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.