I keep learning about friend’s lives from forwarded Daily Mail articles. For those outside the UK, the Daily Mail is the lowest of the bottom-feeding tabloids. I can’t find attribution for the quote, but journalist Polly Toynbee said, “The Mail’s founder, Lord Northcliffe said his winning formula was to give his readers ‘a daily hate’ — and it does.” If you fear anything in this life — gays, immigrants, whatever — the Mail will give you the fuel to keep you feeling justified in your hatred (while remaining docile, inactive, and manipulable).
First, I learned about one of my best friends getting divorced (in which the muckrakers trawled up every irrelevant fact about him, his wife, and her family for inclusion in the piece). Then, yesterday, I learned about a friend’s suicide.
“Friend” is overstating it: we went to a movie once shortly after he’d moved here to start his life again after breaking up with a television celebrity. He was a nice guy going through a difficult time. He’d messaged me recently, saying he’d been to Africa to do some work there, and it sounded like he was finding his feet again. Apparently not: last week he left a grim message on Facebook and did away with himself.
This event leaves me thinking two things today:
1) Death is weird. You’re typing away in the office, or you’re at home having a meal, then suddenly a zebra prances through the room. What the hell? Stranger, though, is that we continue on as if we hadn’t seen it. Or we’re incapable of processing it (it doesn’t bleep in our barcode reader) so we have to just shake our heads, keep calm and carry on.
2) Gay life is hard. I encountered this guy on a gay dating site (“dating” might also be overstating it). The tabloids are telling one story, the one they’re interested in, about his marriage and divorce with the TV star, but a lot of us in this town have another in our heads, the story of his life since. Things between us were merely friendly, but as I spoke with friends at the time, it turned out he’d approached us all, desperate for contact, even abuse.
Maybe it’s not a gay thing — we all have the potential for periods of mental illness, even if we’re uncomfortable with the idea — but it doesn’t help to have media forms like the Mail fomenting hatred against you, and even within the gay “community” we’re particularly mercenary, dealing with each other as objects that are either useful or not. (Difference and lack of perfection are to be derided, so as to distance ourselves from them.)
I tried to always be empathetic and respectful in my exchanges with others, but, as in this case, the guy and I weren’t going anywhere, so despite our intending to meet again sometime for a friendly drink or a movie, we never did. Now I’m left in this situation, again, of wondering what I should have done, could have done.
Yesterday was Canadian Thanksgiving, and I am full of thanks that I’ve got my fella and am free to just be in my life and stay away from the scene. I’m grateful to be spared that loneliness, the trying. I’m also grateful for the friends and family who’ve supported me through the years, including a dark period I went through that, thanks to them, turned out differently from this story.
Of course, I’m also aware that at any moment the zebra could barge into the room and wreck the place. But what can you do?
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