Fascinating Captain....

Jay called me twice today. First to tell me that he had been approved by his insurance company for top surgery on the 14th of September. He was estatic, life was good, finally things were starting to come together for him.

The second time was to tell me that the chest xray he had had taken a few days ago because of the cough he has had for 3 months turned up with a dark mass in his lower right lung. The CT scan is scheduled for tomorrow.

The mass in the xray, depending on what it turns out to be, could possibly mean the surgery would have to be postponed, for who knows how long. The pecular thing about the latter conversation was that Jay was most worried about the postponement of the surgery rather than what the mass might be.

Now I know Jay pretty well, possibly better than anyone else on the face of the planet. Possibly even better than he knows himself. I think Jay thinks I am his best friend, but I am not sure, he used to call me his best friend years ago, but you know, times change, people change, so who knows in what esteem I am held at this moment. I do know that he still shares things with me that he will not share with others, so I guess that still gives me some clout with him or at least some insite into his psyche.

Knowing Jay as well as I know him, it did not shock me that his head appears in the sand about the mass in his right lung. It's kind of his MO in a way. Let's pretend that there is not something possibly life threatening hanging over my head, instead let's focus on my dream being thwarted by this untimely turn of events.

He seemed not in a head space to talk possibilites of what might be the underlying medical issue at hand. He was seemingly concerned only with his possible loss of a surgery date and losing his insurance's coverage of said surgery. I wouldn't say I am annoyed by his behavior, I am used to that kind of behavior in him. What I felt was at a loss for words for his situation.

I know that if I was in seventh heaven (on cloud nine or whatever) about having top surgery and then something as off the wall (or out from left field) came hurling its self at me like a mass in my lung all in the same day, I just might stick my head in the sand too and pretend that the mass was simply an annoyance, like a flat tire or the battery going dead in your car when you are already late for a most important date. I certainly can comprehend his reaction.

I am concerned for him. I was truly thrilled, elated, whatever, for him when he called with the good news of the pending surgery this morning. When he called with the not so good news this afternoon, I was simply stunned. Kind of like that guy in left field who gets blinded by the sun and the ball bonks him in the head instead of landing in his glove.

I mentioned this to Barb Dunnam this afternoon as we were out riding around in my work truck. I hadn't talked to anyone since I had gotten the phone call. I was just sort of well, stunned. It's as if mentioning it to Barb spoke it into reality to me in my head and heart.

Jay has a mass in his lung. It made me begin to wonder what it feels like to have the knowledge that you have a mass in your lung. Then Sue called and I relayed the news to her. I could tell by her response that it immediately made her thoughts go to "what if I had a mass in my lung".  In talking briefly with her on this subject, I decided that I would never wanted to know if I had a mass on my lung. Mainly because I have no health insurance and there's not a fucking thing I could do about it if I did know I had a mass on my lung anyway.

Jay has a mass on his right lung. Eventually I began to go over the ramifications of what Jay having a mass on his lung could really mean. I thought about Jay dying, how would I feel about that? I imagined going to Jay's funeral. As you can see, I go directly to worst case scenario. That always gives me a starting point to go backwards from.

It was the picture of seeing Jay in a casket that made my heart begin to ache. My friend layed out there in a lovely dress suit, dead. It made the ache of so many deaths come back vividly. Damnit, you weren't suppose to die so young. You weren't supposed to die before me. We would all go on forever, young, happy, carefree, enjoying life to the fullest.

Of course, we all never lived life like that in the first place, but still, you weren't suppose to die at age 36, Randy Stewart.  I watched you wither away and die a slow and agonizing death my friend. All in the course of our 36th year on this planet, in this lifetime. I watched your youthful beauty be eaten away by disease until there was only a shell of my beloved friend left.

It still hurts sometimes Randy, that memory, of you, of death, of pending death. Of the agony, both physical and emotional. I still miss your sweet and gentle energy.

Don't die Jay. I order you to not be sick. It would suck to have to wait however many lifetimes again to reconnect. It would really suck my friend. Really, really suck.

The end

Tonight was the last episode of Queer as Folk forever. I am melancholy this evening.

I am a 51 year old queer person. I have been out since I was 19 years old. That's 32 years of living in a straight man's world as a queer person. I have known there was a name they gave people like me since I was 12. Interestingly enough, the first name I was ever called by a homophobe was "queer" when I was 12 years old.

I won't bore you with the gory details of the abuse I and most other queers have suffered at the homophobic hands of our culture. This is not about the specifics of abuse, this is about survival... it's about the human spirit, that against all odds, rises up and overcomes. This is about affirmation of us queers as folk.

What Queer as Folk did for me and countless other queer folk is to affirm that we are real people with real lives. Never before had queer life been depicted with so much honesty. In some cases bold, raw honesty. Those characters were us, our friends, our lovers, our families. It was fiction, yet it was close enough to the truth that it was as close as anyone of us has ever come to seeing our own real lives portrayed on TV.

Every week our fictionalized "friends" came into our homes and made us laugh, cry and think as we watched the ongoing saga of their lives. Our lives. Any town USA queer lives.

And that has meant the world to many of us queer folk. A show on TV that was really about our real lives, about us and how we live, in all our diversity.

Now it is gone, except on DVD and in our collective memories. Nothing can replace the loss of our friends on QAF.  Brian, Michael, Justin, Emmitt, Ted, Mel, Lindsey, Ben, Deb and Hunter, their characters frozen forever with the last show tonight.  We won't see them continue to grow, or develope. They will never grow old, which is something I personally would have liked to have seen.

So many of my friends are dead. They died in their relative youths. In their 20's, 30's and 40's of AIDS related diseases. They are also frozen forever in time in my mind. Never to grow old, never to know joy, or pain or any other human experience again. They were queer folk, just like me, just like the many queer characters on QAF.

I went on without them. I have gone on, growing and changing and losing that one thing they never had the opportunity to lose, their youth. I would like to have seen Michael and Brian growing old, losing their youthful beauty, learning to survive in a world that is also ageist too. But no television show lasts that long. Life however does.

And so I sit here reflecting. Wishing that my "friends" could go on forever, unlike my real friends who did not.

Life. Queer life. We go on.... even after our friends are gone. Against all odds, against a hateful culture. We go on. Us queers, us folk, we survive.