Week Three: Homosexuality and Homelessness

I am currently faced with a dilemma. I am finding it hard to write this thing and make it suitable for both family, friends at home and friends over here! There are things that are more appropriate to one group than the other and this entry is probably more suited to friends than family, but I have tried to filter it down and I apologise in advance if this is not the type of thing you want to read. Nevertheless, it is the type of thing I want to write about...

Last Saturday, after enjoying a lovely Japanese meal, my friend and I went to a gay bar. I should point out that these two events are not connected. The choice to go to a colourful bar on Davie Street (the gay neighborhood in Vancouver) was not directly related to the success of the meal – neither was it the natural way to continue our evening together. It was, I guess, a spontaneous and not particularly well thought out decision made by two heterosexual males.

Davie Street is my favourite part of this city. Not only is it lined with Rainbow flags and pink bus-stops, it also has an amazing parade of restaurants serving food from all over the world at cheap prices. Going for dinner on Davie Street is always unpredictable, and selecting a restaurant at random to have dinner in is a terrifically liberating feeling - a feeling that I have never felt in London. The restaurants in London are more often than not too expensive, too busy or too shabby.

So, we hesitantly stepped into the Oasis bar and ordered two pints of lager from the dusty looking tap at the end of the bar. The tap hadn't been used for so long that it practically needed oiling - a substance that could have easily been obtained from the hair of most of the males in that place. We propped ourselves against the bar and talked about anything other than the hairy drag queen on the table next to us. We must have stood out like a pair of sore thumbs. Compared to the other sharply dressed, well-groomed men in the room, we had clearly made no effort whatsoever. To a passing observer, it must have looked like we had clumsily strolled in after watching a football match and were cheerfully oblivious to our surroundings. But as it happens, we did have a passing observer - Cliff.

Cliff was the friendliest Canadian I had met so far. He was also the most forward. Cliff has recently filed for divorce from his wife and established out access-rights to his two children in order to pursue the gay lifestyle – a lifestyle which he did not hold back from discussing in depth with us. Without going into details, we ended up talking to this guy for about two hours and it was honestly the weirdest two hours I have ever spent in the company of another person. We both left the bar feeling overwhelmed, confused and mentally violated.

When you filter out all the filth, Cliff did raise a couple of interesting points, particularly in regards to the existence of homosexuality. Cliff suggested that homosexuality itself was not inherent from birth, but the need for an individual to seek a father figure is. As a result, homosexuality is apparently more common among men who do not have a close relationship with their fathers and seek that closeness with other men. It sounds like a valid point and I found myself agreeing with it although it does not provide an explanation for the existence of heterosexuality, but, err... I guess there are probably books out there on this and are backed up by far more reliable sources than some guy down the pub. Read them!

From the bright lights and unashamed cross-dressers of Davie Street, I want to move on to talk about the dark side of Vancouver; the Downtown Eastside. This neighborhood is overflowing with the homeless, the mentally ill and the drug addicts. In most cases all three are blended into one, given a beard and a shopping trolley and are left to haunt the backstreets. I recently read that AIDS and Hepatitis C rates in this district are the highest in North America and are at Third World Levels; a quite shocking statistic. Although I have not yet ventured into the heart of this neighborhood, I would say the number of homeless/beggars in the main part of Vancouver is still pretty damn high – higher than those in London. At night, it is common to be asked for ‘spare change’ at least once every couple of blocks.

Being asked for money is so common, that you can effectively place tramps into various categories based on their begging technique. My favourite group of tramps has to be those who have a ‘trick’ or a one-liner that has proven successful in the past and has been reused time and time again. In my first week here, I foolishly accepted a challenge proposed by a tramp. “I can tell you where you got your shoes” the tramp boldly declared. The deal was that if he guessed correctly, I had to give him money. As Millets is an English chain, I thought I would have him stumped – ‘no food for you tonight!’ I secretly thought. The tramp then smugly pointed out that I had got my shoes on my feet. Oh god, I could have thumped him!

Promising myself that I would never fall into that trap again, I just walked on by when I was approached by another homeless guy who claimed to be a ‘word definer’. “Give me any word and I will define it” he yelled at my retreating figure. The irritating thing is that after spending hours thinking about what his smart-arse one liner would be and reaching no conclusions, I now wish I had challenged him. Maybe he was an actual English Language prodigy!

My least favourite sub-category of tramps is those who are in disguise. These guys have realized that they can get more money from passers-by if they invest in a nice suit and draw you in with some story about needing some money to get the bus to work. One of my friends was terribly frustrated after giving a tramp a couple of dollars for the bus only to hear them ask the next passer-by the exact same question. I think a law should be passed requiring all tramps to look like tramps. If all tramps walked around clean-shaven in a suit then no one would know where they stand! It would generate a kind of uneasy, post-9/11 climate of suspicion but with business-men not Muslims. Unbearable.

So that's the end of that entry. Again, I apologise (to my family in particular) if you expected to read some stuff about pretty rivers. However, to make up for it, I do have some nice photos for you to look through. Check out: http://picasaweb.google.com/chrischivers/TheThirdWeek