I took this picture at Toronto’s Pride Parade – of a man dressed as a princess, and a young boy in a bountiful skirt. I’ts a moment of rapture, captured on every face in the crowd. Not to see it is to be blind to love. Which, when it beckons, we must follow even if the path is hard or steep.
As I reflected on love and fear and freedom and policies, my thoughts followed their inexorable path to my South African upbringing and how it had tarnished me.
It was the late eighties and Vince was my boss. In a time when any black person in a position of authority was a real novelty. Mandela was still in prison (where he’d been all my life) and apartheid, the rigid policy enforcing Vince’s ‘separateness’ from me, had been the law since my mother was born. Vince was not regarded as a citizen in his own land. He had no right to vote or even pull up a chair, unless he had the papers to prove it.
Bear in mind I am the genetic offshoot of conservative Dutch forebears. This is fortunately outweighed by significant doses of Irish and Scots descendancy, allowing perhaps for more liberal sentiments to flow through my veins. Nevertheless, should I have decided to have sex with Vince, we would both be thrown into jail. It was not only considered ungodly for different races to live as one, it was illegal. And the law is the law.
Vince made me nervous. Clothing myself in my only available defence, I would skip into his office wearing brightly coloured skirts and Farrah Fawcett hair, where I’d make as much noise as possible to cover up my emptiness. He would lean back in his chair and look at me, like some starling he couldn’t decide whether to capture or release. Then he’d tell me to get out. To leave his office and to come back when I had a well-formed thought in my head. He pointed out that I was smart, and that my feather-fluffing impressed him not at all. In my entire, albeit short-lived working life, Vince was the first person who believed in me.
We overcome prejudice when anonymous strangers become people who matter. Vince and I became friends. I came to care for his custom of asking after the equivalent of ‘crops and tribe’ before rudely and directly getting to the business at hand. To be awakened to the ludicrous notion that my friend could not live in my neighbourhood or swim in the same piece of ocean as me. To respect that the vast intelligence which he so freely shared, (that which had been ‘given unto me’), was gained at considerable effort and expense.
Whereas my main preoccupation in life at this point was drinking to drown my own sorrows, I now started to care enormously about the injustice of it all. When I stood in that long line in 1994 (political heathen that I am), I voted for Mandela with all of my heart. For freedom and equality, for the dismantling of apartheid, and for a multiracial democracy in our land.
A decade later, I found myself being Steven’s boss in Canada. We too became friends. I set about turning him into an ‘Adman’, and he invited me to dinner so his partner could teach me how to cook. Actually I think he was a little afraid for my son’s nutrition – what would a boy raised on McDonalds turn out to be? I arrived to find the carefully prepared ingredients for bobotie, my favourite South African dish. Not only had they divined my preference, they were kind enough to want to please me. It touched me to the core.
The thing is, I have met lots of gay people, I just didn’t really know them. Now I do, and by default, I extend the enormous affection I feel for Steven to the rest of his ‘tribe’. I put myself in the shoes of people I wouldn’t normally put myself in the shoes of.
Stalin said, “a single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.”
It would be a tragedy to me if Steven were expected to forfeit a single human right. I don’t claim to know what ‘makes people gay’ any more than I care to know what makes me an alcoholic. What I do know is that all our lives are important. That anyone brave enough to be who they are captures my attention and draws me into standing ovation.
So I celebrate Pride and sing with Gaga, “Baby you were born this way.” I give up the endless pontificating over nature and nurture and recognize that moment of clarity where you know, without exception, that you are not mainstream, no matter how much society abhors aberration. My son will never learn the way other people are taught, I will never drink like I’ve had enough, and Steven will love whoever he damn well pleases.
100 Crunches 