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This is where I get to tell you a little about myself. I’m a long term survivor who has been living with HIV since the early to mid 80’s.
Soon after being diagnosed in Winnipeg, Manitoba, I began working for Manitoba Health as a telephone counselor for the provincial AIDS/STD line. This set me on a new direction from my degree in French studies, which I did complete, but continued on to work for various AIDS service organizations in Winnipeg, Regina (that’s pronounced like vagina, but with an R, don’t ask me why, it’s a Canadian thing), and Toronto. While in Saskatchewan, I began to do some work on a national level with the Canadian AIDS Society on various committees.
Not much longer after my diagnosis, I found myself in the public eye. Refusing to accept the stigma of the 80s, I spoke to many groups, community organizations, students etc. This grew to being a full fledged poster boy in the media in order to put a face to HIV. I firmly believed if you act like a leper, you will be treated like a leper, and it was about time that someone showed other HIV positive people that they do not need to hide.
Several years after coming to Toronto in 1992, I decided I had enough of this kind of work. I was burned out, and tired of the politics. In the meantime, my life had taken many twists and turns.
Eventually I went back to work as a make-up artist, and trainer for a Toronto-based company. In my early thirties and with the help of the internet, I discovered my exhibitionist side. This lead to me eventually starting up a amateur porn site with an ex-partner after I had gone on disability. One thing led to another, after much personal destruction later, this relationship crumbled and I ended up in the wonderful world of escorting.
This subculture took me all over North America and Europe. After much partying, and way too much crystal meth, I changed my ways.
It’s been several years since the last time I used crystal meth, I have regained my health, and I am back into the world of AIDS. My focus now is advocacy work around access to treatment issues.
Throughout all of this, I have maintained a very black sense of humour. It is dark, very dark. This is how we survived the 80s where there was no vacation from death. Massive loss of friends and acquaintances honed my darkness. My role models were a bunch of guys with AIDS in San Francisco who produce a Zine called D.P.N., short for Diseased Pariah News. They featured the “Innocent Victim of the Month,” ads for AIDS Barbie, and the Malibou Home Hospice. The blog Acid Reflux marks the birth of HIV Glamour politics, which you will get to understand more as go through my writings.
To finish this bio off, I am going to include a post I wrote on April 29, 2006 to show where part of me is coming from. To know more, you gotta keep reading.
A moment of reality
I’m not sure why, bit I on the serious side. I figure, with all my tongue and cheek stuff, it was time to get a bit real.
Even though I was joking about BGG, there is a lot of truth there. I have to back up many years. I was an incredibly shy child, dysfunctionally shy. I could not pass another child my own age on the sidewalk; the moment when we’d pass each other was far to painful and awkward for me, and I’d have to cross the street before having to endure the experience.
This carried on until early adulthood. During Junior and high school it just got worse and worse. Sturgeon Creek Collegiate was aptly nick-named, many years prior to the trend-setting Columbine shoot outs, “Shot Gun High.” This was due to that one day when other students had picked on this on guy so badly that he returned with a sawed off shut-gun. He entered the open concept design area and shot the head off of the offending student. And to be honest, as terrible as these events are, I can really understand why these kids loose it.
I first turned to drugs while in jr. high school. Go Ask Alice, is the story about the first time I got high. After that I continued. The way I saw it, the only group of misfits I could possibly fit into were the “stoners.”
My entire childhood I was the subject of complete and utter self-esteem destroying activities. Even my voice in high school was the subject of mockery. The resulting effect of my speaking so quietly meant that I was always hearing, “Can you speak up?”
All and all, the sum total of these experiences left me in a world where I was the ugliest, the worst, the most fucked up, the least interesting, the worst of whatever the worst could be. I always felt I was on the outside looking in. Or at least that was the way it was in my mind. This left me is such state of desperation looking for approval and validation anywhere I could get it.
Thinking back on who’d I’d let fuck me back when I was seventeen, eighteen, was pretty pathetic. But at least it meant, even if it were for a couple of hours or an evening, that I was desirable and that I meant something to someone; even if it were a hole to fuck.
How do you “negotiate” safer sex when you are constantly looking to be wanted, and fearing the ultimate humility of rejection? We didn’t even talk about that back then. We were just on the cusp of discovering this virus. When it did finally start to get peoples’ attention, it was easy to pass it off as a “big city thing” in LA, New York or Paris. When I lived in the south of France, I was warned to stay away from anyone coming for Paris. It’s funny how we will do anything to justify a bare cock, and not do what is necessary to protect ourselves.
When I lived in Vancouver, prior to running off to France, I remember someone, who turned out to be the first person in my life I truly could call a friend, turned to me in a bar and said, “I really like you and I hope we can become friends.” I wanted to look around to make sure he wasn’t talking to someone else. “Me?” I thought. “Is he serious, why would anyone want to be friends with me!”
Phillip taught me that I did have someone thing to offer, and that I did have value as a human being. I will always remember him for that. He died two weeks prior to me finding out that I indeed had the same infection.
As it turns out, the desperate need for external validation is still here. I deny it, but it is there. I’m not sure if it is a part of being gay, but I am an overachiever, motivated by the true desire to be the best at whatever I do, but also by the need to compensate for being gay, and at times even being HIV positive. It’s kind of an over compensating phenomenon. The natural extension of trying to be the best I can, is the need to be recognized for it. It’s a part of me that I don’t like very much.
At the second point in my life, post adolescence, where my self-esteem and self-image had been squashed into extinction, this again re-surfaced. Joe (PFF – for those who are new joining us, that stands for psycho-fuck-face) was an expert of deciphering weakness and insecurity and attacking it. I have to admit, he is a master of this. Statements such as, “I really would like to meet your mother so I can ask her what happened to you as a child!, You are motionally unstable, nothing but a leach.” and my favorite ones were of him accusing me of one day willfully infecting him.
I left that experience just as I had started escorting. When I heard someone accusing me of being a financial parasite, I had to act; and that was to put an ad out and make my own money. It just so happened that I fled PFF before the ad came out.
Since I was back in that zone of seeing myself as the victim of PFF (of course I didn’t recognize that for some strange perverse reason I stayed with him until the point of almost killing myself several times). Being an escort, whether or not I wanted to admit it, gave me my sense of control and power that I so willingly gave away. What kind of better validation is there when guys actually pay you money to be with you? As shallow as it was, it was nice and safe. These client/escort relationships were safe for me.
I was even voted on the male4fmalescort site one of the top ten escorts for the year 2000.
Again, if you are going to do something, take pride in what you do, I thought. I enjoyed this kind of recognition. The problem I have with external validation is that it is actively seeked out, when I do get a complement, I don’t believe it. I could not be worthy of such a thing. When I don’t get it, it simply reinforces my feelings of being not “good enough, smart enough, talent enough, whatever enough.”
I set myself up for failure not matter what. I recently have been the recipient of some flattering comments. The first few times I got them, I thought, “They’re just being polite!” But then a fellow board member made a similar comment, and then I thought there must be something to this. Funny eh?
I used to think, “Oh poor me, I had such a wounded soul from growing up.” Everyone else’s lives were living vacations to which I was not invited. The entire PFF experience was something that “happened to me” and I, as a participant, had nothing to do with it. To consider it as anything different was to give up the victim role of all things bad.
Through my participation in the twelve-steps, and personal growth through recovery, I have learned that I am not a victim. I have choices. There was some defect in me, some sick need being filled by staying in such a dangerous and dysfunctional situation. As desperate as I was by the end, I did leave with nothing, a fair amount of debt, no where to go to live; and still managed to land on my feet.
As I attended various meetings, I found that my life wasn’t this extraordinary experience, in the truest sense of the meaning out-of-the-ordinary. My feelings and experiences were very similar to many others who had turned to drugs in attempt to heal life’s wounds.
When I started this blog, I had bought into the external validation to a point. I certainly did as far as the Best of Gay Blogs was concerned. In other ways I hadn’t. I had no idea how many people came to read my musings, rants and unique outlook on life. When my friend who owns, edits, produces (I believe in collaboration with a business partner) Gay Guide Toronto asked me how many hits I was getting, I had no idea. Figuring I had about five daily readers, I put up a hit counter. Although it’s not that accurate as I have to come back to do stuff on the blog and it counts those hits, I was till surprised at the number I was getting. Yes, it’s not in the thousands, but it was sure more than the five I figured that would routinely visit.
Why this post? As I mentioned, I felt it was time to get a bit more real. Charm School, is unquestionably a fun place to teach, but it’s not real life. Putting myself out there warts and all, I think, provides some perspective and context to where I am coming from (I apologize to those gramatically inclined, I let a prepostition dangle at an end of a sentence!). Acid Reflux is about not only not letting others define me as I have done far too often in the past, it is also a way to shout out my own personal demons.
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