AIDS, fairies and other tales

[vaneramos]

pegkerr's novel The Wild Swans relates the stories of two parallel lives, Eliza and Elias, but while reading it I was struck by a third parallel in my own life.

Eliza's story is based on the fairytale of the wild swans, in which a girl risks her life to rescue her 11 brothers from a curse. Peg sets it in 17th Century England and New England.

Elias's story begins in New York City in 1981. He is an 18-year-old whose father has discovered he is gay and kicked him out of the house. He is living on the streets, hungry and penniless, when somebody helps him out. Elias finds a job, falls in love, and starts to discover acceptance in a newfound family of his own choice.

Then his friends start falling mysteriously ill.



From our perspective 22 years later, this plague is not so mysterious. The Wild Swans is about the tragedy wrought by AIDS in the early 1980s.

Meanwhile Eliza's brothers, caught beneath a curse, are an allegory of Elias's chosen family. And while he and his gay friends are afflicted by misguided judgments, Eliza becomes the innocent victim of a cruel witch hunt.

The Wild Swans won a Gaylactic Specturm Award for best positive portrayal of a gay character in 2000.

The stories weave together subtly. The plots never actually intersect, but run parallel. They become interconnected by characters and ideas. Elias encounters an elderly gay man, a self-proclaimed fairy, who resembles a peculiar old woman Eliza meets in the English countryside. The two heroes face similar horrors, temptations and afflictions. The similarities are always strangely altered, shifting in time, sequence and quality. The novel develops a sense of the uncanny.

With that same feeling I encountered parallels in my own life.

In 1981 when Elias was 18 and on the streets, I was 17. But I didn't come out of the closet or become sexually active at that time. If I had, my life would have unfolded much differently. It has often occurred to me that I might easily have perished in the 1980s. I have met several men my age who experienced AIDS the way Elias did: one personal loss after another.

As with Elias, religion played an important role in the way I came out. But the sequence of events is out of kilter. Elias came from a religious home and I did not. At the age when he came out of the closet, I turned to Christianity and became deeply committed to an evangelical church. In hindsight, I made some bad choices. I deliberately put myself in a position where acting on my sexual feelings would cost me dearly. I built religious walls around myself.

On the other hand, it may have saved my life. The path also included having two beautiful daughters. But when I could go no further, I would have a price to pay.

Elias and Eliza got banished from their biological families, victims of harsh judgment by their fathers. That didn't happen to me. In the beginning I was my own harshest judge. I didn't see how God could accept someone like me, so I was determined to change.

Between 1990 and 1995, the years when I was married, I attended New Direction For Life, a Toronto organization under the umbrella of Exodus International, otherwise known as the ex-gay movement. I went through counselling and participated in support groups designed to cure my homosexuality.

It did not cure me. Contrary to the movement's claims, I never met any successfully converted heterosexuals. Instead, everyone ended up combatting various degrees of denial and depression.

My depression, when I finally acknowledged it, had become severe and disabling. In spring 1995 I had an emotional breakdown from which I am still recovering. Several different counsellors and my family doctor helped me face the fact that the only road to recovery was through self-acceptance. That meant I had to stop treating my sexual orientation as sin.

The decision to do that cost me my marriage, my church, most of my friendships, and almost my daughters. I am fortunate to live in a country where, even in 1996, Family Law did not normally discriminate against gay parents. If my ex-wife had found a legal loophole to prevent me from having access to my children, she would have used it.

I say it now without animosity, though at the time we put each other through hell. I don't like to dwell on my divorce. The fact is we had a nasty time. A few people had an agenda which included trying to prove I was an unfit parent. In the end a child psychologist refused to recommend sole custody for my ex-wife, so she didn't get as much control as she wanted.

Karen and I are civil to each other now.

Back in January 1996 I was utterly alone in an apartment of my own. Standing late one night at the window I watched snowflakes, like swan feathers, blowing through the flood of a streetlight below. The street was cold and empty. It looked like my life. I had gone from living in a deeply connected church community where everyone looked after one another, to discovering that no one could tolerate a gay man abandoning the path of repentance, and that I had no genuine friends at all.

I hesitate to write these things. For a while I saw myself as a victim. I don't see my life that way anymore. I made choices, and continue to make them, good and bad. I still do a poor job, sometimes, of taking responsibility for my life, but I'm trying. Several years ago I realized I needed to move beyond bitterness, and I stopped complaining about the events surrounding my coming out. I almost stopped talking about it altogether. Now I want to relate the story as objectively as I can, in hindsight.

The part of The Wild Swans that made me cry the most was chapter 4, when Elias met a Good Samaritan who helped him off the streets. Along with Elias, I fell in love with the character Sean.

I didn't have anyone to rescue me in 1996. My parents have helped financially, but their mental constitution has never enabled them to offer any moral support. I felt emotionally abandoned by them, too.

I am amazed at Peg's insight into the emotional experience of a gay man, from a Christian background, coming out of the closet. She did her homework.

I fell in love in December 1996. I felt for Dan the same way Elias felt for Sean. He moved in with me and we had a passionate, turbulent relationship with a couple of break-ups and reconciliations. He has been the one true love of my life. But getting over that, after it finally ended in spring 1999, has been one of the most difficult challenges of all. The loss of Dan was also mirrored in The Wild Swans.

Ultimately no one can improve our lives except ourselves. I have often felt like Eliza, labouring painfully over the coats that would lift her brothers' curse. Throughout the ordeal she could not speak, or her efforts would be in vain. She was accused of witchcraft and could not speak in her own defence.

I have laboured to lift the curse I inflicted on myself by repressing my own feelings and desires for so long. After the religious walls came down, I found emotional walls behind them. My healing task has been learning to trust people again, let them in. As from the fairy who visited Eliza in a dream, I have had insight along the way, sometimes from counsellors, often from books.

Here are two of the most important lessons I have learned, also paralleled in the book:

1. Keep being creative, no matter how hard it is, like Eliza making coats out of nettles even while accusations fell around her.



2. As Elias found, when our families turn their backs, we need to build families of choice. It usually requires harder work than Elias had to do. If you give up on yourself, many other people will not know how to love you. You have to be your own best friend. And you have to be a good friend to others in order to make good friends.
   

As I read the final chapters of The Wild Swans, often close to tears, I was reminded how lucky I am to have come out when I did, despite the harm I did myself by running away for so long. In 1996 I was forewarned and forearmed about HIV. I have never lost a friend to AIDS. I have friends who are Poz, and while it's still a terrible affliction, it's not a death sentence anymore.

Anyone who actually suffered losing an entire community to AIDS might not be able to read The Wild Swans. It is heart-wrenching. But I'm glad that I read it. It gave me another picture of what some of my friends have gone through, and it gave fresh meaning to some of the events of my own life.

A strange thing happened today. I took the girls to the Stratford Festival to see The King and I. Before the show we went down to the river and fed wild swans. Brenna picked up a white feather and asked me keep it in my pocket for her.

In case you don't know Rodger and Hammerstein's musical, in one scene the children of the King of Siam dramatize "The Little House of Uncle Thomas" (a twist on the American classic by Harriet Beecher Stowe) in which a slave girl, Eliza, flees from her cruel master, Simon of Legree. She escapes across a frozen river with snowflakes swirling around her.

"Run, Eliza!"

The Wild Swans isn't done with me, yet.

Comments

[blue-by-you.livejournal.com]

Amazing. You gave me chills, V. You said so many things here I couldn't say because it wasn't my own to say it and other things I could have said but didn't know how to articulate. A most excellent review. I hope Peg gets to read it.

[vaneramos.livejournal.com]

I have been inhibited because I didn't know how to write about gay characters for a mainstream audience. I don't read much "gay literature," and don't want my writing labelled that way. Timothy Findley (one of my Canadian heroes, recently deceased) wrote successfully for a mainstream audience, but his most vivid gay character, in Spadework, was antagonistic. He himself was forthright and unambiguous about his sexual orientation, but his characters manifested conflict and perversity that I can't relate to personally.

Peg's book and her character, Elias, have given me hints of ways to write from my own experience. Thank you for telling me about The Wild Swans.

[vaneramos.livejournal.com]

I'm glad to be able to share it with you, in pictures and stories. The story isn't over, of course. My daughters still have to figure out how to grow up with one evangelical Christian parent, and one gay atheist. So far they manage to identify with both sides, but I'm sure it will give them difficulty. I suspect that my younger daughter is going to have a harder time with it.

On August 2 we're going to the wedding of my friends, Judy and Brenda (who have lived together for 30 years, since university). We talked about it on Tuesday evening, when Sylvie and Sarah were here for dinner. Marian seems delighted about it. Brenna has accepted it, but I can see some gears turning. Her lower lip shot out when we talked about same-sex marriage, but she held her tongue. On the other hand, both girls adore Sylvie and Sarah. I think the challenge is to show my kids that gay people are just normal, regardless of what anybody tells them to believe.

[bardcat.livejournal.com]

such a rich and insightful read. the way you share your journey is quite moving. i have a sense i can learn a lot from your story. i am grateful for the seans who cross our paths.

[vaneramos.livejournal.com]

My story wants to come out more completely and articulately. I'm glad if you can learn from it. Thank you.

[ruralrob.livejournal.com]

I'm glad you finally told this story. Incredibly moving to read, of course, but I wonder who you feel now that it's out there.

You've also done a masterful job of weaving in the threads of your personal journey, the story of the book, AIDS and even Stratford. Seems to me this is excellent writing.

[vaneramos.livejournal.com]

It is an uncomfortable feeling. I woke up this morning thinking I wanted to delete it. But posting this is an important beginning. I'm still thinking about that conversation we had that afternoon you picked me up at the train station.

[jaique.livejournal.com]

Thank you for this beautiful sharing, for exposing the source of much of your wisdom.

[vaneramos.livejournal.com]

Yes, sometimes if we pay attention to the difficult things that happen to us, we get a little wisdom as pay-off. Maybe we would be happier if we just stayed on a mountaintop, never got into any trouble, and never learned anything. ;-)

[jaique.livejournal.com]

Yep, we would. Right up until the moment an eagle flew by and shit on our head. :-)

[ghostsandrobots.livejournal.com]

Wow, thank you for sharing this.

(Also, I'm going to have to read the book now.)

[vaneramos.livejournal.com]

I hope you do. It is more powerful than enjoyable.

[noveldevice.livejournal.com]

*hugs*

[vaneramos.livejournal.com]

Thank you. I wanted some real ones while I was reading this book. ;-)

[wonderboynj.livejournal.com]

What a well written story Van. I'm going to see if I can get this book from my library.

I love The King and I, The Little House of Uncle Thomas sequence is brilliant. And what irony it held for you.

*hugs*

[jwg.livejournal.com]

I don't usually read science fiction, but your incredibly wonderful posting made me want to read this so I just requested it from the public library.

I've done well following your previous recommendation by reading The Wild Within by Paul Rezendes. I'm not quite finished it so I just renewed it; I'll post about it soon.

[vaneramos.livejournal.com]

It falls under fantasy more than science fiction. The part set in New York in the 1980s is hardly fantastical, though.

I'm glad you're enjoying Rezendes!

[vaneramos.livejournal.com]

Thanks, it's an excellent book.

The King and I is a great musical. I had forgotten. I was expecting the usual Rodgers and Hammerstein heterosexist fantasy. But the story explores tolerance, forbidden love and the problem of repression.

[peregrinus236.livejournal.com]

Strange and dreadful beasts grow in the dark and behind the walls we erect. And the initial illumination, like closing time at the bars when the lights come on, can seem rather shocking. But in time, the real people, real feelings, and real life around us are revealed to be much fuller than the romance we tried to create or the horror we imagined -- and not so bad afterall.

My own history parallels your history that parallels the story in the book (which I now have to read). I have come to believe that the more we share our true journey, the more we find connections with each other. And the monsters and ogres diminish in size and imagined ugliness, and are even revealed to be not so different from ourselves. You daughters may struggle, but some day will be grateful for the humanity you are illuminating for them. And we are all better for it. Thanks for letting us see that man behind the curtain.

[vaneramos.livejournal.com]

You're welcome.

[rfmcdpei.livejournal.com]

Beautiful.

[quirkstreet.livejournal.com]

I'm sooo glad you didn't delete this! I've been a little behind on reading LJ and I would hate to have missed the stories you weave together.

When I find better words to tell you how special you are than simply "Van, you're incredibly special," I will tell them to you.

[vaneramos.livejournal.com]

Just whisper it in my ear sometime and the words won't matter. ;-)

[poetbear.livejournal.com]

i give that a big 'thumbs up'! glad you didn't delete!~paul

[holyoutlaw.livejournal.com]

What a strong, wonderful, and personal response to a book. Yeah!

[vaneramos.livejournal.com]

Thank you!

[qwyneth.livejournal.com]

Hey--I linked here through another journal. I stumbled upon 'The Wild Swans' a few years ago, and was absolutely blown away--the book simply never leaves your mind. But your review gave me an entirely new perspective on certain aspects. Thank you. Thank you also for sharing your story--it takes incredible strength to do something like that. Again, thank you.

[vaneramos.livejournal.com]

Thanks for your kinds words!

Thanks (with spoilers for everyone else)

[pegkerr.livejournal.com]

I'm grateful that you have given me an insight into your deeply personal experience reading my book. I'm particularly glad to hear that it rang true for you, that you thought I did my homework. In fact I did take particular pains while writing, because unlike other fiction I've done, I knew I was writing about the experiences of real people who had lived in a real time who had suffered greatly. I agonized a great deal about this, wondering how I, a heterosexual chick from the suburbs, could ever nail down the powerful emotions I was writing about, which had been experienced by people so different demographically from myself. Did I even have the right to write it? This doubt almost made me abandon the book several times. It was absolutely essential to me that I honor their experience by "getting it right." I'm glad you think I succeeded.

The book turned out to be much more spiritual/religious than I expected it would when I started writing it. Spiritual/religious issues, I came to firmly believe, were totally intertwined with AIDS and the way the epidemic played out. The failure of the Reagan administration to respond effectively was rooted in the mindset of our Puritan historical roots, which believes that the community/body politic has insiders who are accepted by God and outsiders (today read gays) who aren't the any concern of the community because they have already been rejected by God (the damned). By this reasoning, the powers that be were justified in ignoring the first people to start dying until the epidemic spread totally out of control. They weren't really "us" (God's elect) so their sufferings didn't matter. The ravages of AIDS played right into this: they died so awfully so of course that must mean that God had turned His face from them.

And yet I came to see Eliza as a Christ figure (note the wounded hands and feet, and I deliberately added a wound to her side for that reason, positing that she rubbed the nettles against her side when she lost her spindle). I felt that if Christ came today, He might very well come as a victim of AIDS. Note the use of Psalm 31 which I used again and again throughout the book. That's the source for the verse about God being a rock of refuge, which refers both to the rock in the sea and Fire Island. Psalm 31 comes back in during the trial scene (an excerpt was used as that chapter's epigram). Yet another portion of the psalm has referred to continually by commentators as a prophetic description of Christ's trial and agony at Golgotha. Yet I couldn't help noticing that the very same passage is a damn good description of the suffering of AIDS (...I am in distress; my eye is wasted from grief, my soul and my body also...my strength fails because of my misery and my bones waste away. I am the scorn of all my adversaries, a horror to my neighbors, an object of dread to my acquaintances; those who see me in the street flee from me.)

I came to understand that the church has made a terrible and cruel mistake in rejecting gays because of their sexual orientation. Dare I even say "unchristian" mistake? This leaves gays with the terrible choice you faced (spoiler: and my character W. faced): accept what the church says about you, and deny who you are, or else walk away to be true to yourself but then deny God and your own spirituality. If you truly believe what the church says, you end up embracing your own "damnation." That, I have come to believe firmly, is a false dilemma which has tragically led to so much unnecessary pain for so many. I told the story twice, perhaps, to show how the first characters "failed" Eliza, but their later doppelgangers in Elias's story came closer to getting it right. Spoiler again: W. turns away from the roses (symbol of God's grace and acceptance) at the end, but his counterpart, B., has more hope that he can reconcile his sexual orientation with his spiritual calling.

Anway, thanks again, Van. So often when a writer writes a book and releases it into the world, it's like dropping a stone down a very deep well and waiting in vain to hear the splash. Good intelligent reader feedback (and recommendation of the book to others!) is worth its weight in rubies. I appreciate your kind words and thoughtful review.

Peg

Re: Thanks (with spoilers for everyone else)

[vaneramos.livejournal.com]

Thanks for such a thoughtful reply, Peg.

I can see how difficult it must have been to write from the perspective of a gay man. I wondered how you did it. You must have gay friends, or have done a helluva lot of research because I certainly related to the characters Elias and Sean.

In fact it has given me some ideas about how to write for a mainstream audience out of my own experiences. I don't read much "gay literature" and don't want my writing to be thrown in that genre. One of my heroes (who unfortunately died last year) was Timothy Findley, who managed to be out of the closet and one of Canada's most lauded living authors at the same time. I love his writing, too. But his gay characters were always deeply troubled and antagonistic. In Findley's last novel, Spadework, a manipulative gay director seduces and nearly destroys the marriage of a straight actor with the promise of aiding his career. Findley's writing is brilliant, but I'm sad that he never created any strong gay protagonists.

It has left me with the question of how to create a gay protagonist for a mainstream novel. I think yours was the first novel I have read that did that effectively.

The religious theme sometimes intimidated me. Several years ago it would have stopped me cold.

After I came out, I had a hard time finding a meaningful spiritual path, but eventually I did. I don't identify with organized religion anymore. But religious tolerance is important to me, and that includes being willing to learn from people with different beliefs from me, including Christians.

This is probably the first book I have read in about five years that included so many Christian references. It is a kind of homecoming. I still honour the faith experience that kept me alive through a time of confusion and isolation.