A better man for it

(The following is an edited written version of the keynote speech delivered by Dave Brindle at the Canadian AIDS Society World AIDS Day Gala - A red tie affair - December 1, 2009, Ottawa, ON)

My name is Dave Brindle, and I’m here tonight to recruit you. If those words sound familiar, they should. The anniversary of the assassination of gay civil rights leader Harvey Milk was five days ago. Those were his words, as were: "come out." Simple, powerful words.

Harvey Milk did not live to see the onset of the HIV/AIDS horror that killed the thousands and thousands of too-young gay men - whose lives he championed, and forever changed - I am here before you tonight to give his words re-newed emphasis. I think we need to remind ourselves of how effective the simplicity of those words can be in bringing about monumental change, if we are to change the stigma of HIV/AIDS.

Harvey Milk, had he survived the assassins bullet, could have guided us through the confused start of the AIDS horror, and would not have let us live in shame. He would not have been silent so long as HIV/AIDS continued, as it does today. He would have championed this disease of shame, and would have brought it out of the closet, as he did with homosexuality. He would not have stood silent as young gay men, aboriginal women, and drug addicts continude to put themselves at risk.

The epidemic in Canada spreads among the desperate and powerless and frightened because we aren't speaking their language. For too long we've been talking about HIV/AIDS in a language understood in a place like Ottawa, but not in the alleys of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, the streets of North Central Regina or the remote communities of northern Manitoba.

If just one of us chooses to relight one of those thousands of candle lights that flickered from The Castro into one giant flame before City Hall San Francisco and scorched the North American consciousness 31 years ago, then this night is a success. Just one. I am here tonight, to admit my part in neglecting to keep the fire of Harvey Milk's legacy stoked. I am here tonight to make it right.

Ten years ago, when I was last in Ottawa as the keynote speaker for the Canadian AIDS Society Forum, I said then that it was every HIV positive person’s moral obligation to declare their status - to "come out."

It shouldn’t come as any surprise that my message didn’t exactly cause the floodgates to break wide open. People with HIV/AIDS did not step from the shadows of shame and into society’s sunny embrace. Sadly, HIV/AIDS remain "Scarlet Letters;" the vampire of diseases - which should be to our benefit given the popularity of the night-stalkers in today's culture. Far from it. If you have HIV/AIDS, society looks at you as someone morally bankrupt with a logic that follows like this:

HIV/AIDS is bad.
Bad people get HIV/AIDS.
Therefore, if you have HIV/AIDS, you're a bad person.

That's bad logic; unsound and invalid. There is no shame in having an illness. People with HIV/AIDS must "come out" and be better for it. I am.

A few months after my remarks in 1998 something happened... my life changed. I removed myself from the public eye and that level of mediocre celebrity that I'd held as network anchor and host for CBC TV and, what was then called, Newsworld. Back then, we reported the news thoughtfully. I stepped away from advocacy.

It happened one morning. December, 11 years ago. I awoke, "jonesing," in a fetal position on my sofa after another coke-run (six days, if memory serves, and memory is suspect when you're a coke addict), and thought of two endings to my story:

I'll end up dead on Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.
I'll pick up that phone and ask for help.

It wasn't the first time I'd thought of the end to my story. The first was in 1988 when I tested HIV positive and thought I'd be dead by 35. When I turned 35, I thought I'd be dead by 40. When I turned 40, I thought I'd be dead by 45. Last month, I turned 53 and I haven't been thinking of a "best-before-date" for some time. In fact, HIV/AIDS will not be the harbinger of my death. I'll more likely be taken out by a heart attack or cancer.

As for that choice 11 years ago, I split the difference. I did pick up the phone, and asked for help - entering a two-month treatment program for a 20-year addiction to cocaine and crack cocaine. I did move to Vancouver where I earned the last remaining goal I'd set for my life, which had eluded me: a university degree - a Bachelor of Arts from UBC with a double major in Religious Studies and English Literature. Religious studies, you might be asking? Remember: know your enemy. (There were, in total, four goals. To be a broadcaster, writer, actor, and university graduate. Those now having all been successfully attained, I need more goals.)

I buried my parents with nothing left unsaid between us. Nothing. No secrets. They were proud of me. They said so. I was blessed to have had them raise me. Many of you here tonight are parents. My Mom and Dad weren't educated. They were by no means wealthy. Both had lived through the "Dirty 30s." Dad had fought in WWII. He was a mechanic. Mom was a homemaker. I'd like you to pause for a moment to think how you would respond to your son if he were to one day tell you that he was gay, and then ten years later tell you that he was HIV positive. Would you react as they did, with love and acceptance?

Today I live on the edge of perspective, between Canada's sexiest neighbourhood - Yaletown - and it's most notorious, the Downtown Eastside. I prefer the Downtown Eastside because, of the two, it is the "truthiest."

All of the gay friends from my twenties and thirties; the friends who I'd thought I'd reach this middle-point-of-everything-in-life with are long dead. I'd attended their memorials, donated to fundraisers, walked for AIDS, talked for AIDS, been a so-called "face of AIDS." I had reached a point when I just didn’t feel like supporting another one of those "AIDS things." Until tonight. Why tonight?


Good question. I don't even know why the Canadian AIDS Society asked me to speak tonight. I never thought to ask. I just said yes when asked. I am not a "face of AIDS." The face of AIDS is sick. The man who stands before you tonight is not sick. In fact, my doctors look at my lab and blood test results and see a healthy, middle-aged Canadian male. Thank you pharmaceutical science and research for the drugs. Keep 'em coming. Better living through chemistry, I say.

I'm here to talk about HIV/AIDS for the same reason I chose to come out as gay, the same reason as I chose to get tested for HIV, for being the first TV personality in Canada to publicly acknowledge my HIV status, and for the same reason I chose to kick cocaine. I am here for the same reason I returned to advocacy journalism on my former radio program. There are moments in your life when you know intuitively that it's time. You just know. You blink and, instantly, there is clarity. Something entered me when I blinked. (No, it wasn't God. Even He knows to avoid certain toxic, no-fly zones.) The closest I can come to describing it is purpose. At each touchstone in my life I have had singular purpose. I am of a generation which I've often thought has nothing to live up to, even though we set out to change the world and make it better. I dom however, have something to live for - something left unfinished.

For many of gay men, a collective AIDS apathy, or exhaustion settled over us in the last decade. If we'd fought on the front lines of AIDS in the 80s, we were battle-scarred and weary. New treatment regimes had allowed us to live a life, of sorts, again. If we were too young to remember or know the war, we didn't really care because there were new and better drugs that would just keep getting newer and better, and with youth comes the shield and the sword of invincibility and entitlement. And we were all smitten; distracted by those hot new studs who’d caught our eye – gay rights and gay marriage, neither of which would have been won in this country without us having gone to war against AIDS. Funny that AIDS gave us equality. That's a hell of a price to pay. And even with equality, we still can't be gay, but that's another story for another time.

Let's remember the time Harvey Milk said, "Come out." If Harvey hadn't called us out from the prairie; if he hadn't shown us a gay person could be elected to public office; if he been not been a lightning rod for human rights; if he had not been a target of the emerging Christian right of Reaganism; if he had not been killed by two bullets to the brain, and; if tens of thousands of flickering faerie lights had not spontaneously combusted - silently, powerfully - on the night of his assassination - if he had not given us our voice, many more thousands of would have died than did. Why?

Because we came out, we became a community; we became a political force, a fighting force, and an "in-your-face" force for change. We took the fight against AIDS into the streets. We marched in the streets. We lay-down in the streets. We were organizing flash-mobs in the 80s using telephones with wires attached to the wall.

Harvey Milk’s liberation movement in The Castro of San Francisco over 5 short years wasn’t a recruitment of young impressionable boys into becoming gay. He wasn’t recruiting for a political campaign. He was recruiting for fundamental human rights and freedoms. Make no mistake, the fight against HIV/AIDS is a battle of human rights, and I'm here to recruit you. He said so:
HIV/AIDS is a disease of the us'es. We - gay men - somewhere along the way, we gave up the fight against HIV/AIDS. If not on ourselves, then we gave up on the other us'es.

"I can't forget the looks on faces of people who've lost hope. Be they gay, be they seniors, be they blacks looking for an almost-impossible job, be they Latins trying to explain their problems and aspirations in a tongue that's foreign to them…

“Without hope, not only gays, but the blacks, the seniors, the handicapped, the us'es, the us'es will give up.”

I see the looks on the faces of people who've lost hope everyday on Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. Be they seniors, First Nations, black, unemployed, mentally ill, sex workers, addicts, street kids, gay kids, the us'es. They're without hope right now. They've given up, and we gave up on them after we got what we wanted. We got equality, marriage, and better drugs. We went mainstream while the us'es floated further downstream.

The Downtown Eastside is "Ground Zero" for HIV/AIDS in Canada. If we fail there, the war is near lost, and we're just holding on right now. There are those who've expressed the idea of walling-off the Downtown Eastside, like some quarantined "plague-zone" and "let nature take its course." (That's what a caller said on my former talk show.)

The Government of Canada has gone to court to see the doors of Insite, Vancouver's safe injection site, locked to people who most need help and hope. Insite prevents death caused by addiction, and HIV/AIDS often associated with it.

In October, the Chief Medical Health Officer for BC, Dr. Perry Kendall, released a study associating crack-cocaine use with higher incidents of HIV infection. The report recommended a "crack safe-smoke house," based on the successful model of Insite. Dr. Kendall didn't endorse the study, but he did say: The report is here. Let's talk about it.

And, while we're at it, let's talk about this, too: There is growing anecdotal evidence that HIV doesn't just attack the immune system. Does it also cause mental illness? Either the disease itself or the drugs we're taking can be unmasking bi-polar disorder in patients.

How hard can that be? Talk to each other.

The problem we face is two-fold. Firstly, conservative morality isn't open to talk because talk might lead to ideas... and ideas lead to hope. Hope leads to change. And change is liberal morality. Change is action.

The second challenge is inertia. Any student of organizational behaviour knows about "storming, forming, norming and performing." In the 80s, we were completely caught off-guard. Hell, we were dieing. We stormed around in a confused and terrified state - dieing but the hundreds, then the thousands. Eventually, the shock and awe wore off, and we organized and formed. Gay men across North America became the political and fighting force that brought about policy change and government accountability, we forced science and medicine to look for the cause of what was killing us, we pressured the pharmaceuticals to mobilize and create more effective treatments. Today, AIDS/HIV has normed. But, with HIV/AIDS, normal is not a setting on a washing machine, and we have yet to fully perform.

I thought about the title for tonight's Gala - a red tie affair - and something bothered me about it. I can't help thinking that we're bound, our hands are tied by the agencies, the treatments, and our performance to-date against against HIV/AIDS. I can't help wonder if the isolation of this place - Ottawa - is not keeping us from the reality of HIV/AIDS in Canada.

This could be a red-letter night toward breaking those ties that bind, and getting back on the road of hope that Harvey Milk traveled. Who better to lead, to carry the red banner of passion than gay Canadians rediscovering our true character and identity which our society so desperately needs right now - our passion, our humour, our fight, our courage, our sass? Let the red ribbon become the medium again not just today, but everyday. Our cities and towns across Canada need to see anger burning red in our eyes again, not for selfish reasons but for selfless reason; for the rights and freedoms of others.

I'm here to recruit you to come out stand against the mistreatment of the downtrodden. Let me emphasize that word: downtrodden. For me, it means someone who is past being stepped-on. The downtrodden have been stepped-over and stepped-on for so long that they have become the sidewalk. They are the gutter. They have become invisible by neglect or by their own misfortune. Come out and stand for human dignity. Come out and stand for human rights. We know what it's like to be downtrodden. Don't you remember what it was like and, for far too many of us still, what it is like? It's 2009, what are we afraid of? What more can they do to us?

The theme of World AIDS Day in Canada is posed in a question asked of us: HIV in Canada – How do you see it? Have you answered it? It's an important question. I ask that each of you take a few moments to answer it yourself, and ask it of others. I put the question to my friends, and here is one response from many. It is the opinion of one of my closest and dearest friends, a prominent Canadian, an Order of Canada recipient, an emminent scientist, and a leading thinker, Dr. Julia Levy:

Ask your co-workers, your friends, your family and your children. How do they see AIDS in Canada? It's an important question. At this moment, HIV/AIDS is out of sight and out of mind for most Canadians.

"I see HIV in Canada as a disease which has brought out both the best and the worst in people. The best - Julio Montanner and his colleagues at the NCE for HIV at St. Paul's hospital, the Dr. Peter Centre and all the other nameless heroes who care for the sick and dying. There are many of them. Also, the four pillars approach to harm reduction. Three cheers for the people involved there. It's always nice to start out with the best.


The worst - Stephen Harper and his cronies. Need I say more? They've stopped funding for four pillars. They don't even send a representative to international AIDS conferences when they are held in our country. They simply don't care. In their eyes I believe it's not important because it is a disease of the least represented in our country."

How can you see that which is invisible? When was the last time you were face-to-face with a First Nations woman from Fort Nelson, an 18-year-old gay boy whose parents had kicked him out, or a sex-worker whose father had abused her? I haven't recently.

AIDS is moving further and further out of sight and out of mind because it remains the disease of shame, of the marginalized and ostracized whose voices are growing too faint to cry for help let alone demand their rights. Any time they've tried to speak up for themselves - to demand their rights and freedom in the past - the door has been slammed in their face, they've been slapped across the face, or worse.

I'm not here to recruit the pharmaceuticals and sponsors who are here tonight. With genuine and heartfelt sincerity, I thank you for your courage. It is not an easy decision to align your corporate beliefs and values with the cause of HIV/AIDS. Thank you. I'm not here to change the mind of a government that would slam shut the door on hope. I am here to recruit you, if you have HIV/AIDS, to "come out."

The root cause of the HIV/AIDS predicament in Canada today is the same as that for gay people in the 70s, and what Harvey Milk changed by telling us to "come out" - invisibility. I cannot tell you how invigorating it is to "come out." When you come out, you become visible to yourself, to others like you, and true to those who love you.

The second lesson we can learn from Harvey Milk is reach downward, not upward for support. Don't knock on the doors of the establishment - the boardrooms and the government. Reach out to the downtrodden and say, I'm here to help you. Give them hope, and they'll help you.

I have heard and answered the clarion call twice in my life to "come out.”

In 1978, in the months before his assassination, Harvey Milk delivered his two most important speeches.

The Hope Speech challenged our willingness to embrace and celebrate our differences.

But it's Milk’s words in June 1978 before 375,000 people - three-hundred-and-seventy-five-thousand people, and the media was beside itself with bias when Barack Obama spoke to a quarter-million before the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin last year. Three-hundred-and-seventy-five-thousand assembled at City Hall in San Francisco for the Gay Freedom Day Parade to hear Harvey.

His hope that day was to energize a campaign against the bigotry of Anita Bryant – devout Baptist, Miss America runner-up, and anti-gay campaigner; basically, today’s Carrie Prejean, or archetype of Sarah Palin.

I ask that you allow me license to change a word in Milk’s speech to one which is in keeping with tonight. I think he’d approve:

“People with HIV/AIDS, we will not win (our) rights by staying quietly in our closets.


…We are coming out! We are coming out to fight the lies, the myths, the distortions! We are coming out to tell the truth about HIV/AIDS!


For I am tired of the conspiracy of silence.”

A few years later, that phrase - "conspiracy of silence" would inform one of the most iconic messages in the early battles of the war against HIV/AIDS: SILENCE = DEATH. That is the language that works. That is the power of words we can all understand. Those are words that can empower multitudes.

Breaking the conspiracy of silence begins with individuals speaking out. It begins with simple words. It begins with trust and trustworthiness. With trust, we can talk to each other. With trust and through talking, we can form meaningful relationships. But, I'm not talking about talking to each other with the latest statistics or report findings or legislation before committee. Start by sharing your story.

Five days ago marked the 31st anniversary of the assassination of Harvey Milk. That same month, that same year, I came out to my sister, and I became the man who stands before you this evening. Ten years later, in 1988, I tested positive for HIV and a month after that, on my niece Kate's first birthday, I phoned my sister and came out to her again to tell her that I'd tested HIV positive.

I am a better man for it.


That's twice I've said that tonight. Let me close by explaining how being openly gay and HIV positive have made me a better man.

For the last two years, I have had the privilege of producing and hosting my own daily radio talk show. I was an open-book on the show: gay, HIV positive, bi-polar disorder, smoke pot, get buck-naked in the summer at Wreck Beach. A lost friend of mine in the mid-80s while living in Toronto once said to me: "If you tell all of your secrets, you cease to be a mystery. For too long, I lived by that creedo until the show. I came out! I revealed all of my secrets. I'd ceased to be a mystery to myself and others.

The show had three fundamental principles, which I came to learn through coming out - reason, respect, and common sense. The show allowed me to advocate on behalf of those issues that I believe to be of critical importance to a free society.

About a month ago (November 5, 2009), the corporation made the decision to silence not just me, but the radio station; changing format from news and information to sports.

So now I'm unemployed. But I'll be fine because I'm successful. Not successful as we measure success in our society - by wealth and treasures - but by how I measure success:

When they come for me, and they will, and if not me they will come for you or the next generation or the us'es because history teaches us that, and history repeats.

When they come for me, I know there are people in my life who I can run to; who will take me into their arms; who will protect me; who will hide me; who will care for me; who will do whatever is necessary; who will even lay down their lives for me because I loved them enough to be truthful with them and true to our relationship - to be open and honest. I "came out" to them.

A beautiful idea does not require a great mind to explain it. There is nothing more beautiful than hope. Harvey always said, "You've got to give them hope," and he was talking about hope and change way before Bill Clinton, and before Barack Obama. His simple message did not need explanation – “My name is Harvey Milk and I want to recruit you.” Overnight, young gay men across North America heard hope for the first time in their lives and they came out then. They'll come out tonight. They'll come out next week, next month, and next year.

Harvey Milk showed us what we can accomplish just by being honest and truthful with ourselves and the people who love us. He taught us how to talk to one another. What if we were to be true to the legacy of Harvey Milk and reach out to the downtrodden with an open hand of friendship and say, "I have HIV, hope is here and I want to help you. Come out. Hope is here."

My name is Dave Brindle and I'm here to recruit you.