Interview with Michael D.
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17-11-24-MD.docx
1
“HIV in My Day,” Michael D. (November 24, 2017)
HIV in My Day – Interview 12
November 24, 2017
Interviewee: Michael D. (MD); Interviewer: Ben Klassen (BK)
Ben Klassen: Alright, so I’m sitting here this afternoon with Michael, just getting started. To
ease into the interview, we like to start by asking guys how you first became involved in the gay
community or started engaging in gay life, so to speak.
Michael D.: Um… Let me think about that. I had a couple of friends in high school that I used to
kind of play around with, very – pretty minimal – you know, a couple of times sort of thing.
When I was sixteen-years-old, me and a friend who was a girl – a girlfriend – went down to
Wreck Beach. And we were kind of weirded out because we didn’t go down the main trail
because we didn’t know where the main trail was, we went down the old one. Yeah, it was very
strange. There was a lot of men around and they were all naked of course and they had this
intensity about them that we didn’t understand, and so we left after a while. But when I was
nineteen-years-old there was two places I knew where gay people were: one was a bar called
John Barleys which was an S&M bar down in Gastown, which me and friend had stumbled into
one day and turned around very quickly, and the other place was Wreck Beach. So, that’s where
I came out. That’s where I met my first gay people, and actually met my first lover there who I
actually spent two-and-a-half years with.
BK: At Wreck Beach?
MD: No, we went home occasionally. [laughs] But I met him at wreck beach, and that was about
– before I turned twenty, so it was 1982.
BK: That’s an interesting snapshot of the community to have.
MD: It was pretty wild. It was the tail end of what I call “the party.” They were wild times.
There was a lot of gay men in Vancouver, specifically in the West End. There was a lot of sex,
and a lot of that was going on at Wreck Beach. There was the trails – there was constantly a lot
of gay men having sex in the trails. There was the parks – there was a lot of stuff going on. There
was fifteen gay bars when I came out, ‘cause a friend of a friend took me on a pub crawl. There
was Neighbours, this huge dance club on Robson street. And we went to Faces, this little tiny
clap board place on the corner of Seymour and Robson. Anyways there was fifteen of them, and
they were all busy! The hookers and the hustlers and the transvestites were all still standing on
the corner at Nicola and Pendrell or Jervis and whatever, one block off of Davie Street. You
couldn’t drive down there ‘cause there was so many cars. Very vibrant – there was gay
restaurants, all the bars and night clubs. We used to think it was the gay ghetto, but it was the
nicest ghetto ever. It was just wild and crazy and very different from now. Like nobody was
thinking of getting married and nobody was thinking of having kids. We were just having a
party! It was a very different vibe and a very different feel. Lots of people here from
Newfoundland for example who just went all the way across the country to get away from their
families. And lots of people from the Prairies and they would all end up in Vancouver in the
West End.
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“HIV in My Day,” Michael D. (November 24, 2017)
BK: It sounds bigger in a lot of ways - it geographically covered a lot more space, stretching
down to Robson, Gastown, Yaletown?
MD: No, well there was one spot – Yaletown was very different, and Yaletown was a dirty old
scary dark warehouse district. The Gandy [Dancer] was down there, so everyone would go
trapesing down to The Gandy, but that would mean going across Granville Street which was kind
of scary. It was this one door on a dark warehouse street, and that was The Gandy. And once you
got inside it was just wild – good sound system, really young clientele. And then eventually there
was the Love Affair which was on the corner of Seymour and Drake, which was also still a very
rough area. There wasn’t really residential down here other then the old West End. Everything
east of Burrard was all old commercial, kind of slummy. There was a couple of old houses that
had after hours parties, and there was the baths as well – there was at least two bathhouses down
by the Gandy but they were really seedy. We didn’t go there because we were nice boys.
BK: Maybe it looked a little different but part of it is Vancouver looked a lot different.
MD: Yeah, the only high risers were the old West End which was built in the ‘70s. It was very
congregated, it was very concentrated. Whereas today there’s gay people living all over the city,
in those days if you were gay you came down to the West End.
BK: Any other thoughts on what the community looked like in those early years?
MD: Yeah, like the – because everybody went outside to socialize, right? There was no internet
so you didn’t spend a lot of time by yourself typing, you were out at Buddy’s which was just
around the corner, just off of Burrard on Burnaby, I guess. It was always jammed every night of
the week. So, people were always out on the streets, driving around or walking around, or out at
restaurants. It was a very vibrant street scene. If you wanted to meet somebody or wanted to have
sex you had to go outside. Lots of guys went down to the park – that wasn’t really my thing. Lots
of guys went to the Fruit Loop which was down near the entrance to False Creek. It was an
outdoor area. There was this old paddle steamer that had been dragged up onto the shore and
turned into a restaurant. I think it was called Tommy Africa’s, and then it caught on fire, and it
burned so it was condemned, but all the gay guys used to go in there and cruise in the dark
burned up, floor falling – truly quite dangerous. But they loved it, they thought it was great fun.
Just stuff like that. It was really quite crazy – in some ways it was. I think we sort of tend to
romanticise or have a nostalgia for it, but it was… If you were gay in the ‘80s, when you came
out you were kind of socializing with drug dealers and hustlers and you were kind of skirting
around the edge of the criminal and a lot of the guys kind of fell into the criminal. And when I
came out pretty much everybody that I met initially was a hustler or a drug dealer – they were
pretty sketchy. And a lot of the guys who came out very young, they would meet somebody, they
would fall in love, they would tell their parents, and their parents would disown them. And six
months later the thing was over and they were seventeen years old with nowhere to go. And a lot
of them ended up hustling. It was a very crazy time. It was fun because it was edgy and kind of
dangerous but it wasn’t a better time. I mean the reason it was like that was because you were
pushed out onto the edge of society. It wasn’t better it was just kind of fun and exciting.
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“HIV in My Day,” Michael D. (November 24, 2017)
BK: Certainly there was much less acceptance of gay people in dominant society, which would
probably lead to hanging out with other people that were outcasts.
MD: Yeah, I was quite disturbed when I came out. It seemed like everyone I met was very self-
destructive. They were either doing way too many drugs or drinking way too much. I think the
one sort of commonality that runs through that was very low self-esteem, which happens when
you grow up in a society that doesn’t even see you and if it does see you it reviles you. That was
a very big part of the community.
BK: I think you have a done a great job of giving me an idea of what the community looked like
prior to the epidemic. Bit of a stark transition here but when did you first hear about HIV and
AIDS? Do you remember where that was or who that was through.
MD: I remember a big screaming headline on The Province newspaper about a gay disease
killing people – I can’t remember what the headline was but that was kind of – the first that I had
heard of it. You know, there was vague stories of it being around but I would say in 1982
certainly, maybe [198]3 – I mean, it seemed like something that was somewhere else. We didn’t
think it was here – it seemed like it was in New York or San Francisco. I remember going to see
my doctor in this very building, Dr. [Brian] Willoughby, very early on in 1984, and me and a
partner at the time had contracted something. And he said, “You know, we can deal with this.
This is no big deal. You guys need to be concerned with-” – I don’t think it was called AIDS at
the time, maybe it was… He said, “You need to be thinking about this. You need to be wearing
condoms.” And we were only twenty-three years old – we weren’t really listening to him.
[laughs] But I distinctly remember him telling us that we need to pay attention to this.
And then people started to disappear. The first one that I remember was a guy – I only knew him
from his performance name. His name was Billy Gene and he was a singer at Buddies – very
good singer and piano player. I don’t know if he did drag or not, I don’t recall seeing him in
drag. But he just disappeared one day. You would ask about him and “He went back to wherever
he was from because he was sick.” That was very common. You would all of a sudden realize
that so-and-so wasn’t here anymore, and then if you asked around you found they had gone
home or died. They just weren’t here anymore, and it happened very, very quickly, because there
was no test. There was no warning until somebody actually got physically sick, and by that time
it was because they had no immune system left. They were dead in six months, three months – so
yeah, it was pretty scary.
BK: So, those disappearances would have only made you feel more uncertainty and more fear I
imagine?
MD: Yeah, but that was later on, that wasn’t in the early days. It was just – I mean when I –
when I originally found out in 1985, I didn’t know anybody else who was – I didn’t know
anybody who had HIV. Like nobody. So, it wasn’t like it was common. There was a couple of
people that had disappeared.
BK: So, that must have felt very isolating in a way?
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“HIV in My Day,” Michael D. (November 24, 2017)
MD: Oh yeah. You mean to become positive?
BK: I am thinking more like, “Am I the only person in Vancouver that has this?”
MD: Hell yeah, it was crazy. I think actually BCPWA or AIDS Vancouver were around at the
time, but I didn’t know about of them. And I had had kind of a flu, and it hurt when I swallowed,
and I had a funny rash – kind of like a flat rash, it wasn’t bumpy or anything. But I made an
appointment to see Brian Willoughby. So, I said, “Yeah, I got this and this and it’s all going
away. Probably wasting your time.” And he said he wanted me to go to the hospital for some
tests. And I was like, “Why would I do that? It’s all getting better.” And he said, “Look, I don’t
have time right now. Just go do the tests and we will talk about it when you get back.” So, I went
to the hospital and did a bunch of blood tests. I can’t remember exactly how this rolled out but I
then went back to talk to Brian Willoughby and he said, “I think you may have been exposed to
the virus that causes AIDS.” He said, “It will take a while to find out.” Back in that time there
was no testing here in Vancouver. The only way you could tested for the antigens for the virus
was they would take blood here, they would strap the vials to a guy, they would tape them to his
chest to keep them warm, and they would fly him to Ottawa. And I think it took two months as I
recall, because over the entire summer the first one came back and it was negative. And then the
second one came back at the end of the summer, September 1985, and it was positive. It was a
death sentence. They said, “You got three years to live.” And there was nobody to talk about it,
because as soon as you became… you know, you became a pariah, you became a total outcast.
You know, I was twenty-three-years-old. It was very, very difficult. I think I sort of ignored it for
a long time and pretended it wasn’t there.
BK: How are you supposed to deal productively with news like that?
MD: I don’t know, because there was nothing you could do about it – there was no treatment.
And in 1985 it was the year that Rock Hudson died, so all of a sudden it became a much more
mainstream thing. But yeah, it was a very… I remember actually – it must have been after the…
I’m not sure if it was confirmed. It was in the summer, but I remember I was in a suit for some
reason – don’t know if it was a job interview or what I was doing. But I remember coming out of
St. Paul’s and sitting on the side of the street on the curb, trying to figure out – not really
thinking, just overwhelmed by the whole thing. So yeah, it was pretty wild.
BK: That must have… I can’t even fathom what that would have been like because in a very
short about of time you went from “this isn’t happening” to “this is happening to me now.”
MD: Yeah, and the guy who – there was only – because it was a very specific period, I was
told… The lady I went to see at St Paul’s hospital, her name was Linda Rabeneck – Dr.
Rabeneck – and she was studying a thing at the time, what they were calling Rabeneck’s disease,
which was exactly as I described my symptoms – the rash, swallowing pain, and flu. And what
that was was an acute reaction to the virus that about 25% of people have. So, I was one of the
first people that they watched do that transition. I can’t remember where I was going with that…
What was the question?
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“HIV in My Day,” Michael D. (November 24, 2017)
BK: I don’t think I had a question. I was just saying that you went from thinking this is not
something that was happening to this is happening in such close proximity.
MD: Yeah, and you had this sort of period of two or three months where they kind of said this
might be what happened. “Oh, here’s your first test. It’s negative.” “Here is your second test. It’s
positive.” So, you had a bit of time to sort of get used to the idea. But it was – what do you do
with it? And my reaction was figure out all the things I wanted to do, and start doing them! So, I
learned how to dive, and I got my pilot’s license in 1992 – I got my private pilot’s license. Yeah,
I did a whole bunch of them and, yeah, that was my reaction. [laughs]
BK: That seems like a very a positive reaction, all things considered.
MD: Yeah, it worked out okay.
BK: So, when you were diagnosed were you aware of any forms of support that were out there at
all?
MD: I really wasn’t. I know that in retrospect that BCPWA was around and I think AIDS
Vancouver was around as well. And I suppose the doctors – I am sure that Dr. Willoughby
would have said you can go here or whatever, but I wasn’t very good at asking for help and I
sure as hell didn’t want to go sit in a room with a bunch of people who were positive – that
would have been scary. I think in retrospect I was very much in denial, that the easiest way to
deal with it was to push it off to the side and say, “It’s not real.” And that worked for a long
time… [laughs] … because I didn’t die, and I just kept – not only didn’t I die, I never ever had
any other symptoms other than that initial reaction, which became increasingly weird. So, it went
from being, “Gees, I wish I wasn’t the only one,” to having people around me start to get sick,
and a very weird feeling watching other people get sick and I never did – and that went on for
years.
BK: So, I imagine just waiting for the bomb to drop? You know it’s coming, you know it’s going
to happen eventually – I guess that’s the idea, right?
MD: The other thing – I worked in a very homophobic industry. I worked on the waterfront on
towboats, on tugs, and so that was never – nothing was ever discussed. He [my partner] was
called Jennifer… [laughs] …because there had to be some reason I had to be so happy. It was not
an option to discuss the fact that I was gay or – so, that was problematic. I was terrified that I
was going to get sick and as soon as they could see that I would be out of the job. I mean people
were being thrown out of apartments, people were losing jobs. I remember Dr. Rabeneck, she
had been away at a conference and while she was gone some waiter had been discovered to have
AIDS. He probably didn’t have AIDS, he probably was just HIV positive, but they didn’t
distinguish between things like that. And the local media was wound up in a frenzy on whether
or not anyone could get this from this waiter. So, she arrived back from the conference and was
jumped on at the airport and she was tired and a bit cranky, and she was annoyed from the
questioning. And they kept saying things like, “Well, couldn’t he – what if he cut himself?
Couldn’t he give AIDS to the clientele?” And she finally turned around and said, “Look, if he cut
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“HIV in My Day,” Michael D. (November 24, 2017)
his thumb and bled all over your salad then shoved it up your ass you might get AIDS.” [laughs]
And then she turned around and walked away. She was a very interesting lady.
BK: Wow, that’s a great anecdote. Talking about the media, you mentioned that in 1985
becoming HIV positive meant becoming a social pariah. Did you pay attention to the mainstream
media and what they were saying about AIDS and gay people?
MD: Yeah, I mean Rock Hudson was a huge deal. All of a sudden, he kind of became the face of
it, and then after that Freddie Mercury from Queen became – came out not very long before he
died. I don’t remember what year that was but it was a huge deal. But it was interesting because
most of the time there wasn’t much about it locally and there no movies or… I mean, there was a
couple of things on TV about it, but basically it seemed to be this thing down in the community
here. And then slowly people started to, you know, create ways of helping each other, and taking
care of partners or friends. A lot of the time it was friends because the partners would split as
soon as somebody because positive. So yeah, it was very much sort of in the community and
when you went outside the community, you didn’t really talk about it, and you were always
afraid that people would not have anything to do with you if they found out. And with my own
family, I didn’t tell them for – I told my mother fairly quickly I think, but we didn’t tell my
father and rest of the family until I was thirty, so at least five years. Because we first had to tell
them that I was gay and then we had to tell them that I was dying. [laughs] So, it was kind of a
big deal. But I remember shortly after my thirtieth birthday, me and my mom cooked up a plan.
So, she would talk to this one and this one, and I would talk to this one and this one, but it took a
long time.
BK: Any sense of what else was being said in the mainstream community about AIDS, HIV, gay
men?
MD: Well, I remember a friend of a friend – I can’t remember what the occasion was but a friend
came over with another girl, and… This isn’t directly answering your question but just kind of
where things were at. They came over to my house, had a couple of drinks, whatever, and left. I
found out later that he had told her that I was HIV positive and she got very angry with him for
taking her to my place and she had a drink from my dishes. She was very concerned that she was
going to catch something. I really can’t remember much attention in the mainstream media. I
remember some of the early TV – made-for-TV movies that came out like Longtime Companion.
I can’t remember what some of the other ones were. And they were always about these kind of
semi-wealthy white males that got this nasty disease, but there was never any sex or reference to
the community. They were all more from the point of view of the family dealing with it. One of
the things that did happen, which was amazing, was Dr. Peter. I can’t remember – was that the
early ‘90s maybe? Certainly well before the cocktails and it was again this wealthy white
successful male who could tell the story. I have to give credit to him, because it was a very scary
thing to do at that time. He personalized it and he turned it into a human being, and it was
brutally sad to watch him deteriorate. He had a black lab – I remember him, this really cute black
lab dog. He really was the perfect person to personalize the disease and make it mean something
to a lot of people. I want to say he did a weekly piece on the evening news or something.
BK: I think there is something like 100 segments or something like that.
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“HIV in My Day,” Michael D. (November 24, 2017)
MD: And he went blind, and, yeah, it was brutal. But that certainly ramped up the conversation,
and you know it became this rising tide of – of people that were affected. It went from nobody
knew about it to everybody had a friend who was sick or dying. It really became an
overwhelming tide.
BK: I think that anecdote about your friend bringing his girlfriend over really speaks to the
degree of fear and stigma attached to the epidemic, attached to HIV at that time.
MD: I will tell you another thing about that. I never had anything related to the disease but this is
a very embarrassing story. I went to see Dr. Willoughby one time because I was having problems
with my bum, and he said, “We need to go to the hospital and have them have a look at you.”
And I went to St. Paul’s again – I am guessing it was early 1987 and I ended up going to St.
Paul’s and they were going to do some exploratory surgery on me. And they were going to –
there was a whole big discussion about this – I thought I was going to be knocked out, which I
was happy about, and as they gave me some drug to relax, as they were wheeling me in, I
remember having this argument with the anesthesiologist. He said that, “We aren’t going to
knock you out we are going to give you a spinal block,” and I said, “No, no, no, I want to be
knocked out.” And he said, “No we aren’t going to do that.” And this whole long argument and
then they punctured me like 7 times to get a spinal block. I remember the Doctor being quite an
asshole. I am all drugged up and what not. He’s exploring and he said, “Has it ever occurred to
you that maybe you should just stop having sex,” basically? I was like, “Yeah, the thought’s
occurred to me.”
Anyways I got out of there and they put me on the bone ward which was the clean ward and at
that time did not allow anyone who was HIV positive to be on the ward, and the two surgeons
who ran it were out of town and so somebody put me up there just to kind of push the
boundaries. And whenever I would sit up or try to stand, I would throw up, because they
punctured my spine seven times and apparently the liquid in my spine had drained out a bit, so
every time I tried to stand up I would get nauseous and throw up. I was in there for four days and
no one knew I was there. It was 1986, my mother was in Montreal. How could I tell anyone I
was in the hospital when no one knew I was positive? I thought I was going to be in and out in an
afternoon and I was there for four days. Nobody would come into my room. They would come in
once or twice a day in beekeeper outfits – they would slide some food to me and leave. On the
third or fourth day I was there, a friend of mine who was a nurse at St. Paul’s in the emergency
ward somehow found out that I was in there and he came into the room. And as soon as he
walked into the room I burst into tears, because I hadn’t seen anybody, and nobody knew I was
there, and I was freaking out. And he just tore strips off of everybody there. I was moved within
half an hour down to another ward and had excellent care after that. It turned out that I had
gonorrhea and the point is that gonorrhea was fairly common, but because I had those three
initials on my charts, every time I saw a doctor everything was about HIV and I never actually
had a physical – I never had any physical problems from that disease.
BK: I think that provides a good counter snapshot of good care – bad care, stigma in the medical
realm.
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“HIV in My Day,” Michael D. (November 24, 2017)
MD: There was a lot of – there was some very good people and almost everybody that I was
exposed to was very good, but that was at St. Paul’s in the centre of the epidemic down here in
the early days. I think it also generates and illustrates the amount of fear in the medical
community. People didn’t know how it was transmitted, people didn’t know what was going on,
and it was frightening.
BK: There aren’t many things that can make you feel like more of a pariah then a healthcare
provider walking in in a hazmat suit.
MD: Yeah, exactly. And part of that was homophobia as well. This was a way of keeping gay
people out of the ward as well. All of a sudden there was an excuse for the homophobia. It was
also the time of Ronald Regan. There was a lot of stuff going on – the moral majority screaming
and yelling that this was god’s revenge, which if we hadn’t been so wrapped up in trying to take
care of ourselves or each other we would have been very angry about it. We did get angry about
it. A lot of people got angry about it. But I was never part of that. I wasn’t part of the ACT UP
thing or – yeah, I just kind of kept on doing my thing.
BK: Just not an activist or…? I don’t want to imply at all that everyone should join ACT UP
because that’s not true at all…
MD: Yeah, I never really felt like a victim. I never – I didn’t feel like society was ganging up on
me. I never felt that. You know I was aware of homophobia – with the job that I worked, I knew
you didn’t tell them. Yeah, I just didn’t have that anger. I don’t know. The only way I did get
involved was - Brian in 1987, he said, “There is this new drug trial, AZT.” And people had been
talking about it in the media and people were flying off to Paris and going to Mexico to get AZT.
And he said, “They are starting a clinical trial here in Vancouver where they are going to try to
establish the dosage and the protocol to follow for people who are on it.” And he asked, “Do you
want to participate?” And I said, “Sure.” All of a sudden, after two years there was something I
could do.
And so I started going to – we used to call it the dungeon. It was down below – I think it was
called IDC – I can’t remember, in St. Paul’s. And it was scary, it was really scary. I would have
been twenty-five-years-old and perfectly healthy, and I can’t remember… Once every couple of
weeks I would go down into the dungeon and sometimes there would be fifteen guys there who
looked like that just stepped out of Dachau, covered in purple blotches of Kaposi’s Sarcoma and
it was very scary. You sort of wondered if that was going to be me in a year. How soon? So, it
was very scary. And so we started AZT and we were taking triple the dose that they eventually
settled on, and people were passing out and needing blood transfusions. And I was fine – it never
bothered me at all. The only thing that bothered me is they would do bone marrows, so they
would come in with this huge spike and shove it in your thigh because apparently that was one of
the few places where your body makes bone marrow. And they freeze the area so it didn’t hurt
but you would feel the bone pushing inside. It was pretty gross. But other than that and walking
into the place with all these people who were so sick… So, I stayed on AZT for a year or two
before I realized it wasn’t actually doing anything. It turned out to be a false hope.
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“HIV in My Day,” Michael D. (November 24, 2017)
BK: It’s pretty rare for people to talk about AZT and not have symptoms. From what we’ve
heard from other people, it was a brutal drug.
MD: It didn’t bother me at all! Yeah, and this was like triple the dosage. People were passing
out, and they were giving blood transfusions and I was like, “Whats next?” [laughs]
BK: It’s also interesting that you were in that trial as someone who wasn’t showing any health
effects.
MD: Nope, nothing. Yeah, that was 1987 and then – I mean, I kind of kept in touch, that trial
kind of put me in the system. The only other doctor besides Dr. Brian Willoughby who is still
around is Doctor Julio [Montaner]. He was a god of man, an Argentinian man. He was very
young back then. That was where I met him, actually, was 1987. Yeah, so I would run into him
every now and then and he would be all surprised I was still alive. He would say, “You should
come in. We’ll do tests.” And I was like, “Yeah, not so much.” Far better for me to be out
cruising the coast than in your hospital doing tests. But I would run into him every now that then.
I still run into him every now and then.
BK: We have captured a couple different snapshots of what has gone on in the medical
establishment – lots of positive and horrible things, and then you talked a little bit about Regan I
guess. Do you remember anything politically in BC or Vancouver in response to the epidemic?
MD: I remember Billy Vander Zalm, our premier at the time. I remember that there was a
conversation – I want to say it was 1986 but I don’t remember – but I remember there was a
conversation about quarantining men who were positive and apparently it went all the way up to
the cabinet level. That was sort of the level of hysteria; people were just so freaked out. Yeah,
that’s the only thing I can remember politically. And there was just this rage as it went on and on
that nothing was happening, that more money wasn’t being spent, things were not moving faster,
you couldn’t get access to experimental drugs. And again, I could sort of see both sides of it,
because there was more than one test that looked like it was having very promising results, so
they would speed it up, but then it turned out it wasn’t actually doing anything. So, I could kind
of see both sides of it. But again, I didn’t – I just – for whatever reason, I just kind of kept on
doing my own thing and not really getting involved in that. I just didn’t see it as – you know, I
didn’t feel like victim and I wasn’t raging angry. There were things that made me angry but I just
never got involved in that, not until 1996 actually.
BK: So, going back to this idea of stigma or fear around HIV positive people, was this
something that was also manifesting within the gay community?
MD: Oh yeah, oh my god, yeah! Yeah, I can’t – I haven’t thought of this for so long but there
was people who just stopped having sex. They were terrified. There was people who – the
problem at the beginning was that nobody used condoms. In fact, one of the great things about
being gay is you didn’t have to wear a condom. [laughs] The only people who wore condoms
were hustlers, so if you said in the early days, “Oh, maybe we should put a condom on,” they
would be like, “Why?” It was this weird thing. Then of course all the education campaigns
started up and that changed, but yeah it was a real problem at the beginning. There was some
10
“HIV in My Day,” Michael D. (November 24, 2017)
really weird reactions. Some people were just, “No, I am not doing anything.” Other people, it
became quite fashionable to have a partner. There was the rise of monogamist relationships and
in my experience that hadn’t really been a thing prior to AIDS, but then all of a sudden it made a
lot of sense to get one partner and stay with them. I remember a whole bunch of hysteria around
the bathhouses and all of these different places that people used to play – they got pretty quiet
pretty fast. And there was talk of closing down the bathhouses, but I don’t think they ever did
here – I don’t think they ever did. And it developed into there was always someone at these
places handing out condoms and lube – that became common.
BK: Which to me seems like a better strategy because you can use those spaces for promoting
safer sex, because otherwise people are going to go have sex somewhere else.
MD: Yeah, exactly. And there was raging arguments about what was the way to go, what was
the best thing to do. I mean, that was right around the time Nancy Regan came out with “just say
no,” which was about drugs, but it was pretty much her answer to everything. But in Vancouver
– honestly, if you were going to be HIV positive anywhere, this was the place to be because
however it came about the Centre for Excellence was a remarkable thing and even compared to
Ontario or Montreal, they don’t have – they don’t pay for HIV drugs or they didn’t. I remember
even in 1996 people coming from Nova Scotia for the AIDS conference and those drugs were
not on the government’s list. This was the place, and we didn’t have – Toronto had the bathhouse
raids in the early ‘80s. We didn’t have that here. The police were pretty easy-going. Every now
and then they would go down to Stanley park and harass the gays in the bushes and what not, but
they were pretty low key, and I always thought he community had pretty good relationships with
them.
BK: Maybe slightly more accepted than other places?
MD: Definitely, and I don’t know why that is. It was certainly true – I mean, much less uptight
than Toronto. Quebec was always pretty fun – Montreal, but that was just on visits. But there
was no questions this was the place to be with the care you could get. The attitude was about as
good as it got.
BK: So, building on that – information… Was there a lot of good sources of information as the
epidemic started to progress? Prior to 1985, probably not a whole lot, because there is all this
stigma in the community – there is fear around sex in the community.
MD: Well, nobody knew what it was about. They thought it was about poppers at first. And there
was a lot of cynicism about gays. They just sort of got this sexual freedom and now there was all
these organizations saying you shouldn’t have sex, and they were like, “Screw you!” So, there
was that kind of dynamic as well. But honestly, I can’t really remember how the information
started to happen. It started to show up in bathrooms and little posters and these guys started to
show up in all the different places. But it just kind of happened slowly and I honestly can’t
remember. It just sort of became a feature of the community.
BK: Do you remember anything around things the community organizations were doing at that
time?
11
“HIV in My Day,” Michael D. (November 24, 2017)
MD: No. Not at all… not at all. I really didn’t get involved with any of the organizations until
the mid-‘90s and that was because a couple of friends said you should really go be a peer
counsellor, but honestly before that I didn’t really have anything to do with them. I mean, I was
aware of AIDS Vancouver because they would pop up in the media and seeing the safe sex
campaigns.
BK: Do you remember anything about those safe sex campaigns? What was kind of being said
about sex?
MD: I remember them being pretty funny. They were very progressive language and very in-
your-face. And again, Vancouver seemed to be one of the best places to be for that. The States
was so far behind on that stuff. But yeah, I just remember it being very shocking and in-your-
face.
BK: Relatedly, did you stay plugged into the gay community after you seroconverted?
MD: Oh, absolutely.
BK: What did your involvement look like? The same?
MD: Pretty much for the very early years I pretended nothing had changed. Yeah, the biggest
problem for me was in relationships. It was – I always used to think of it as “the chat” – when
did you have the chat? Did you have it after you kissed them? You sure didn’t want to have it
after you had sex with them. Yeah, it was very problematic. And yeah, that was the biggest
problem. Even if you had safe sex, having the chat after you had sex was not a good idea. And in
fact I remember I had a party with a whole bunch of people there and there was a guy – a
younger guy that we had been having a bit of relationship with and I had not had the chat with
him. And in the middle of the party someone had asked him, “Why are you seeing Michael when
he is positive?” and it just blew up the middle of this party. And it was entirely my fault but it
was like a worst nightmare – it was a nightmare, and that was probably maybe the mid-‘90s.
Yeah, he was almost hysterical, and understandably so.
BK: My goodness, disclosing early in the epidemic would have been almost impossible.
MD: And a few times you would have people just go, “No, I am out of here,” and so it becomes
a really big deal and a lot of guys just stop dating. It was a very big deal, and later on when it
wasn’t such a big deal anymore, it took a long time to realize it wasn’t a big deal. Today is weird
– today is strange. I was in an eleven-year relationship that ended three or four years ago, and as
I said, I went in as a pariah and came out a fetish. It’s a very strange world. You know, there are
like hookup sites and stuff where not only is it not a big deal, it’s a sought-after thing – it’s very
strange. I mean, I find that very weird. I remember when this whole – this was an earlier iteration
of it, it was called bug chasing. That must have been – well, it was before the Internet, because I
had messaged this guy in Melbourne, Australia and I was here and he called himself a “bug
chaser.” And I said, “Hey, I’m like on the other side of the world so we are never going to meet
but I am just curious why? What’s the thrill?” And he never responded to me, but I thought it
12
“HIV in My Day,” Michael D. (November 24, 2017)
was absolutely bizarre. And that’s morphed a lot to now where they certainly wouldn’t think of
themselves as bug chasers, but they don’t care – they think it’s over, they think it’s no big deal,
or they are on PrEP. And I do think there is a whole thing that has happened through
pornography that has fetishized cum. It has turned it from just something that happened in the
middle of sex to the point of sex. It’s a very odd thing. Maybe it’s not that odd, maybe it’s what’s
prohibited is sexy, but it’s very odd – and to me it’s really odd.
BK: Yeah, there are so many factors that go into that. The desire for intimacy, and closeness
and…
MD: And taboo. Taboo is definitely part of it because it’s a very – somebody should do a study
on the changing pornography or, even more interesting, the changing hookup sites, because there
is an amazing amount of data there that would be really interesting to analyze.
BK: Yeah, oh my goodness, there sure would be. So, any other sense of how the community was
responding?
MD: Well, later on in like 1993, I met a couple and one of them was starting to get ill and his
partner actually connected up with Lorne Mayencourt, and they helped arrange a schedule of
friends to help take care of him. And that was kind of sort of the beginnings of Friends for Life.
And it was very informal and it was friends and acquaintances. So, that was sort of when I
started to become – that was kind of the first time I was involved with somebody who was
slowly getting sick.
Another thing I should mention to you, just going back – another weird thing about the
community was you would start going to funerals all the time. I remember one year we went to
six funerals and they were quite bizarre, because they were just weird. I remember going to one
where his family they were Jehovah’s Witnesses which wasn’t terribly relevant other than it was
held at a Jehovah’s Witnesses hall, down on Robson Street. And half the crowd was screaming
gays from the West End and the other half was people from Surrey, and it was intensely
uncomfortable. There was a guy there from AIDS Vancouver who spoke and talked about – got
us all to hold hands so I held hands with this guy from Surrey for ten minutes, which was
intensely uncomfortable, while he talked about AIDS and what else he talked about. It was really
bizarre. You couldn’t tear yourself up every time you went to funeral, you would joke about it.
You would cruise at funerals, you would rate the food and the entertainment. I had a friend who
would count the slats in the blinds so he wouldn’t get completely emotional and sobbing. Yeah,
it was very weird to go to that many funerals. And they were not normal funerals – they were
twenty-somethings, thirty-somethings, and the families were distraught and conflicted. So it was
a very, very strange time. And I would say that was the very late ‘80s, early ‘90s up to ‘96. Then
it all kind of stopped.
BK: I don’t understand the psychology behind this at all but that amount of emotional weight
and trauma – you would have had to have some way pushing some of that way.
MD: I mean everybody had different ways of coping but a lot of us were in denial. And then
what happened was in ‘96 it all changes, but you don’t realize that its changed. Like I mentioned
13
“HIV in My Day,” Michael D. (November 24, 2017)
before, there were all kinds of cures that didn’t work, and they been announced and everyone got
excited about them, then they didn’t work. So, when 1996 came along: “Oh we got these new
cocktails,” it was just like everything else. Everyone was just like, “Oh yeah, another cure,” and
it took six months, a year before people realized that people weren’t dying anymore. One of the
effects of that was you never really went back and visited this period, because you didn’t know it
was over, and then it was over so why would you want to talk about it. So, I think a lot of people
came out of that very intense period never having discussed it or processed it. The community
certainly didn’t, not that I am aware of it. You just stopped dealing with it and kept on going.
Other than the poor fuckers who were – I remember being in the car with this one guy when I
started working with BCPWA. We were going to lunch or something and this guy – he was like
thirty maybe and he said his finances were pretty bad. He said, “I racked up like eight credit
cards to the max. Who knew I would be here!?” [laughs]
BK: It’s so understandable because why would you…? There was no point in having a savings
account if you were not going to be here in six months.
MD: Oh yeah. Most of them didn’t have great jobs but, hey, everyone wants to give you a credit
card! Yeah, I think a lot of people got caught in that.
[Start of video 2]
BK: Just continuing talking to Michael. Going back a little bit, you were talking about how you
stayed very involved in the community and you were also talking about how people’s behaviours
were changing in reaction to the epidemic, with people pairing up and some people stopped
having sex. How were you responding behaviourally?
MD: I would say in the beginning, I was just in denial and – certainly, for the first couple years I
was just in denial and did not react or respond the way that one would hope. You know, we
talked about how most people didn’t use condoms. And yeah, there was – you would end up sort
of saying, “I am not going to have sex,” then you would end up having sex. That happened more
than once, and I would feel horribly guilty about it. That really kind of just built up and built up.
You would see these things in the media occasionally where somebody would be charged
because they had unprotected sex with someone without disclosing they’re HIV. Everybody else
would be like, “Oh, those evil people should be thrown away, killed.” And I would be like, “Oh,
my god I would be so horrified,” and think that could be me. And that kind of built up for quite a
period of time and then eventually just got to a point where I said, “Well, I can’t change anything
that happened up until now. All I can do is change what happens going forward.” And I stopped
having – dealt with it kind of. I made sure that the chat was always had before. So, that brought
its own challenges as far as having the chat, but at least I wasn’t kind of overwhelmed with guilt
because again it seemed like there was nobody around. I mean, looking back from now, it’s
obvious that there was many, many, many people around that were unknowingly or knowingly -
that were already positive, we just didn’t know. A lot of us – not a lot of us. I would – would
have hoped to respond better than I did. Yeah.
BK: Yeah, as I said earlier, it’s hard to imagine what a productive or positive response to that
would have been at that time.
14
“HIV in My Day,” Michael D. (November 24, 2017)
MD: What you were supposed to do was stop having sex or only have safe sex, and that’s sort of
the easy answer, but it isn’t that easy particularly when you’re twenty-three. And yeah, there’s
alcohol and drugs involved quite often, but it doesn’t remove the fact that I didn’t respond the
way I would have hoped.
BK: Did things like substance use or other types of behavior change for you at all?
MD: [Pause] Hard to know. I think they are connected because gay men have used substances
for a long time to remove inhibitions. I just continued to do that. [laughs] No, we were a very
druggy generation. In some ways, my generation was the druggiest of them all. The baby
boomers were experimenting; we were not experimenting. We knew what we were doing.
[laughs] I once did a survey and it was a full page of drugs and it said, “Which of these?” You
could say “yes,” “no,” or “stopped” which I thought was kind of restrictive. I gave it back to my
doctor and I said you’re missing some drugs here. [laughs]
It wasn’t… I mean drugs were dangerous. I feel this could just be me being older, but I feel this
is a much more dangerous time for drugs. Fentanyl is deadly. Crystal meth is deadly. Arguably,
cocaine and heroin have been around for a long time – they could be deadly themselves, but it
made… Gay men used drugs to get over inhibitions and they do it to get around safe sex. There
was an enormous guilt around safe sex. We all knew what we were supposed to be doing and
you constantly failed at it, because you were drunk or you were whatever – whatever the reason
was, you constantly failed at it. Everyone did and you felt enormous guilt at that. I don’t think it
was just me, I think a lot of people struggled with that.
And there was community guilt too. It was, “Well, why don’t you gay people stop killing each
other?” That was the message. And it’s like, “Well, why don’t you straight people just stop
having babies? You have known about that for a long time but it still happens.” But there was
sort of a collective guilt we just weren’t able to stop. There was people in the community as well
that said we should close the bathhouses – the community did not respond homogenously. There
was a wide range of views and a wide range of people. We talked briefly about activism – I
wasn’t an activist – I wasn’t comfortable with that role, I didn’t feel like a victim, I didn’t feel
angry. I was basically just trying to blend in. I worked on tugboats most my days acting like a
straight boy. The last thing I wanted to do was scream and yell at politicians or lead a parade. I
did both of them once in 1996 and it was not my roll.
BK: What was the context of…?
MD: It was the 1996 AIDS Conference here in Vancouver, which happened to be in 1996 or
late-’95. A friend of mine said, “You should go be a peer councillor,” so I went to BCPWA and
that happened to be the year of a conference. So, I held a banner at the front of the parade and I
think it was Paul Martin – I can’t really remember – it was the minister of health – I don’t know
if Paul Martin was ever the minister of health – but I remember he came to the conference and
we all stood on our chairs and screamed, “Shame, shame, shame,” or whatever we were yelling.
And I was intensely uncomfortable – that was not my roll. That was not my shtick.
15
“HIV in My Day,” Michael D. (November 24, 2017)
BK: Was that something that was maybe needed in the community? Or was it something that
you didn’t get?
MD: In hindsight, I think it was needed. At the time I remember being very uncomfortable with
it. And there was ACT UP – ACT UP was here. I remember them throwing red dye or red paint
on the premier and his wife down at the Pan Pacific and kind of cringing, you know, because we
just wanted to blend in. We just wanted to – we were just normal like everybody else and that
kind of extreme activism or that sort of queer activism, it really freaked a lot of us out. You
know, and I would say that most – well, not most – a lot of the gay community just wanted to be
normal. They just wanted to blend in. Yeah.
BK: I think that’s why it’s so important to have all these different perspectives, because not
everybody was an activist.
MD: No, I would say very small percentage of people were. Certainly none of the people that I
hung out with were. Yeah, I think the activists were a very small percentage, then you had
another group that were involved in service organizations, then gay people within the health
community – I think they were very important. The number of gay nurses that moved patients
along, and took care of them, and gave them some human contact was really a big deal. But
yeah, I think probably three-quarters of us were just trying to blend in and live our lives. We
didn’t identify primarily as – our first identity was not as a gay man – it was part of our identity.
The last thing we wanted to do was go scream and yell in front of cameras. It just wasn’t our
thing.
BK: I think if you were an HIV positive guy there is also that added element of “I need to look
after my own health.”
MD: And more, inclination to hide, quite frankly. You know the last thing you wanted to do was
draw attention to yourself in support of HIV issues, because it outed you. That was kind of the
thought.
BK: So, you didn’t get involved with support groups early on. Where were you finding support?
Groups of friends? Your family?
MD: Certainly my mother was – is a big, kind of my major ongoing support. I had a very good
friend named Ralph Parker who was a nurse, who was very supportive. And I eventually, in
1987, met a much older man named [name], who was a friend of mine for years until he passed
away, and I ended up living at his place. It was supposed to be a short-term thing but it ended up
being eleven years, and that was kind of my security blanket. I knew that even if I lost my job or
got sick I had a place I could live, and that allowed me the freedom to go out and learn to dive or
learn to fly, because I had this relatively cheap place to live. He was a terrible old letch who used
to love letting everyone think I was his lover, but I wasn’t. And he was cheap – he was a
depression baby so he would make you pay for everything, then he would act like he was my
sugar daddy, but it pretty much worked out very well.
BK: Sounds like an interesting arrangement.
16
“HIV in My Day,” Michael D. (November 24, 2017)
MD: I mean I paid him rent – it was a very transactional thing. But we were good friends, and he
was heavily involved in McLaren housing and he was a social worker. But again I never really
got involved until 1996.
BK: Did you have any peers in terms of having friends your age who were HIV positive that you
could have these kinds of conversations with?
MD: Later on. [Name], for example, had been a partner for a year and half, two years maybe,
and after we separated he became – actually, no, he was positive when we met. He was the first
time I had the chat and he was positive as well, which was wonderful. Well, it wasn’t wonderful
but it was like, “Oh my god, somebody who’s like me.” That was probably 1994. That was a
long way in, and he was the very first person who I ever told who said, “Yeah, so am I. So yeah,
we were together for two years and not long after we separated, probably six months to a year
after, he got very sick and ended up dying. He was one of the first I could talk about – there was
other friends… What was really disturbing was that a bunch of these friends became positive in
like the ‘90s when you would have thought – all the sex campaigns were full on and I think they
felt really dumb about it. Like, “You should have known better,” kind of thing. At least I could
claim there wasn’t much knowledge back then, but even then it’s not really true. But yeah, to see
them – on the one hand, you felt, “Finally, I’ve got someone to talk to,” but on the other hand
you were just horrified because you friends are now positive. [Partner’s name] died, my very
best friend, [name], passed away after a long, long bout of illnesses. So, you very quickly went
from, “Gee, I really wish I had someone to talk to” to “Gee, I don’t need anybody else to talk
about this with.”
BK: Because they are just going to die to?
MD: Exactly, yeah. That was really alarming and a total – a real mind fuck.
BK: What changed in the mid-‘90s to make it so you felt more comfortable to be involved?
What kind of drew you in? You started working closely with Positive Living.
MD: Yeah, part of it was a friend of mine asked me to participate in a film school production,
and they did this whole thing. By 1995 I had been positive for ten years which they considered at
that time to be a long-term survivor. Yeah, so they asked me if I would do this film. So, that kind
of – it made me aware I guess, that I was in kind of a unique position and I was not so nervous
about it anymore. It had gone on for so long. You can only chew on something for so long and I
just kind of exhausted my worry about it. Oh, and I told my family finally about it. So yeah, I
kind of felt out and more comfortable with – and there was a lot more people around that were
positive. And there was a need for help. So yeah, a friend of mine said, “You should be a peer
counsellor.” So, I called them up and unfortunately they never made me a peer counsellor, they
put me on the board which was a nightmare. You should never give a bunch of gay men with a
terminal illness 2.7 million dollars a year to play with because it’s really, really messy! [laughs] I
am sure it’s not like that now, but it was pretty over the top. And in fact I stopped after six
months. I couldn’t get financial reports, I couldn’t get anything. Yeah, it was an interesting
17
“HIV in My Day,” Michael D. (November 24, 2017)
experience. We went through the whole AIDS Conference we had people from all over Canada
who were amazing people.
There was one woman – her name fell out of my head, but I remember her husband’s name was
Randy, ‘cause she said he really was. [laughs] And he was a hemophiliac and he had gotten HIV
through that. And she fought that fight for many, many, many years. So, you would meet these
amazing people that were… So, it was kind of weird, by the time you got to the mid-‘90s, people
are actually saying we’ve got things to be proud of in the way we have taken care of our own.
And conversely, I think the mainstream media and – I have always say the two things that really
did the most for the gay community were the AIDS crisis and when they realized how much
money we all had and they started marketing to us! [laughs] But really the way the community
came together and took care of its own – and how ridiculous the people who stood on the
sidelines screaming this is gods revenge, it made them look idiotic – that was really the turning
point of the gay community. And you could feel that in the mid-‘90s. You could feel that sort of
pride, how the community had come together and taken care of it its own.
BK: Yeah, I mean, it’s amazing how the community made it through a crisis of this magnitude.
MD: They didn’t have any choice, they just had to deal and they did for the most part. But like I
say, I sort of helped out with some friends and stuff but nothing very organized. I don’t know
why that was actually. I really did not like support groups and – just wasn’t my thing. I just
didn’t want to sit around talking… [laughs] It wasn’t my thing.
BK: You alluded to how earlier you would see these other people who are positive or who are
sick and you would worry, “Is this going to be me eventually?”
MD: Yeah, part of it I think is avoidance, denial, whatever.
BK: How do you think the epidemic changed the community? You provided a beautiful snapshot
of what Vancouver looked like in the early-‘80s. Did it change as a result of that?
MD: Oh yeah, profound change. It ended the party. It ended that craziness. It ended that whole
drug induced, crazy, “Let’s have a good time.” And what came out the other side was not the
same. Like, I mean, arguably you could say there is just as many people having sex now as back
then through online sites but there is not that sense of the celebration in the early-‘80s, late-‘70s
was about freedom – the freedom to do what you wanted to do, to be whatever you wanted to be.
At the tail end of the AIDS crisis, it’s about being like everyone else. It’s about getting married
and having kids and trying to be like everyone else. It’s a very different thing. I’m not sure if it’s
a good thing or a bad thing but it’s very different. Some people say that the most outrageous gay
people all died from the epidemic. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but that’s kind of some of
the feeling – like, the really outrageous ones either died or were kind of tamped down into being
normal.
BK: Or burnt out?
MD: Burnout, yeah, a lot of them burnt out.
18
“HIV in My Day,” Michael D. (November 24, 2017)
BK: That’s so interesting that you see before the epidemic this kind of radicalism and we come
out on the other end and talk about marriage equality and military inclusion.
MD: And you lost a good chunk of that generation and you exhausted a whole bunch of those
who were left. I mean, by the time you get to ‘96, ’97, so many of those people are done – they
are just exhausted. And then, you know, you do have a whole new generation that’s coming up,
but they have a different focus and they do the whole marriage fight and the military thing and
adoption. And I think they do very good things but it’s all different from what people were
looking for before AIDS.
BK: Yeah, it seems to be more about inclusion then it does before AIDS.
MD: Yes, it’s more about assimilating gays and lesbians as opposed to being queer – that
anything’s possible. It’s interesting to see the whole – the trans community feels in a lot of ways
like the gay community twenty years ago. They are sort of fighting that same fight. I don’t know
where that’s going, but it’s interesting to watch. I don’t look at that very much. [laughs]
BK: No, I have been through this a few times now. Do you feel like we have rebounded a little
bit now as a community, that some of that vibrancy is back? During the peak of the epidemic
people were of course still having sex and still having fun but there was still a massive dark
cloud hanging over everything. Do you think we have gained some of that vibrancy back as a
community?
MD: I would say that, and I have said this quite often – it’s weird from my perspective that this
huge dark cloud, this black cloud that was the centre of our lives for a decade is gone, and it’s
not talked about, it’s not part of the consciousness of the community in a lot of ways, which is
very disturbing to people who have lived through it. So, that feels weird. Vibrancy – that’s hard
for me to say because I am a much older person. My perspective as a fifty-five-year-old is very
different from my perspective as a twenty-five-year-old. I don’t see the vibrancy; I don’t see a
community quite frankly. There was a physical community in the West End that was very, very
gay, as we talked about – it was intensely gay. There was a community on Wreck Beach, there
was a community – there was a solid community, and I don’t feel community now at all. There is
no public spaces we meet in or there is very, very few. There is this online thing which is
interesting but doesn’t feel like community to me. I don’t know if we need the community
anymore, quite frankly. Do you need the gay community when you can exist and live pretty
much anywhere in Vancouver? I was on the SkyTrain and got out at Edmonds in North Burnaby
and there was two young men holding hands, which freaks me right out. I worry about – it’s kind
of titillating in one way and exciting, but I worry are they going to be okay or is someone going
to beat them up? No one seemed to notice, no one seemed to care. Do we need gay community?
Don’t know, but it doesn’t feel like there is community to me. I don’t know if that’s just me
being older and not participating in the community or if it’s there or not. It sure feels different –
it’s not the same thing at all.
BK: One thing that you just mentioned is how this is something that has dropped out of our
consciousness as a community, and one thing we like to ask long-term survivors is what advice
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“HIV in My Day,” Michael D. (November 24, 2017)
do you have for the younger generation – mayb the newly seroconverted folks? Or even just
how can we foster this cross-generational dialogue? I know there’s not an easy solution.
MD: [pause] I don’t know how you foster cross-generational conversation. I don’t know. To
newly seroconverted I would say, take care of yourself because that seems to be the biggest
piece. I honestly think part of the reason I am here is because I wasn’t – within the context of my
generation – was not terribly druggy, was not drinking to excess, I got a lot of exercise – I think
that helped. Although, I know a lot of people who did that too and did survive. And I would say
don’t go back into the closet – try not to go back into the closet. Try not to be going back into
that hiding – this has always been one of the challenges of this. HIV is a virus but it’s also got all
these other things attached to it, right? And that’s always been one of the challenges. I think
through the online community there is more opportunities to meet people who share the
condition, so in that sense it’s not as big a deal. Yeah, I don’t have a lot of wisdom for – I would
presume to advise this generation. In so many ways, you tend to sort of – us older guys tend to
romanticise but the reason we don’t need that community anymore to the same extent is because
it’s okay to, you know, talk to your parents and talk to your friends. That’s a good thing. That’s a
really good thing. It’s not quite as edgy and colourful maybe but it’s a good thing.
BK: It is. One of the reasons why I am involved in this project is that I feel that it should be
useful to younger gay men.
MD: Yeah, maybe it well be after – like, it’s a story as opposed to… Yeah, it’s a weird thing. I
will tell you one other weird thing – I went to Berlin. Have you ever been?
BK: No, but I would love to go.
MD: You have to go. It’s a lot of fun.
BK: It sounds like a very sexy city.
MD: It is, and it’s very – if you like history, it’s an incredibly raw city – “Here’s where the wall
was.” Or you walk along a sidewalk and there was a brass star with someone’s name on it and
the year they were taken out of that house and sent to the camps. And in the centre of it all is the
holocaust memorial, which is this crazy grid of dark grey granite blocks, and they are probably
nine feet by three feet. As you walk through the middle of it they get really high, and all of a
sudden you come to an intersection and see someone else and say, “Hey, how are you?” Then
you keep walking along this path of grey. And the thing that it reminded me of was the AIDS
crisis, and just this rising tide of dark grey, and then it goes away. You walk out of it and its
gone. And it was a really weird feeling. It’s good that you guys are doing this, because it’s nice
to have pieces of it that are recorded and remembered.
BK: How has it felt to come out on the other side of this? You’re a long term survivor, one of the
longest. Thirty-two years. That’s incredible.
MD: Yeah, it’s not really something I think about that often. I mean obviously I am pleased to be
here. A lot of the time I think if I am getting more stressed about something it’s all gravy right?
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“HIV in My Day,” Michael D. (November 24, 2017)
It’s all good! [laughs] And there is some little tinges of guilt and, yeah – I don’t know what the
word is but it’s just loss. There are lot of people that just aren’t there anymore. So yeah, when I
look at old photos, a lot of them aren’t here anymore and that’s a weird thing. But yeah, it’s good
to be here.
BK: And those things aren’t made better by a cocktail treatment – those feelings of loss, those
don’t go way.
MD: Yeah, I mean they sort of get duller as the years go by, but they are always still there.
BK: And does HIV mean something different to you in the present than it did?
MD: Oh god, yeah. It went from being a death sentence to a social stigma to I don’t know what it
is now – a trait? A box you check on a website? Almost irrelevant. Irrelevant is almost a good
word – it doesn’t seem terribly important or relevant now. It’s a pretty big change.
BK: It’s pretty incredible.
MD: Yeah, and that’s a good thing.
BK: I think I am just about out of questions. Do you have any advice for health care providers –
how they can optimize care for people living with HIV or prevention efforts? The reason we
want to ask this is because long-term survivors are no longer at the centre of these discussions.
Anything you can offer there?
MD: The only thought I have on that is they need to get real on what’s actually happening –
what’s actually going on in the community. They need to have a real conversation about
barebacking and sex in the community, because I don’t – it feels like a lot of the conversation
has become irrelevant to what’s actually going on in the community. I see these articles about,
“Oh, you shouldn’t have pornography that’s barebacking.” Well, all pornography is barebacking.
Let’s get real and have a real conversation about that. It feels like the sort of safe sex campaigns
– people have gotten bored with them years ago and they’re irrelevant. I don’t know how they
get that relevance back but they need to have a real conversation about it, because it is still a
serious thing – it’s a very expensive thing, it’s a big change to someone’s life. I go to the
hospital, I go for blood work, I go to the pharmacy, I go to my doctor, three appointments every
three months all the time. I can’t live outside of Canada, because I can’t get my drugs. It’s not
just a pill and it’s not gone. I think they need to have some real conversations about what’s really
happening. I know that stats are not going down – the number of new infections.
BK: And among young guys they are going up a little bit.
MD: Yeah, that doesn’t surprise me at all.
BK: It’s concerning.
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“HIV in My Day,” Michael D. (November 24, 2017)
MD: Yeah, it’s very concerning. And its tied in with the other thing – the whole crystal meth
thing is very terrifying. The number of people I see on sites that “like to party” is really
horrifying. It’s shocking. There, that was the last one, right?
BK: That was the last question I had. I’d prefer to leave it on a more positive note, but maybe I
will leave it you to decide what that note is.
MD: Well, you can have a look at this [USB drive], and maybe see if you can drag it across, and
I don’t know if its relevant or not, but it might be entertaining.
BK: I would love to see that.
MD: And it’s just interesting because it’s such a long time ago. Even I was shocked, because for
the longest time I didn’t have it on this I had it on VHS which I could play for years and year,
then we had it put on to here. And just to see my attitudes back then, before the cocktails, it’s
kind of weird. Yeah.
BK: Anything else that we didn’t touch on that you would like to share? I think there are so
many different layers to a story like this and we can’t explicitly ask you about every part of it,
but if there’s anything that comes to mind, you’re welcome to share.
MD: I can’t think of anything else.
1
“HIV in My Day,” Michael D. (November 24, 2017)
HIV in My Day – Interview 12
November 24, 2017
Interviewee: Michael D. (MD); Interviewer: Ben Klassen (BK)
Ben Klassen: Alright, so I’m sitting here this afternoon with Michael, just getting started. To
ease into the interview, we like to start by asking guys how you first became involved in the gay
community or started engaging in gay life, so to speak.
Michael D.: Um… Let me think about that. I had a couple of friends in high school that I used to
kind of play around with, very – pretty minimal – you know, a couple of times sort of thing.
When I was sixteen-years-old, me and a friend who was a girl – a girlfriend – went down to
Wreck Beach. And we were kind of weirded out because we didn’t go down the main trail
because we didn’t know where the main trail was, we went down the old one. Yeah, it was very
strange. There was a lot of men around and they were all naked of course and they had this
intensity about them that we didn’t understand, and so we left after a while. But when I was
nineteen-years-old there was two places I knew where gay people were: one was a bar called
John Barleys which was an S&M bar down in Gastown, which me and friend had stumbled into
one day and turned around very quickly, and the other place was Wreck Beach. So, that’s where
I came out. That’s where I met my first gay people, and actually met my first lover there who I
actually spent two-and-a-half years with.
BK: At Wreck Beach?
MD: No, we went home occasionally. [laughs] But I met him at wreck beach, and that was about
– before I turned twenty, so it was 1982.
BK: That’s an interesting snapshot of the community to have.
MD: It was pretty wild. It was the tail end of what I call “the party.” They were wild times.
There was a lot of gay men in Vancouver, specifically in the West End. There was a lot of sex,
and a lot of that was going on at Wreck Beach. There was the trails – there was constantly a lot
of gay men having sex in the trails. There was the parks – there was a lot of stuff going on. There
was fifteen gay bars when I came out, ‘cause a friend of a friend took me on a pub crawl. There
was Neighbours, this huge dance club on Robson street. And we went to Faces, this little tiny
clap board place on the corner of Seymour and Robson. Anyways there was fifteen of them, and
they were all busy! The hookers and the hustlers and the transvestites were all still standing on
the corner at Nicola and Pendrell or Jervis and whatever, one block off of Davie Street. You
couldn’t drive down there ‘cause there was so many cars. Very vibrant – there was gay
restaurants, all the bars and night clubs. We used to think it was the gay ghetto, but it was the
nicest ghetto ever. It was just wild and crazy and very different from now. Like nobody was
thinking of getting married and nobody was thinking of having kids. We were just having a
party! It was a very different vibe and a very different feel. Lots of people here from
Newfoundland for example who just went all the way across the country to get away from their
families. And lots of people from the Prairies and they would all end up in Vancouver in the
West End.
2
“HIV in My Day,” Michael D. (November 24, 2017)
BK: It sounds bigger in a lot of ways - it geographically covered a lot more space, stretching
down to Robson, Gastown, Yaletown?
MD: No, well there was one spot – Yaletown was very different, and Yaletown was a dirty old
scary dark warehouse district. The Gandy [Dancer] was down there, so everyone would go
trapesing down to The Gandy, but that would mean going across Granville Street which was kind
of scary. It was this one door on a dark warehouse street, and that was The Gandy. And once you
got inside it was just wild – good sound system, really young clientele. And then eventually there
was the Love Affair which was on the corner of Seymour and Drake, which was also still a very
rough area. There wasn’t really residential down here other then the old West End. Everything
east of Burrard was all old commercial, kind of slummy. There was a couple of old houses that
had after hours parties, and there was the baths as well – there was at least two bathhouses down
by the Gandy but they were really seedy. We didn’t go there because we were nice boys.
BK: Maybe it looked a little different but part of it is Vancouver looked a lot different.
MD: Yeah, the only high risers were the old West End which was built in the ‘70s. It was very
congregated, it was very concentrated. Whereas today there’s gay people living all over the city,
in those days if you were gay you came down to the West End.
BK: Any other thoughts on what the community looked like in those early years?
MD: Yeah, like the – because everybody went outside to socialize, right? There was no internet
so you didn’t spend a lot of time by yourself typing, you were out at Buddy’s which was just
around the corner, just off of Burrard on Burnaby, I guess. It was always jammed every night of
the week. So, people were always out on the streets, driving around or walking around, or out at
restaurants. It was a very vibrant street scene. If you wanted to meet somebody or wanted to have
sex you had to go outside. Lots of guys went down to the park – that wasn’t really my thing. Lots
of guys went to the Fruit Loop which was down near the entrance to False Creek. It was an
outdoor area. There was this old paddle steamer that had been dragged up onto the shore and
turned into a restaurant. I think it was called Tommy Africa’s, and then it caught on fire, and it
burned so it was condemned, but all the gay guys used to go in there and cruise in the dark
burned up, floor falling – truly quite dangerous. But they loved it, they thought it was great fun.
Just stuff like that. It was really quite crazy – in some ways it was. I think we sort of tend to
romanticise or have a nostalgia for it, but it was… If you were gay in the ‘80s, when you came
out you were kind of socializing with drug dealers and hustlers and you were kind of skirting
around the edge of the criminal and a lot of the guys kind of fell into the criminal. And when I
came out pretty much everybody that I met initially was a hustler or a drug dealer – they were
pretty sketchy. And a lot of the guys who came out very young, they would meet somebody, they
would fall in love, they would tell their parents, and their parents would disown them. And six
months later the thing was over and they were seventeen years old with nowhere to go. And a lot
of them ended up hustling. It was a very crazy time. It was fun because it was edgy and kind of
dangerous but it wasn’t a better time. I mean the reason it was like that was because you were
pushed out onto the edge of society. It wasn’t better it was just kind of fun and exciting.
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“HIV in My Day,” Michael D. (November 24, 2017)
BK: Certainly there was much less acceptance of gay people in dominant society, which would
probably lead to hanging out with other people that were outcasts.
MD: Yeah, I was quite disturbed when I came out. It seemed like everyone I met was very self-
destructive. They were either doing way too many drugs or drinking way too much. I think the
one sort of commonality that runs through that was very low self-esteem, which happens when
you grow up in a society that doesn’t even see you and if it does see you it reviles you. That was
a very big part of the community.
BK: I think you have a done a great job of giving me an idea of what the community looked like
prior to the epidemic. Bit of a stark transition here but when did you first hear about HIV and
AIDS? Do you remember where that was or who that was through.
MD: I remember a big screaming headline on The Province newspaper about a gay disease
killing people – I can’t remember what the headline was but that was kind of – the first that I had
heard of it. You know, there was vague stories of it being around but I would say in 1982
certainly, maybe [198]3 – I mean, it seemed like something that was somewhere else. We didn’t
think it was here – it seemed like it was in New York or San Francisco. I remember going to see
my doctor in this very building, Dr. [Brian] Willoughby, very early on in 1984, and me and a
partner at the time had contracted something. And he said, “You know, we can deal with this.
This is no big deal. You guys need to be concerned with-” – I don’t think it was called AIDS at
the time, maybe it was… He said, “You need to be thinking about this. You need to be wearing
condoms.” And we were only twenty-three years old – we weren’t really listening to him.
[laughs] But I distinctly remember him telling us that we need to pay attention to this.
And then people started to disappear. The first one that I remember was a guy – I only knew him
from his performance name. His name was Billy Gene and he was a singer at Buddies – very
good singer and piano player. I don’t know if he did drag or not, I don’t recall seeing him in
drag. But he just disappeared one day. You would ask about him and “He went back to wherever
he was from because he was sick.” That was very common. You would all of a sudden realize
that so-and-so wasn’t here anymore, and then if you asked around you found they had gone
home or died. They just weren’t here anymore, and it happened very, very quickly, because there
was no test. There was no warning until somebody actually got physically sick, and by that time
it was because they had no immune system left. They were dead in six months, three months – so
yeah, it was pretty scary.
BK: So, those disappearances would have only made you feel more uncertainty and more fear I
imagine?
MD: Yeah, but that was later on, that wasn’t in the early days. It was just – I mean when I –
when I originally found out in 1985, I didn’t know anybody else who was – I didn’t know
anybody who had HIV. Like nobody. So, it wasn’t like it was common. There was a couple of
people that had disappeared.
BK: So, that must have felt very isolating in a way?
4
“HIV in My Day,” Michael D. (November 24, 2017)
MD: Oh yeah. You mean to become positive?
BK: I am thinking more like, “Am I the only person in Vancouver that has this?”
MD: Hell yeah, it was crazy. I think actually BCPWA or AIDS Vancouver were around at the
time, but I didn’t know about of them. And I had had kind of a flu, and it hurt when I swallowed,
and I had a funny rash – kind of like a flat rash, it wasn’t bumpy or anything. But I made an
appointment to see Brian Willoughby. So, I said, “Yeah, I got this and this and it’s all going
away. Probably wasting your time.” And he said he wanted me to go to the hospital for some
tests. And I was like, “Why would I do that? It’s all getting better.” And he said, “Look, I don’t
have time right now. Just go do the tests and we will talk about it when you get back.” So, I went
to the hospital and did a bunch of blood tests. I can’t remember exactly how this rolled out but I
then went back to talk to Brian Willoughby and he said, “I think you may have been exposed to
the virus that causes AIDS.” He said, “It will take a while to find out.” Back in that time there
was no testing here in Vancouver. The only way you could tested for the antigens for the virus
was they would take blood here, they would strap the vials to a guy, they would tape them to his
chest to keep them warm, and they would fly him to Ottawa. And I think it took two months as I
recall, because over the entire summer the first one came back and it was negative. And then the
second one came back at the end of the summer, September 1985, and it was positive. It was a
death sentence. They said, “You got three years to live.” And there was nobody to talk about it,
because as soon as you became… you know, you became a pariah, you became a total outcast.
You know, I was twenty-three-years-old. It was very, very difficult. I think I sort of ignored it for
a long time and pretended it wasn’t there.
BK: How are you supposed to deal productively with news like that?
MD: I don’t know, because there was nothing you could do about it – there was no treatment.
And in 1985 it was the year that Rock Hudson died, so all of a sudden it became a much more
mainstream thing. But yeah, it was a very… I remember actually – it must have been after the…
I’m not sure if it was confirmed. It was in the summer, but I remember I was in a suit for some
reason – don’t know if it was a job interview or what I was doing. But I remember coming out of
St. Paul’s and sitting on the side of the street on the curb, trying to figure out – not really
thinking, just overwhelmed by the whole thing. So yeah, it was pretty wild.
BK: That must have… I can’t even fathom what that would have been like because in a very
short about of time you went from “this isn’t happening” to “this is happening to me now.”
MD: Yeah, and the guy who – there was only – because it was a very specific period, I was
told… The lady I went to see at St Paul’s hospital, her name was Linda Rabeneck – Dr.
Rabeneck – and she was studying a thing at the time, what they were calling Rabeneck’s disease,
which was exactly as I described my symptoms – the rash, swallowing pain, and flu. And what
that was was an acute reaction to the virus that about 25% of people have. So, I was one of the
first people that they watched do that transition. I can’t remember where I was going with that…
What was the question?
5
“HIV in My Day,” Michael D. (November 24, 2017)
BK: I don’t think I had a question. I was just saying that you went from thinking this is not
something that was happening to this is happening in such close proximity.
MD: Yeah, and you had this sort of period of two or three months where they kind of said this
might be what happened. “Oh, here’s your first test. It’s negative.” “Here is your second test. It’s
positive.” So, you had a bit of time to sort of get used to the idea. But it was – what do you do
with it? And my reaction was figure out all the things I wanted to do, and start doing them! So, I
learned how to dive, and I got my pilot’s license in 1992 – I got my private pilot’s license. Yeah,
I did a whole bunch of them and, yeah, that was my reaction. [laughs]
BK: That seems like a very a positive reaction, all things considered.
MD: Yeah, it worked out okay.
BK: So, when you were diagnosed were you aware of any forms of support that were out there at
all?
MD: I really wasn’t. I know that in retrospect that BCPWA was around and I think AIDS
Vancouver was around as well. And I suppose the doctors – I am sure that Dr. Willoughby
would have said you can go here or whatever, but I wasn’t very good at asking for help and I
sure as hell didn’t want to go sit in a room with a bunch of people who were positive – that
would have been scary. I think in retrospect I was very much in denial, that the easiest way to
deal with it was to push it off to the side and say, “It’s not real.” And that worked for a long
time… [laughs] … because I didn’t die, and I just kept – not only didn’t I die, I never ever had
any other symptoms other than that initial reaction, which became increasingly weird. So, it went
from being, “Gees, I wish I wasn’t the only one,” to having people around me start to get sick,
and a very weird feeling watching other people get sick and I never did – and that went on for
years.
BK: So, I imagine just waiting for the bomb to drop? You know it’s coming, you know it’s going
to happen eventually – I guess that’s the idea, right?
MD: The other thing – I worked in a very homophobic industry. I worked on the waterfront on
towboats, on tugs, and so that was never – nothing was ever discussed. He [my partner] was
called Jennifer… [laughs] …because there had to be some reason I had to be so happy. It was not
an option to discuss the fact that I was gay or – so, that was problematic. I was terrified that I
was going to get sick and as soon as they could see that I would be out of the job. I mean people
were being thrown out of apartments, people were losing jobs. I remember Dr. Rabeneck, she
had been away at a conference and while she was gone some waiter had been discovered to have
AIDS. He probably didn’t have AIDS, he probably was just HIV positive, but they didn’t
distinguish between things like that. And the local media was wound up in a frenzy on whether
or not anyone could get this from this waiter. So, she arrived back from the conference and was
jumped on at the airport and she was tired and a bit cranky, and she was annoyed from the
questioning. And they kept saying things like, “Well, couldn’t he – what if he cut himself?
Couldn’t he give AIDS to the clientele?” And she finally turned around and said, “Look, if he cut
6
“HIV in My Day,” Michael D. (November 24, 2017)
his thumb and bled all over your salad then shoved it up your ass you might get AIDS.” [laughs]
And then she turned around and walked away. She was a very interesting lady.
BK: Wow, that’s a great anecdote. Talking about the media, you mentioned that in 1985
becoming HIV positive meant becoming a social pariah. Did you pay attention to the mainstream
media and what they were saying about AIDS and gay people?
MD: Yeah, I mean Rock Hudson was a huge deal. All of a sudden, he kind of became the face of
it, and then after that Freddie Mercury from Queen became – came out not very long before he
died. I don’t remember what year that was but it was a huge deal. But it was interesting because
most of the time there wasn’t much about it locally and there no movies or… I mean, there was a
couple of things on TV about it, but basically it seemed to be this thing down in the community
here. And then slowly people started to, you know, create ways of helping each other, and taking
care of partners or friends. A lot of the time it was friends because the partners would split as
soon as somebody because positive. So yeah, it was very much sort of in the community and
when you went outside the community, you didn’t really talk about it, and you were always
afraid that people would not have anything to do with you if they found out. And with my own
family, I didn’t tell them for – I told my mother fairly quickly I think, but we didn’t tell my
father and rest of the family until I was thirty, so at least five years. Because we first had to tell
them that I was gay and then we had to tell them that I was dying. [laughs] So, it was kind of a
big deal. But I remember shortly after my thirtieth birthday, me and my mom cooked up a plan.
So, she would talk to this one and this one, and I would talk to this one and this one, but it took a
long time.
BK: Any sense of what else was being said in the mainstream community about AIDS, HIV, gay
men?
MD: Well, I remember a friend of a friend – I can’t remember what the occasion was but a friend
came over with another girl, and… This isn’t directly answering your question but just kind of
where things were at. They came over to my house, had a couple of drinks, whatever, and left. I
found out later that he had told her that I was HIV positive and she got very angry with him for
taking her to my place and she had a drink from my dishes. She was very concerned that she was
going to catch something. I really can’t remember much attention in the mainstream media. I
remember some of the early TV – made-for-TV movies that came out like Longtime Companion.
I can’t remember what some of the other ones were. And they were always about these kind of
semi-wealthy white males that got this nasty disease, but there was never any sex or reference to
the community. They were all more from the point of view of the family dealing with it. One of
the things that did happen, which was amazing, was Dr. Peter. I can’t remember – was that the
early ‘90s maybe? Certainly well before the cocktails and it was again this wealthy white
successful male who could tell the story. I have to give credit to him, because it was a very scary
thing to do at that time. He personalized it and he turned it into a human being, and it was
brutally sad to watch him deteriorate. He had a black lab – I remember him, this really cute black
lab dog. He really was the perfect person to personalize the disease and make it mean something
to a lot of people. I want to say he did a weekly piece on the evening news or something.
BK: I think there is something like 100 segments or something like that.
7
“HIV in My Day,” Michael D. (November 24, 2017)
MD: And he went blind, and, yeah, it was brutal. But that certainly ramped up the conversation,
and you know it became this rising tide of – of people that were affected. It went from nobody
knew about it to everybody had a friend who was sick or dying. It really became an
overwhelming tide.
BK: I think that anecdote about your friend bringing his girlfriend over really speaks to the
degree of fear and stigma attached to the epidemic, attached to HIV at that time.
MD: I will tell you another thing about that. I never had anything related to the disease but this is
a very embarrassing story. I went to see Dr. Willoughby one time because I was having problems
with my bum, and he said, “We need to go to the hospital and have them have a look at you.”
And I went to St. Paul’s again – I am guessing it was early 1987 and I ended up going to St.
Paul’s and they were going to do some exploratory surgery on me. And they were going to –
there was a whole big discussion about this – I thought I was going to be knocked out, which I
was happy about, and as they gave me some drug to relax, as they were wheeling me in, I
remember having this argument with the anesthesiologist. He said that, “We aren’t going to
knock you out we are going to give you a spinal block,” and I said, “No, no, no, I want to be
knocked out.” And he said, “No we aren’t going to do that.” And this whole long argument and
then they punctured me like 7 times to get a spinal block. I remember the Doctor being quite an
asshole. I am all drugged up and what not. He’s exploring and he said, “Has it ever occurred to
you that maybe you should just stop having sex,” basically? I was like, “Yeah, the thought’s
occurred to me.”
Anyways I got out of there and they put me on the bone ward which was the clean ward and at
that time did not allow anyone who was HIV positive to be on the ward, and the two surgeons
who ran it were out of town and so somebody put me up there just to kind of push the
boundaries. And whenever I would sit up or try to stand, I would throw up, because they
punctured my spine seven times and apparently the liquid in my spine had drained out a bit, so
every time I tried to stand up I would get nauseous and throw up. I was in there for four days and
no one knew I was there. It was 1986, my mother was in Montreal. How could I tell anyone I
was in the hospital when no one knew I was positive? I thought I was going to be in and out in an
afternoon and I was there for four days. Nobody would come into my room. They would come in
once or twice a day in beekeeper outfits – they would slide some food to me and leave. On the
third or fourth day I was there, a friend of mine who was a nurse at St. Paul’s in the emergency
ward somehow found out that I was in there and he came into the room. And as soon as he
walked into the room I burst into tears, because I hadn’t seen anybody, and nobody knew I was
there, and I was freaking out. And he just tore strips off of everybody there. I was moved within
half an hour down to another ward and had excellent care after that. It turned out that I had
gonorrhea and the point is that gonorrhea was fairly common, but because I had those three
initials on my charts, every time I saw a doctor everything was about HIV and I never actually
had a physical – I never had any physical problems from that disease.
BK: I think that provides a good counter snapshot of good care – bad care, stigma in the medical
realm.
8
“HIV in My Day,” Michael D. (November 24, 2017)
MD: There was a lot of – there was some very good people and almost everybody that I was
exposed to was very good, but that was at St. Paul’s in the centre of the epidemic down here in
the early days. I think it also generates and illustrates the amount of fear in the medical
community. People didn’t know how it was transmitted, people didn’t know what was going on,
and it was frightening.
BK: There aren’t many things that can make you feel like more of a pariah then a healthcare
provider walking in in a hazmat suit.
MD: Yeah, exactly. And part of that was homophobia as well. This was a way of keeping gay
people out of the ward as well. All of a sudden there was an excuse for the homophobia. It was
also the time of Ronald Regan. There was a lot of stuff going on – the moral majority screaming
and yelling that this was god’s revenge, which if we hadn’t been so wrapped up in trying to take
care of ourselves or each other we would have been very angry about it. We did get angry about
it. A lot of people got angry about it. But I was never part of that. I wasn’t part of the ACT UP
thing or – yeah, I just kind of kept on doing my thing.
BK: Just not an activist or…? I don’t want to imply at all that everyone should join ACT UP
because that’s not true at all…
MD: Yeah, I never really felt like a victim. I never – I didn’t feel like society was ganging up on
me. I never felt that. You know I was aware of homophobia – with the job that I worked, I knew
you didn’t tell them. Yeah, I just didn’t have that anger. I don’t know. The only way I did get
involved was - Brian in 1987, he said, “There is this new drug trial, AZT.” And people had been
talking about it in the media and people were flying off to Paris and going to Mexico to get AZT.
And he said, “They are starting a clinical trial here in Vancouver where they are going to try to
establish the dosage and the protocol to follow for people who are on it.” And he asked, “Do you
want to participate?” And I said, “Sure.” All of a sudden, after two years there was something I
could do.
And so I started going to – we used to call it the dungeon. It was down below – I think it was
called IDC – I can’t remember, in St. Paul’s. And it was scary, it was really scary. I would have
been twenty-five-years-old and perfectly healthy, and I can’t remember… Once every couple of
weeks I would go down into the dungeon and sometimes there would be fifteen guys there who
looked like that just stepped out of Dachau, covered in purple blotches of Kaposi’s Sarcoma and
it was very scary. You sort of wondered if that was going to be me in a year. How soon? So, it
was very scary. And so we started AZT and we were taking triple the dose that they eventually
settled on, and people were passing out and needing blood transfusions. And I was fine – it never
bothered me at all. The only thing that bothered me is they would do bone marrows, so they
would come in with this huge spike and shove it in your thigh because apparently that was one of
the few places where your body makes bone marrow. And they freeze the area so it didn’t hurt
but you would feel the bone pushing inside. It was pretty gross. But other than that and walking
into the place with all these people who were so sick… So, I stayed on AZT for a year or two
before I realized it wasn’t actually doing anything. It turned out to be a false hope.
9
“HIV in My Day,” Michael D. (November 24, 2017)
BK: It’s pretty rare for people to talk about AZT and not have symptoms. From what we’ve
heard from other people, it was a brutal drug.
MD: It didn’t bother me at all! Yeah, and this was like triple the dosage. People were passing
out, and they were giving blood transfusions and I was like, “Whats next?” [laughs]
BK: It’s also interesting that you were in that trial as someone who wasn’t showing any health
effects.
MD: Nope, nothing. Yeah, that was 1987 and then – I mean, I kind of kept in touch, that trial
kind of put me in the system. The only other doctor besides Dr. Brian Willoughby who is still
around is Doctor Julio [Montaner]. He was a god of man, an Argentinian man. He was very
young back then. That was where I met him, actually, was 1987. Yeah, so I would run into him
every now and then and he would be all surprised I was still alive. He would say, “You should
come in. We’ll do tests.” And I was like, “Yeah, not so much.” Far better for me to be out
cruising the coast than in your hospital doing tests. But I would run into him every now that then.
I still run into him every now and then.
BK: We have captured a couple different snapshots of what has gone on in the medical
establishment – lots of positive and horrible things, and then you talked a little bit about Regan I
guess. Do you remember anything politically in BC or Vancouver in response to the epidemic?
MD: I remember Billy Vander Zalm, our premier at the time. I remember that there was a
conversation – I want to say it was 1986 but I don’t remember – but I remember there was a
conversation about quarantining men who were positive and apparently it went all the way up to
the cabinet level. That was sort of the level of hysteria; people were just so freaked out. Yeah,
that’s the only thing I can remember politically. And there was just this rage as it went on and on
that nothing was happening, that more money wasn’t being spent, things were not moving faster,
you couldn’t get access to experimental drugs. And again, I could sort of see both sides of it,
because there was more than one test that looked like it was having very promising results, so
they would speed it up, but then it turned out it wasn’t actually doing anything. So, I could kind
of see both sides of it. But again, I didn’t – I just – for whatever reason, I just kind of kept on
doing my own thing and not really getting involved in that. I just didn’t see it as – you know, I
didn’t feel like victim and I wasn’t raging angry. There were things that made me angry but I just
never got involved in that, not until 1996 actually.
BK: So, going back to this idea of stigma or fear around HIV positive people, was this
something that was also manifesting within the gay community?
MD: Oh yeah, oh my god, yeah! Yeah, I can’t – I haven’t thought of this for so long but there
was people who just stopped having sex. They were terrified. There was people who – the
problem at the beginning was that nobody used condoms. In fact, one of the great things about
being gay is you didn’t have to wear a condom. [laughs] The only people who wore condoms
were hustlers, so if you said in the early days, “Oh, maybe we should put a condom on,” they
would be like, “Why?” It was this weird thing. Then of course all the education campaigns
started up and that changed, but yeah it was a real problem at the beginning. There was some
10
“HIV in My Day,” Michael D. (November 24, 2017)
really weird reactions. Some people were just, “No, I am not doing anything.” Other people, it
became quite fashionable to have a partner. There was the rise of monogamist relationships and
in my experience that hadn’t really been a thing prior to AIDS, but then all of a sudden it made a
lot of sense to get one partner and stay with them. I remember a whole bunch of hysteria around
the bathhouses and all of these different places that people used to play – they got pretty quiet
pretty fast. And there was talk of closing down the bathhouses, but I don’t think they ever did
here – I don’t think they ever did. And it developed into there was always someone at these
places handing out condoms and lube – that became common.
BK: Which to me seems like a better strategy because you can use those spaces for promoting
safer sex, because otherwise people are going to go have sex somewhere else.
MD: Yeah, exactly. And there was raging arguments about what was the way to go, what was
the best thing to do. I mean, that was right around the time Nancy Regan came out with “just say
no,” which was about drugs, but it was pretty much her answer to everything. But in Vancouver
– honestly, if you were going to be HIV positive anywhere, this was the place to be because
however it came about the Centre for Excellence was a remarkable thing and even compared to
Ontario or Montreal, they don’t have – they don’t pay for HIV drugs or they didn’t. I remember
even in 1996 people coming from Nova Scotia for the AIDS conference and those drugs were
not on the government’s list. This was the place, and we didn’t have – Toronto had the bathhouse
raids in the early ‘80s. We didn’t have that here. The police were pretty easy-going. Every now
and then they would go down to Stanley park and harass the gays in the bushes and what not, but
they were pretty low key, and I always thought he community had pretty good relationships with
them.
BK: Maybe slightly more accepted than other places?
MD: Definitely, and I don’t know why that is. It was certainly true – I mean, much less uptight
than Toronto. Quebec was always pretty fun – Montreal, but that was just on visits. But there
was no questions this was the place to be with the care you could get. The attitude was about as
good as it got.
BK: So, building on that – information… Was there a lot of good sources of information as the
epidemic started to progress? Prior to 1985, probably not a whole lot, because there is all this
stigma in the community – there is fear around sex in the community.
MD: Well, nobody knew what it was about. They thought it was about poppers at first. And there
was a lot of cynicism about gays. They just sort of got this sexual freedom and now there was all
these organizations saying you shouldn’t have sex, and they were like, “Screw you!” So, there
was that kind of dynamic as well. But honestly, I can’t really remember how the information
started to happen. It started to show up in bathrooms and little posters and these guys started to
show up in all the different places. But it just kind of happened slowly and I honestly can’t
remember. It just sort of became a feature of the community.
BK: Do you remember anything around things the community organizations were doing at that
time?
11
“HIV in My Day,” Michael D. (November 24, 2017)
MD: No. Not at all… not at all. I really didn’t get involved with any of the organizations until
the mid-‘90s and that was because a couple of friends said you should really go be a peer
counsellor, but honestly before that I didn’t really have anything to do with them. I mean, I was
aware of AIDS Vancouver because they would pop up in the media and seeing the safe sex
campaigns.
BK: Do you remember anything about those safe sex campaigns? What was kind of being said
about sex?
MD: I remember them being pretty funny. They were very progressive language and very in-
your-face. And again, Vancouver seemed to be one of the best places to be for that. The States
was so far behind on that stuff. But yeah, I just remember it being very shocking and in-your-
face.
BK: Relatedly, did you stay plugged into the gay community after you seroconverted?
MD: Oh, absolutely.
BK: What did your involvement look like? The same?
MD: Pretty much for the very early years I pretended nothing had changed. Yeah, the biggest
problem for me was in relationships. It was – I always used to think of it as “the chat” – when
did you have the chat? Did you have it after you kissed them? You sure didn’t want to have it
after you had sex with them. Yeah, it was very problematic. And yeah, that was the biggest
problem. Even if you had safe sex, having the chat after you had sex was not a good idea. And in
fact I remember I had a party with a whole bunch of people there and there was a guy – a
younger guy that we had been having a bit of relationship with and I had not had the chat with
him. And in the middle of the party someone had asked him, “Why are you seeing Michael when
he is positive?” and it just blew up the middle of this party. And it was entirely my fault but it
was like a worst nightmare – it was a nightmare, and that was probably maybe the mid-‘90s.
Yeah, he was almost hysterical, and understandably so.
BK: My goodness, disclosing early in the epidemic would have been almost impossible.
MD: And a few times you would have people just go, “No, I am out of here,” and so it becomes
a really big deal and a lot of guys just stop dating. It was a very big deal, and later on when it
wasn’t such a big deal anymore, it took a long time to realize it wasn’t a big deal. Today is weird
– today is strange. I was in an eleven-year relationship that ended three or four years ago, and as
I said, I went in as a pariah and came out a fetish. It’s a very strange world. You know, there are
like hookup sites and stuff where not only is it not a big deal, it’s a sought-after thing – it’s very
strange. I mean, I find that very weird. I remember when this whole – this was an earlier iteration
of it, it was called bug chasing. That must have been – well, it was before the Internet, because I
had messaged this guy in Melbourne, Australia and I was here and he called himself a “bug
chaser.” And I said, “Hey, I’m like on the other side of the world so we are never going to meet
but I am just curious why? What’s the thrill?” And he never responded to me, but I thought it
12
“HIV in My Day,” Michael D. (November 24, 2017)
was absolutely bizarre. And that’s morphed a lot to now where they certainly wouldn’t think of
themselves as bug chasers, but they don’t care – they think it’s over, they think it’s no big deal,
or they are on PrEP. And I do think there is a whole thing that has happened through
pornography that has fetishized cum. It has turned it from just something that happened in the
middle of sex to the point of sex. It’s a very odd thing. Maybe it’s not that odd, maybe it’s what’s
prohibited is sexy, but it’s very odd – and to me it’s really odd.
BK: Yeah, there are so many factors that go into that. The desire for intimacy, and closeness
and…
MD: And taboo. Taboo is definitely part of it because it’s a very – somebody should do a study
on the changing pornography or, even more interesting, the changing hookup sites, because there
is an amazing amount of data there that would be really interesting to analyze.
BK: Yeah, oh my goodness, there sure would be. So, any other sense of how the community was
responding?
MD: Well, later on in like 1993, I met a couple and one of them was starting to get ill and his
partner actually connected up with Lorne Mayencourt, and they helped arrange a schedule of
friends to help take care of him. And that was kind of sort of the beginnings of Friends for Life.
And it was very informal and it was friends and acquaintances. So, that was sort of when I
started to become – that was kind of the first time I was involved with somebody who was
slowly getting sick.
Another thing I should mention to you, just going back – another weird thing about the
community was you would start going to funerals all the time. I remember one year we went to
six funerals and they were quite bizarre, because they were just weird. I remember going to one
where his family they were Jehovah’s Witnesses which wasn’t terribly relevant other than it was
held at a Jehovah’s Witnesses hall, down on Robson Street. And half the crowd was screaming
gays from the West End and the other half was people from Surrey, and it was intensely
uncomfortable. There was a guy there from AIDS Vancouver who spoke and talked about – got
us all to hold hands so I held hands with this guy from Surrey for ten minutes, which was
intensely uncomfortable, while he talked about AIDS and what else he talked about. It was really
bizarre. You couldn’t tear yourself up every time you went to funeral, you would joke about it.
You would cruise at funerals, you would rate the food and the entertainment. I had a friend who
would count the slats in the blinds so he wouldn’t get completely emotional and sobbing. Yeah,
it was very weird to go to that many funerals. And they were not normal funerals – they were
twenty-somethings, thirty-somethings, and the families were distraught and conflicted. So it was
a very, very strange time. And I would say that was the very late ‘80s, early ‘90s up to ‘96. Then
it all kind of stopped.
BK: I don’t understand the psychology behind this at all but that amount of emotional weight
and trauma – you would have had to have some way pushing some of that way.
MD: I mean everybody had different ways of coping but a lot of us were in denial. And then
what happened was in ‘96 it all changes, but you don’t realize that its changed. Like I mentioned
13
“HIV in My Day,” Michael D. (November 24, 2017)
before, there were all kinds of cures that didn’t work, and they been announced and everyone got
excited about them, then they didn’t work. So, when 1996 came along: “Oh we got these new
cocktails,” it was just like everything else. Everyone was just like, “Oh yeah, another cure,” and
it took six months, a year before people realized that people weren’t dying anymore. One of the
effects of that was you never really went back and visited this period, because you didn’t know it
was over, and then it was over so why would you want to talk about it. So, I think a lot of people
came out of that very intense period never having discussed it or processed it. The community
certainly didn’t, not that I am aware of it. You just stopped dealing with it and kept on going.
Other than the poor fuckers who were – I remember being in the car with this one guy when I
started working with BCPWA. We were going to lunch or something and this guy – he was like
thirty maybe and he said his finances were pretty bad. He said, “I racked up like eight credit
cards to the max. Who knew I would be here!?” [laughs]
BK: It’s so understandable because why would you…? There was no point in having a savings
account if you were not going to be here in six months.
MD: Oh yeah. Most of them didn’t have great jobs but, hey, everyone wants to give you a credit
card! Yeah, I think a lot of people got caught in that.
[Start of video 2]
BK: Just continuing talking to Michael. Going back a little bit, you were talking about how you
stayed very involved in the community and you were also talking about how people’s behaviours
were changing in reaction to the epidemic, with people pairing up and some people stopped
having sex. How were you responding behaviourally?
MD: I would say in the beginning, I was just in denial and – certainly, for the first couple years I
was just in denial and did not react or respond the way that one would hope. You know, we
talked about how most people didn’t use condoms. And yeah, there was – you would end up sort
of saying, “I am not going to have sex,” then you would end up having sex. That happened more
than once, and I would feel horribly guilty about it. That really kind of just built up and built up.
You would see these things in the media occasionally where somebody would be charged
because they had unprotected sex with someone without disclosing they’re HIV. Everybody else
would be like, “Oh, those evil people should be thrown away, killed.” And I would be like, “Oh,
my god I would be so horrified,” and think that could be me. And that kind of built up for quite a
period of time and then eventually just got to a point where I said, “Well, I can’t change anything
that happened up until now. All I can do is change what happens going forward.” And I stopped
having – dealt with it kind of. I made sure that the chat was always had before. So, that brought
its own challenges as far as having the chat, but at least I wasn’t kind of overwhelmed with guilt
because again it seemed like there was nobody around. I mean, looking back from now, it’s
obvious that there was many, many, many people around that were unknowingly or knowingly -
that were already positive, we just didn’t know. A lot of us – not a lot of us. I would – would
have hoped to respond better than I did. Yeah.
BK: Yeah, as I said earlier, it’s hard to imagine what a productive or positive response to that
would have been at that time.
14
“HIV in My Day,” Michael D. (November 24, 2017)
MD: What you were supposed to do was stop having sex or only have safe sex, and that’s sort of
the easy answer, but it isn’t that easy particularly when you’re twenty-three. And yeah, there’s
alcohol and drugs involved quite often, but it doesn’t remove the fact that I didn’t respond the
way I would have hoped.
BK: Did things like substance use or other types of behavior change for you at all?
MD: [Pause] Hard to know. I think they are connected because gay men have used substances
for a long time to remove inhibitions. I just continued to do that. [laughs] No, we were a very
druggy generation. In some ways, my generation was the druggiest of them all. The baby
boomers were experimenting; we were not experimenting. We knew what we were doing.
[laughs] I once did a survey and it was a full page of drugs and it said, “Which of these?” You
could say “yes,” “no,” or “stopped” which I thought was kind of restrictive. I gave it back to my
doctor and I said you’re missing some drugs here. [laughs]
It wasn’t… I mean drugs were dangerous. I feel this could just be me being older, but I feel this
is a much more dangerous time for drugs. Fentanyl is deadly. Crystal meth is deadly. Arguably,
cocaine and heroin have been around for a long time – they could be deadly themselves, but it
made… Gay men used drugs to get over inhibitions and they do it to get around safe sex. There
was an enormous guilt around safe sex. We all knew what we were supposed to be doing and
you constantly failed at it, because you were drunk or you were whatever – whatever the reason
was, you constantly failed at it. Everyone did and you felt enormous guilt at that. I don’t think it
was just me, I think a lot of people struggled with that.
And there was community guilt too. It was, “Well, why don’t you gay people stop killing each
other?” That was the message. And it’s like, “Well, why don’t you straight people just stop
having babies? You have known about that for a long time but it still happens.” But there was
sort of a collective guilt we just weren’t able to stop. There was people in the community as well
that said we should close the bathhouses – the community did not respond homogenously. There
was a wide range of views and a wide range of people. We talked briefly about activism – I
wasn’t an activist – I wasn’t comfortable with that role, I didn’t feel like a victim, I didn’t feel
angry. I was basically just trying to blend in. I worked on tugboats most my days acting like a
straight boy. The last thing I wanted to do was scream and yell at politicians or lead a parade. I
did both of them once in 1996 and it was not my roll.
BK: What was the context of…?
MD: It was the 1996 AIDS Conference here in Vancouver, which happened to be in 1996 or
late-’95. A friend of mine said, “You should go be a peer councillor,” so I went to BCPWA and
that happened to be the year of a conference. So, I held a banner at the front of the parade and I
think it was Paul Martin – I can’t really remember – it was the minister of health – I don’t know
if Paul Martin was ever the minister of health – but I remember he came to the conference and
we all stood on our chairs and screamed, “Shame, shame, shame,” or whatever we were yelling.
And I was intensely uncomfortable – that was not my roll. That was not my shtick.
15
“HIV in My Day,” Michael D. (November 24, 2017)
BK: Was that something that was maybe needed in the community? Or was it something that
you didn’t get?
MD: In hindsight, I think it was needed. At the time I remember being very uncomfortable with
it. And there was ACT UP – ACT UP was here. I remember them throwing red dye or red paint
on the premier and his wife down at the Pan Pacific and kind of cringing, you know, because we
just wanted to blend in. We just wanted to – we were just normal like everybody else and that
kind of extreme activism or that sort of queer activism, it really freaked a lot of us out. You
know, and I would say that most – well, not most – a lot of the gay community just wanted to be
normal. They just wanted to blend in. Yeah.
BK: I think that’s why it’s so important to have all these different perspectives, because not
everybody was an activist.
MD: No, I would say very small percentage of people were. Certainly none of the people that I
hung out with were. Yeah, I think the activists were a very small percentage, then you had
another group that were involved in service organizations, then gay people within the health
community – I think they were very important. The number of gay nurses that moved patients
along, and took care of them, and gave them some human contact was really a big deal. But
yeah, I think probably three-quarters of us were just trying to blend in and live our lives. We
didn’t identify primarily as – our first identity was not as a gay man – it was part of our identity.
The last thing we wanted to do was go scream and yell in front of cameras. It just wasn’t our
thing.
BK: I think if you were an HIV positive guy there is also that added element of “I need to look
after my own health.”
MD: And more, inclination to hide, quite frankly. You know the last thing you wanted to do was
draw attention to yourself in support of HIV issues, because it outed you. That was kind of the
thought.
BK: So, you didn’t get involved with support groups early on. Where were you finding support?
Groups of friends? Your family?
MD: Certainly my mother was – is a big, kind of my major ongoing support. I had a very good
friend named Ralph Parker who was a nurse, who was very supportive. And I eventually, in
1987, met a much older man named [name], who was a friend of mine for years until he passed
away, and I ended up living at his place. It was supposed to be a short-term thing but it ended up
being eleven years, and that was kind of my security blanket. I knew that even if I lost my job or
got sick I had a place I could live, and that allowed me the freedom to go out and learn to dive or
learn to fly, because I had this relatively cheap place to live. He was a terrible old letch who used
to love letting everyone think I was his lover, but I wasn’t. And he was cheap – he was a
depression baby so he would make you pay for everything, then he would act like he was my
sugar daddy, but it pretty much worked out very well.
BK: Sounds like an interesting arrangement.
16
“HIV in My Day,” Michael D. (November 24, 2017)
MD: I mean I paid him rent – it was a very transactional thing. But we were good friends, and he
was heavily involved in McLaren housing and he was a social worker. But again I never really
got involved until 1996.
BK: Did you have any peers in terms of having friends your age who were HIV positive that you
could have these kinds of conversations with?
MD: Later on. [Name], for example, had been a partner for a year and half, two years maybe,
and after we separated he became – actually, no, he was positive when we met. He was the first
time I had the chat and he was positive as well, which was wonderful. Well, it wasn’t wonderful
but it was like, “Oh my god, somebody who’s like me.” That was probably 1994. That was a
long way in, and he was the very first person who I ever told who said, “Yeah, so am I. So yeah,
we were together for two years and not long after we separated, probably six months to a year
after, he got very sick and ended up dying. He was one of the first I could talk about – there was
other friends… What was really disturbing was that a bunch of these friends became positive in
like the ‘90s when you would have thought – all the sex campaigns were full on and I think they
felt really dumb about it. Like, “You should have known better,” kind of thing. At least I could
claim there wasn’t much knowledge back then, but even then it’s not really true. But yeah, to see
them – on the one hand, you felt, “Finally, I’ve got someone to talk to,” but on the other hand
you were just horrified because you friends are now positive. [Partner’s name] died, my very
best friend, [name], passed away after a long, long bout of illnesses. So, you very quickly went
from, “Gee, I really wish I had someone to talk to” to “Gee, I don’t need anybody else to talk
about this with.”
BK: Because they are just going to die to?
MD: Exactly, yeah. That was really alarming and a total – a real mind fuck.
BK: What changed in the mid-‘90s to make it so you felt more comfortable to be involved?
What kind of drew you in? You started working closely with Positive Living.
MD: Yeah, part of it was a friend of mine asked me to participate in a film school production,
and they did this whole thing. By 1995 I had been positive for ten years which they considered at
that time to be a long-term survivor. Yeah, so they asked me if I would do this film. So, that kind
of – it made me aware I guess, that I was in kind of a unique position and I was not so nervous
about it anymore. It had gone on for so long. You can only chew on something for so long and I
just kind of exhausted my worry about it. Oh, and I told my family finally about it. So yeah, I
kind of felt out and more comfortable with – and there was a lot more people around that were
positive. And there was a need for help. So yeah, a friend of mine said, “You should be a peer
counsellor.” So, I called them up and unfortunately they never made me a peer counsellor, they
put me on the board which was a nightmare. You should never give a bunch of gay men with a
terminal illness 2.7 million dollars a year to play with because it’s really, really messy! [laughs] I
am sure it’s not like that now, but it was pretty over the top. And in fact I stopped after six
months. I couldn’t get financial reports, I couldn’t get anything. Yeah, it was an interesting
17
“HIV in My Day,” Michael D. (November 24, 2017)
experience. We went through the whole AIDS Conference we had people from all over Canada
who were amazing people.
There was one woman – her name fell out of my head, but I remember her husband’s name was
Randy, ‘cause she said he really was. [laughs] And he was a hemophiliac and he had gotten HIV
through that. And she fought that fight for many, many, many years. So, you would meet these
amazing people that were… So, it was kind of weird, by the time you got to the mid-‘90s, people
are actually saying we’ve got things to be proud of in the way we have taken care of our own.
And conversely, I think the mainstream media and – I have always say the two things that really
did the most for the gay community were the AIDS crisis and when they realized how much
money we all had and they started marketing to us! [laughs] But really the way the community
came together and took care of its own – and how ridiculous the people who stood on the
sidelines screaming this is gods revenge, it made them look idiotic – that was really the turning
point of the gay community. And you could feel that in the mid-‘90s. You could feel that sort of
pride, how the community had come together and taken care of it its own.
BK: Yeah, I mean, it’s amazing how the community made it through a crisis of this magnitude.
MD: They didn’t have any choice, they just had to deal and they did for the most part. But like I
say, I sort of helped out with some friends and stuff but nothing very organized. I don’t know
why that was actually. I really did not like support groups and – just wasn’t my thing. I just
didn’t want to sit around talking… [laughs] It wasn’t my thing.
BK: You alluded to how earlier you would see these other people who are positive or who are
sick and you would worry, “Is this going to be me eventually?”
MD: Yeah, part of it I think is avoidance, denial, whatever.
BK: How do you think the epidemic changed the community? You provided a beautiful snapshot
of what Vancouver looked like in the early-‘80s. Did it change as a result of that?
MD: Oh yeah, profound change. It ended the party. It ended that craziness. It ended that whole
drug induced, crazy, “Let’s have a good time.” And what came out the other side was not the
same. Like, I mean, arguably you could say there is just as many people having sex now as back
then through online sites but there is not that sense of the celebration in the early-‘80s, late-‘70s
was about freedom – the freedom to do what you wanted to do, to be whatever you wanted to be.
At the tail end of the AIDS crisis, it’s about being like everyone else. It’s about getting married
and having kids and trying to be like everyone else. It’s a very different thing. I’m not sure if it’s
a good thing or a bad thing but it’s very different. Some people say that the most outrageous gay
people all died from the epidemic. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but that’s kind of some of
the feeling – like, the really outrageous ones either died or were kind of tamped down into being
normal.
BK: Or burnt out?
MD: Burnout, yeah, a lot of them burnt out.
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“HIV in My Day,” Michael D. (November 24, 2017)
BK: That’s so interesting that you see before the epidemic this kind of radicalism and we come
out on the other end and talk about marriage equality and military inclusion.
MD: And you lost a good chunk of that generation and you exhausted a whole bunch of those
who were left. I mean, by the time you get to ‘96, ’97, so many of those people are done – they
are just exhausted. And then, you know, you do have a whole new generation that’s coming up,
but they have a different focus and they do the whole marriage fight and the military thing and
adoption. And I think they do very good things but it’s all different from what people were
looking for before AIDS.
BK: Yeah, it seems to be more about inclusion then it does before AIDS.
MD: Yes, it’s more about assimilating gays and lesbians as opposed to being queer – that
anything’s possible. It’s interesting to see the whole – the trans community feels in a lot of ways
like the gay community twenty years ago. They are sort of fighting that same fight. I don’t know
where that’s going, but it’s interesting to watch. I don’t look at that very much. [laughs]
BK: No, I have been through this a few times now. Do you feel like we have rebounded a little
bit now as a community, that some of that vibrancy is back? During the peak of the epidemic
people were of course still having sex and still having fun but there was still a massive dark
cloud hanging over everything. Do you think we have gained some of that vibrancy back as a
community?
MD: I would say that, and I have said this quite often – it’s weird from my perspective that this
huge dark cloud, this black cloud that was the centre of our lives for a decade is gone, and it’s
not talked about, it’s not part of the consciousness of the community in a lot of ways, which is
very disturbing to people who have lived through it. So, that feels weird. Vibrancy – that’s hard
for me to say because I am a much older person. My perspective as a fifty-five-year-old is very
different from my perspective as a twenty-five-year-old. I don’t see the vibrancy; I don’t see a
community quite frankly. There was a physical community in the West End that was very, very
gay, as we talked about – it was intensely gay. There was a community on Wreck Beach, there
was a community – there was a solid community, and I don’t feel community now at all. There is
no public spaces we meet in or there is very, very few. There is this online thing which is
interesting but doesn’t feel like community to me. I don’t know if we need the community
anymore, quite frankly. Do you need the gay community when you can exist and live pretty
much anywhere in Vancouver? I was on the SkyTrain and got out at Edmonds in North Burnaby
and there was two young men holding hands, which freaks me right out. I worry about – it’s kind
of titillating in one way and exciting, but I worry are they going to be okay or is someone going
to beat them up? No one seemed to notice, no one seemed to care. Do we need gay community?
Don’t know, but it doesn’t feel like there is community to me. I don’t know if that’s just me
being older and not participating in the community or if it’s there or not. It sure feels different –
it’s not the same thing at all.
BK: One thing that you just mentioned is how this is something that has dropped out of our
consciousness as a community, and one thing we like to ask long-term survivors is what advice
19
“HIV in My Day,” Michael D. (November 24, 2017)
do you have for the younger generation – mayb the newly seroconverted folks? Or even just
how can we foster this cross-generational dialogue? I know there’s not an easy solution.
MD: [pause] I don’t know how you foster cross-generational conversation. I don’t know. To
newly seroconverted I would say, take care of yourself because that seems to be the biggest
piece. I honestly think part of the reason I am here is because I wasn’t – within the context of my
generation – was not terribly druggy, was not drinking to excess, I got a lot of exercise – I think
that helped. Although, I know a lot of people who did that too and did survive. And I would say
don’t go back into the closet – try not to go back into the closet. Try not to be going back into
that hiding – this has always been one of the challenges of this. HIV is a virus but it’s also got all
these other things attached to it, right? And that’s always been one of the challenges. I think
through the online community there is more opportunities to meet people who share the
condition, so in that sense it’s not as big a deal. Yeah, I don’t have a lot of wisdom for – I would
presume to advise this generation. In so many ways, you tend to sort of – us older guys tend to
romanticise but the reason we don’t need that community anymore to the same extent is because
it’s okay to, you know, talk to your parents and talk to your friends. That’s a good thing. That’s a
really good thing. It’s not quite as edgy and colourful maybe but it’s a good thing.
BK: It is. One of the reasons why I am involved in this project is that I feel that it should be
useful to younger gay men.
MD: Yeah, maybe it well be after – like, it’s a story as opposed to… Yeah, it’s a weird thing. I
will tell you one other weird thing – I went to Berlin. Have you ever been?
BK: No, but I would love to go.
MD: You have to go. It’s a lot of fun.
BK: It sounds like a very sexy city.
MD: It is, and it’s very – if you like history, it’s an incredibly raw city – “Here’s where the wall
was.” Or you walk along a sidewalk and there was a brass star with someone’s name on it and
the year they were taken out of that house and sent to the camps. And in the centre of it all is the
holocaust memorial, which is this crazy grid of dark grey granite blocks, and they are probably
nine feet by three feet. As you walk through the middle of it they get really high, and all of a
sudden you come to an intersection and see someone else and say, “Hey, how are you?” Then
you keep walking along this path of grey. And the thing that it reminded me of was the AIDS
crisis, and just this rising tide of dark grey, and then it goes away. You walk out of it and its
gone. And it was a really weird feeling. It’s good that you guys are doing this, because it’s nice
to have pieces of it that are recorded and remembered.
BK: How has it felt to come out on the other side of this? You’re a long term survivor, one of the
longest. Thirty-two years. That’s incredible.
MD: Yeah, it’s not really something I think about that often. I mean obviously I am pleased to be
here. A lot of the time I think if I am getting more stressed about something it’s all gravy right?
20
“HIV in My Day,” Michael D. (November 24, 2017)
It’s all good! [laughs] And there is some little tinges of guilt and, yeah – I don’t know what the
word is but it’s just loss. There are lot of people that just aren’t there anymore. So yeah, when I
look at old photos, a lot of them aren’t here anymore and that’s a weird thing. But yeah, it’s good
to be here.
BK: And those things aren’t made better by a cocktail treatment – those feelings of loss, those
don’t go way.
MD: Yeah, I mean they sort of get duller as the years go by, but they are always still there.
BK: And does HIV mean something different to you in the present than it did?
MD: Oh god, yeah. It went from being a death sentence to a social stigma to I don’t know what it
is now – a trait? A box you check on a website? Almost irrelevant. Irrelevant is almost a good
word – it doesn’t seem terribly important or relevant now. It’s a pretty big change.
BK: It’s pretty incredible.
MD: Yeah, and that’s a good thing.
BK: I think I am just about out of questions. Do you have any advice for health care providers –
how they can optimize care for people living with HIV or prevention efforts? The reason we
want to ask this is because long-term survivors are no longer at the centre of these discussions.
Anything you can offer there?
MD: The only thought I have on that is they need to get real on what’s actually happening –
what’s actually going on in the community. They need to have a real conversation about
barebacking and sex in the community, because I don’t – it feels like a lot of the conversation
has become irrelevant to what’s actually going on in the community. I see these articles about,
“Oh, you shouldn’t have pornography that’s barebacking.” Well, all pornography is barebacking.
Let’s get real and have a real conversation about that. It feels like the sort of safe sex campaigns
– people have gotten bored with them years ago and they’re irrelevant. I don’t know how they
get that relevance back but they need to have a real conversation about it, because it is still a
serious thing – it’s a very expensive thing, it’s a big change to someone’s life. I go to the
hospital, I go for blood work, I go to the pharmacy, I go to my doctor, three appointments every
three months all the time. I can’t live outside of Canada, because I can’t get my drugs. It’s not
just a pill and it’s not gone. I think they need to have some real conversations about what’s really
happening. I know that stats are not going down – the number of new infections.
BK: And among young guys they are going up a little bit.
MD: Yeah, that doesn’t surprise me at all.
BK: It’s concerning.
21
“HIV in My Day,” Michael D. (November 24, 2017)
MD: Yeah, it’s very concerning. And its tied in with the other thing – the whole crystal meth
thing is very terrifying. The number of people I see on sites that “like to party” is really
horrifying. It’s shocking. There, that was the last one, right?
BK: That was the last question I had. I’d prefer to leave it on a more positive note, but maybe I
will leave it you to decide what that note is.
MD: Well, you can have a look at this [USB drive], and maybe see if you can drag it across, and
I don’t know if its relevant or not, but it might be entertaining.
BK: I would love to see that.
MD: And it’s just interesting because it’s such a long time ago. Even I was shocked, because for
the longest time I didn’t have it on this I had it on VHS which I could play for years and year,
then we had it put on to here. And just to see my attitudes back then, before the cocktails, it’s
kind of weird. Yeah.
BK: Anything else that we didn’t touch on that you would like to share? I think there are so
many different layers to a story like this and we can’t explicitly ask you about every part of it,
but if there’s anything that comes to mind, you’re welcome to share.
MD: I can’t think of anything else.
An interview with Michael D. as part of the HIV in My Day Oral History project. Interviewer: Ben Klassen. Location: Vancouver (Momentum).
- In Collection:
- 01:03:14 (Part 01)
- 00:41:22 (Part 02)
- 49.24966, -123.11934
- HIV in My Day
- YouthCO HIV & Hep C Society
- Vancover Island Persons Living with HIV/AIDS Society
- Lachowsky, Nathan
- Rights
- This item made available for research and private study. For all other uses please contact Dr. Nathan Lachowsky.
- DOI
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Interview with Michael D. transcript | 2021-05-27 |