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.