DELICIOUSDEITY: 2025

Sunday, August 17, 2025

Profiled

After watching the annihilation of Yamasaki's Twin Towers way back 24 years ago, I got it into my head to act in a responsible manner and decided to give blood. I never thought to myself whether my blood would ever reach New York, or what would be done with it. I strolled some blocks along College Street to reach Canadian Blood Services. After the contamination of the blood supply with AIDS in the 80s, and its inevitable scandal, the Red Cross stopped processing the Canadian blood supply. In 1998 a new entity, Canadian Blood Services, was created.

They occupy a gorgeous Victorian building in downtown Toronto. I gingerly made it up the steps and eventually found myself in a line. After about five or ten minutes in my completely conventional line - a typical cross-section of very multicultural Toronto - a woman approached me and asked me in for an interview. As I was in the line I didn't understand why it was necessary to be asked questions, but determined to help, I followed her into a large room. I remember it seeming to be a spare space, for it struck me as half storage, as if a conference room had been designated a dump site.

It was then, sitting across from this older lady, that I noticed her eyes. She didn't seem to blink, but stared through spectacles looking suspiciously like Miss Gulch. The questions started and got increasingly more personal to the point of discomfort. She asked about partners and drug use. Seemingly strung along in innocence, I answered truthfully. I am by no means a sexual adventurer, or a taker of extreme contraband, but I enjoy sex, of course.

I remember looking into her eyes and becoming quite naked in her presence. Clearly, I had said enough to convince her that my orientation was capable of real damage. Curt and quick, it was over and she snapped her file shut - and announced my ineligibility. I was a fool, what had made me think that I could have helped?

Things have changed in Canada since then, but gay men are still stigmatized. Just a few weeks ago this whole episode had bounced around in my head, so I decided to call Canadian Blood Services and ask some simple questions. I found out that my record is to be kept for 50 years, so I will most probably be very dead by the time it is shredded. All of the lady's notes were apparently not kept, just a notification that I was flagged. So that one time I took mushrooms has been recorded and most likely resides in some landfill at present.

The rep I was talking to apologised and said that things had become more open and understanding. The thing I wanted to know, but knew she could never answer, was .. how did someone know? Who saw me, and what did they see in me? I don't wear a gold band, I consider my hands small and a bit stubby, but if I had, I wonder what would have crossed their minds. I am not flamboyant and being mostly Scandinavian I am genetically engineered to function on low burn. No wrists, no prance, no sharkskin. It must be something I will never see - or absently strange - like hearing your voice recorded and played back to you.

What the whole episode created in me was a resentment and a vow to myself that they will never ever get a drop of my blood. This is wrong and irrational, but I can't dislodge it. I will go to my grave with all my buggering corpuscles, society be damned.

I am that global pariah, the old white guy. I see it clearly on people's faces now that I have arrived at the end of one quarter of this perplexing century. Fat on privilege and entitlement, astride the barricades, proppping up patriarchy and the carnage of history. But I have always considered myself of a chameleon minority, just underneath my skin, there I am.