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The contact is genuine and natural, rather than being bound by “therapeutic” imperatives. You are not being “treated” or talked down to. It’s also that the support is, or at least has the potential to become, mutual. The point of getting support from other psychiatrized people, outside of the system, is not just that they won’t be alarmed by you, or that you can learn from and be inspired by their experiences. But I’ve never stopped thinking about it. By the time I moved to Vancouver, in 1993, it was hard to find anyone who even remembered VEEC. The late, great activist Judi Chamberlin stayed there, in the earliest days of her own activism, and was inspired to write On Our Own: Patient-Controlled Alternatives to the Mental Health System. It was just too much of a threat to the psychiatric establishment.
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Just people helping people in whatever way was wanted.ĭespite (or because of) its unprecedented success in keeping people out of hospital by helping them navigate emotional crises, the Centre lost its funding after only two years. No drugs, no force, no medical personnel. Way back in 1974, a group of former mental patients and their allies founded VEEC: a safe space where people in extreme states could stay for a few days or weeks and be accompanied while they went through whatever they were going through. I want to tell you briefly about VEEC: the Vancouver Emotional Emergency Centre. The author was invited by Jim Gottstein to give an updated version in a recent virtual event. If you happen to spot my glittery, dishevelled carcass sprawled somewhere on Oxford Street come Sunday morning, don't forget to pay your respects.Editor’s Note: This is the second part of an essay adapted from Irit Shimrat’s keynote speech delivered at the 2014 conference of the National Association for Rights Protection and Advocacy. I'll dance like I'm not tired or aching, indulge all the vices that can be indulged and search for love and meaning in all the wrong places. So this weekend I suppose I'll attempt to go out with a bang. In retirement, you sit around a dining table and share a bottle of riesling among four. As a young man, you throw up in the Stonewall bathrooms and go home with some guy from the central coast. What good could our 30s possibly bring? If age is wisdom, give us ignorance and youthful beauty any day.Ī fellow "friend of Dorothy" this week admitted he was hosting a dinner party - a sure-fire admission of seniority if ever there was one. Battered by bigotry, self-hatred and the acid tongues of countless drag queens, we've developed a sense of cynicism par excellence. Gay death, then, ain't so much of a stretch. If you don't, it's a special kind of hell. And maybe it is - if you've got money, a partner and a plan. Of course, you can't complain about these feelings to any older and supposedly wiser folks, because they've lost all perspective and reckon your 20s is a decadent decade of carefree bliss. So consider this a very public wiping of the slate. I started fudging my age a while ago - shaving off a year or two, no more - and I've lost track of who I have and haven't lied to. It has taken quite a dose of vinegar for me to admit all this. In the musical Avenue Q, the seminal text about being in your 20s, there's even a song about it: I wish I could go back to college, in college you know who you are - you sit in the quad and think "oh my god, I am totally gonna go faaaaar!" But you have to be pretty famous to pull that off.Īnd with each passing year it becomes harder to go back to university in a hopeless attempt to recapture those heady days of yore. Of the decade's remainder, only the "27 Club" has any romantic value the age Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse shuffled off this mortal coil. And if "nobody loves you when you're 23", one can't imagine how they feel two years later.
#Its your birthday and youre gay meme windows#
I'll never be a tennis pro, model or pop star - those windows of opportunity have shut. My natural impatience means I feel it more acutely the clock ticking constantly down and life's options ever thinning. No matter your stripes, being in your 20s is an agonising procession of self-doubt, existential crises and regret. Indeed, gay death cuts to the fear of ageing that festers somewhere in all of us.