Missed Connections

by Brian Francis

  I never had that growing up. There were no openly gay relatives at our family functions, no same-sex spouses, no rainbow buttons on anyone’s lapels. There was no guidebook to being gay, no road map. No examples of what a healthy and positive gay life could look like. Whatever path I walked down, I had to carve it out for myself, even if it felt like I was fumbling through thick brush most of the time.

  If I’m going to be honest, I was a little jealous when my nephew came out. To my eyes, his coming out wasn’t a big deal in my family because I had already done so much of the hard work. I’d already put in the time with my relatives. I’d had the uncomfortable conversations about how being gay was normal, how it wasn’t a reflection of bad parenting skills, and no, nothing had happened to make me this way. (My mom had a theory that my homosexuality had been caused by a scare she got while she was pregnant with me while driving through the Rockies. This was also a woman who once proclaimed, “All gay men have thin fingers so they can do artistic things.”)

  But I was also proud of the role I had played in my nephew’s coming out. I had helped make it a bit easier for him than it had been for me. And isn’t that the point, Randy M.? Doesn’t that make our struggle worth it?

  Recently, I gave my nephew, now twenty-eight, and his new boyfriend a ride to a family function. It was the first time I’d met someone he was dating. Since he’s come out, it’s been fun having another gay in the family. We’re not just uncle and nephew; we’re gay uncle and gay nephew. And this means we have a bond, regardless of our age difference. We’re by no means the same person, but there’s an undercurrent of understanding between us, of our shared struggles and achievements, of the trajectory of our gay lives.

  I was self-conscious about what his boyfriend might think of me. What had my nephew told him about me? Was I still relevant? Still hip? (The fact that I’m even using that word points to the obvious answer.) Even though there’s often that common ground, in my experience, the younger generation can be dismissive of their gay elders. They rarely ask questions, and never seem all that interested in what I have to say. I’m not implying that I need the conversation to centre around me, but a few basics would be nice: What do you do? How long have you lived in Toronto? Who’s your favourite queen from RuPaul’s Drag Race?

  This, thankfully, was one of several questions the boyfriend asked me. Leave it to drag queens to bridge the generational divide.

  Needless to say, I saw potential.

  This car ride made me realize how lucky the three of us were to be living openly as gay men. A few short generations ago, these drag-queen conversations wouldn’t have happened. I might have assumed my role as the Closeted Uncle. I might even be married to a woman.

  In spite of that luck, and the appreciation I felt while we debated the merits of Monét X Change versus Trinity the Tuck, that realization also terrified me. The freedom my nephew and I now enjoy hasn’t been around for very long. Those broken lines in your rear-view mirror are never as far behind as you think.

  But there we were, in that moment, driving along the 403, an uncle getting to know his nephew’s new boyfriend for the first time.

  It was a perfectly normal scene.

  * * *

  —

  Before my mom married my dad, she dated someone for ten years who I’ll call Johnny. Everyone in the family had heard about Johnny over the years. He was, by my mom’s accounts, the most fascinating person she’d ever dated. (And my mom had dated a lot.) He’d been an entertainer, a singer and a dancer, and had even run his own dance studio.

  “I used to play the records for him,” my mom said proudly.

  I’d seen photos of them together, her impossibly young face smiling back, complete with bumper bangs.

  “I can’t believe I was ever that thin,” she’d sigh. “Those are my real teeth, but I had problems. I had them taken out after you were born. You took all my calcium, Brian.”

  Looking at the photos, it was obvious to me that Johnny was gay. The bleached-blond hair was a dead giveaway.

  “Men didn’t do those sorts of things in the fifties,” my mom whispered to me once, as if we were standing at her locker between classes. “But Johnny didn’t care. He got teased something terrible, though. The other boys would be after him constantly.”

  I wonder if a fixation with hair colour is another common denominator among gay men. I had an unfortunate Sun In Hair Lightener episode in Grade 8. I’d intended to bleach a single lock of my hair, like Andrew Ridgeley from Wham!, but coordination was never my strong point and I ended up spraying half my head. I went from brunette to strawberry blond in a matter of days. The teasing from my classmates was relentless. I patiently explained that I hadn’t dyed my hair, I was using a new shampoo that accentuated my natural highlights, but no one believed me. My parents, who had also noticed, told me to stop or else people would think I was a fag.

  I wince as I write that now. It’s hard to believe they’d say something that harsh to me. But their words are immortalized in the journal I kept at the time.

  Such was the taboo of a boy bleaching his hair in the mid-eighties. Imagine Johnny doing it thirty years earlier! The teasing would have been merciless. (It makes me wonder about the choices we make as queer people, especially in our adolescence. Did I really think I could somehow escape the teasing, that I’d be heralded instead of being reviled? Or was it one of those self-fulfilling prophecies—had I willingly courted the disapproval of others, and sealed my fate of being named the thing I dreaded more than any other?)

  Johnny became part of my mom’s—and our family’s—folklore over the years. He was the showman of her past, the tap dancer she’d lost her heart to. How could she not have known? I wondered. How could she not have seen what was so obvious to everyone else?

  When she was in her sixties, my mom and Johnny reconnected at their high school reunion. I’d been out to her for ten years by that point and was curious to learn more about him. My mom told me he was living in Las Vegas, in a mansion (“It’s Diahann Carroll’s old house!”), and had been with his partner for twenty years.

  “He looks very good,” she said, her voice still resonating with some of that teenage crush. “But I think he’s had plastic surgery. His skin is awfully shiny.”

  A few years later, after my dad died, Johnny invited my mom to Vegas for a visit. She begged me to go with her.

  “I’ll be too nervous on my own. He knows you’re gay. I’ll even pay for your ticket.”

  I understood what this bright spot of excitement would mean to her, especially in the dark time following my dad’s death, but I had mixed emotions. On the one hand, was there anything more anticlimactic than going to Las Vegas with your senior mother? But I was more than a little interested in finally meeting this larger-than-life character from her past. And I knew this reconciliation would give my mom some closure. There she was, bringing her gay son to meet her former gay boyfriend. It was practically a Hallmark movie in the making. Working title: Gays of Our Lives.

  The good news was that Johnny and his partner were everything I wanted a pair of aging Las Vegas homosexuals to be. They greeted us at our hotel wearing silk shirts with loud, colourful patterns and were draped in so much jewellery I was surprised they could lift their heads and arms.

  “Welcome to fabulous Las Vegas!” Johnny announced as he gave my mom a swallowing hug.

  They had us over for dinner that first night. It wasn’t quite the mansion my mom had described, but it was impressive enough. One of the rooms was plastered with framed black-and-white photos of Johnny and his famous friends over the years. He and his husband had even known Liberace.

  Throughout our few days together, they showed us the sights. Johnny was boisterous, theatrical, and generous. I came to appreciate some of the spell he’d cast over my mom, the freedom he would have offered to a teenaged girl whose path in life, like many women of that time, had
been predetermined.

  We went out for dinner on the last night of our visit and Johnny told a few stories about my mom.

  “We were at a party once and Doreen had a few too many drinks. She got up on a chair in front of everyone and started telling dirty jokes.”

  “Johnny!” my mom squealed. “Don’t tell Brian that! Oh, I was so embarrassed afterwards. I felt just terrible.”

  It’s easy to think of your parents as simply that: parents. That they came into being the day you were born. But they had lives before you, before your family, before they were married to one another. And that’s one realization that’s remained with me in the years since that trip. Johnny showed me a side of my mom I’d never known—a tipsy, teenaged girl in love, telling dirty jokes.

  “Do you think it’s possible a gay man can still love a woman?” my mom asked me on the plane ride back. “In a romantic way, I mean.”

  I said that anything was possible, but I held back what I really thought: Johnny was as gay as they got.

  But to say that would have ended my mom’s fantasy. And that’s what I think Johnny had meant to her—an escape for the young girl with few options, and for the grieving widow looking for a respite from her sadness.

  Later, I realized what it was I found interesting about older gay men like Johnny. They were a rarity.

  * * *

  —

  I’m glad to hear you were HIV-negative, Randy M. If you were a retiree in 1992, even an early retiree, it meant that you were likely among the generation hit hardest by AIDS. I came the generation after—I was one of the post-AIDS gays. By the time I entered university, in 1990, I knew what AIDS was. There was still stigma around the disease, and judgement and general bullshit. But at the very least, I knew how it was contracted and how to protect myself.

  Condoms, condoms, condoms! That was drilled into my generation, gay and straight alike. You couldn’t turn around without seeing a safe-sex poster staring back at you. There were even songs about it on the radio. People were making up for lost time, for ignoring the disease—and its earliest victims—for so long.

  In my last year of university, I worked as a waiter in a restaurant that was down the street from my apartment, the one I moved into after sharing a house with my roommates. My new apartment wasn’t much to look at. It was tiny and tacked on to the side of an old house sandwiched between train tracks and a gravel parking lot. The bathroom was narrow like a bowling lane. And there were mice. I’d set out traps and then race to my bed, pulling the covers over my head, terrified I’d hear the snap. But the apartment was mine, and it was the first place I had ever lived alone, and the first place I had ever lived as my true self.

  The restaurant was in a Victorian house, the kind you see in downtown areas that harken back to more charming and sophisticated times. I’m not sure when the house made the transition from residential to commercial, but I could only wonder at the number of restaurants that had blown through its doors over the years. I don’t know what the owner knew about running a restaurant (and truthfully, it didn’t seem like much), but because he was gay and well known in the community, the restaurant attracted a gay clientele. This is one experience I’ve never taken for granted—dining at a gay restaurant. It’s so comforting to not be the only gay couple in a public place.

  Many of the owner’s friends would come in during the empty afternoons and sit at a table by the window, chatting, drinking coffee, and acting campy, the smoke from their cigarettes spiralling towards the ceiling. Maybe you were among them, Randy M. You would have been around the same age. Some of the men had AIDS. There was such a definitive look to the disease back then. The gauntness. The hard ledges of cheekbones and forehead. The shocking uniformity.

  I remember sensing this instinctive internal shift whenever I saw a gay man with AIDS. A chasm was instantly created between us. He was over “there” and I was over “here,” even though I might be standing right next to him. I suppose I could lie and say I felt compassion for these men. That I understood, so plainly and starkly, how easily it could have been me instead. It still could.

  I did feel sympathy for them—how could I not? These men were being robbed of their lives—but I didn’t feel compassion. I told myself that I was smarter than these men. Younger. Stronger. I was better. Because they had AIDS and I didn’t.

  Time changes you, as you likely know. I’ve become more aware of my vulnerability as the years have passed. And what those years have shown me is that the invincibility I once believed I’d earned was nothing more than an illusion. There was no force field surrounding me. True, I had a force field of knowledge, so that counted for something. But that knowledge wasn’t my birthright. That force field wasn’t protection I’d earned. If anything, despite that chasm I’d imagined between my younger self and those men in the restaurant, the only things separating us were luck and a handful of years.

  I went back to that restaurant just last winter. I had returned to my university town for an extended period. My mom was in the hospital, dying, and my sisters and I were taking turns sitting at her bedside, waiting, as you do when someone is in palliative care. My mom slept mostly, but I still felt a compulsion to be there at all times. When I wasn’t in the room with her, I’d worry about how she was doing, if she was in discomfort, if the orderlies had repositioned her or changed her, if the Daniel O’Donnell CD that we had on repeat had stopped and she was lying there, alone, in silence, which, to me, seemed the worst possible fate.

  It almost became an addiction, this bedside sitting, even though there was nothing to do besides look out the window at the other hospital room windows or just stare at my mom, trying to imagine what life would be like without her, without her phone calls and the sound of her voice, which had been so much a part of my life’s soundtrack.

  I learned that this act of imagining a world without a loved one in it is called anticipatory grief—a way to prepare yourself for losing them. But you can’t, of course. You can’t really understand or feel the loss until it comes. And there’s no way to gauge its impact, or how you’ll reconcile yourself with that silence. How you’ll process the memories at a later time, once there is no hospital and no bedside to sit at, once you attempt to return to some semblance of normalcy.

  I needed to take breaks. I was wearing myself out. So one day, I decided to put aside my worries and take the day off. I never get to explore the city where I once lived as a student. My sisters and their families live there now, and it’s always drive to this house, then drive to that house, then drive back to Toronto. All that sitting and talking and eating. And I never have the chance to simply walk around, alone, with no responsibilities or family obligations.

  I revisited some of the places I used to go to when I was a student. Things change, but they also don’t. It seems I’m always caught between the past and the present, comparing the two, trying to figure out how they intersect with one another.

  I ended up walking to the restaurant where I had worked all those decades ago. That restaurant had been closed for years, and other restaurants had come and gone since then.

  On that day, I saw there was a new restaurant at the location, a Tex-Mex place. And it was open. I hadn’t been inside since I worked there, but it was lunchtime and I thought, “Oh, what the hell?” The waitress took me to a small booth, and after she left, I took a good look around. Needless to say, the decor was different. Sombreros and crucifixes on the walls, skeletons dangling from the chandeliers. But the overall layout was the same. It wasn’t hard to imagine my younger self moving about the tables. Even the table by the window was still there. But it was empty.

  I thought about how the men who once sat at that table are long gone. They’ve dissolved like smoke. I was still there, though, in that moment, a middle-aged man myself. Sitting at my booth for two, deciding which tacos to order, debating if I should tell the waitress about the connection I had to the place, if
it would be worth the effort. It’s always a risk, isn’t it? To try to connect with a stranger. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it can make you feel even more alone.

  After I was done my lunch, I went out into a bright and surprisingly balmy January day, the sun causing my eyes to squint. I walked further down the street, to my old apartment, which was still there. It looked rundown, faded, but there were still signs of life inside—blinds in the window, a few items propped up on the enclosed porch. I imagined another student was living there now. A gay student, who walked under the rail overpass every morning like I used to, taking the same path along the river to the university. I wondered about his life, the differences and similarities between us, both now and back when I’d lived there, almost thirty years earlier. Maybe he was fully out, and everyone in his life had known since he was a teenager. (Can you even imagine that possibility when we were that age, Randy M.? But it’s true, kids are coming out younger and younger.) Maybe he was in love or healing a broken heart. Maybe he walked along that river every morning and took stock of all the undefined territory that lay before him. The promise and the possibility of the days ahead.

  I thought about Johnny, who had died a few years earlier, from cancer. I thought about my young nephew, and the open path in front of him. I thought about my own life from where I stood, squarely between them both, and how the randomness of luck had spared us.

  It was still early, and I didn’t want to go back to the hospital just yet. I wanted to wrap this respite around me and delay my impending grief for as long as possible.

  I considered what I wanted to do with the rest of my time.