I can’t remember

 the first time I used poppers. It was a long time ago. They will probably kill me. It’s an ugly filthy habit, akin to huffing cleaning products under the sink. But is my duty here to strip myself bare, or at least to do the rhetorical equivalent. I am doing what no one else ever does, every other goddamn person you read — they hold themselves up as some sort of ‘good.’ The same 'good' people who recently went online to eulogise an old friend of mine who wasn’t dead. Yes, she wasn’t even dead yet, and all those ‘good people’ were ready to eulogise her. God help them if they actually had to see her or help her in real life. Well I am defnintely not a good person. And when I die — probably with a popper bottle up my nose — no one will eulogise me. But somewhere, sometime, someone will find a copy of Drag Queens On Trial, in some dead faggot’s bookcase (you can't get it online), and say ‘God that’s funny. Politically incorrect, but funny.’ I’m very glad to be demonized, always have been. It should help you put everything I say in context; so when I sit and rant and rail here about how horrible faggots are,  possibly you will remember that I am a faggot too (perhaps the most ‘faggoty’ of them all!). I must have started using poppers about 1981, when I was ‘getting over ‘ Glenn Cassie — the first boy I was  in love with. And that was the excuse for everything -- for the baths -- everything: ‘If only Glenn had loved me!” It’s a great idea — blaming all your problems on someone who didn’t love you. You should try it sometime. (Oh, sorry, you have!) Anyway then I became a popper freak for years, even when everyone thought they caused AIDS  I stuck with those buggers, and only stopped really when it finally occurred to me that I was having sex -- not with men  anymore — but with the drug. And that’s what I’m doing these days, alone in my room (and occasionally with some poor hapless usually methed-up fag).  This will go on until lock down ends, which is — when? Oh, as always, some day soon. I looked at the statistics from British Columbia and some 1700 people died of drug overdoses in 2020. Of course most of these people were homeless drug addicts, people who are not like us, and thus, people who we don’t care about, who we don’t think deserve to live. (That’s one consolation.) But the statistics are interesting. Let’s just start by saying that in principle  I think statistics are always bogus, anything can be done with them, and usually is (statistics courses are prerequisite for social workers — remember that). Anyway, all skepticism aside -- or better yet, keep that skepticism alive — that’s 1700 human beings who died (even though you don’t care about them and mostly you think it’s their fault). But stick with me. That number is apparently a 75% increase over the number of people who died of drug overdoses in Vancouver in 2019. And the number of people in B.C. who  died of COVID-19 during 2020 was something like 1300. So that means that the number of people who died of COVID-19 during COVID-19 in B.C. is roughly equal to the number of people who died  of drug overdoses. And the latter are people who died  because of this charming lock down. I just thought you should know. But you don’t need to take my statistics, or any, seriously. Take my anecdotal experience and the anecdotal experience of others. All my friends are telling me that everyone on Grindr is a meth-head. They are all meth-heads. All they want to so is ‘party and play.’ The last guy I tried to pick up spelled so badly in the pickup app I thought he was asking me to do something quite impossible sexually until I realised he was too stoned to put his fat finger on the proper keys of his cellphone. But it’s always been like this. My gay therapist in the 90s told me that most gay men he counseled required some sort of drug (that includes alcohol) in order to have sex with another men. It’s because we hate ourselves for being gay. I know, you’ll ask me to remember all the happily married gay couples. Why in heaven’s name aren’t I talking about them, and their dogs named ‘Fonzie’ (I don’t know, it was the stupidest dog name I could think of)? Well because that would make people think ill of us, but the fact of the matter is we’ve been ill ever since AIDS, but we do ourselves ill by pretending we are not ill, by denying illness ,when we are all in the grip of an illness called self-hatred, no matter how much we try and deny it with our marriages and our dogs. And don’t worry -- the married fags will get divorced, just like the straight people (because monogamous matrimony is an inhuman, unrealistic institution). Dear me, I am filled with bile today! But it isn’t just bile, it’s concern, nay, love, for all those lonely meth-head fags sitting alone in their giant/tiny condos getting stoned and then turning on the porn — and for what? To remind themselves they were gay, once? But we must speak of how beautiful getting high is. Because what used to drive me crazy about condom advertisements was when they would try and tell you that condoms are fun, which is  as bad as telling you that drugs aren’t fun, because they are. I’m not recommending drugs, I’m just saying that if you don’t know they are the reincarnation of heaven, then you won’t be prepared for what happens when you take them. I think I should speak a little about Glenn’s unspeakable beauty. I met him at a party at Peter and Caroline’s house in 1980. He was 17 and I was 28. He seemed to me the arrogant essence of masculinity; looking back on it now he may have been a somewhat shy over-intellectual lad who was a little bit girly. (In other words, me.) O, how I loved him! We wrote poems to each other, and watched Pasolini movies together, and once I took him down to Niagara-on-the-Lake and lay out on the golf course next to an old ruin, and my finger was up Glenn bum for about an hour, while he took in the sun. (I don't think he liked it much.) Those were the days. He was the dream of gay when I met him; and believe it or not, I still haven’t given up that dream.