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Divine Interventions
Divine Intervention number one
In the 1930s and 1940s in Toronto, there was a war going on besides WW11. Following a “Romeo and Juliet” script, my Irish Roman Catholic mother and my Orange Protestant father, both artists, started dating at age fifteen. The stress of the religious war between their communities led to numerous breakups.
Luckily for me and my siblings, Anne McCarthy married Fred Armstrong on September 11, 1948. They had only met because my mother, looking for a career in commercial art and not able to find instruction in the Catholic Convent school system, was forced to attend Danforth Tech High School. My dad was enrolled there as well. Destiny took over.
Divine Intervention number two
I was lucky to survive my birth as it took a specialist to deliver me as I presented as a difficult breech birth. The umbilical chord also was around my neck. Unusual for a newborn, I kept my neck held upright as the nurse took me down the hall to meet my father. I suppose I needed to check this new world out after such a bumpy ride into it.
Divine Intervention number three
As a child and as a teen, I loved school and I loved horses. The passion for Thoroughbred racehorses would rescue me from the worst aspects of depression later in life.
Divine Intervention number four
Through a neighbour, I entered a gifted students’ program beginning in grade eight. It was held at Neil McNeil High School, an all-boys school in Toronto. I stood first in academic ranking throughout my time there, from grade eight to thirteen. Two things I really loved about the school were the dances and the cute guys. About what this last tendency foreshadowed in my life was oblivious to me in those days. I dated the same young woman from grade three through first year university.
Divine intervention number five
At the end of 1992, I moved into a one bedroom apartment on the waterfront with an old family friend. I slept in depressive mode most of the time. I had drifted without a doctor for a long time and decided I wanted a gay one. One day, I picked up a copy of the gay paper, Xtra, to check their classifieds. The drama began as there was only one doctor advertising. I assumed he was gay. I called him. He was not. I had the fortunate inspiration to become his patient nonetheless.
He immediately suspected my schizophrenic diagnosis was wrong. He was about to give me my life back. He consulted with a brilliant young psychiatrist. With a new diagnosis of bipolar affective disorder, also known as manic depression, he made the mistake of again trying to take me off the haldol and using other medications. Predictably I ended up in hospital three more times in 1995 and 1996 as a result of tampering with that medication.. Despite these well-intentioned errors, I admired him a lot. We came to the conclusion that the only thing that kept me from constant, ongoing psychosis was the haldol, along with lithium. I could start to build a life, at last.
I praise the day I picked up that particular copy of Xtra. Not the one two weeks before, not the one two weeks after.
A previous, critical Divine intervention.
In the early spring of 1979, I was slowly drifting into mania after successfully completing, without medication, my Bar Admission Course for the Law Society of Upper Canada. I traveled to New York City in a van full of other young, gay lawyers for the first, and last, international gay and lesbian lawyers’ conference.
While I was there, I checked out the St. Mark’s Baths, a multi-storey building housing a gay men’s bathhouse in lower Manhattan. It is not a stretch of the truth to say that I was good-looking enough at the time to normally attract some interest in such a situation. Curiously enough to me, no one in the place made a move on me for sex during the entire night. There was lots of sex going on around me, but not for me.
It only struck me a year or two later that there was a lot of HIV transmission going on around me that night, unknown to us all. A lot of those guys never had a chance, as AIDS was only about to come out in the open a number of months later. A secret invasion of death and suffering was taking place, as beautiful men had sex with beautiful men in the St. Mark’s that night.
That night God sent an angel with a flaming sword to keep all hands off me. He had other plans for me than coming home infected from New York. God had to get me home safely because this would be the last chance I had of getting into deadly trouble before I would collapse into serious depression, quite deadly in its own right, and evacuate the field of gay male sex. I would remain “out of it” long enough for me to know what, in future, I needed to do to protect myself.
Interestingly, it would be by volunteering with the AIDS Committee of Toronto years later that I began to lift myself up from my devastating depression.
Another Divine intervention
The second life-changing event of 1993 came in February. Toronto and the waterfront were in the grip of a hellish cold spell week after week. In an effort to make new gay friends with similar interests to mine, I had been going to the home meetings of a group known as Covenant Circles. It was a gathering of prayer for male, gay Catholics. Here I was looking for community but not finding any.
One frigid night that February, I set out from the waterfront to travel to Thorncliffe. In the Covenant Circle apartment that evening, I met William, whom I had never seen before. We got talking. He was a member of a community I had never heard of, the Toronto Catholic Worker. This group was founded in Toronto by William, Jim and Dan, all of whom were gay, and all of whom had been in formation to become Basilian priests. Interestingly enough, the Basilians were the order that ran Columbus Boys’ Camp where, years before, I had encountered such an ill fate.
The Toronto Catholic Worker was modeled on dozens of others in North America, and rooted in the original in New York City. Two people, Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, began it there during the Depression. They were a powerful force in twentieth century Catholicism. Their theme was offering hospitality to disadvantaged people, in all that complexity. When William offered me an invitation to check them out, I didn’t need a second offer.
Over the next months, turning into years, I participated in Wednesday evening liturgies and soup. I was accepted, and ultimately loved. I moved into one of their homes in 1998. If the freezing cold had kept me in that February evening, almost everything of significance in the unfolding of my life since 1993 would have been dramatically different.
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