallop towards middle age (truth be told, I’m there already, although it’s hard for me to believe), I can’t help but think of that twenty-one-year-old as a stranger, too. What would I say to him, the young man who was just coming out, who had gone in search of love and companionship?

  Was it possible these strangers could help me connect to him as well, the person I used to be?

  So I sat down and I did what I hadn’t done twenty-nine years earlier.

  I replied to those thirteen letters.

  Hello “hunk”

  Today is Sunday, Sept 27, and I grabbed a copy of the newspaper on my way home from the gym. I’ve glanced at the companion column before, but your ad definitely got my attention. I’ve read it a few times, but I’m still confused. What part of the ad does the “not” refer to?

  I’m 5 feet 11 inches and weigh in at 175 pounds. I work out at least 3 times a week, sometimes more, so I’m pretty solid. I get lots of compliments, especially on my arms. I have blond curly hair and brown eyes. I know some people from the university but no one with your description who would be up for some “guy fun.”

  Here are a couple of photos. They’re not great. The lighting is bad in one of them. But you’ll get a sense of what I look like. I bet you’ll get a lot of letters, but if you like what you see, write back and maybe include a photo?

  Hope to hear from you.

  Dwayne

  Dear Dwayne,

  I knew who you were. I recognized you from your photos, bad lighting and all. I don’t think we had ever spoken or interacted with one another, though. It was funny, how minuscule the gay community in our university town could seem at times, how jam-packed the bar could get on a Saturday night, and yet there were people I never spoke to or whose paths I never crossed.

  I rarely go to gay bars anymore. Not that I still can’t, but I’m asleep by eleven thirty most Saturday nights. Still, I miss being twenty-one and roaring into the weekends with a vengeance. I’ll hear a new Lady Gaga song and think, “I’d be fucking killing it on the dance floor right now.” I miss the excitement and possibilities. The Saturday night people parade. When you’re gay and not living in a metropolis like Toronto, there aren’t many options when it comes to nightlife. So you, and every other queer person, have no choice but to make do with whatever bars and watering holes there are, regardless of your interests or inclinations. But this, for me, was always the charm. Sure, big cities might boast more diverse entertainment offerings, permitting people to stay within the comfort of their cliques, but where is the joy in sameness? Give me a smoky room with no windows, volunteer DJs, and a spinning mirror ball dangling pr
ecariously from the ceiling. Give me dykes, drag queens, leather daddies, trans men and women, bears and twinks. Give me your closeted, your brazenly open, your flaming and your butch. Give me your old, young, fat, thin. Your messy drunks and your anal-retentive gay guys in pleated khakis. Put them all in the same space while “Rhythm Is a Dancer” thumps from a shitty sound system and you’ve got my brand of gay bar heaven.

  And yet, as with everything in life, there was a flip side. The bar scene could feel stifling at times, an arena of competition and negativity. I wanted to be myself, but I still felt pressure to conform. I wanted freedom, but instead I was confined. I sought companionship but often walked away feeling lonelier than I had at the start of the night. The bar was where I sought solace, but instead I often felt judged. You’d be either praised or dismissed based on your looks, your body, your age, your clothing, whether your circle of friends was the “right” circle. There were few rituals I enjoyed more than getting ready to go out, but the pressure was always on to look hot, desirable. A piece of man candy. Those blessed with muscular bodies could get away with a simple white T-shirt and jeans—not an option for the rest of us mortals sucking in our stomachs and trying to cover up other imperfections with blazers or baggy pants. It was hard, at times, to see my reflection in the length of mirror along the dance floor and not feel deflated. Good looks and a hard body could get you anywhere on a Saturday night. Or so it seemed to me.

  There I was, trying desperately to get laid, watching some muscle-bound guy saunter by. I’d pray for a look back, a signal of mutual attraction, but it rarely happened. I didn’t have a chance. Not that rejection was unfamiliar to me. By that point, I was well versed in it—just not rejection by other gay men. And that subset of exclusion, the refusal by my own kind, was a particularly deep wound.

  Now that I consider your letter, it was brave of you to include your photo. I wouldn’t have done it. It would have made me feel too vulnerable, to know that I had sent a stranger a photo of myself. That the stranger might know who I was but I wouldn’t know him. He could have shown the photo to his friends. I could just imagine being pointed out at the bar. “That’s the loser over there! As if!!!” Cue the cacophony of mean girl laughter.