Back in Montréal: July 15, 2004

Well, I am hunkered over a vanilla latté and an hourly-rental computer here at PressCafé, an Internet café in the heart of Montréal's gay village (le Village Gai). Le Village Gai stretches for several blocks along Rue Sainte-Catherine, slightly south-east of downtown Montréal. The GALA conference starts on Saturday, which gives me a couple days to wander around my old stomping grounds, revisit old memories, see how the city has changed.

I lived in Montréal for eight months in 1986/1987, where I attended McGill University as a student in their graduate program in library science. (No, I didn't stay; that's a story for another blogpost.)

I moved to Montréal under the mistaken impression that I could improve my French (*snort*). I lived in a lovely apartment in Cote-Saint-Luc, where I could easily have picked up more Yiddish than French (the apartment was across the street from one of Montréal's biggest traditional Jewish synagogues).

I know what you're thinking: Gay Montréal in the late Eighties. But I was nowhere near that scene; I didn't even know that it existed. I was essentially still that good little Transcona Lutheran in complete self-denial and on auto-pilot, with a miniature version of my father still operating in my head (even though he had died two years previously). I wasn't even close to coming out to myself, let alone anybody else.

And to boot, I was in a long-distance relationship with another good little Transcona Lutheran, the woman who became my wife (who later also came out of the closet after our divorce; I tell you, the two of us could be the perfect anti-ex-gay poster couple).

We both tried so hard to make it work according to the example set by our community, our families, and our church; but both of us had simply staved off the inevitable, and caused ourselves a lot of anguish in the process.

I'm actually not bitter (well, O.K. yes I was, but I've worked through almost all of it; you have to let it go or it just weighs you down forever). Everything I have been through has made me the person I am today. I treat it like a cosmic joke, and laugh at the punch-line.

Anyways, Montréal. Expect fewer posts, but I'll try to post some pics as well...if I can find a USB port on this damn thing. Au revoir!