Now boarding...

My oldest brother, Dan, is almost 9 years my senior. Needless to say, growing up we were never really close. Mostly he ignored me outright while he was dealing with his homosexuality as he grew up in a backwater East Ontario town of 20,000. I remember Mom calling him an “outsider” when he was a kid and I don’t recall him having many friends.

I’ve always looked up to him so it’s safe to say he was instrumental in me becoming the geek I am today, by introducing me to science fiction. He “liked” the movie 2001 because of it’s music (he was the only person in the house who would play our baby grand piano with any semblance of skill) and I fell in love with 2001 because of the future it promised. Because of the age difference and our lack of communication, he was a stranger living in our house and like any childhood mysteries I had to investigate. I use to sneak into his room just so I could play with his Pan Am Shuttle model from the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey (hell I use to sneak into all my sibs rooms and touch their things). Which resulted in a beating or getting ratted out to some parent.

He also taught me that drawing could evoke laughter. I remember finding a small, folded two page card made by him of a crudely drawn cat. The front caption saying “Rita the cat says…” and the inside flap revealed “…fuck off.” I think I laughed for hours. I still love that level of low brow, near non-sequitur humour even today.

Dan was the reason we all had to send in samples of poo to the Canadian Government. While on one of many class trips to the USSR, he picked up a nasty unidentifiable intestinal bug and brought it back to Canada. For a week, Da had to capture the entire family’s leavings on newspapers that were balanced across toilet seats, bottle them up and then ship them off to some bunker near Ottawa. We were worried we would be quarantined for some reason and yet it was an odd family bonding moment. Probably the last.

I was the last to know that Dan had ran away.

When I was 7 or 8 years old, Dan, at the ripe old age of 17, took off to the comfort of Toronto to live with his 21 year old lover. His sudden departure was explained to me with great detail: “Dan’s moved out.” Later it was further expanded into a life lesson that “everyone moves out eventually” successfully avoiding the whole homosexual thing. But my relentless onslaught of questions as to why he left led my sister to explain to me that Dan was “just like Jody, from the TV show Soap” Effectively, Dan’s true reason for running way left me a beacon as to who I was.

Dan fell in love with Russia as a teen. He speaks Russian fluently, which lead to his studies in Russian history. Specifically Gay Russian History. I’m simplifying it because his actual field of study is a bit more involved than that – the only clear record of homosexuality during the last 100 years in Russia are archival medical documents regarding social/medical anomalies during the Soviet era, so his doctorate has some pretty fancy schmancy words explaining it (one of my favorite article title he has written is ‘Masculine Purity and “Gentlemen’s Mischief”: Sexual Exchange and Prostitution between Russian Men, 1861-1941’). To keep it simple, I just call it Gay Russian History. He would send me postcards/emails of his adventures of digging around musty archives, looking for documentation of comrades who got whisked away to re-education camps, collecting images of before and after shots of Siberian lesbians while outfoxing bee-hive haired archivists by smuggling out Xerox copies. Pure post Cold War intrigue.

He now teaches at the University of Swansea and my mom positively bursts with pride when you say DOCTOR Dan Healey.