Last Seen: Winter 1998
Strictly speaking, we were never supposed to meet.
You see, I was volunteering with Lethbridge’s Gay and Lesbian Peer Support Line (it was 1997, this was pre-acronym). The PSL had a policy: no one-on-one meets. The purpose was two-fold – the safety of volunteers and the protection of vulnerable callers. But you see, there weren’t other volunteers. It was just me, for months and months at a time, and this guy, he needed to meet a real life gay person, badly.
One of those Mormons, you know.
Lethbridge in the late 90s was nestled snugly between fundamentalist Christians and Canada’s main Mormon population, and neither of them had anything good to say about the gays. Having grown up with the former, I certainly empathized with the latter. I’d been out 2-4 years at the time, depending how you looked at it, but I was certainly a lot farther along my coming-out journey than this guy, and knew I could help.
I was also in a horrible mental state and was absolutely desperate for some kind of connection. Which is less noble a motivation, true, but at this stage, honesty trumps nobility.
I was not expecting what I found, when we met for coffee – a smart, funny social work student who was absolutely dreamboat handsome. I would like to say that nobility trumped horniess, and that I stood by my morals and didn’t sleep with him. Oh, I didn’t, but that was likely more his choice than mine. “Doable if dateable” was how I described him – he was too good to be just another notch in a whittled-down bedpost. So, friends we became.
We met up a few times, even had him over to my place – where we looked through photo albums of gay parties (“See Mike, this is the fun you could be having,” I said, trying to convince him to hit up a homo hop or gay coffee night). He pointed out one friend of mine he thought was cute, and so -and nobility definitely trumped here! – I played matchmaker.
And it seemed to work. It worked enough that they both repeatedly thanked me, and I’m sure I wasn’t bitter at all, sitting there single as a pringle while the hot new gay immediately found a happiness I’d been so desperately searching for for years.
Except then he told his parents, who did what so many Christofascist parents do – wanted him to see a therapist to get “fixed”. And he agreed. And broke up with his happiness and his potential new life to focus on the cure.
And then he was dating a girl. But as his friend who had helped him through so much, he kept in touch. And then he wasn’t dating a girl, and was hanging out with another local gay, who got him drunk and took advantage of him, and so now he was gay again, but didn’t want to be. (Ironically, the same predatory gay later called me out for meeting Mike one-on-one in violation of the rules. Kettle, you’re black).
Keep in mind. This is all over about five months. It was August when we first met, and by January of the following year, he called me to tell me he was straight. “I like girls. I want to have sex with girls. I want to marry a girl, and have a family with her. Before, I was confused and experimenting.” I had no idea what to say, other than I didn’t agree, didn’t understand, didn’t think that was something he could just change. “But I’m your friend and I’ll stand by you.”
I don’t think we ever spoke again.
Part of me dreads he became a statistic of conversion therapy, so fucked in the head by it that he drove himself back deep into the closet – or ended his own life. But there’s another part of me that pictures him living his best gay life somewhere. I’ll probably never know, but Mike, if you ever read this, say hi.
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